Over the New Year of 1925 Hilda became convinced she was pregnant and a quiet wedding was arranged at the parish church of distant Wangford in Suffolk, where Hilda had served as a Great War landgirl. Only a few family attended, returning to London soon after the ceremony and leaving Stanley and Hilda to make their way to their digs at Mrs Lambert’s cottage to celebrate their honeymoon. He described his feelings on that walk in a moving reminiscence [printed in full in Andrew Glew’s Stanley Spencer, Letters and Writings] ….at last we were alone. I can feel the gravel and tarmac under my feet now….We did not hurry but listened to ourselves loving. We stood singly about like things set adrift. How lovely it was. In our apparently aimless standing about we loved and mentally hugged each other. I could have sat on that low garden wall off Hill St for ever….

The marriage was to prove crucial in Stanley’s emotional and artistic journey, although
its immediate impact was to compel a reappraisal of the content of The Cookham Resurrection which he had planned in his pre-nuptial state. His mastery of the resulting compositional problems ended for ever his doubts about marriage and of its 'peril' as a disturber of the peace.
 
After Hilda's death in 1950, Stanley again celebrated the impact of these marriage-feelings, this time in a series of paintings he called The Marriage at Cana. In them he honoured the up-in-heaven perfection of love through marriage by recalling joyous down-to-earth moments ('epiphanies') of their life together. In an introductory painting in the series, Bride and Bridegroom, he shows them preparing to sit at a symbolic wedding breakfast. Hilda is wearing the wedding dress she prepared in earlier years, but in fact did not wear at the actual ceremony. The wedding cake stands temptingly on the table in front of them, but the room is still being prepared and there are no guests as yet. The detail suggests that Stanley is alluding to their pre-marriage lovemaking as having pre-empted the formal event. Equally intriguingly a small bridesmaid, not present in the initial drawing, peeps in from one edge of the painting, perhaps an afterthought indicating an embryonic attendant at the occasion to suggest Hilda may have been pregnant at the time.

Stanley and Hilda could never afterwards decide whether she had been pregnant or not, and according to Patricia Preece endlessly worried the question. But interesting though
it was to them in their down-to-earth life, Stanley's art tells us that it was no longer of any creative consequence for him. The miracle of love had overtaken it.