“Well as to that there is a train but you’ll find hotels very crowded. Accommodation has been arranged for you in the officers’ quarters on this base, but I wasn’t told there’d be a female civilian,” he said.
Eleanor Roosevelt rolled down the window. “Is there a problem, Colonel?” she said.
“Not at all,” he said. He got into the front seat, slammed the door and the car began to move away.
“But, Nora,” Mrs. Roosevelt called out. I just waved.
The pilots and I looked at each other and started laughing.
“What now, fellows?” I said.
“I suppose we have to walk,” Mike said pointing at the hangars that were a good half mile away.
“The English have abandoned us again,” I said. But the next thing we knew a young man with the map of Ireland on his face, as the old ones in Bridgeport would say, was running up to us.
“Sorry,” he said. “Somebody from the squadron borrowed the company car and it took me a while to find this old banger.” He pointed at what looked like a delivery van. “I’m Ray Finucane. Welcome.”
“Finucane?” Mike said. “Finucane was the name of the great British ace. Are you?”
“Yes, Brendan was my brother. Still can’t believe he’s … Well.”
Brendan Finucane, or Paddy as all the newspapers called him, had been the most decorated pilot in the Royal Air Force with the highest number of enemy planes shot down in aerial combat. Why hadn’t I thought to throw his name at old fish face when he said, “Irish?” I should have said, “Just like the greatest hero in the Royal Air Force.” The Chicago newspapers reported every one of Paddy’s victories. Twenty-eight, and possibly more, enemy planes destroyed. The Chicago American had covered an entire front page with a picture of the pilot in his plane decorated with a shamrock. The headline read “Flying Shamrock. Terror of the Nazis.”
The Irish American News had followed up with a feature about how his father had fought with de Valera in the 1916 Rising. But now the hero was dead. Hit by antiaircraft fire over France. He’d had to ditch his plane into the English Channel. His body was never found. He was twenty-one years old. I remembered the words of “The Foggy Dew.” “I’d rather die ’neath an Irish sky.” So many Irishmen killed fighting for the English in every one of their wars over the centuries, and now here we were again.
“I volunteered to meet you,” Ray said. “We’ve cousins in Chicago.”
“There’s a Finucane family in Bridgeport,” I said as we got into the van.
“They could belong to us,” he said.
“Except they probably would have given interviews to the papers by now,” Mike said.
“I don’t know. Lot of shy people in our family,” Ray said. He turned to me. “And you’re Miss…?”
“Kelly,” I said, “but call me Nora.”
“I’ve an aunt named Nora but her nickname in the family is Nonie.”
Mike laughed. “I’d say we found our man.”
* * *
Well … let me say that I didn’t miss being with Eleanor Roosevelt at all. In fact when we finally met up four days later, I’d say we’d seen more of London and of our troops than she had.
Because Ray—Raymond Patrick as his mother called him—took us home to where his parents, a brother, and two sisters lived in a suburb of London called Richmond.
“Now those Finucanes in Chicago,” his father, Thomas Andrew—called Andy—explained as his wife, Florence, served cups of tea, “would be second cousins, I’d say. My father’s uncle’s children.”
“I can offer you sugar because Raymond’s brought us a good supply,” Florence said.
It was still a house in mourning. A picture of their oldest son, big smile, dressed in his RAF uniform with black ribbons attached to the frame hung over the fireplace in the parlor where we sat. A comfortable place. Andy did well as a banker. Florence told us her boys had been educated in good schools taught by the Christian Brothers both here and in Dublin, and the girls were going to the nuns.
I realized that the Irish in London had created their own world just as we had in the States. Very like being in Ireland, chatting and sipping tea with the Finucanes. I stayed there while Ray took the three boys out for a runaround some of his favorite pubs. I told Andy that I’d been in Dublin soon after the Easter Rising and had known both Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera.
“A tragedy that those two fell out,” Andy said. “It was why I brought the family over here really. We left during the Civil War. We’d beaten the greatest empire in the world only to turn on each other. When I think how we fought together and then—”
“Now, Andy,” Florence said, “no sense in stirring up the past. The present is hard enough.” She turned to me. “Would you like a glass of whiskey, Nora? Andy is a Pioneer but I keep a bottle. Brendan liked a drop at night—” She stopped.
“I named my son Brendan Éamon Fergus. Irish heroes all, but the British press erased all that and called him Paddy. We’re all Paddies to them,” he said.
“They mean no harm,” Florence said.
“Don’t they? A way to trivialize us,” he said.
“Ah, Andy,” Florence said, “surely now…” She looked over at the picture. “I’m English myself,” she said to me. “Born in Leicester. I met Andy in Dublin.”
Andy laughed. “Here I was, a rebel taking on the Brits, and I fell for an English lass. Of course I was very young when I got involved. Dev was my teacher at Blackrock College. It was because of him I joined the Volunteers. I was one of the last fighting alongside him at Boland’s Mill. And yet my son … I opposed his joining the RAF at first. He was only seventeen but he was mad to fly and we still hoped there’d be no war. Sometimes I kick myself for taking the boys to the air show at Baldonnel. That’s when he decided to be a pilot. And once Hitler … Well, whatever about the government here and the empire, regular English people are decent enough. We’ve good friends and neighbors here.”
“And I’m proud that my son gave his life defending them,” Florence said. “Some of the newspapers say the Battle of Britain would have been lost if not for Brendan. A terrible time.”
“And yet that’s when I saw the English at their best,” Andy said. “There’s an air raid shelter at the top of our street. It’s a Tube station and down there we’re like one big family. Cups of tea and sing-songs.” He shook his head. “Not sure whether they’re just too thick to understand the danger or are just very brave.”
“Mrs. Anderson next door lost her father in the Great War and both her husband and son joined up,” Florence said.
“Here’s a fact for you, Nora,” Andy said. “More men from Ireland have enlisted in the British Army than have been conscripted in Ulster. Odd when you think that it was conscription in the last war that led so many to join the Volunteers.”
“But, Andy,” Florence said, “this war is different. The Nazis are truly evil.”
“We wouldn’t have this war if not for the last one, and that was imperialists fighting each other to carve up the world,” he said.
“I agree with you, Andy,” I said. “I nursed soldiers in France and saw the Marines cut down as they walked through a wheat field in Belleau Wood. I consoled myself by thinking, well surely all this will teach every nation a lesson. We won’t slaughter each other again.”
“And each one who dies leaves a hole in the lives of those who loved them, a wound that will never heal,” Florence said.
I heard voices. The front door slammed. Two young girls and a little boy came into the parlor.
“My daughters Margaret and Maureen and our son Eamonn,” Florence said. They smiled at me. “Nora’s from America. Chicago,” and the little boy extended his arms and started making machine gun noises.
“Al Capone,” he said.
“Stop it,” Andy said to him.
“That’s alright,” I said. “I suppose if you have to live with being called Paddy, I can accept our gangster reputation.”
I wondered how this family would react if I’d said. “Met one? Why I had a gangster lover who tried to murder me but I was saved by another gangster who killed him and please pass the scones.”
Instead I said, “We’re not as bad as the movies make us out to be.”
Florence sent the kids upstairs to do their homework and explained to me that they got into their beds where it was warmer. Their evening meal was potatoes and bacon, and I knew she was taking less to give me a share.
The boys didn’t get in ’til midnight, too late to drive back to the base. Florence somehow found a place for all of us. Her daughters doubled up in one bed and I took the second in their room. Ray, who shared his room with his little brother Eamonn, took the sleeping boy into his parents’ room and settled him on pillows on the floor. Jerry and Denis took Ray’s room. He and Mike made do in the parlor, Mike on the couch, and Ray in the easy chair.
“This reminds me of the nights all of us kids bunked in your apartment, Aunt Nonie,” Mike said to me as I stood in the doorway.
“Yes,” I said, “doesn’t seem that long ago.”
I thought the girls would be asleep, but when I got into bed I heard sobs coming from across the room. Margaret was turned toward me. Maureen faced the wall crying.
“She’ll stop soon,” Margaret said. “She lets herself think about Brendan before she falls asleep. I told her not to, but…”
“And you?”
“Oh I decided I’m just going to believe my mother and Sister Anselm at school. Brendan has a high place in heaven being a hero and all. He’s my own special saint and will get me whatever I want. Right now I’m asking him to help me do my maths. He said he would as long as I do my homework.”
“So he talks to you.”
“I don’t hear his voice if that’s what you mean. I’m not bonkers like Mary Reagan’s mother who said she sees her son Tom who was killed in North Africa last month. It’s more like Brendan thinks the words to me.”
“Well that’s comforting,” I said.
“Better than crying myself to sleep. Though Maureen told me I was only fooling myself, that Brendan wasn’t up there. Neither was Jesus or Mary or God even because if they were Brendan would still be alive. What do you say to that, Miss Kelly? Am I silly to pray? Does praying do anything?”
I didn’t answer her right away. What could I say? “If it helps the one who’s praying then why not?”
The crying had stopped now.
“Good night,” Margaret said.
“Good night, girls.” I looked up at the ceiling. Okay, Brendan, I thought, if any of this is true, if there is a heaven of some kind and you’re up there, I turn Mike over to you. No sounds came from the other bed. I fell asleep. It had been a very long day and many miles traveled.
* * *
“I bet you’ve never seen anything like this,” Ray said to us the next day as we drove past blocks of buildings hit by the bombs the Luftwaffe dropped on the city of London night after night. “The Blitz” Ray called it, which had a kind of German sound to it but blitz seemed to describe a quick sharp blow while these attacks kept coming. Such random destruction. One apartment building stood intact next to another whose façade had been sheared off, exposing parlors very like the Finucanes’—a couch, a chair, just visible under the rubble.
“Jesus,” Mike said, “this really makes the war real.”
I wondered if I should tell them that the streets of Dublin looked very much like these after the British naval guns bombarded the city during the Easter Rising. Had Andy Finucane told his son about the similarity? Probably not. Wouldn’t want to equate the British with the Nazis. I shouldn’t either so I said nothing.
Ray dropped me back at his parents’ house, as Florence had invited me to stay on instead of going to the base and she seemed to enjoy taking me around to meet the neighbor women. I was a novelty. As I took their photographs and listened to their stories I realized I’d always associated the English with the British Army and Ireland’s oppressors. With landlords whose allegiance was to the crown and who had watched a million people starve to death while they sold food to England. But these women were very like those I knew in Bridgeport, or in Bearna for that matter, where Granny Honora had been born. I said as much to Andy the last night I stayed with the Finucanes.
“We’re all alike really aren’t we?” he said. “We want the same things. A decent job. Security. Opportunities for our children. I’ve always thought that the British government’s greatest fear was that ordinary Irish and British people would figure out how much they have in common and band together against all those lords and ladies who want to rule over us and take our money. But even the kindest, most polite English person can’t quite see someone Irish as his equal. It’s centuries of being told that Paddies are dumb and dangerous, good for a song and a laugh, but not really solid, can’t be trusted. We’re full of blarney and superstition, Papists after all, very brave sometimes, but inferior really. Without us who would they have to look down on? Rather like the attitude toward colored people in your own country I’d say, Nora. Maybe the war will change all that. Shared danger and shared sorrow.”
“I hope so, Andy. I surely do,” I said.
The next day I joined Eleanor Roosevelt. Not only had she stayed for the weekend with the Churchills but she had spent two days being entertained by the king and queen at Buckingham Palace.
“They’re old friends,” Eleanor Roosevelt said. “They visited us at Hyde Park. Franklin made them eat hot dogs. I think they were secretly appalled.”
We were at the main Red Cross Club. A four-story building serving the US forces. Mike and the rest of the aircrew were all back at the base waiting for word of our departure. Eleanor Roosevelt, Tommy, and I were helping to serve hot dogs to lines of soldiers and sailors. We were to fly out the next morning, land in Belfast, spend the afternoon meeting the troops, then fly on to Derry and the Navy base where we’d stay.
“We’ll spend the rest of the afternoon here,” Eleanor Roosevelt said. “Spend the night in the embassy and then we’ll leave for Belfast at first light. The colonel is informing our air crew.”
I went down to the kitchen for more buns, and as I passed the club entrance I saw a group of Negro soldiers standing at the door.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” said the tallest fellow, who had what I recognized as sergeant stripes on his sleeve. “We heard they’ve got hot dogs, mustard, and Coca-Cola inside this club. Is that true?”
“It certainly is and you’ll never guess who’s serving them. Eleanor Roosevelt.”
He turned and told the others, “This is our lucky day.” Then turned to me. “We love the First Lady. She’s done more for our race than even the president has.”
The men came through the red-painted door of the club. But when we reached the hallway two MPs who I hadn’t noticed before stepped forward.
“What are you doing here, boys?” the first MP asked.
“Going to get some hot dogs,” the sergeant said.
“Not here, you’re not,” the MP said. Both MPs were older than most of the soldiers I’d seen. Army regulars I’d say, big. Southerners from their accents. “Your club is around the corner on Wellington Street,” he said.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Stand aside and let these men through. Mrs. Roosevelt expects them.”
The Negro sergeant looked at me.
“Isn’t that right, Sergeant?” I said to him.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “And we don’t want to be late, so…” He waved the other four forward.
“Hold it,” the MP said and the two drew their guns. “I don’t give a damn what Eleanor Roosevelt wants.” He snarled out her name. “This club is for whites only.”
“I’m getting Mrs. Roosevelt. We’ll see about this,” and I started toward the main dining room. But the sergeant took my arm, turned me around, and walked me out of the door. The Negr
o soldiers followed. “Wait,” I said. “You’re not going to take that are you?”
“Listen, ma’am, that cracker could have arrested the whole pack of us. Even shoot at us if we back-talked him,” the sergeant said.
“He wouldn’t dare,” I said.
“Oh yes, he would,” another man said. “I’ve lived with boys like that all my life. They’re mean as dirt and love to pull the trigger.”
“Let’s go,” the sergeant said. “Find that place around the corner.”
“I’m going with you,” I said. “It better be as good as this club or Mrs. Roosevelt will hear about it.”
“Where are you from, ma’am?” the sergeant asked me as we started walking.
“Chicago,” I said.
“There are two clubs in Chicago too, you know,” he said. “Jim Crow’s a traveling man.”
What could I say? It was tough finding this other club. Finally we saw a small sign “US Service Personnel (Colored).” An arrow pointed down the steps into a basement. “Welcome, welcome,” a woman said. “I’m Winnie from Jamaica and I’m very glad to have you here.”
“Thank you,” the sergeant said. “We’re really looking forward to hot dogs and mustard.”
“Oh,” she said. We were the only people in the place. A storage basement I’d say. Two long tables took up the center of the room. Wooden tops, no tablecloths. The Red Cross Club had a complete kitchen but I didn’t see any facilities here.
“Sit down. Sit down,” Winnie said. “I’ve some delicious biscuits, cookies as you say. Homemade by our volunteers. All members of my church. And nice cups of tea.”
“No hot dogs?” I said. She shook her head.
The men were too polite to complain to her but the sergeant said to me, “I know the Army is segregated but I thought when we got overseas the people might be different.”
Winnie had sat down with us and she answered him. “There are a lot of crazy stories told about you fellows. They say tan Yanks have tails.”
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