Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  OUT OF BOUNDS TO TROOPS

  The emotion surrounding Rainbow Corner’s final hours is evidence of the place that 2 million young Americans now held in many British women’s hearts. Despite the culture clash, and for all their brashness, impudence and noisy lust, the sexy, well-heeled, smart-uniformed GIs had marched straight into the affections of innumerable British women. More than 100,000 of these had married their American sweethearts. Witnessing their forced departure was an occasion for mass heartbreak; but, nothing daunted, the GI brides were determined to follow soon after.

  From early after the end of the war – October 1945 – British brides of US servicemen had been clamouring to be reunited with their departing husbands. But priority had to go to demobilising the men first; the wives could follow when there was spare shipping capacity. This didn’t go down well. Thousands of frantic brides from Wales, Scotland and the north of England travelled to London to demonstrate in Westminster. Many were heavily pregnant or with small babies, arm-in-arm, chanting ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ and ‘We Want Boats!’ There was hysteria, and fights broke out on the steps with policemen.

  ‘Goodbye, Piccadilly …’: Rainbow Corner, the US servicemen’s club, closed its doors for the last time on 8 January 1946.

  Getting the war brides resettled with their new husbands in America and Canada was one of the challenges faced by authorities attempting to reorder post-war society. It was a bureaucratic swamp, involving visas, immigration laws and transport quotas. Every war bride had to demonstrate that she had the right documentation, and enough money to cover her railroad ticket. Then she – and her baby if she had one (and many did) – had to be processed through an ex-military camp at Tidworth near Southampton, where each woman was required to strip and line up to have a torch shone between her legs to check for VD. If she passed this humiliating medical examination she would be permitted to embark for the New World.

  At last, on 26 January 1946, the SS Argentina set sail from Southampton. It was followed on 5 February by the Queen Mary; Victoria Stevenson, a reporter with Woman’s Own, joined 2,000 young ‘Pilgrim Mothers’ (as the press named them) and 600 babies, packed on board like sardines: a veritable floating nursery. ‘Many of the girls had never been to sea before,’ Stevenson told her readers, and went on to paint a heart-warming picture of ship life for the happy brides, who included a nurse, a dress designer, a psychology student, a riveter and an ex-clippie. The American government official chosen to accompany them described them as ‘a fine type of British girl’. Stevenson went to see a cheery crowd of young women in an eight-berth cabin, ‘creaming their faces and curling their hair’:

  Occasionally a tear was dabbed away as they spoke of partings with their home folk, then a love-letter or a photo of their new home would be produced, and their thoughts raced ahead to the man they each loved and for whose sake they had uprooted themselves.

  Knowing how many more brides were due to follow in their footsteps, Woman’s Own went out of its way to present an upbeat picture of what had been dubbed the ‘Diaper Run’. There were descriptions of the jolly laundry rooms, frequented by busy throngs of women wringing nappies or getting their babies’ clothes aired. Fatherly stewards helped out with feeding bottles, resident Red Cross workers were on hand to help with all queries; sing-songs, religious services and instructive talks about America were organised. But Elizabeth Jane Howard, who was not a war bride, but had boarded the Aquitania with her British husband in spring 1946 along with 400 of them bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia, saw no cause to be upbeat:

  It was the worst crossing, according to the captain, that they’d had for thirty years. And everybody was tremendously sick – except me.

  And all those girls – I can’t tell you what they were like! They were a huge collection of ‘no oil paintings’. They were mostly working-class girls, and they all looked battered, flabby, sleazy, and older than they were, caused, I suppose, by years of rotten food and bad lights. And they were met at the other end – vociferously – by either their bridegrooms or husbands as the case might be.

  And I just remember thinking how drab they all looked. I just remember thinking ‘Goodness, how can anybody want to marry you?’

  She herself was a statuesque beauty. But in 1945 Jane, desirable as she was, had had another love affair, followed by a couple of near misses. She was dependent on Peter, however, and was too frightened to take any action that would further jeopardise their shaky union. When her husband asked her to join him on his transatlantic journey, ‘I could think of no valid excuse for not going.’

  With its freight of brides and babies, the Queen Mary sailed up the ice-strewn Hudson River and neared Manhattan. Woman’s Own again:

  These British wives have the pluck and spirit of adventure of the old pioneers, only they go to no strange land fraught with unknown perils, they go to the friendly peoples of the great American Democracy, to forge yet another link between the two English-speaking nations.

  When she first met Kenneth Davis outside a fish and chip shop near Seaton Barracks in 1942, ATS girl Mary Angove hadn’t given much thought to forging international links. An on-off relationship with the attractive Yank ensued, ending with marriage in March 1945. Six months later Kenneth was shipped back home to Washington, DC. Mary was one of the 2,000 who crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary in February 1946:

  Kenneth was probably affected by the war, because he became alcoholic.

  I wasn’t over there long. Actually, I left him three times.

  The first time was when I was working at ‘Fanny Farmer’s Candy Store’ in Washington, DC. I came back home one day, and he was in the bedroom with this girl. Well, I wasn’t the sort of person to make a big hoo-ha about that, but he smacked me one – so that was that.

  But then the next thing, there he was ringing up and saying he worshipped the ground I walked on and apologising, blah blah blah. So back goes Muggins.

  The second time I was getting ready to go to the cinema with a neighbour. Suddenly he wopped me up against the wall; I ran next door across to her flat, and he sat outside watching our door. Finally he went off. I got back into our flat and found he’d taken my clothes and my passport. Next day I went to the British Embassy. They said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to go to New York.’ I just wanted to get away from him. I was really afraid of him, he was a barber and he had razors didn’t he? They helped me to get a job in New York as a waitress. Then somebody told Kenneth where I was. So of course he comes up, and he’s all over me … So back goes Muggins …

  Then it was all right for a while. And then he came in one night, and said he was going to hit me. So I stood there and I said, ‘Go on then, hit me.’ So he did. Well that did it, I thought, ‘Right, I’m off.’ My sister-in-law lent me $25, and I went back to New York. This time I thought, ‘Nobody’s going to know where I am.’ I got a job looking after two little girls not far from Central Park. Then I realised I wouldn’t get paid till the end of the month. So I pawned my engagement ring. It was then I found out I was pregnant. So I thought, ‘Right, this child’s going to be born British.’ So I worked there and I made enough money to come home on the Queen Elizabeth. When I got home at the beginning of 1947 I had £12 and the clothes I stood up in. I never even let him know I had a child. You know, the Lord did look after me!

  An altogether happier – and probably more typical – experience was that of Peggy Biggs. Peggy came from a tolerant bourgeois home in Marlborough, Wiltshire; she worked as a teacher and met the newly landed Lieutenant David Wharton in the summer of 1943 at a WVS dance in Marlborough Town Hall. They married early in 1944. For nearly two years, from D-day until she too travelled to America on board the Queen Mary in February 1946, they were separated. She would never forget her arrival in icy New York that Sunday morning:

  We were all on deck to see New York’s celebrated Skyline and Miss Liberty lifting her lamp beside the Golden Door. In our threadbare wartime British ‘utility’ coats we shive
red in the bitter wind.

  Peggy caught her breath at the sight of David waiting among the crowds, far below her on the dock. Where was the tall man she remembered, so good-looking and suave in his brand new, clean-cut officer garb? There he was in unglamorous civvies and a hat – the first time she had seen him out of uniform. Then he was with her, and soon she was caught up in the bewildering circuit of David’s well-meaning but inquisitive relatives, all of whom flocked to view the new bride.

  I was regarded as something of an oddity with my pronounced accent and typically English looks … I was interviewed by newspaper reporters … and generally made much of … I was then faced with the task of getting down to daily life in a strange country with little money to spend and many lonely hours to face.

  Peggy was a prudent, realistic person; ‘any lingering feeling of wishing that I could live once more in England is dispelled by the knowledge that one can never go back’. Her marriage endured. David’s culture and education were similar to hers, and, despite missing ‘the BBC, British newspapers, tea properly made, fields and downs of the Wiltshire countryside, and even the English weather’, she brought up a family, made a life for herself in New Jersey and in 1952 took American citizenship. She recognised, too, that America offered her material comfort at a level that she could never have enjoyed in the country of her birth.

  The brides who left Britain had spent six years surviving on potatoes, carrots, spam and that inexpressibly horrible South African tinned fish that smelled of cat-food: snoek. Here in the land of steak and steaming hot dogs the comparison was glaring. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s account of arrival in New York paints a picture of untrammelled luxury:

  The food! I was ill in a minute, I couldn’t cope with it at all. When you ordered a boiled egg for breakfast two boiled eggs came, and you thought, ‘I just can’t waste this egg!’

  And what was so extraordinary was this city, all lit up. We’d been used to being in the dark for six years. And the lights were just absolutely dazzling and overwhelming and marvellous.

  American excess took some getting used to. Buildings reached to the sky, hats were ten-gallon, there were traffic jams. People thought nothing of jumping into cars to drive forty, or even fifty miles. As one ex-Wren bride recalled:

  I truly gorged myself with my eyes and my stomach. I learned to eat hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks and banana splits, with no worries about calories or cholesterol …

  – and yet when you wanted a nice cup of tea all you got was a cup of hot water containing a little soggy bag full of brown dust.

  Let loose on the sidewalks of Manhattan with her husband’s dollars burning a hole in her handbag, Elizabeth Jane Howard went on a never-to-be-forgotten end-of-the-war spending spree:

  I went shopping. It was dreadful, I’m really ashamed of myself. I spent all Peter’s money. I bought my daughter two years’ worth of clothes – marvellous American dresses. I bought coats and jerseys and cigars for my father. I had written down all my friends’ sizes in shoes and clothes and I bought everybody nylon stockings which were absolutely like gold dust. When I got off the Queen Mary coming back the Customs man asked me, ‘Do you always travel with four dozen pairs of nylon stockings?’ and I said ‘Yes.’

  I had a whale of a time, I was so excited. I’ve always adored shopping. But it was wonderful, just absolutely, staggeringly exciting.

  Between the extremes of madcap extravagance and borrowing $25 to get home lay a multitude of variations on the GI bride theme, from seasickness to homesickness, culture shock to racial prejudice, isolation to the language problem. Trams were streetcars, good girls didn’t jaywalk, you said ‘tomayta’ not ‘tomartoe’.

  Setting transatlantic true love back on its course became a long-running and highly charged story in the media, which ran it over months, with the emotional travails, the shipment and reception of GI brides fed regularly to a public hungry for romance. Newspaper editors knew instinctively that the story of the ‘Pilgrim Mothers’ braving the oceans and mountains to follow the dictates of the heart touched something profound in the post-war breast. Perhaps this was because the GI bride appeared, on the face of it, to be ‘having it all’. Adventure, enterprise and courage were hers, as she set forth to conquer the New World. The legacy of war would be, for her, a brand-new start and fresh challenges. She would be Scarlett O’Hara, Laura Ingalls Wilder. But – she would never forsake her birthright as a wife and mother. She had uprooted herself to become, not an adventuress, but an American housewife.

  Our Mothers’ Shoes

  LAURA: Fred – Fred – dear Fred … I don’t want you to be hurt. You see, we are a happily married couple, and must never forget that. This is my home …You are my husband – and my children are upstairs in bed. I am a happily married woman – or rather, I was, until a few weeks ago.

  The brittle, refined voice is Celia Johnson’s; the role, Laura Jesson in the 1945 hit movie Brief Encounter, screenplay by Noël Coward. In the film the violent passions of Laura’s relationship with a married man – played out amid the roaring, whistling voids of a busy provincial railway station – bring her to the edge of suicide until, to the dying strains of Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto, she accepts the imperatives of her marriage.

  Watching, many members of the film’s audience would have experienced Laura’s conflict as their own: women whose horizons the war had broadened, who ached to follow their star, but who dared not. Before the credits roll, Fred, simple, good and perhaps more understanding than his wife suspects, puts his crossword aside and folds her in his arms. Laura has pulled back from the brink, the danger is past. Her husband is not sexy or desirable, but he will protect her now, and she will stay safely in their chintzy home until the threat fades into a dim memory. Brief Encounter was notionally set in late 1938, and it is surely not far-fetched to suggest that its 1945 audience responded as powerfully to the movie’s message of a return to a ‘pre-war’ type of peace and tranquillity as they did to the intense, near-tragic sentiments of the star-crossed lovers. In this way, Brief Encounter is a perfect evocation of the repressed emotional undercurrents of post-war Britain: there will be no more bombs, no more sirens, no more running away. Stay at home, urged the movie. Home is best. National trauma will be resolved by a reversion to rooted tradition, in which the sexes know their place, and two children, a girl and a boy, lie trustingly upstairs in bed. It was a potent message that would resonate powerfully for the female movie-goer of 1945. The likelihood was that she had left home and experienced a far wider world than the house-bound generation she had left behind in 1938. But was it the right decision to go back? Laura Jesson, and many of her real-life counterparts in 1945, would have to live with that question to the end of their lives.

  Immediate post-war Britain was not a showcase for emancipation. Was it inertia, fear of the unknown, diffidence, modesty or just an instinct of self-preservation that deterred so many women of this generation from marching straight out through the door that their wartime experiences had opened for them? Or was it, quite simply, the demands of their men?

  War had given men an uncomplicated brief: to defend, and to kill. Peace had taken it away from them. Exhausted, and deprived of his gun, his military status and his urgent mission, the demobbed soldier felt inessential, irrelevant and under-appreciated. One 8th Army driver got home to his empty London home to find a note on the kitchen table from his absent wife: ‘Pilchards in the larder if you feel peckish. Joan.’

  Here I was, in one of the greatest cities in the world, yet lonelier than in the middle of the desert … Somehow, something seemed to be wrong.

  The male ego craved more than that. He – they – had won a victory. Yet many, like this man, came home almost unable to express how damaged, defeated and lost they now felt. One psychologist writing about men and warfare in 1945 put it into words:

  In war they served their country; in peace they are needed no longer … men will not spring to attention when they pass. Words of command perish
on their lips unuttered. The great days have passed like a dream; yet all their lives they will try to live in this dream.

  Few women were so uncharitable as to walk out leaving a tin of pilchards for their returning husbands. As a generation they had been conditioned to minister to the male. They could help alleviate his loneliness, and his sense of irrelevance. And so they stayed – where they were most needed, forsaking their own aspirations, and paying the price of love.

  *

  In the spring of 1946 Nina Mabey was riding the crest of a wave. Her talents, her mind and her friendships had all been broadened by the independence that the war years had thrust on her, as an evacuee, as a college student and as a political campaigner in the 1945 election. In her last year at Oxford, Nina’s Uncle Stanley gave her a portable typewriter. She had her first story published, and made up her mind to become a foreign correspondent. Shortly before taking her finals she was offered a launch-pad job as junior reporter on the Manchester Evening News.

  She didn’t take it. Instead, Nina became engaged to Harry Bawden, a demobbed airman a good deal older than her, whom she met when he returned after the war to take up his place at the university. They married soon after her graduation, when she was just twenty-one, in the autumn of 1946.

  He took it for granted that we would live in London and I gave up what had been my ambition since the day Uncle Stanley gave me the typewriter without a second’s thought … I felt, deep down, that I was still only a frivolous schoolgirl …