‘Your family sounds lovely,’ Lyn said, in between mouthfuls of toast.
‘You’re quite a chowhound!’ Ben laughed. ‘You know, you would love my mom’s homemade pizza.’
‘What’s pizza?’ Lyn asked.
Ben’s jaw dropped. ‘You never had pizza? Boy, you Brits are really missing out.’
‘Well, I bet you’ve never had a good English roast,’ Lyn responded. She told Ben about the wonderful meals her mother used to make every Sunday before rationing started, with roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, Brussels sprouts and roast potatoes.
The more they laughed and shared stories together, the more Lyn found she was enjoying herself. She was surprised to find she hadn’t thought about Russ for a while.
At the end of the night, Ben walked Lyn home. He made no attempt to kiss her, but he held her hand. It felt good, Lyn realised – and unpressured.
‘Goodnight then,’ she told Ben, as they reached her front door. ‘I had a nice evening.’
‘Goodnight, Lyn,’ he replied, squeezing her hand.
Inside, Lyn went straight to the mantelpiece and picked up Russ’s letter. But this time she didn’t open the envelope, or look at the photograph. Instead, she took it straight upstairs to her bedroom and shut it away in a drawer.
On her next date with Ben, Lyn gave him her undivided attention – and he gave her his unqualified devotion. It was clear that he was smitten, and at times he would drift off from talking and simply gaze at her.
At first, it made Lyn feel a little uncomfortable. ‘What is it?’ she asked, as Ben sat staring at her in silence.
‘Boy, you really don’t know how cute you are,’ he replied. After that, Lyn decided that she rather liked it.
Soon, Ben and Lyn were seeing each other every evening. He treated her like royalty, always taking her coat for her, pulling out her chair at the table and bringing her chocolates and flowers. He persisted in calling her his ‘chowhound’ whenever he saw her stuffing her face, which always made her laugh.
When Ben and Lyn went to the pictures together they would stroll back home afterwards through Watts Park. It was on one of these walks that Lyn saw another side of Ben’s character that raised him even further in her estimation.
‘Wait here a minute,’ Ben told her suddenly, guiding her to sit down on a bench before rushing over to a mixed group of black and white GIs.
Lyn could hear the men were arguing, and it sounded nasty. ‘Get back in the gutter where you belong,’ one of the white men shouted angrily. ‘Uppity nigger,’ another said.
Since the black GIs had first arrived in Britain two years earlier, racial incidents like these had grown common. Some had spilled over into violence, with knife fights, murders and even castrations of black soldiers. In one town a group of GIs from the South regularly went out ‘nigger hunting’, boasting of the black soldiers that they had killed. Since the Americans were subject to US Army law and beyond the control of the British police, such crimes were easily swept under the carpet.
But Ben was loyal to the black soldiers who served under him, and would always do his best to protect them. From the safety of her bench, Lyn watched as he waded right into the group. He was not a physically imposing man, but he had a quiet authority.
Lyn strained to hear what Ben was saying, but she couldn’t make it out. Evidently it had the desired effect, though. As fired-up and angry as the young white men had become, soon they began to disperse. The black GIs thanked Ben and then went off in the other direction.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ Ben told Lyn, rushing back to the bench.
But she didn’t mind. Once again she felt stirred by Ben’s strength of purpose and decency.
As they continued to date, Lyn saw a string of similar encounters from her vantage point on the bench in the park. Each time Ben somehow managed to step in and diffuse the situation before a single blow was even landed.
‘I like the way you stand up for your men,’ she told him. ‘A lot of Yanks don’t give them a chance.’
‘I didn’t either, to begin with,’ he admitted. ‘When I first heard they were putting me in charge of Negroes, I was down in the dumps for a week. I thought they smelled bad, they were lazy, I didn’t want anything to do with them. But those were my orders so I figured I just had to swallow it. Then I started to realise that some of them weren’t so bad after all. You ask me now, I’d say they’re the best group of guys I ever met.’
Lyn took Ben’s hand and squeezed it tightly. She thought of Russ, the man she had previously thought was so perfect. Somehow, she couldn’t imagine having the same conversation with him.
After Lyn had been dating Ben for several weeks, her parents insisted on meeting him. Mrs Rowe was keen to make a good impression, and having heard about the legendary Italian love of pasta, had blown most of her week’s rations on tins of Heinz spaghetti in tomato sauce.
Ben smiled politely as Lyn’s mother doled the sticky red gloop onto a piece of toast in front of him.
‘Well, eat up everyone,’ she said.
Ben took a hearty mouthful and made appreciative noises. But after a while Lyn noticed that he seemed more interested in the toast than the spaghetti, and once that was gone the rest merely moved around his plate.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Lyn. ‘You’re not eating.’
‘I’m not that hungry is all,’ Ben replied tactfully.
‘Don’t you like the spaghetti?’ Mrs Rowe asked anxiously.
‘Oh, yeah, it’s real good,’ Ben replied.
‘Then why aren’t you eating it?’ Lyn demanded.
There was a silence until Ben spoke again. He turned to Mrs Rowe and said, ‘To be honest, ma’am, I’ve never eaten spaghetti out of a tin.’
‘That’s all right,’ she laughed. ‘You don’t have to eat it.’
But Lyn was incensed. ‘I knew Americans were rude, but I never thought you would insult my mother like that!’ she declared.
‘Don’t be silly, Gwen,’ Mrs Rowe replied. ‘I like a man who’s not a phoney. I wish all Americans were as honest as he is.’
Lyn leaped from her chair and stormed upstairs to her bedroom. ‘You’ll need a firm hand with that one,’ she heard her father tell Ben as she went.
When, after twenty minutes, no one had come up after her, Lyn became curious and crept back downstairs. She was surprised to see that Ben and her parents were getting on brilliantly. Her dad was fascinated to hear all about Ben’s black troops, and observed that down the pub the black GIs always seemed more courteous than the white ones. For his part, Ben laughed at all of Mr Rowe’s jokes, while Mrs Rowe was evidently taken with Lyn’s new young man too.
Watching Ben’s easy relationship with her parents, Lyn’s anger at him dissipated. Somehow, despite the spaghetti incident, everything seemed to be going really well.
One evening, before the city was swallowed up by the blackout, Lyn and Ben were strolling through Watts Park. Everywhere she looked, she could see girls just like her, walking and laughing with their GI boyfriends. This was how it was meant to be, she thought: a guy, who liked a girl, who liked him back – not the tortured longing that she had endured with Russ. It was simple, really. Why had it taken her so long to realise?
‘Want to go sit on “our” bench?’ asked Ben, pointing out the one that Lyn had sat on so many times watching him sort out fights between the black and white soldiers.
‘As long as you promise to sit with me this time,’ she joked.
They sat down together and Ben pulled her close. ‘Lyn,’ he whispered. ‘You know I’m head over heels in love with you. I’ll never love anyone else as long as I live.’
It was the most romantic thing Lyn had ever heard – and coming from Ben she knew that it was true.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘there’s something I want you to have.’
Lyn watched as he reached inside his shirt and took off a little beaded chain with a crucifix on it. He pressed it into her hand. ‘I want you to wea
r this,’ he said. ‘It’s my mom’s – she gave it to me the day I went away.’
‘But Ben, I can’t take this,’ said Lyn. ‘Your mother will be hurt if she finds out you don’t have it any more.’
Ben shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She’ll understand when I tell her I gave it to you.’
When Lyn got home that evening there was another letter waiting for her on the mantelpiece, this time from Eugene. She had continued to correspond with the young GI throughout his time in Europe, and still thought of him often, sitting outside her house in his jeep.
Eugene wrote that he would soon be coming home on leave and would like to see her again. ‘There’s a question that I really want to ask you,’ he said.
Lyn didn’t hesitate. She took a pen and paper and drafted a quick but friendly reply. She told him she was sorry, and she wished him all the best in his life, but she was now with someone else – and it was serious.
9
Sylvia
Sylvia had corresponded with her GI boyfriend Carl all throughout his training for D-Day. The cheerful red-headed young man had eclipsed all the previous men she had dated, American or English, and she had fallen for him with all her heart. It seemed that Carl had felt the same way about her – several times he had mentioned the sights that he wanted to show her in his hometown of Boston, and she had begun to look forward to one day following him to America.
Then Carl had written to let her know that he would be travelling to Normandy on an LST – a large boat capable of transporting tanks – and that he would write again as soon as he could. But in the weeks after D-Day no letter had come, and when Sylvia tried writing to him, her envelope came back marked ‘UNDELIVERABLE’. Much as she didn’t want to admit it, she knew in her heart what that meant – Carl was one of the many who hadn’t made it.
As Sylvia sat holding the crumpled envelope, which she herself had carefully inscribed with her boyfriend’s name only a few weeks earlier, the tears streamed down her face.
Her mother came over to comfort her. ‘There, there, love,’ she whispered.
Mrs Bradley knew exactly how her daughter felt. She had suffered a similar loss in the First World War, before she had met Sylvia’s father. She had told her family humorous stories of her dalliances with Australian soldiers stationed in Britain, but it hadn’t all been mere fun and flirtation. One man in particular had made a more meaningful impression, and she had been ready to cross the ocean to be with him – then his letters, just like Carl’s, had dried up, leaving her with the same inevitable, bleak conclusion that Sylvia now faced.
Mrs Bradley hugged her daughter tight. ‘What do I do now, Mum?’ Sylvia asked her through her tears.
‘Only one thing you can do, love,’ her mother replied. ‘Get back on your feet and keep going.’
While soldiers were being killed every day on the Continent, life on the home front was far from safe. Since the Normandy landings, the Nazis had begun using two devastating new weapons. The V-1, or ‘doodlebug’, was a pilotless plane that would fall from the sky when its engine cut out, causing a ton-weight warhead to explode on impact. Even more terrifying was the V-2 rocket, which travelled at nearly five times the speed of sound. The only warning it gave was a sonic boom as it dropped from 30,000 feet, and it could destroy a whole row of terraced houses.
Every Sunday, at their home in Woolwich, Mrs Bradley threw open the windows so that the whole family could hear the band playing in the church parade at the chapel of the Royal Artillery. But one week the drums and brass were silent.
‘I can’t hear the band this morning,’ Sylvia told her mother.
‘No, love,’ Mrs Bradley replied. ‘I think one of them doodlebugs got the chapel. The band won’t be playing any more.’
‘Oh,’ Sylvia replied quietly. From then on, Sunday mornings passed in silence.
Sylvia was doing her best to throw herself into her work at the Piccadilly Hotel and the Red Cross club. On her commute ‘Up West’ every morning she had made friends with a group of young women who always caught the same train – the 8.10 from Woolwich to Charing Cross. There was a local girl by the name of Olive Kelsey who Sylvia had been to the pictures with a few times, a young married woman called Vera whose parents owned the local pet shop, and two other girls whose company and gossip she always enjoyed. Chatting away with the little group had become one of the rituals of Sylvia’s day. They had all agreed to meet in the carriage at the back of the train every morning, to make sure they would always find each other and that everyone would get a seat.
One day, however, Sylvia was running late – so late, in fact, that she almost missed the train altogether. Dashing down the steps to the platform just as it was about to leave, she hopped onto the first carriage, disappointed that she wouldn’t get to sit with her friends.
The train was just beginning to pull out of the station when Sylvia heard a deafening thunderclap. The glass window by her side shattered and a shard of glass nicked her right cheek, as she heard a second, deafening noise – the sound of a V-2 rocket exploding behind her. The train carriage shook, and Sylvia heard a buzzing in her ears, followed by some more indistinct noises of crashing and crunching. The train’s brakes screeched as the driver brought it to a halt, and she noticed that all the doors had been blown open.
All around her was pandemonium. Her fellow passengers stumbled about, some of them screaming in panic, and those who had sat nearer the windows were badly cut and bleeding. Sylvia reached up to her own face, where the shard of glass had caught her. Her fingers came down red with blood, so she took a hanky from her bag and held it up to her cheek.
The conductor rushed down the carriage to check whether anyone was seriously hurt. Mostly their injuries seemed fairly superficial, but they were in a frantic state and he struggled to restore calm.
Sylvia ran over to where one of the doors had blown open. Leaning her head out, she could see the carriage behind, with its windows shattered just like her one. But where were the carriages beyond that? She was sure there had been four of them when she boarded the train.
Then she saw the remaining carriages, laid on their sides across the track, ripped open by the blast. The back carriage looked like little more than a pile of debris. From amid the mess of wood and metal a human arm protruded, but it wasn’t moving. She knew it was the carriage that Olive, Vera and the others would have been sitting in. It was only because she had been running late that she was not lying among the wreckage too.
In a daze she went back to her seat and sat down again. Before long, the conductor ushered the passengers off the train, and walked them along the track to a waiting area. The glimpse Sylvia had caught of that dead arm kept playing over and over in her mind, and she felt sick to her stomach.
After about forty minutes, the conductor returned with news. ‘We’re going to uncouple the train and send the front two carriages on to Charing Cross,’ he said.
The dazed group of passengers boarded the train again, and it continued to Charing Cross. There, Sylvia boarded a bus to Piccadilly as usual, but she felt strangely detached, as if none of the morning’s events were real. Still holding the handkerchief up to her face, she wandered up the spiral staircase to the billing office.
Miss Frank accosted her on her way in. ‘What time do you call this, young lady?’ she barked angrily. ‘Don’t you know you’re two and a half hours late?’
As she heard the harsh words, something in Sylvia snapped and she collapsed to the floor sobbing. The handkerchief fell from her face, and Miss Frank saw the bright-red gash across it. ‘Sylvia! What’s happened?’ she asked, crouching down by her side.
‘A V-2 hit the train,’ Sylvia sobbed. The image of the dead arm came into her head again.
‘Someone run down to the hotel bar and fetch some brandy,’ Miss Frank shouted. Sylvia’s friend Peggy left the room, returning a few minutes later with a glass of Armagnac, which she put up to Sylvia’s lips. As she sipped the drink, Sylvia began to feel a lit
tle calmer.
‘That’s better,’ Miss Frank said soothingly. ‘Now, let’s get you home. You can’t work today.’
Sylvia was vaguely aware of being led back downstairs to the street and put into a black cab.
Back in Woolwich she staggered up to her front door. She was fumbling to find her key when her mother threw the door open. ‘Oh thank God, you’re alive!’ she cried, pulling Sylvia into a hug.
Since the V-2 had struck, Mrs Bradley had been having the worst morning of her life. She had heard the noise from the house and had rushed up the hill to the local butcher, who had a good view, to find out what had happened. When he told her the rocket had struck a train leaving just after eight, she had been beside herself with worry. She was sure it must have been Sylvia’s train, and was convinced that she had been killed.
The two women stood on the doorstep, holding each other close for several minutes, both sobbing. Then Mrs Bradley brought her daughter inside the house and gently led her up to bed. Exhaustion caught up with Sylvia, and before long she had drifted into a deep sleep, her mother sitting anxiously by her bedside.
For the next few days Sylvia was unable to get up, too shaken by her experience to face the world and barely aware of the days passing by. After a while she began to develop carbuncles under her armpits, which the doctor said were caused by the trauma of the bombing.
One day, after about a week, her mother knocked on the bedroom door. ‘You’ve got a visitor, love,’ she said. She ushered in Sylvia’s friend Vera from the train.
Sylvia gasped – she could hardly believe her eyes. ‘Vera!’ she said. ‘I thought you were dead!’
Remarkably, Vera had survived the attack with only cuts and grazes, and she told Sylvia that two of the other girls had also been very lucky – they were in hospital, but had avoided any serious injuries. But Olive Kelsey had not been so fortunate – she had been sitting by the window when the rocket fell, and had died instantly.
GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love Page 8