GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love

by Barrett, Duncan; Calvi, Nuala

  Knowing that she should have been in the carriage with the other girls, Sylvia felt a tremendous sense of guilt. She was glad that Vera and the other two had recovered so well, but the thought of Olive dying just feet away from them haunted her, and she couldn’t shake the image of the arm she had seen poking out of the rubble.

  Slowly, the carbuncles went down and Sylvia began to regain her strength. She started spending more of the day out of bed, even going for short walks down to the river. Mrs Bradley could see she was beginning to think about returning to work.

  ‘Don’t go back, Sylv,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s too dangerous. You don’t know what trains might be hit next.’

  ‘I could be somewhere else and the same thing could happen, Mum,’ Sylvia replied. She loved her jobs at the hotel and the Red Cross club – they were her social life – and she didn’t want to give them up.

  ‘All right then, love,’ her mother replied reluctantly.

  That first morning getting back onto the 8.10 to Charing Cross was the hardest thing Sylvia had ever done. Her stomach was doing somersaults and her heart was racing as she stepped up from the platform, and she spent the whole journey feeling like she was about to throw up. But she managed to get into work on time, and as the weeks and months passed, bit by bit the morning journey became easier.

  Every day as she boarded the train, she remembered what her mum had told her when Carl had died: ‘You just have to get back on your feet, and keep going.’

  10

  Margaret

  Margaret stood on the deck of the RMS Mauretania and watched England fade into the distance. It was four months since her husband had been kicked out of the American Army for defrauding the Red Cross and failing to pay his debts, and he had been repatriated shortly afterwards. In his letters to her since then he had repeated his promise that if she followed him to America they could start afresh and he would never touch another drop of alcohol. His apologies seemed heartfelt and sincere, and Margaret hoped that once he was away from the stress and strain of the war things would be easier.

  As the wife of an officer, Margaret had been entitled to transportation by the Army, which had requisitioned Cunard’s great ocean liners to carry troops from America to the theatres of operation and had spaces onboard on their return journeys. But the voyage was top secret – the passengers’ bags were marked with a code number rather than their destination, and the brides had been instructed to tell no one at home when they were travelling, for fear of a U-boat attack. On some voyages, brides found the secrecy meant that even the crew didn’t know who they were and assumed they must be prostitutes brought onboard for the officers.

  Margaret soon learned that as well as taking British war brides to New York, the Mauretania was bringing German prisoners of war to Canada. ‘Do not attempt to communicate with the prisoners,’ the war brides had been told sternly when they boarded. But they watched with interest as the Germans were allowed up on deck once a day to take the air, and could hear them singing German folksongs at the tops of their voices down in the hold.

  ‘Sounds like they’re pretty happy down there,’ Margaret’s cabin-mate said. ‘I bet they can’t believe their luck, going to Canada!’ Like Margaret, the woman had a baby with her, and though their cabin was clean and pleasant, it was hard to get any sleep with both infants crying at night.

  Margaret was suffering from morning sickness, and combined with the motion of the boat she felt queasy almost all the time. To add to her discomfort, on the first day onboard the women all made the mistake of overeating at dinner. After years of rationing they were unable to control themselves at the sight of the tables laden with bowls of fruit – a rare treat in England – and the enormous portions of steak and potatoes. The children onboard, meanwhile, gorged themselves on sweets and chocolates, and soon the whole deck the GI brides were on smelled of sick. Luckily the plush carpets that had once lined the floors had been removed when the Mauretania had been requisitioned.

  The ship had also been robbed of other luxury trappings, including its silver, crystal and china, which were now languishing in a warehouse. Tiers of canvas bunks had been installed in the first-class cabins in order to squeeze in as many troops as possible in rooms where once only one or two well-heeled guests had stayed, while the ship had been painted a dull battle grey and fitted with armaments. German U-boats still lurked in the waters, and it had to zigzag to avoid being targeted, setting a new course every few minutes.

  Its grand restaurants had been turned into mess hall cafeterias, with narrow tables that could seat large numbers of troops at a time. But even these attempts at wartime economy couldn’t mask the Mauretania’s beauty. The ship wasn’t as big as the Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth, but when it had been built just before the war it had been the largest vessel ever constructed in Britain for the newly combined Cunard White Star Line, and had been intended to bring glamour to the Atlantic crossings. It still had its exquisite chandeliers, grand staircases and glittering ballroom, and Margaret enjoyed simply wandering around gazing at them.

  Among the Mauretania’s passengers was the well-known bandleader Spike Jones, who was being transported home after having entertained the American troops in Europe. He and his band performed in the ballroom every night of the voyage, but with young babies to look after, Margaret and her cabin-mate usually retired early.

  During the day, Margaret did her best to get up on deck as much as possible to assuage her seasickness. Staring out across the endless miles of ocean, she was reminded how cut adrift she had always felt in her life. Some brides might feel the ache of homesickness, but she had never had a real home to miss.

  Thankfully, the Mauretania was one of the faster Cunard vessels, and after just seven days at sea they approached New York. Margaret rushed up on deck with the other war brides to catch a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. Some of the women were moved to tears by the sight of it, and it gave Margaret a rush of hope for the new life she was embarking on.

  One woman, however, was incredulous. ‘You mean it’s green?’ she exclaimed. Having only ever seen the statue in black-and-white photographs, she had assumed it was silver.

  When the Mauretania pulled into Pier 86, those brides who were being met by their husbands were allowed to disembark. Lawrence had told Margaret he would meet her in New York and then take her by train to Arlington, in Southwest Georgia, where he was staying with his sister Ellen.

  Margaret and the other brides waited to have their documents stamped and to undergo a medical check. Standing in line pregnant, with little Rosamund in a carrycot, she felt exhausted. Army transportation had not yet taken account of the needs of war brides and their children, and there was nowhere she could change the baby, who cried pathetically as she got wetter and wetter.

  It was well into the evening by the time they got through, and representatives from the Red Cross were waiting to link them up with their husbands. Some had come to the port to meet their wives, while other women were being taken away in cars by the Red Cross to go to their husbands’ addresses.

  Margaret scanned the faces of the men, but she couldn’t see Lawrence anywhere.

  ‘Are you sure he didn’t expect you to go to him?’ a Red Cross girl asked her, after she had waited for about half an hour with no sign of her husband.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Margaret replied. ‘He said in his letter he would be waiting for me.’

  ‘Do you have the address where he’s staying?’ the girl asked her.

  Margaret produced Lawrence’s latest letter from her bag, which gave the name of the hotel. ‘Let me drive you there,’ said the girl.

  Margaret was too tired to argue, so she climbed into the Red Cross car, doing her best to soothe Rosamund as she started crying again.

  ‘Any sights in New York you’d like to see?’ the girl asked, cheerily.

  Margaret felt like asking whether she would want to go sightseeing if she had spent seven days at sea and had a baby crying to be changed, but s
he merely shook her head.

  ‘This is the one,’ the girl said eventually, as she pulled up in front of a rather seedy looking hotel.

  She picked up the luggage while Margaret took the carrycot. The receptionist gave Margaret a key to her husband’s room, and they travelled up in the lift.

  When they arrived, the Red Cross girl knocked on the door but there was no reply. Margaret put the key into the lock and pushed the door open.

  ‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Lawrence?’

  Margaret flicked the light switch, and at last she saw her husband. He was passed out on the bed, an empty glass in his hand, and on the bedside table was a half-finished bottle of Scotch.

  When they stepped off the train at Arlington, Margaret felt for a moment as if she was in a completely different country. It was Saturday, and the town was so busy that it was almost impossible to walk down the street – and almost every face she saw was black.

  ‘Welcome to the South!’ Lawrence said.

  He was back to his funny, charming self and was doing his best to smooth things over between them. He had pointedly avoided alcohol in the train’s dining car throughout the long journey, and Margaret just hoped that now she was here he would keep his promise not to drink any more.

  The heat was unbearable, even though it was late in the day, and the smell of cooked fish rising from stalls set up in the street was overwhelming. In between the crowds, carts drawn by mules moved slowly along the uneven roads, which Margaret noticed had not been paved. She felt as if she had stepped back in time by a hundred years.

  They made their way down Cedar Street, a road along the railway line that divided grand houses owned by white families on one side of the tracks from the main black residential area on the other.

  Lawrence’s sister Ellen and her husband Jack Cowart lived in a beautiful white wooden house with balustrades and columns and a large front porch. As Margaret opened the gate in the white picket fence and walked into the front garden, two blond-haired boys ran past shooting BB guns. ‘Those are my nephews, Lawrence and Jack,’ Lawrence told her.

  Ellen emerged on the porch. She had short red hair and was wearing a dark patterned dress and elegant little heels. Her husband, following her, was a tall lanky man with an open, honest face.

  ‘Why, Margaret!’ Ellen cried, with a strong Southern lilt, her arms outstretched. ‘You are just as pretty as Lawrence led us to believe. Welcome to Arlington, my dear!’ She embraced her and kissed her on the cheek.

  Jack Cowart also greeted Margaret warmly, although she noticed he was slightly cooler in welcoming her husband.

  ‘This here’s my daughter, Jane,’ Ellen said, as a slim girl of around thirteen with a shoulder-length brown bob came onto the porch, ‘and I’m sure Rosamund will have a friend in baby Daniel.’

  A black nanny appeared with a little a boy who wasn’t much older than Margaret’s own child, and offered to take Rosamund.

  ‘Y’all must be hungry,’ Ellen said, leading them into the house. They crossed a large hallway with hardwood floors and went into a pine-panelled dining room with an enormous table. ‘I hope you like chicken because I’ve been busy frying up a whole heap,’ she told Margaret. ‘It’s just about the only meat we’ve had since the war started.’

  Margaret had never heard of frying chicken before, but did her best to keep an open mind as it was brought onto the table, along with rice, broccoli, sweet corn and bread and butter. She was relieved to see there was no alcohol.

  To her surprise, the family picked up the chicken drumsticks in their hands and began tearing at the meat with their teeth. Margaret tried to pick at hers daintily with a knife and fork.

  ‘No need to stand on ceremony round here,’ Jack Cowart told her, smiling.

  Seeing everyone turn to look at her, Margaret picked up the drumstick hesitantly and took a bite.

  ‘That’s it!’ said Jack approvingly.

  ‘Lawrence tells me you’re quite a reader,’ Ellen said. ‘Help yourself to any books you like in the house.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Margaret replied.

  ‘Oh, my sister’s got a real library,’ Lawrence said. ‘She’s always giving books to the help.’

  ‘I think it’s important,’ Ellen replied. ‘It’s a chance for them to educate themselves.’

  Margaret asked them how the war was affecting life in Georgia. She knew the family had around 2,000 acres of plantations, including several hundred that had belonged to Lawrence’s late mother.

  ‘With young black men going off to war there’s been a pretty bad labour shortage,’ Jack told her. The Cowarts’ sons, who weren’t yet in their teens, had been helping with the cotton picking.

  ‘Industry’s having a fine time out of this war, but we farmers are struggling more than ever,’ Ellen said bitterly. ‘Very few of us are turning a profit these days. You won’t find a more helpless, discouraged group of people in all of America.’

  Margaret learned that most of the farming was still done with mules and Jack owned the only tractor in the county. She was shocked – when Lawrence had talked about his family owning plantations she had assumed that meant they were wealthy, but it seemed she was wrong. Despite the nice house and acres of land, money was a constant source of worry for the Cowarts, and their bill at the grocery store had been known to go unpaid for months.

  She also discovered that being a ‘landowner’ didn’t stop Jack from having to get his hands dirty. On Monday morning, he and his sons were up at 5 a.m., going out in their pick-up truck to collect the farm hands and head out to help with picking the peanut crop. It was back-breaking work, and the boys were sent off with handfuls of salt pills to counteract the effect of sweating under the hot sun. They came home at lunchtime for their main meal of the day, but then stayed out again until almost midnight.

  While the men were out at work, Margaret and Ellen sat on the porch, drinking iced tea and chatting. Margaret felt she had found a true soulmate in her new sister-in-law, who was intelligent and kind, just like her brother in his better moments. But she was taken aback by a comment she made about Lawrence. ‘He’s always been able to charm his way out of anything – just like he did when they let him resign from the Army,’ said Ellen.

  ‘Let him resign?’ Margaret said, confused.

  ‘Yes, after he had the argument with the General and threw him down the stairs.’

  Margaret realised Lawrence had told his family a tall story about why he had come back to America. But she didn’t have the heart to tell Ellen about him defrauding the Red Cross.

  Later, they went into town to run some errands. Margaret was surprised to discover that, as they walked along the pavement, black people stepped out of their way and into the gutter in deference to them.

  Arlington was in the grip of segregation – there was a ‘colored’ school and a white school, a ‘colored’ church and a white church, and even the water fountains were marked as separate. Ellen told her that in the cinema, black people had to sit upstairs, unless they were a nanny accompanying a white child.

  ‘It’s as if there are two separate towns in the same place!’ Margaret exclaimed.

  Meanwhile, although slavery was a thing of the past, the black workers on the plantations seemed to live the same life as their forefathers, living in board houses on small plots of land without plumbing or electricity. Ellen’s husband Jack was more forward-thinking than most, and whenever one of the sharecroppers needed new clothes for their children or had to see a doctor, he would pay for them.

  Over lunch, Jack told Margaret of his disgust at the way crimes within the black community were treated with little interest by the white justice system – when an employee of theirs had had her throat slit by her jealous husband, the man had escaped jail. Yet if a black man committed a crime against a white person all hell would break loose, and lynchings were still taking place in the region.

  Because Jack was a respected member of the community, when disputes flared up people would often s
end for him to sort them out. Late one Saturday afternoon, the family were all home when a man came to the door asking for Jack to come and talk down Billy, one of the local farmers. Billy had got a mob together who were threatening violence against a white girl and a black man who had slept together.

  The girl, Lila, came from one of the white sharecropper families, who lived in similar conditions to the black sharecroppers but were looked down on as ‘white trash’ and accused of being less clean than their black counterparts. Lila was only thirteen, but like many of the girls she was already married, and her husband was quite a bit older than her. He had been approached by a local black man who wanted to sleep with Lila in return for payment. The husband had agreed, and had sold his young wife.

  In such a small town the arrangement hadn’t stayed a secret for long, and soon Billy had got a group of white folks together, outraged not at Lila’s husband, but at her and the black man for having had interracial sex.

  When Jack arrived, the mob had been whipped up into a frenzy by Billy, who had clearly had one too many beers. Jack went straight up to him and, drawing himself up to his full six feet two inches, told him, ‘You better shut your mouth and go home right now, if you know what’s good for you. And take your buddies with you.’

  Being publically admonished by Jack Cowart was enough to make Billy back down. Cursing under his breath, he left, and the mob began to disperse.

  The sheriff had now arrived and was about to take Lila and the black man to the county jail. Jack knew there was a good chance he would throw the pair out on the side of the road, shoot them and claim they had been trying to run away.

  ‘If these two people don’t get to the jail alive, you’ll have me to answer to,’ he warned him.

  As a result of Jack’s actions, Lila and the black man were neither lynched nor shot that day – even if they were later convicted of miscegenation and sent to the state penitentiary.