The closer they got to their final destination, the more troubled Rae felt about having left her home and her family, and the more anxious she became about what was before her. She was not alone. In the last few days of their voyages, many brides began to panic. As well as their other duties, the Red Cross provided a counselling service, and their caseload became heavier as they approached New York. Often these worries simply needed ‘talking out’, but some cases were more sensitive than others. One Red Cross girl was charged with explaining to a twenty-three-year-old French woman the trouble she and her ‘Negro’ husband, a bag handler at Grand Central station, could expect to face in America as a mixed-race couple. Many war brides had no idea that mixed marriages were still illegal in some states.
As the Bridgeport arrived at the mouth of New York Harbor, the brides rose early to see the Statue of Liberty. For some it was an exciting moment, but the sight filled Rae with dread. She stood up on deck and cried, wishing that she could jump in the water and swim back to England.
In New York Rae was put on an overnight train heading west, which had been commandeered for the brides. Red Cross girls were onboard handing out candy, doughnuts, fried cakes, peanuts and newspapers – in which some brides spotted pictures of themselves that had been taken by the press on their arrival. The Red Cross had become vigilant in guarding against journalists and photographers after hordes of them had jumped a war-bride train in Chicago, which led to the women becoming separated and stranded without their baggage.
The Red Cross girls took good care of the brides, staying up all night and preparing baby formula, comforting those who were ‘train sick’, talking to the women about their destinations and handing out maps so they could see where they were going. On one train, the women were so grateful to a Red Cross worker that at the end of the trip they made a collection of $23 and suggested that she and the male medic onboard use it to go out for dinner together.
Meanwhile, the Red Cross girls also continued to fulfil their role as counsellors. One tall, blonde bride wept as she told a caseworker how she and her GI both wanted a divorce. She said she intended to leave him and marry a relative in America – who, it soon transpired, was on the train already. The Red Cross called the immigration authorities, who said that if she did not go to her husband she would be deported. When she arrived at her destination, the unwanted spouse, who did not want a divorce after all, was there to meet her. Reluctantly, she went off with him, leaving her boyfriend behind.
As the train pulled into Pittsburgh, Rae saw that the sky was thick with smog and the buildings were blackened and grimy – it was even worse than she was used to in London. The city’s steel mills had been booming during the war, and smoke-control laws, passed in 1941, had been put on hold. Not for nothing had the city garnered the nickname ‘Hell with the lid off’.
Rae was the only bride who got off at Pittsburgh, where the Red Cross handed her over to a woman from Travelers Aid, who put her on the train to her husband’s hometown of Hackett. After about half an hour, the train was passing through woodland, in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, when it came to a stop. Rae peered out of the window. There was no station, just a road running alongside the railway line. She was wondering if they had broken down when a man came running along the tracks calling, ‘Rae Wessel?’
Rae grabbed her bag and ran to the door, and the man offered a small stool so she could step down onto the gravel by the side of the tracks. She wondered what kind of a place she had come to, where there weren’t even platforms for the trains.
As the train departed, Rae saw a little group of people heading towards her, and at the front of them was Raymond. He was dressed not in his old army uniform but in a white shirt and loose-fitting trousers, which made him look even more laid-back than she remembered.
‘Rae!’ he called, running up to her, his familiar big grin on his face. She reached up to hug him, but couldn’t help feeling a little like she was hugging a stranger. It had been so long since they’d last seen each other.
He took her bag. ‘This is my mom and pop,’ he said, introducing a short thin man and a little chubby woman, both of them dark haired.
‘Hello, Rae!’ said Mrs Wessel, giving her a hug.
‘Welcome!’ said her husband.
‘And these are my brothers, Jimmy and Charles,’ Raymond continued. Both were shorter than Raymond, like their parents, and all of them greeted her warmly.
‘Everyone’s going to be calling the police, wanting to know what’s wrong with the train,’ her father-in-law told her. ‘It’s the first time in history it’s stopped here!’
They walked up to a little road, where Charles’s car was parked. Raymond put Rae’s bag in the boot and they all squeezed in.
‘Charles is the only one around here with a car,’ Raymond said apologetically, as they set off.
As they drove along, there was little more than woods and scrubland on either side, punctuated by the occasional house, but after a while they passed a church and a big red-brick school building.
‘My other uncle is the janitor there, so we get to use the shower once a week!’ said Raymond, pointing to the school.
‘Oh,’ said Rae. She hoped there would be more washing facilities at their home.
After five minutes or so, a few more houses started to appear, all of them small clapboard constructions with triangular slanted roofs and little porches at the front. They were widely spaced, and Rae could see that behind them there was nothing more than forest.
‘Welcome to Hackett,’ Mr Wessel said.
Rae blinked. Was this it? This was the ‘town’ she was to live in?
At every door, women in housecoats, with their hair in curlers, emerged to stare at the new arrival. As the car drew up to the Wessel home, towards the far end of the line of houses and opposite the only shop, one neighbour said, ‘I hope she knows what she’s letting herself in for.’
Rae did her best to ignore the stares and followed Raymond and his family inside. To the right as she came in was a small living room containing a couch and a rocking chair, and to the left was a little kitchen. Raymond’s other brother Bill and his wife Chi-Chi had arrived, and they were also excited to meet her.
While Mrs Wessel busied herself preparing a lunch of meatloaf, they all sat around the kitchen table and began firing questions at Rae: ‘How was the trip?’ ‘Was the voyage very rough?’ ‘Were there lots of other war brides onboard?’ Rae did her best to answer the stream of enquiries, although she was tired from her night on the train and really just wanted to lie down.
‘Where’s the loo?’ she asked, interrupting the conversation.
They looked at her blankly. ‘She means the bathroom,’ Raymond explained to the others.
Rae wondered why the family had to take showers at the local school if they had their own bathroom.
To her surprise, Raymond pointed out of the window. Around twenty feet away was a small shack. ‘In there,’ he said.
Rae went to the back door. Between her and the ‘bathroom’ was a ferocious dog, chained to a fence, which started barking threateningly as soon as it saw her. Rae steeled herself and ran as fast as she could, reaching the door to the little shack just before the dog lunged at her. Inside, she was horrified to see that, far from being a bathroom, or even a proper outdoor toilet, it was just a two-hole outhouse.
The Wessels’ neighbours were keen to meet their exotic new arrival, and soon Rae was taken across the road to a slightly larger house belonging to Mrs McClure, who was throwing her a ‘Welcome to America’ party.
Every woman on the street seemed to have been invited, and they crowded around Rae, firing more questions at her about her trip and about life in England. ‘Oh, we suffered during the war too,’ one of them said, telling her about the scarcity of petrol. The others chimed in, complaining how they hadn’t been able to get this or that. You’re lucky, Rae felt like saying – we didn’t have anything! But she kept her mouth shut.
M
rs McClure had bought a large case of fruit from Chuck’s Corner Store, and the other women had brought cakes, biscuits and sandwiches. Everyone helped themselves, eating and chatting away cheerily.
Rae was grateful for the effort they were making, and did her best to join in, but she couldn’t help feeling a little resentful. They all seemed quite spoilt, complaining about what they lacked even as they stuffed their faces. All she could think about when she saw the piles of food in front of her was her poor mother back home in England, still struggling to survive on her rations.
However friendly they were, these people couldn’t understand her, she realised. They had no idea who she was or what she had been through. The welcome party had been thrown in her honour, but Rae might as well have been an uninvited guest. In the midst of all the laughter and merriment, she felt utterly alone.
18
Sylvia
As Sylvia boarded the DC-4 propeller plane that would take her across the Atlantic, her mother’s words were still ringing in her ears: ‘You’ve made your bed, and now you’ll have to lie in it.’
But she felt more excitement than trepidation. She was about to embark on a new phase of her life, with the man she loved more than anyone else in the world.
The inside of the aeroplane looked to Sylvia very much like the inside of the buses at home, with their straight-backed, leatherette seats. It had about fifty or sixty passengers, and two-thirds of them were women.
Sylvia was pleased to get a seat by a little round window and watched in fascination as the earth beneath her grew further and further away and she was transported into a landscape of endless cloud.
‘Going anywhere nice?’ the girl next to her asked.
‘I’m going to Baltimore to get married,’ Sylvia told her. ‘My fiancé was stationed in England during the war.’
‘Mine too!’ the other girl replied. ‘We got married in England but he got sent home. We’re going to live just outside Baltimore.’
Sylvia began to wonder whether the other women on the plane were also GI brides. Probably like her companion they had been lucky enough to get married before they set off for America.
But Sylvia was shy with people she didn’t know, and didn’t want to seem to be prying, so she didn’t ask too many questions. After a while the other girl took out a book, and Sylvia realised she hadn’t thought to bring anything to occupy her on the journey. The estimated flight time was twenty hours, with refuelling stops in Ireland, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.
The only thing Sylvia had with her was a pen and paper, so she wrote a letter to her mother, telling her all the things she hadn’t said at the airfield – how much she was going to miss her, how much she appreciated everything she had done for her over the years, and how she planned to come back and see them often, just as Bob had promised. It was the longest letter she had ever written.
The plane touched down at LaGuardia airport at 6 a.m., and as Sylvia stepped down onto the tarmac she was immediately hit by the heat, which even in the early morning was pushing eighty degrees – twenty degrees higher than in Croydon.
After going through customs, she and the other passengers who were being met were ushered into a little waiting room. She checked her face in her compact mirror and gave her nose a good powdering, then settled down to await Bob. She was so excited at the thought of seeing him again that the hands on the little clock on the wall seemed to be going at half speed. Every time someone arrived to collect their loved ones she looked up hopefully, but each time she saw an unfamiliar face.
After half an hour the room was beginning to thin out. Sylvia was almost bursting with anticipation and began to tap her foot impatiently on the floor. If only Bob would hurry up.
After an hour, she was the last one left in the waiting room, and a janitor poked his head round the door. ‘Are you meeting someone?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘My fiancé’s picking me up.’
‘Okay then,’ said the man, and went back to his rounds.
The second hour that Sylvia waited, she started to become increasingly anxious. Surely Bob couldn’t just be running late any more. There must be something else going on.
The janitor came back. ‘Are you sure someone’s picking you up?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I’m sure!’ retorted Sylvia. But she was beginning to panic. What would she do if Bob didn’t show up? The only thing she could think of was somehow getting to the British Embassy and throwing herself on their mercy.
She looked at the clock again. It was just after eight. If he hadn’t arrived by nine, she told herself, she would go.
That hour was the longest of them all. As the hand on the clock got closer and closer to nine, Sylvia’s hopes diminished further and further and she couldn’t help thinking how humiliating it would be to have to return to England and tell everyone that her marriage had never actually taken place.
At three minutes to nine, she got up and walked shakily to the door of the waiting room. She heaved it open and stepped back into the long corridor outside. At the other end of the corridor she could see a man walking towards her. He had glasses and was wearing a double-breasted pin-striped suit with a watch chain and a fedora hat, which made him look alarmingly like a gangster. The man noticed her and started walking towards her more quickly. ‘Sylvia!’ he called out.
Sylvia stood rooted to the spot. How on earth did this gangster know her name? Then, as his face came into focus, she suddenly recognised Bob. She was completely taken aback. He had never worn glasses in the Army, and she had never imagined that in his civvies he would dress like this. But it was him all right.
‘Bob!’ she cried. ‘I was just getting ready to go to the Embassy. I thought you’d stood me up!’
Bob laughed and rushed up to her, grabbing her in his arms and spinning her round. ‘I’ve got you at last!’ he said. ‘I’ve really got you at last!’
It transpired that Bob had mistakenly gone to Idlewild airport, on the south side of Queens, and spent hours walking all the way to LaGuardia. ‘I met some people here who offered to drive us home,’ he told Sylvia.
Outside the airport it was even hotter than when she had arrived, and Sylvia immediately took off her fur coat and hat. Bob led her over to a little black Plymouth, and she was surprised to find the GI bride she had met on the plane, with a man who was evidently her husband. ‘Hello again!’ the other girl said.
Sylvia and Bob got into the back seat, and they set off for Baltimore. Inside the car, Sylvia found the heat was even worse than before. The back windows didn’t open, so she tried to fan herself with her hand. ‘Too hot for you, babycakes?’ Bob asked, laughing.
Sylvia nodded. She was transfixed by how wide the roads were and how many cars there seemed to be on them, not to mention how big the cars were.
Bob chatted and joked away, but Sylvia found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying. She had never been so hot in her whole life, and felt as if she would die. She took off her tweed jacket, undid the bow on her blouse and kicked off her shoes, but even that didn’t give her any relief.
She didn’t understand it – why was it so hot? She knew Florida and California were meant to be warm, but she hadn’t expected the northeast coast to be. She took off her stockings, much to Bob’s amusement, and rolled up the sleeves of her blouse.
It was a four-hour drive to Baltimore and every minute of it Sylvia felt like she was in pure hell. Sweat ran down her face, her hair was wet with it, and her face broke out in ugly red bumps from the heat.
At last Bob told her they were nearing his home, in the northeast of the city. They drove through a large, pretty park and came out onto a busy little road called Washington Street with a tramline running through it. The houses were all terraced, brick buildings, each of them with white marble steps up to the front door. Many of the steps had people sitting on them, and all of the people looked with interest as the car pulled up to number 1722.
‘They all heard you’re coming!’ Bob e
xplained. As Sylvia stepped out of the car, giddy with heat and exhaustion and her curly hair now an enormous frizz-ball from the perspiration, she wondered what on earth they must be making of her.
The other couple drove off and Bob’s parents emerged from their house. Mr O’Connor was a handsome, fair-haired man with broad shoulders, and was smartly dressed. He looked an unlikely match with Bob’s mother, who was short and rather dumpy, with dark hair like her son’s, and wearing a loose housedress. Bob’s dad had a big smile on his face, but his mother looked more serious.
Mrs O’Connor tried to disguise her shock at the sight of the bedraggled, half-conscious English girl that her son had brought back from the airport. ‘Welcome!’ she said, kissing her on a heat-bump-covered cheek. Sylvia winced, but Bob’s mother smiled warmly.
His father seemed equally friendly. ‘I think you’re so brave to leave your home and your family for my son,’ he told her.
Sylvia’s mother ushered her inside. ‘I’ve filled the tub with cold water for you, if you want to go upstairs and cool off,’ she told her. The words were like music to Sylvia’s ears, and she followed her to the bathroom. After soaking for half an hour in the blissfully cool water she was a little less red-faced but very sleepy, and Mrs O’Connor showed her to the middle of three bedrooms, which she told her would be hers until after the wedding, while Bob would be sleeping in the back bedroom.
Five hours later, when she awoke, several sleeveless cotton dresses and sets of cotton underwear were lying at the end of her bed. While she had been sleeping, Bob’s mother had unpacked her case and, horrified by the sight of her one pair of woollen underwear, had taken the tram down to Monument Street to kit her future daughter-in-law out with more suitable attire. Sylvia still felt woozy from the flight, but she was filled with gratitude at her new family’s kindness.
The next day was a Sunday, and Bob proudly showed Sylvia around the local area, all the time holding her hand and stealing kisses whenever he could. It was a pleasant neighbourhood a couple of miles from the city centre, with a seafood shop just across the street and a cinema nearby.
GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love Page 16