The receptionist glided silently back in and, without a word, put a small pink card into her client’s hand. His ebullient triumphalism quickly collapsed as he read the details of a ‘Baptist, 5 foot 2 inches, school teacher, serious-minded, interested in classical music, children, dogs, cycling & botany.’ The name of this wonderwoman was masked by a strip of paper pasted over it.
With shaking fingers ‘Sir Hubert’ passed the card back to the interviewer, whose overly bright, quelling smile stopped far short of her hooded eyes.
‘Thank you,’ he mumbled unconvincingly, ‘I shall t-t-t-tell George that there is hope for him in your esteemed B-B-B-Bureau. I trust that he will f-f-f-find the courage to overcome his shyness sufficiently to v-v-v-visit you.’ He slunk off, deeply impressed but chastened and discomfited, consoled only by the knowledge that he could now abandon ‘Sir Hubert’, breathe freely, and write up his adventure.
Patrick Campbell’s article about his light-hearted deception gave Heather, Dorothy, the interviewers and the receptionist a good laugh (and brought in new clients). But graver deceit caused anger and pain. Looking back, Heather considered that the war had increased dishonesty, with desperate people turning to crime – forging coupons for extra rations of food, petrol and clothes, looting bombed properties, selling stolen goods on the black market, making false declarations to avoid conscription, drawing rations for dead people. More mountainous bureaucracy added to the problem, wrote Heather:
The forms that the government made us fill in increased, for private people as well as for businesses. They became more and more complicated, so that more people had to go to already overworked accountants and pay enormous fees to have what should be a simple matter sorted out. Together with the effects of the war, which made us into a paternalistic state, this undermined people’s feelings of responsibility and honesty. In the Bureau we find that our clients are much more dishonest about paying their After Marriage Fees than they used to be, and this applies often to people with plenty of money rather than those with less.
Heather uncovered one of the most blatant examples of dishonesty when a woman rang up, spluttering with fury: ‘How dare you introduce my son to a girl without him knowing she was a divorcee? We have never had any divorce in our family, but now he’s married her, it’s too late. How DARE you!’
‘Would you be so kind as to tell me the names of your son and daughter-in-law?’ asked Heather, shaken by the venom in the woman’s voice but maintaining a glacial control.
The woman spat out two names, neither of which Heather recognized.
‘Thank you,’ she replied, icily polite. ‘I shall check our files, and shall telephone you in half an hour. Would you be so kind as to give me your telephone number?’
‘It is Welbeck 3267.’ The woman banged the telephone down.
‘Phew!’ breathed Heather as Dorothy raised her eyebrows in enquiring sympathy. ‘She is really spitting tacks! I don’t know every single client’s name, but it is beyond doubt that I would recollect a recent marriage. Help me, please, dear Dorothy. We must check every possible record.’
Heather and Dorothy searched the registration forms, the record cards, the ledgers of new registrations, the accounts, the letters, the boxes of clients ‘off’ for one reason or another (courting, or ill, or going abroad, or just wanting a pause). They questioned the receptionist and the interviewers, all to no avail. Neither name was anywhere to be found.
Heather braced herself and telephoned the woman. ‘I regret to inform you that we have no record of either your son or your daughter-in-law. Would you be so kind as to tell me when your son registered, and whether he paid his registration fee by cheque? And exactly when did he marry and pay his After Marriage Fee, and was that by cheque?’
There was a long pause. Heather could hear the woman’s mind churning. ‘I gave him the money to join your Bureau in cash, and the same for the After Marriage Fee. It was such a sudden marriage, too.’
The unfilial son had never been a client, but had found a devious and dishonest way of laying his hands on a quick bit of cash. He had probably met his divorcee before he accepted his mother’s kindly given money for the Bureau’s fees, and had spent both payments on a more lavish honeymoon than he could otherwise have afforded.
As the inescapable truth dawned on her, the wounded mother started to sob, first quietly then noisily. For once at a loss for words, Heather visualized the woman’s face crumpling, the tears furrowing her make-up, her bosom heaving, her heart breaking.
‘Oh the poor, poor woman,’ sighed Dorothy, anger rising in her usually calm breast. ‘What a wicked, cynical, cruel, unforgivable thing to do. I should like to thrash that evil son. He’s an even more poisonous toad than the Reverend Hogg!’
For years that reverend clergyman had been living in sin with Mrs Joy, whom he had met through the Bureau, but was still maintaining that she was merely his housekeeper. He had failed to reply to Heather’s latest letter, and she had failed to establish any connection with his bishop or other churchman of influence. However, the resourceful match-maker persuaded a theatrical friend of Picot’s, who lived in the next village, to attend matins in the Reverend Hogg’s church.
The cooperative friend duly shook the Rector’s hand as she walked out of the church and complimented him on his sermon, enthusing until there was a small queue of villagers behind her. Then she announced in clear, carrying tones: ‘I am so pleased to meet you as I believe we have a mutual friend, Miss Heather Jenner of the Marriage Bureau in New Bond Street. Isn’t she marvellous? She has made so many wonderful marriages – her couples are always so happy and grateful. She has a God-given gift, don’t you think?’
The Rector blanched and turned rapidly to greet the next person in the queue. Mrs Joy, at his side, seized the friend’s hand and, on the pretext of urgently needing to show her the ancient lychgate, steered her firmly away from the crowd. Two days later, an envelope enclosing a cheque for two After Marriage Fees was delivered to the Bureau. The cheque was signed by the Reverend Hogg. There was no letter.
Heather did not reveal such unpleasant episodes to the press. The Bureau remained a source of positive, entertaining, helpful stories, headed eye-catchingly:
MIND OVER MARRIAGE
300 EX-SERVICEMEN SEEKING BRIDES
ARE YOU HAPPY?
BOGUS BLONDES NO MORE
MATRIMONY WITHOUT TEARS
700,000 WOMEN WANT A MIDDLE-AGED MAN!
The more the press wrote about her, both in the UK and in America, the more in demand Heather became. Much though she loved doing the mating and organizing the Bureau, she was ready and thrilled to spread her wings, and eagerly accepted an invitation to sit with a psychiatrist, an MP and the Governor of Holloway Jail on a public brains trust discussing marriage and divorce. The News Chronicle photograph showed Heather, beautifully dressed in a chic dark suit, seated with her elegant legs demurely crossed, looking thoughtful. Next she joined the Principal of Westfield College, film producer Herbert Wilcox, film star Anna Neagle, the President of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, two MPs and an Auxiliary Territorial Service Senior Commander, to advise on career opportunities for girls demobbed from the Services or the Women’s Land Army.
A newly acquired journalist friend, Eve Brent, backed Heather in another new venture: a Tell Us Your Troubles bureau. TUYT was open to enquiries by post or telephone, to be answered for five shillings by the Misses Jenner and Brent, aided by an advisory panel consisting of a solicitor, doctor, midwife, and experts on dress, travel, beauty, hairdressing and cookery. A psychiatrist and adviser on domestic problems would be added.
TUYT rapidly led on to Heather’s own advisory column: ‘Tell Heather Jenner Your Troubles’ in the Metropolitan Times, which ran the preface:
We have much pleasure in introducing to our readers a columnist who is understanding and helpful with regard to all questions on marriage. Miss Heather Jenner is an authority on the subject and yet soph
isticated.
The first letter sought help for a common post-war dilemma. Many men separated from their wives for years, in a foreign country, had inevitably found solace with another woman. Similarly wives, left to fend for themselves in the harsh and lonely conditions of wartime Great Britain, had lapped up the attention of foreign servicemen, especially Americans, and those prisoners of war who were allowed to help with such jobs as farm work (Italians were particularly popular POWs, considered more romantic than other nationalities, and better at singing). The letter ran:
Serviceman Returns
When I was in Italy during the war I had an affair with a girl who really meant nothing to me. Now that I am back in England I am engaged to a girl with whom I am very much in love and whom I have known since she was a child. She is a good deal younger than I am and very unsophisticated. Should I tell her about the girl in Italy?
Heather’s solution was characteristically realistic and practical:
Miss Jenner Answers . . .
I don’t think that it is necessary to tell her specifically about this girl. If she is young and unsophisticated she might be made unnecessarily unhappy. If the subject is mentioned at all I should explain tactfully that you are older than she and were living under different conditions owing to the war, but that nothing that you may have done in the past could in any way affect your love for her.
All letters were to be addressed not to the Metropolitan Times but to Heather Jenner at The Marriage Bureau, 124 New Bond Street, London W1. In yet another way, the press was putting the fascinating Heather Jenner and her marvellous Marriage Bureau ever more prominently on the map.
19
A Chapter of Accidents and Designs
In late 1940s Great Britain, austerity held crushing sway. In 1946 the meagre sweet ration was halved. Canned and dried fruit, chocolate biscuits, treacle, syrup, jellies and mincemeat remained rationed until 1950, tea until 1952. Petrol coupons allowed only ninety miles a month; clothes were limited to one new set per year. The ferocious winter of 1946–7 froze bodies and spirits. The National Health Service promised change but was in its infancy. The 1948 London Olympics raised morale, but only briefly.
No wonder that many dreamed of a new life in a sunnier, more optimistic continent. Europe was a disaster area, the Far East too far, the Middle East and most of Africa too alien. Female clients wanted a man living in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa or Canada, foreign but blessedly English-speaking, and home to troops who had helped us during the war. Sun, fun, food and security beckoned beguilingly.
In March 1949 an article in Queen magazine about why people want to get married concluded that in the current austere post-victory days people did not like living alone, but that ‘with an agreeable companion even snoek may appear to be palatable’. However, for women the writer identified a more compelling reason than improving the taste of an unpleasantly oily and bony fish:
Women, of course, as the more practical sex, look upon a man as security. That is quite natural, because not only do most women suffer from an inferiority complex, but they are well aware that though they may work as efficiently as two men, they’ll be lucky to get the price of one. Besides, what happens when a woman gets old? Unless somebody leaves her legacies she must go on toiling until some kindly slave-driver of an employer advises her to seek refuge in the workhouse.
Many female clients of the Bureau felt as this one:
I would like a man from South Africa, or perhaps Australia, or other warm climate. Not necessarily anyone English, although myself I am proud to be. He must have a comfortable income and a good job, to look after me.
Conveniently, plenty of men living abroad wanted an English wife. Heather and Dorothy put them in touch with women with whom they corresponded until they could meet. After exchanging several letters and photographs, one girl bought her ticket, sailed out to Kenya, met her correspondent on the dock, fell in instant, mutual love, and married two months later. Another girl allowed a generous American businessman, Austin, to foot the bill for her fare to New York and a hotel there. Hours after her feet touched American tarmac she met and soon married one of his friends, but did not suggest paying back any of the money. ‘She had a great vacation,’ a considerably resentful Austin wrote to Heather,
and now she’s gotten a great future, at my expense. And she pinched my best friend into the bargain. She could at least offer me some return. I reckon she’s a tough cookie, and I’m best off without her – but gee am I sore!
Heather sympathized and immediately put Austin in touch with Mrs Phyllis Duke, the unmaterialistic young widow of Reginald, a returned POW.
Reginald’s death had stunned and grieved Heather, since she had happy memories of introducing Phyllis and her army officer husband in 1943, and receiving euphoric reports of their whirlwind courtship. They had been model clients. Reginald had been bowled over by Phyllis, an alluring twenty-year-old art student, and had wanted to marry immediately, fearing that some honey-tongued American would sweep her away if he didn’t pin her down fast. Phyllis was delighted to flirt with her many American suitors but adored Reginald, and one cold February day in 1944 they married in St Mary le Strand, followed by a reception in the nearby Savoy Hotel. Two weeks after the wedding Phyllis brought minuscule slices of wedding cake into the Bureau, and told Heather and Dorothy the story.
Reginald had chosen London as the most convenient place for people with no petrol to get to the church by train, and there was a lull in the bombing. But the night before, V2 rockets suddenly renewed their deadly attacks. His deaf mother, reading stories to the four-year-old pageboy and bridesmaid in a hotel on the Strand, was blissfully unaware, and the children were happily excited by the din. But the rest of the party feared that neither the church nor they themselves might be standing the next day.
In fact, the only no-show was the organist, whose railway line was bombed, but fortunately Phyllis’s former music teacher stepped in, managing the unfamiliar instrument with only a few false notes. Reginald’s dispatch riders collected the cake from a Knightsbridge friend, whose well-connected cook had resourcefully located the ingredients, and a bouquet of freesias was conjured up by the florists Moyses Stevens. The bride enchanted the congregation in her grandmother’s wedding dress, which fitted after she took out the bones in the bodice – even so, like her grandmother, she had to be laced into corsets underneath. A front panel of embroidered sateen was badly worn and couldn’t be replaced, so Phyllis had bought some net, which did not need coupons, and fellow students at her art college stitched it invisibly into place.
Snow was falling heavily as the wedding party walked from the church to the Savoy. The sodden wedding dress wilted and clung to Phyllis’s slight frame, Reginald’s mother slipped and dropped her big black box of a hearing aid which squeaked and died, the pageboy hurled a snowball at the bridesmaid who burst into unquenchable tears. But in the hotel joy erupted like a genie from its bottle, and hours later Reginald and Phyllis, standing squashed together in a train crowded with troops, on their way to their honeymoon, were dizzy with delight.
A week later, Reginald was posted to Burma.
After his departure, Phyllis dropped into the Bureau occasionally, once accompanying her younger sister, whom she encouraged to register. But since the end of the war she had not appeared, so Heather was taken aback when one day in 1949 Phyllis poked her head nervously round the door, inched her way to Heather’s desk and sat in the chair as if on a bed of nails. Gone was the pretty, smiling girl. Phyllis was unrecognizable: her clothes hanging from her bones, wan-faced, as if she had been dropped in a tub of bleach.
Haltingly, she explained. ‘Reggie’s dead. But he wasn’t Reggie any more. I’ll never know exactly what happened to him in Burma. He was captured the minute he got there, and put in some ghastly camp. The Colonel who visited me when Reggie came home after the war said he’d been tortured, beaten, starved, forced to do heavy labouring work in blazing sunshine. The prisoners regularly f
ell ill and were left to die. By the end of the war his mind was eaten away, the same as his body – he was a walking skeleton. He’d look at food, but he couldn’t eat more than a morsel. Yet if I left anything on my plate, or put a bone with a bit of gristle into the bin, he’d fly into a fury and fish it out, wave it in my face and shriek, “Don’t waste! DON’T WASTE, do you hear?” Once there was a caterpillar in the salad so I pushed it to the side of my plate, and he went berserk, howling that I must cook it and eat it. He was shouting and sobbing all at the same time. I was terrified.
‘He’d been home a year, but he was still crying and yelling in his sleep, twisting and jerking and thrashing his arms, suddenly sitting up and staring pop-eyed at me as if he’d seen the devil himself. He flinched if I reached out to touch him. I tried to talk to him about our wedding, and our home, but he just looked blank, then sprang up as if he’d been electrocuted and staggered out of the room, slamming the door so viciously the shelves all shook. He cursed and swore, couldn’t bear to be indoors, so he used to go striding off. I never knew where he went or when he’d be back.’
One day in October Reggie hadn’t come home. Nor the next day. Phyllis went to the police, who searched and searched in vain. People kept ringing up and telling her they’d seen him in the local town, or catching a bus, or waiting on the station platform. But they were all wrong, because in March, a man walking his dog in a field only a mile away found Reggie’s body. He’d fallen into a deep ditch, and leaves and then snow and water had hidden him. The police estimated he’d been there for about six months, and that almost certainly he had died quickly. That was some relief to Phyllis, and would have been to his mother too, but she was so deaf she couldn’t understand what her daughter-in-law was saying, and she’d lost most of her sight, so it wasn’t any good writing down the fearful news.
Marriages are Made in Bond Street Page 22