They Left Us Everything

by Plum Johnson

  The first Christmas at her base she organizes a party for local children—evacuees, whose fathers have gone off to war. She scrounges a Santa suit and carol music and asks the GIs to play “Daddy-for-the-day,” donating their rations of food and candy. Toys have become scarce in England, since most factories have been retooled to produce munitions, but Mum drives a truck into London where she manages to forage masses of toys from a wholesaler. Word spreads throughout the county, and on Christmas afternoon over four hundred children show up.

  We had a grand time. They looked more like 4000 than 400 but the GIs grabbed one each, and were so attentive and the kids so responsive that there was a wonderful festive atmosphere. Many of the kids had never seen ice cream. One little girl said she’d give anything to have that party over and over again, if only in a dream.

  There is a slew of letters from strangers to the family at Rokeby—introducing themselves … and announcing their upcoming arrival. It seems Mum’s habit of welcoming waifs and strays to Oakville when we were young was nothing new. She casually suggested to many GIs that they go stay with her family whenever they went back to America on leave. Nonplussed, Granny always welcomed them in. One letter describes “a nice Minnesota farm boy, who looked after the guns on Annie’s Post.”

  By early summer Mum has still heard nothing from Dad, but she manages to commandeer army jeeps on her time off and enjoy an astonishing social life with various boyfriends. One night, she’s invited to dinner by the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, and the author Dorothy Woodman.

  They live in the cutest house out in the country—a 300-yr.-old pub, practically all thatch roof with a lovely lawn and garden, full of beautiful old furniture—all very simple. They’re both fascinating people, terribly intelligent, though in the middle of a heated discussion on Japan’s economy or something, one of them would suddenly grab a pair of field glasses and shout, “Look—I do believe that’s the little woodpecker we were looking for!” Before I left, K. asked how I had managed to get a jeep ... was my visit “important business”? I told him I thought anything was important, if it helped you to survive. He pondered this, picked me a lovely bunch of flowers from his rockery, and said “I think that is a very profound remark!”

  Then suddenly, just before closing time on Monday night, June 6th, 1944, the whole base is put on lockdown: no one can go home or use the phones; everything becomes “strictly business.” Mum is suspicious—she’s seen the boys painting the planes all afternoon. By midnight she’s convinced something’s up—that this could be D-Day. Determined not to miss such a momentous event, she stays up to watch. Soon she hears the concentrated engine noises of dozens of planes and rushes outside to watch them zoom off. This is the event that they’ve been waiting for, and planning, for three long years … our Allied Air Armada, disappearing into the vastness of the sky until they just became part of the huge roar overhead. I wouldn’t have missed being here for anything in the world!

  The next morning, ground crews are racing round the clock. Pilots are looking tired and haggard from continuous flying. Now they’re dashing in and out, dressed in gear, grabbing a sandwich, and boasting about the thirty-sixhour stretch they’ve just put in. To Mum, all activity prior to D-Day seems like child’s play. The awful waiting is over. It’s as though you’ve been treading water in the surging seas for hours on end and suddenly you’re picked up and rescued—and life begins again!

  The awful waiting was over in a more personal sense, too, because that very evening she’s called to the front gate. A man, claiming to know Mum, is being held in the guardhouse, and needs to be identified. It’s Dad. She hasn’t seen him since they first met in New York, two years earlier, but their life together is about to begin again—prophetically, on D-Day.

  He looks a little yellowed from Quinine, but otherwise much the same. He wants me to spend a week with him at his sister’s. Will let you know what I think of him after that!

  She slips up to London with Dad and stays in a hotel. As the bombs start falling, she calmly tells Dad to “have faith in God.” He replies, “I think God would tell us to go to an air raid shelter.”

  A week later, I notice with relief that she’s finally spelling his name correctly. Alex and I want to get married—OK? I know you will think we should wait till after the war but I hope you understand how impractical that is. You’ll think I’m nuts, but it’s a screwy world anyway!

  They plan their wedding for September. Mum delegates her trousseau to her brother’s secretary in New York, asking her to buy and ship over “the most impractical clothes you can find,” one of which is a wedding dress.

  … something simple—maybe organdy or taffeta—I don’t really care. Also I’d like a pretty afternoon dress—possibly navy blue with white fluff and a hat to go with it. I need some perfume, a slip that swishes, and two or three risqué nightgowns … I’m pining for frills.

  Then she delegates the wedding announcements to her mother: I wonder if you could get them printed over there and send them out. I’ve forgotten most of my friends’ names, so will you be thinking up a list? Also, can you suggest something for me to give to Alex? My mind is a blank on the subject. She apologizes for being such a “screwball daughter.” If only someday I could come near to being the kind of mother you are, I’ll be satisfied. She encloses a letter from Dad, which she says took him several stiff drinks and six pipes full of tobacco to compose.

  In it, Dad asks permission to marry Mum, even though he warns that the first year or so of married life will include long periods of separation and no definite home. He says he has tried “in not too gallant a manner to put Anne out of my thoughts the past two years, and failed.” Then he adds his own P.S.:

  I shall never be anything but English, but then, thank God, Anne will never be other than American, and if we don’t always understand each other that’s probably what we love about each other.

  With Dad’s week-long leave ended and their wedding still three months away, Mum busies herself opening a Rest Home for American pilots at Eynsham Hall, a colossal, Jacobean-style home in the country near Oxford. In peacetime, she says, it needed 240 servants to run it. Now it’s known as the “Flak Shack.” Mum describes the grounds as particularly lovely, with lake and boathouse, swans and wild ducks, indoor and outdoor tennis courts and a house that can easily accommodate a hundred people. She also describes the fragile emotional state of the men, who “wake up in beds soaked with sweat, describing their nightmares.”

  There are interleaved letters and cables from Dad, as well—most of them written aboard destroyers in secret locations and heavily censored. They are full of love and longing. If Mum was missing Dad, there is little mention. She’s sketching portraits of the pilots, tagging along with the recently widowed war artist Frank Beresford, whose famous painting of George V lying in state has just been bought by Queen Mary, and she’s still being feted by admirers from her old fighter base. I’ve been jitterbugging till 3 am … and playing “Sardines”—you should have seen me and a Colonel hiding on a shelf in the broom closet … whattanite! By now the owners of Eynsham Hall, who have relocated to a smaller house on the property, are fans of Mum’s, too, so Mrs. Mason offers to host her wedding reception there, putting kitchens and cooks at Mum’s disposal.

  Mum’s descriptions of her wedding sound like the original blueprint for my own wedding, which she organized thirty years later. Her dress arrived with shoes that didn’t fit, so she wore her old tennis shoes; she asked friends to donate booze and hitched a ride in an army truck to get to the church on time. Dad arrived at the last minute.

  I also discover that we’ve inherited Mum’s genes for altering church services, as we did at her funeral: The cute old vicar told Alex that I had made history by insisting my bridesmaid precede me down the aisle (apparently it’s the reverse here) and cutting out most of the service (he was referring to the C. of E. stuff) and tho’ Alex insisted on putting back in the word obey, the vicar said, “I don’t
believe this could have been done snappier in America!”

  Once she’s married she gushes about her new husband, in ways that take me by surprise:

  He’s so wonderful, Mum, I don’t see how one man can have so much of everything. He’s the only person I’ve ever known who completely fulfils all the principles you’ve always taught us to live by. All the girls are crazy about him, saying they’d marry him, even if he was a Russian! I certainly never expected to marry a man who takes such complete charge of me. He’s a combination of stern mother, indulgent father, and loving husband, all rolled into one. He reminds me a lot of Daddy in his desire to help others. He even picked up an old hitchhiker in our dash from the reception to our honeymoon, and threw him in the back seat, atop our rice-covered luggage!

  I certainly recognize Dad’s generosity toward hitchhikers, but “indulgent father” is news to me. She writes, We will only have two weeks together—but however long or however short, I’m grateful. Then she adds a curious afterthought—one that we’d seen her put into practice the whole time we were growing up: How do you build up an impression of bold indifference to a husband like mine??? That’s what he needs!

  After their brief honeymoon, Dad was ordered to Belgium and they were separated once again. Mum went to work at a second Rest Home—Knightshayes Court—where she came down with a chest cold and developed full-blown pneumonia, apparently turning blue and spewing streams of nonsense for ten days while delirious. I’m told everyone came by to listen. Isn’t that funny? I was the main entertainment again, even tho’ I was unconscious! Dad was given leave to visit his dying wife—an event that saved his life since, during his brief absence, the rest of his unit was blown up in Antwerp. At the eleventh hour Mum received rare penicillin reserved for U.S. troops, and now both their lives had been spared.

  Almost immediately Dad was posted to India and the Far East, possibly for a two-year stint, and Mum’s strategy, “to build up a bold indifference,” crumbled. She was losing her hair as a result of the drugs—They’re calling me Baldy—and she melted into melancholy. As the glamour of war wore thin and 1945 dragged on, her letters to Dad swing from love and longing … I must have been born loving you … If you do stay two years, I think my heartstrings will be plucked clean by then … to anger and resentment … I don’t want to be the widow of a hero! Dammit, this makes me maddernhell—you don’t have to fight every battle in this damn war!

  But her letters aren’t all so feisty; they also include her unique observations: I was glad to read where the Allies are forcing German civilians to tour the awful concentration camps and see them while the pitiful victims are still there, but I believe only God can bring justice to the criminals. Somehow it seems kind of egotistical for us to be talking of giving justice—don’t you think so?

  When Dad describes landing in Burma and witnessing “the ragged, starving natives” and the “awful sacrilege” committed by the Japanese forces against the “beautiful cathedral in Rangoon,” which has been gutted and filled with pigsties, he draws a sketch of what he’s seen and writes that he can never look at a Japanese soldier the same way again. But Mum tells him, It’s not the Cathedral that’s been desecrated—the Japanese soldiers have desecrated themselves.

  Reading Mum and Dad’s letters makes me feel that I, and my whole generation in North America, have only experienced “life-lite”—with none of the sacrifice and courage demanded of theirs. No wonder Dad thought we had it “too soft.”

  When the war ended in Europe, Dad’s unit remained in the Far East—in what they referred to as the “other war,” the one that hadn’t ended yet—waiting for the Japanese surrender. One of Dad’s letters calculates the amount of time he’s been able to spend with Mum since they first met—twelve percent. Mum returned to her family in Rokeby where, after seeing Dad the following spring for a brief “second honeymoon,” she discovered she was pregnant with me: I’m filled with more than just promises now!

  Mum’s letter to Dad describing my birth reached him aboard ship, off the coast of Manila in late November 1946. She had inked the soles of my feet to the paper and taped a snippet of my hair. Dad cabled back, Always wanted a daughter. He suggests naming me “Victoria,” but Mum doesn’t like it—she says it’s way too British sounding. She’s willing to compromise, though; if he wants to name me after a plum, it should be a sweeter variety than the Victoria—so how about “Sugar Plum”?

  Dad had finally returned to his pre-war civilian job in the Far East, and he sent for us. Mum took me in a bassinet by train from New York to San Francisco, where she boarded a ship for Hong Kong.

  She wrote daily to her mother.

  Dearest Mum, They call the General Meigs a converted troop ship, but they forgot to convert it! There are eighteen of us to a cabin— all in bunk beds. Plum has been so good—she just sleeps and smiles.

  After a month on board ship, she docks in Shanghai, tantalizingly close to her final destination: I feel like I’m serving a sentence in a girls’ reformatory & am coming up for parole— praise Allah.

  She describes travelling up the Yangtze River and docking in the harbour where milling, screaming people are holding up banners lettered in Chinese, trying to locate friends and relatives aboard ship. Dozens of sampans and junks besiege the ship, hawking carved boxes, vases, and kimonos. With long-handled nets, they hand up a ball of string to the passengers who tie money to the string, drop it over the side, and hoist up their purchases. The ship keeps its fire hoses over the side, periodically turning them on full blast to scatter the hawkers, but it doesn’t keep them away for long. When police boats appear, looking for opium smugglers, the sampans “vanish like mist.” Mum didn’t go ashore—she’d heard too many stories about vandalism and robberies and didn’t want to risk it so close to the end of her journey. She set sail for Hong Kong in the afternoon.

  April 4, 1947. Dearest Mum, I still can’t believe that I’ll be seeing Alex in 2 days—I feel as tho’ I’ve been on this damn ship for years. It’s been a nightmare …

  I hadn’t realized the gargantuan effort it took to travel with me or what guts it must have taken for Mum to leave behind her family and travel into the unknown to be with Dad.

  In Hong Kong, Dad was anxiously awaiting us. He’d found an ideal piece of land on Coombe Road, high on The Peak with spectacular views of the harbour and mountains, and here he built a spacious, sprawling bungalow with separate servants’ quarters. My amah, Ah Kan, spent every waking minute with me, and when my brother Sandy was born in 1948, he got his own amah, too.

  Now that they’ve spent their first two years together, Mum’s descriptions of Dad aren’t quite as glowing as they were when she first married him after knowing him for only two weeks:

  When he gets his mind set on something, there’s absolutely nothing I can do—it’s hell! For the first time in my life, I’ve run into a stone wall. Alex, like Daddy, doesn’t know what rest means, can’t stand being idle, highly disapproves of sleeping in late even if he has to concoct things to do; thinks milk is far better for his health than Scotch whiskey; and that it’s a sin to take a taxi instead of a bus when there are so many starving people in the world!

  She’d been more hard-hitting when she’d earlier put her feelings on a piece of paper for Dad: I don’t think you’d listen to all this in conversation, tho’ you might absorb it in writing—am I right? We’ll have to make a start towards agreeing with each other, for we are forever being childish and stubborn and taking opposite views, just to annoy. That gets us nothing but unhappiness and it’s time we matured. I’ve always had the feeling that you didn’t respect my opinions, from the way you instantly discard them, and I don’t give you the cooperation you frequently want & need. I know you’re interested in talking to me, but I’ve never had the feeling you were in the least interested in what I have to say. I resent being slapped down! Believe me, nothing can separate 2 people as quickly or completely as that lack of mutual support, and nothing conveys itself so quickly to ch
ildren—as you should well remember.

  It’s a revelation to me to discover that their marriage had been so conflicted from the start. I’d clung to the illusion that their early years were supportive and romantic, but it seems that was only because they were kept apart. Oddly, I find myself feeling humbled that despite their ongoing battles they stayed together because of us; mindful of the personal sacrifices they made; grateful that I’m allowed to see the private, inner workings of a marriage of great longevity—not something to be ashamed of, but a hard-fought achievement, an investment in love—a union that left us all this.

  In 1949, we left on a big boat to go see Granny, but I didn’t want to leave Ah Kan. Please don’t make me leave Ah Kan. Please, please, please … Ah Kan! Ah Kan! Daddy unhooks my fingers. Ah Kan is crying. Through the railings on deck I see her getting smaller and smaller until I can’t see her anymore.

  April 21, On board ship: Hong Kong to London. Dearest Mum, We’ve been thru absolute hell on this ship—in a cabin so tiny, there’s not even a spot to put the baby’s basket & not any soul to watch the kids. We spend all our time nursing, washing & feeding. Dear little Plum has suffered absolute heartbreak with everything she’s ever known vanished from her life—she won’t let us out of her sight. We had to leave her alone, screaming in terror several times, in order to get food. She misses Ah Kan unmercifully & says hopefully, “maybe tomorrow I go home?” She has tried so hard to be brave, but all sparkle has left her. I leave Sandy in his pram on deck and hope that if he cries, somebody will tell me. When Alex yells at me, Plum says, “Sorry, Mummy.” We arrive in London a month from now …

  Although Mum and Dad took a six-month leave, the trip took more than two months by sea, each way, travelling via the Suez Canal to Portugal, London, and New York City; then back via San Francisco, Hawaii, Japan, and Singapore, so that once they arrived in Virginia, Mum had only six weeks to spend with her family.