They decided to go into the nearest pub to get away from the crowd, but it was even more packed inside. They jostled to the bar and eventually got a round of drinks. ‘Where shall we go?’ Eileen asked.
Rae could see three GIs at the end of the bar. ‘This way,’ she said, heading in the opposite direction. The girls were lucky to get to a table at the front of the pub just as the people sitting at it were leaving.
They had barely taken a sip of their drinks, however, before the three Yanks came over. Rae and Irene were at the end of the table, and to Rae’s annoyance the men started trying to chat them up.
‘Hey, baby, how about you and me get out of here?’ one of them asked her. He was a tall, thick-set American at least ten years older than her, with short-cropped blond hair and small eyes. But if he had been Clark Gable, Rae still wouldn’t have given him a second look. He was a Yank, and therefore not to be trusted.
‘Get lost,’ she told him.
He laughed. ‘Oh, c’mon, don’t be like that, sugar,’ he said. ‘Lemme buy you a drink.’
‘No way,’ she said, turning her back on him and trying to talk to her friends.
But the man seemed to be enjoying her ripostes, and to her annoyance everything she said made him smile more. The GIs were used to rebuffs from English girls, and even had a nickname for their attempts to wear down resistance: the Battle of Britain.
Rae was furious – once again, the Yanks were ruining her day. As soon as she and her friends had finished their first drink they left as quickly as they could.
But the men were not so easily deterred. All the way back to the girls’ billet on Layton Avenue, they followed them, calling, ‘Oh, come on girls, we’re lonely!’
‘Just ignore them,’ muttered Rae, relieved when they got back and could shut the door behind them.
Rae didn’t give the men a second thought, but a couple of days later there was a knock on the door.
She went and opened it, only to find the big, thick-set American on the other side, smiling at her.
‘Hey, baby, can I take you for a drink?’ he asked.
‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ Rae replied.
‘Oh, c’mon, give me a chance,’ he said, laughing. ‘What’s your name, sugar? I’m Raymond.’
‘I’m not interested,’ said Rae, and slammed the door.
A few days later, there was another knock. Once again, she opened the door to see the GI’s big, grinning face looking down at her.
‘I thought I told you to get lost!’ she said, pushing the door shut.
Raymond stopped knocking for Rae, but when she left the house to go to the cinema the following Friday, there he was, hanging around on the pavement.
‘I don’t believe it!’ said Rae angrily. She turned on her heel and marched straight back into the house before he had a chance to speak to her.
After several weeks, Rae’s admirer still hadn’t given up, and he had become a regular fixture outside her billet. ‘There’s your boyfriend again!’ the girls teased whenever they spied him from behind the curtains.
‘Why don’t you just put him out of his misery and go out with him?’ suggested Helen. It was clear he wasn’t going anywhere until he got what he wanted.
The next time Rae saw him, she was heading to the cinema again.
‘Hey, wanna go to the movies?’ he asked her, smiling. Rae sighed. She couldn’t be bothered to go through the whole rigmarole again. Nor did she want to miss the film. Maybe Helen was right and she should just put him out of his misery – then he would see he wasn’t going to get anywhere with her and he wouldn’t bother asking again.
‘Well, I’m going anyway, so you might as well come along,’ she said.
Raymond didn’t need to hear any more. He was already by her side, his grin bigger than ever.
3
Margaret
Margaret Boyle finished typing the letter the American army sergeant had dictated to her, and proudly pulled it out of the brand-new Royal typewriter. She went into his office, laid it on his desk with a smile and returned to her seat. She was confident of her typing skills and felt sure she was doing well in her new job at the European Theater of Operations, United States Army (ETOUSA) headquarters in Mayfair.
But the sergeant, a plump man in his thirties with oily, slicked-back hair, was finding his English secretary rather frustrating. A few minutes later, he emerged holding the letter. ‘Who is this?’ he asked, pointing to the top of the letter, where Margaret had faithfully typed, ‘Dear Bird.’
‘Well, that’s the man you’re writing to, isn’t it?’ Margaret replied. ‘Bird.’
‘I said Bud!’ he exclaimed. ‘B.U.D.’
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ responded Margaret, ‘but I simply can’t understand your accent.’
The sergeant went away grumbling, but she didn’t care – her eyes were on the other officers who milled around the headquarters. All the best, most ambitious young men the Americans had were here, and none had failed to notice the pretty new secretary, with her tall, slim figure and blonde hair pinned up in luscious curls on top of her head.
Margaret was making the most of it, having been starved of male company for years. Since her teens she had been living in the depths of the Irish countryside, where her mother had dragged her and her three sisters after running away from their father, a major in the Royal Artillery.
For as long as Margaret could remember, her parents had endured a tempestuous relationship. She had witnessed the terrible rows that Mrs Boyle provoked with her husband, always for the most spurious of reasons. Sometimes she would vent her frustration by hitting her daughter, or stabbing her with knitting needles. Margaret had learned to obey when told to pull down her sleeves, to hide the telltale marks left by these attacks.
Her parents’ final showdown had come when Major Boyle was posted in India, where Mrs Boyle had invented an affair between her husband and their nineteen-year-old nanny Elfreda. Using all her theatrical talents, she had played the part of the spurned wife to perfection, dramatically sailing off from Bombay vowing that he would never see his children again.
She had chosen rural Ireland as her new home, since it had the advantage of putting the sea between herself and her relations in England, enabling her to reign over her daughters without any outside interference. There, she subjected them to a primitive life in a crumbling old mansion, where they had no electricity and had to cook on an open fire in the hallway.
With her children a captive audience, Mrs Boyle – a creative if unbalanced woman – invented strange plays, which she performed to them in the evenings. She continued to fly into irrational tempers, and took to beating Margaret with a broom as well as her fists.
When Margaret turned eighteen, Major Boyle had arrived unexpectedly, offering to take her back to England with him. She was overjoyed to be rescued from her mad mother, and left before she had a chance to stop her.
Once she was safely in England, Margaret wrote to her mother, asking for her clothes to be forwarded. There was no reply, but a trunk soon arrived. Inside it were Margaret’s clothes – all cut to shreds.
Major Boyle was stationed near his hometown of Canterbury, in charge of the Boche Buster – a large railway gun capable of firing across the Channel. But having pulled a few strings among his army contacts, he had managed to get his daughter her coveted job at the ETOUSA headquarters, arranging for her to stay with some family friends called the Steadhams in Holland Park.
In London, Margaret had quickly discovered the effect she had on men, and had been using it to its full advantage, enjoying dates with a string of Americans. But it was one young second lieutenant that she particularly looked out for. Taylor Drysdale was a tall, athletic man in his late twenties with the chiselled looks of a movie star, and all the girls in the office swooned whenever he walked by. ‘They say he was an Olympic swimmer before the war,’ a young secretary called Grace whispered to Margaret as he passed by in the corridor one day. ‘Isn’t he an A
donis?’
Margaret had to admit he was quite possibly the best-looking man she had ever seen in her life, and she secretly determined to make him hers.
The next time Taylor swaggered towards her, she absentmindedly dropped her handkerchief on the floor, causing him to stop and retrieve it for her. ‘Oh, thank you so much,’ she said. ‘How silly of me.’
She looked up at him through her lashes and he smiled knowingly. Soon Margaret was the envy of all the girls in the office, having secured a date with the adored Taylor.
That Saturday they dined at the Savoy, which had become a regular hangout for American officers. The hotel had to comply with the blackout like everywhere else, so its revolving doors had been painted dark blue, and it was protected with sandbags. Restaurant meals, which were off-ration, had recently been capped by the government at five shillings, but luxury foods served in the top hotels were not subject to regulation.
Sitting opposite the gorgeous Taylor, enjoying a plate of caviar, Margaret was aware of the admiring glances that the two of them drew from around the room. He really was astonishingly good-looking – and, as she soon realised, intelligent as well. He had Master’s degrees in mathematics and nuclear physics and had been chosen for a special electronics training group in the signal corps, where he was currently developing radio navigation charts to increase the safety of long-distance aircraft shipments. He was also an accomplished athlete, and had competed in the controversial 1936 Olympics in Germany, coming fourth in the 100-metre backstroke and narrowly missing out on a medal. Margaret was convinced she would never meet a more perfect man, and by the end of the meal she was utterly in love with him.
Soon Margaret was spending several nights a week at Taylor’s flat in Chelsea. In order for her comings and goings not to be reported back to her father, she moved out of the Steadhams’ house and rented a room of her own.
Up until now she had been a social butterfly, enjoying the attention of various beaus. But suddenly she found herself totally obsessed with one man and one man alone. She thought about Taylor all the time, and was in a constant state of agitation at work, worrying about when her next date with him would be. There was only one way to rid herself of her malady, she decided – to make sure that Taylor stayed hers forever. She had to get him to marry her.
First, Margaret started making little jokes about wartime weddings and how everyone was rushing to the altar, but Taylor merely laughed good-naturedly. Then one morning, when they were lying in each other’s arms, she felt so overcome with passion that she could contain her feelings no longer. ‘Oh, Taylor, I love you so much,’ she gushed, looking up at his perfect face. ‘I do hope we’ll be married soon.’
To her horror, Taylor only laughed, just as he had at her other comments. He got out of bed and dressed, keeping his back to her. Margaret felt sick to her stomach and bitterly regretted what she had said.
She got up and dressed too, and then Taylor offered to walk her to the Tube. All the way there, she did her best to keep up a stream of light-hearted conversation to cover her embarrassment.
When they reached the station, Taylor turned to her. ‘Margaret, you’re a great girl, and we’ve had a good time together,’ he said, ‘but I’m not looking for something serious. Maybe it’s best we don’t see each other any more.’
Struggling to fight back the tears, Margaret hurried away from him to the platform and jumped onto a train just as it was about to leave the station. Once the doors were shut, she started crying desperately into the same handkerchief she had used to get Taylor’s attention in the first place.
An older lady a few seats over looked at her in sympathy. ‘Your boyfriend gone off to fight has he, dear?’ she said.
‘No,’ replied Margaret. ‘He’s absolutely fine.’
Over the next few weeks at work, Margaret was determined not to look as if Taylor’s rejection had crushed her, and she put more effort into her appearance than ever. She found she both dreaded and at the same time longed to bump into him in the corridor, and when she occasionally did, she said hello brightly. She hoped that her cheery disposition would convince him she had been unfazed by his rejection and he would ask her to go out with him again. Perhaps if she had more time with him, she could make him fall in love with her.
But in her heart she knew her plan was doomed to failure. ‘A man that beautiful can’t be tied down,’ sighed her workmate Grace.
For the first time since she had left Ireland, Margaret felt lonely. The life that had seemed so exciting to her a few weeks before now seemed empty, and as she came back alone to her rented room each night, she started to wonder if she wasn’t just as isolated here, surrounded by millions of people in London, as she had been living in the middle of nowhere in Ireland. Who did she really have in her life? A mad mother who had abused her, a father whom she adored but who had often been absent thanks to his military career, and a widowed grandmother in Canterbury who couldn’t possibly understand what she was going through.
On Christmas day, 1942, having no one to celebrate with, Margaret volunteered to stay on at work. At lunchtime, she headed to the Maison Lyons restaurant at Marble Arch. Normally, she loved to sit amid its ornate decor and potted palms, listening to the little orchestra play. But that day, as she sat having Christmas dinner surrounded by empty tables, she had never felt so alone. She wondered what Taylor was doing, and the thought of him made her eyes prick with tears.
After lunch Margaret hurried back to work, and as she came in she found a dark, wavy-haired American captain waiting outside the sergeant’s office.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’ She felt his eyes go over her figure. She was wearing her tightest skirt and jacket that day, and she knew they showed it off to perfection.
‘I have an appointment at one,’ he told her, in the sing-song accent of the American South, ‘but I see your boss has found something more interesting to do. Can’t say I blame him.’
‘Can I get you a cup of coffee while you’re waiting?’ she asked.
‘Would it be troubling you too much to ask for a cup of tea?’ he replied. Seeing her surprise, he added, ‘I got used to drinking it when I was in the Canadian Army.’
‘What were you doing with the Canadians?’ Margaret asked.
The man told her how, frustrated by America’s neutrality at the outbreak of war, he, along with other men from his native Georgia, had gone up to Ottawa to join the Canadian Active Service Force. ‘They’re more British than the British,’ he said. ‘Tea five times a day, and every house and car has the words “There’ll always be an England” in the window!’
Margaret laughed, for a moment forgetting her misery over Taylor Drysdale. Her boss soon came back from lunch, and the captain disappeared into his office. But on his way out, he stopped at Margaret’s desk again.
‘Would you do me the honour of accompanying me to dinner Wednesday night?’ he asked.
Margaret was about to say no. Since Taylor, she had lost all interest in other men, and while the captain was perfectly pleasant-looking, he was no tall, chiselled Adonis. He was of medium height, and although he had very dark, striking brown eyes, they were set in quite a large face, and there was a scar across his nose.
But she liked his manners, which were those of a Southern gentleman and made him seem rather old-fashioned, even though he couldn’t have been more than thirty. Then she had a thought that made up her mind: if she went out with the captain and Taylor got to hear of it, he might feel jealous and try to get her back.
‘Certainly,’ she said, with a winning smile.
The following week she accompanied Captain Lawrence McCaskill Rambo to Kettner’s restaurant in Soho. It was a glamorous place, with mirrored, panelled walls and a pianist tinkling away in the corner, and Margaret felt a stab of longing as she thought how good she and Taylor would have looked there together.
Lawrence was the perfect gentleman, however, pulling out her chair and ordering for them both. As they ate he regal
ed her with stories about his time in the Canadian forces. ‘They told us you can’t get seasick in a hammock, because it rolls with the ship,’ he said. ‘Well, I can tell you, it’s an outrageous lie! Three of the men were hanging so far over the rails being sick that their false teeth are now sitting on the Atlantic seabed!’
Margaret learned how, after arriving in Britain, Lawrence had been sent to the Scottish highlands with the Forestry Corps. ‘Now, this is a Georgia boy who thought thirty degrees was a cold day,’ he said, shivering at the memory.
‘So, how did you end up in the American Army?’ she asked him.
‘Well, when Uncle Sam finally decided to join the war, I was shipped back to America,’ he told her. ‘I was so darn angry I threw my papers overboard before we got into New York, hoping they’d send me back to England. Sure enough they did, but when I arrived they wouldn’t let me off here either. I went back and forth across that ocean six times!’
Margaret was soon in tears of laughter. The captain was clearly quite a storyteller, and he certainly seemed to be enjoying himself, laughing loudly at the end of each tale, even though he hadn’t had a drop of wine. What he lacked in looks he made up for in confidence and charisma, and she felt she could listen to him talk all night. Afterwards, she went back with him to his flat in Kensington and did her best to lose herself in his embrace, trying to block out thoughts of her previous boyfriend.
The next day at the office, however, she made sure to tell Grace all about her date with Captain Rambo, counting on her to spread the news around the office. Margaret hoped it wouldn’t be long until it reached Taylor’s ears.
In the meantime, Lawrence proved to be a welcome distraction from her broken heart. His job was in purchasing and contracting, and he was constantly going back and forth between ETOUSA HQ and Whitehall to liaise about equipment that would eventually be needed for the invasion of Europe. As a result he came into her office all the time, asking her out on many more dates over the following weeks.
GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love Page 3