ROMEO VICAR SAID WE HAD A FUTURE .. SO I GAVE IN TO HIM

WHEN Alastair Whyte asked Pauline Merga out for a drink in the local pub, she was taken aback.

She was a respectable married woman with three children and he was the local vicar. He was married, too.

They had been rehearsing Blackpool Light Operatic Society's production of Fiddler On The Roof together.

Pauline, 43, accepted the Reverend Whyte's invitation - and he ended up seducing her away from her husband of 15 years with promises of marriage.

Last November he dumped her after four years together.

Then it emerged that the vicar had seduced another married woman at the end of last year - Joanna Worden, who he met at another operatic society.

Pauline said: "I am not the only woman whose life he has ruined and if he thought he could get away with it, I am sure he would carry on his womanising ways.

"I admit I fell head over heels in love with Alastair, but I thought we were going to marry. He would whisk me away on romantic holidays and my children had even begun to accept him as their future stepfather.

"Now I've lost everything, my husband and my happy family.

"That is no way for a vicar to behave and people need to know what he is like."

The pair met when Pauline, a civil servant and a trained ballroom dancing teacher, joined the Operatic Society in 1996 for a production of 42nd Street.

At the time, the mother-of-three says, she was happy in her marriage to husband Ian but craved a bit of excitement.

"Alastair stood out from the others because he loves to be the centre of attraction. Life is one long show for him."

Pauline insists it wasn't until the following year, during rehearsals for Fiddler On The Roof, that their friendship began to deepen.

"Alastair and I shared a lot of the same interests. We both loved golf, we liked the same music and although we supported different football teams, we had lots of friendly arguments over the game."

Within weeks, she said, 40-year-old Whyte was professing his love.

"It was after rehearsals one night, and we were in a local pub," recalled Pauline.

"He blurted out that he liked me very much and that he felt we had a future.

"I ignored it at first. It had come out of the blue."

They began having sex about three months later and used to meet secretly for lunch or for walks in the countryside.

She said: "He was charming and he swept me off my feet. He was fun to be with. He paid me compliments - about my looks or how good I was in the show. And took me out in his flash Toyota Celica."

About four months after the affair began, in August, Pauline's husband Ian - suspecting something was wrong -ofollowed Whyte and saw him meeting Pauline.

He confronted Pauline at their home in Poulton-le-Fylde, near Blackpool. Pauline said: "In some ways, I was relieved it was out in the open. By that time, I knew I loved Alastair and didn't want to give him up." Ian walked out, but Pauline persuaded him to keep the relationship secret - so that Whyte could keep his job. Ian and Pauline claim Whyte then strung them both along. Ian, an accountant who has since remarried, said: "He said he would divorce his wife. Pauline would move into the vicarage with my three children and they'd get married. He reassured me that he was deeply in love with Pauline."

In August 1997, Whyte confessed the affair to his wife, Heather, who moved out of the vicarage at Wesham, near Blackpool, with their two children.

Pauline said the vicar even told the congregation that his marriage had ended. But Pauline claims he still hasn't divorced his wife.

Instead, for the next four years he lived at Pauline's house in the week and at weekends she would slip into the vicarage.

Even when he moved to his current post as vicar of St Thomas's Church in Garstang, Lancs, she says they were openly a couple, even going on holidays.

Pauline said: "I thought we were happy. Then last November he said he didn't love me any more then walked out of my life."

Unknown to Pauline, Whyte was already turning his attention to another woman, Joanna Worden.

As his affair with Joanna was revealed, the Reverend Whyte said: "I was not responsible for the break-up of her marriage. I'm being made a scapegoat. We're friends, that is all."

He refused to comment on Pauline, who is still rehearsing with him for My Fair Lady. "It's the thing I enjoy most," she said. "I'm not going to let him make me give it up."

Copyright 2002 MGN LTD
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