Margaret’s life had been at crisis point when she met Clifford. Having left Lawrence, she had turned up with her three daughters at the house of her father’s friends the Steadhams in Holland Park, begging them to take her in. But now, thanks to her new boyfriend, she was standing on her own two feet again, even if she had to endure the pain of separation from her children.
Margaret could tell that Clifford was falling in love with her, and he had talked of divorcing his wife in Australia so that they could marry. She knew if she said yes she would be able to have her daughters back, and there would be no need to struggle any more. She wasn’t in love with him, but he was reliable and she liked him. It was a relief to be with someone normal and stable after her tempestuous life with Lawrence, and she knew that not many men would be willing to take on a woman with three children.
She would be sorry to give up her job when they married, however. For the first time in her life she felt she had found an occupation that she enjoyed and that used her intelligence. She was one of a group of five female copywriters at Lintas, working on campaigns for Unilever’s many products, from Pears soap to Birds Eye frozen peas.
One day, the copywriters were taken on a tour of the old Pears factory in Isleworth, West London, to get an insight into the product. They were taken into office after office, and introduced to various managers who all talked at length about soap. Margaret was beginning to lose interest, but as they walked into one office, a young man caught her attention. He was in his late twenties and good-looking, with dark hair and grey eyes. As he looked at her, Margaret felt as if an electrical charge passed between them. Then their little group was led out of the room and off to yet another part of the building.
When she got back to Oxford Street, she found the only thing she could remember about the trip was the face of the young man who had made such a strong impression on her. There was no point thinking about him, however – that evening she was due to see Clifford for a date at Queens Ice Skating Club near Notting Hill.
As Margaret glided confidently onto the ice, Clifford struggled to keep up with her and she realised she had lost him in the crowd.
Then she felt a tap on her shoulder. ‘Hello, again,’ said an unfamiliar voice. She turned to see the young man from Isleworth. Margaret felt a rush of excitement at the sight of him, a sensation she had not experienced for a very long time.
The young man began to skate alongside her, and as they went around the rink, they laughed about the dreary tour Margaret had endured at Pears. ‘I bet you never knew that anyone could get so excited about soap,’ he said.
‘No, I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘But now my job is to get everyone in Britain just as excited as they are!’
Margaret learned that the young man was a management trainee at Unilever, and that his name was Patrick Denby. They hadn’t been talking long before she spotted Clifford slowly skating along and felt a pang of guilt. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve got to go,’ she told Patrick. ‘It was nice meeting you properly.’
The young man watched as she skated off and took Clifford’s arm.
The next day at work, Margaret was at her desk staring blankly at pictures of Pears soap when her phone rang. ‘Hello Margaret, it’s Patrick Denby here. I just wanted to make sure you got home all right last night.’
Margaret couldn’t help giving a little laugh. Patrick knew perfectly well that she had been out with another man, and that it wasn’t his job to make sure she got home safely.
‘Yes, I did, thank you,’ she replied.
They began to chat, but before long Margaret spotted her manager looking over at her, so she told Patrick she had to go.
‘Well, I hope to see you on the ice sometime,’ he said.
As a management trainee, however, Patrick often had to visit the Oxford Street office, and the following week, Margaret looked up to find him standing at her desk. ‘I’m afraid I can’t take you ice-skating during the working day, but how about lunch?’ he asked her.
It was an open-plan office, and she could see the other copywriting girls watching them, smiling. ‘Yes, that would be nice,’ she said quickly, following him out.
They went to a little café on Oxford Street, and as they sat down opposite each other, Margaret once again felt an overwhelming attraction to Patrick.
Over lunch, he told her how he had been recruited from Oxford University during the war to work as an interpreter of intercepted German and Italian communications. He had been second onboard the Italian flagship Caio Duilio when Italy’s Navy surrendered, translating the terms of disarmament to Admiral Da Zara.
‘We didn’t have much warning that the Italian fleet was coming across, and we went out to meet them in a little tug boat,’ he laughed. ‘We felt pretty insignificant sailing under the battleship’s big guns!’
The more Patrick spoke, the more Margaret’s attraction to him grew. He was clever and interesting, with a cheeky sense of humour. He had a quiet confidence, and unlike Lawrence he wasn’t showy.
But as she cut her food, Margaret was painfully aware of the wedding ring in full view on her finger. She and Lawrence were still legally married, even though he was back in Georgia and hadn’t made any attempt to contact her again.
She didn’t want to put Patrick off by mentioning her marriage, but nor did she want him to think she was still with her husband and was considering having an affair. She decided it was best to be honest, and explained that they were separated. Even if Patrick hadn’t noticed her ring at the ice rink, he must have seen it by now, she reasoned, so there was no point in hiding the truth.
Patrick seemed to take the information in his stride, but when Margaret went back to work she couldn’t help feeling despondent. As soon as he found out that she was not only separated but had three children, she felt sure that he would run a mile. Clifford was her only hope of a future now. She would have to put Patrick out of her mind.
A few days later, however, Patrick asked her out to lunch again, and Margaret felt unable to resist. This time they stayed out far longer than their one-hour lunch break, and she could tell he found it as hard to tear himself away as she did. By the end of the date they were holding hands, and Margaret felt like a schoolgirl again, more excited just to feel her hand in his than she had felt in her whole relationship with Clifford. She knew that she was falling in love with him.
Margaret realised it was no longer fair to carry on seeing her Australian boyfriend, and that evening she told Clifford it was over. She knew she was giving up a man who could offer her the security she and her children so desperately needed, but her feelings for him paled in comparison with those she had for Patrick.
It had been only two weeks since that first moment when they had met each other’s gaze in Isleworth, but she thought about Patrick constantly. One day, she was daydreaming about him as she got onto the Tube at Oxford Circus when suddenly he happened to jump into the same carriage. Margaret immediately felt self-conscious, and he looked equally flustered.
They both said hello at the same time, and laughed at their clumsiness. Then his expression became very serious. ‘Margaret,’ he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about you all the time since we last saw each other. I’ve never met a woman as beautiful or as lovely as you are.’ He grabbed her hand. ‘Will you marry me?’
‘Oh!’ Margaret exclaimed. The other commuters did their best to keep their noses in their newspapers.
‘Say you will,’ Patrick urged.
Margaret felt like screaming ‘Yes!’ with all her heart, but she knew that what she was about to say would ruin any hope of them having a future together.
‘Patrick, I need to tell you something,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m not just married – I’ve already got three children.’
‘That doesn’t change how I feel about you,’ he insisted. ‘If I have to adopt them, I will. Just say that you’ll be my wife.’
She had only known him for a fortnight, but Margaret had no hesitation in telling him: ‘I
will.’
Margaret was anxious to get a divorce, but she had no idea how Lawrence would react. She wrote to her sister-in-law Ellen, who told her he was now in Panama City, Florida, working as a journalist. ‘Don’t worry,’ Ellen wrote. ‘I have a friend in Blakely who’s a lawyer. I’ll see to it that Lawrence divorces you.’
Meanwhile, Margaret introduced Patrick to her three daughters, Rosamund, Maeve and Veronica. It was important to her that they liked him, so she began bringing him with her on her weekly trips to the nursery in Canterbury. Although the girls were wary at first, they slowly began to trust him. Around them Patrick’s playful side came out more than ever, and Margaret could see they loved having him around.
But Patrick’s own family were less easy to please. His parents had been horrified to find out that their only son was planning on marrying a divorcee and adopting her three children. His father, a Yorkshire solicitor, wrote him a long letter setting out the financial burden he would be taking on, having added up exactly how much it would cost to educate the three girls over the next two decades.
Patrick was furious. ‘I’m a grown man,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve been independent of them for years. How dare they tell me what to do with my life?’
‘I can see it from their point of view,’ sighed Margaret. ‘I hardly look like a good prospect!’
‘Well, they’re wrong,’ he told her. ‘And we’ll prove it to them.’
When Patrick’s parents got a wedding invitation in the post, they agreed to attend, but informed him they would be changing their wills to ensure that any children he adopted would not inherit their money.
But there was nothing they could do to ruin his and Margaret’s big day. The wedding took place at St John’s in Kensington, and this time Margaret’s father was there to walk her down the aisle. As Patrick turned to see his bride, dressed in a smart dark-red suit and holding a bunch of tulips, they both felt the same charge pass between them as they had on that first day at Pears when they had fallen in love at first sight.
Once they were married, they moved to Putney, and Margaret was at last able to bring her three children back to live with her. Finally, they had the proper family life that they had been lacking for so long.
When they had settled in, Margaret asked the girls, ‘What would you like to call Patrick? You could carry on calling him by his name, or you could call him Daddy if you like.’
‘We would like to think about it first,’ said Maeve, the most precocious of the three. The little girls huddled together in the corner, holding a whispered conference. Then they pushed Veronica, the youngest, forward to announce their decision.
‘We have decided to call him Daddy,’ she said.
When Patrick came home from work that evening, he was delighted to be greeted by his new name.
Margaret thought their happiness was complete, but one day her husband came into the kitchen with some news. ‘How would you like to live in Geneva?’ he asked her.
He showed her a letter from a friend he had been billeted with during the war, who was now working for the International Labour Organization, a part of the UN promoting workers’ rights. He had offered Patrick a job that was not only more interesting than his current role at Unilever, but that paid more money too.
Margaret knew it would also be a chance to start afresh, in a place where no one would know that their family was any different to anyone else’s. ‘Yes, please!’ she said.
A few weeks later, the whole family were boarding a flight to Switzerland. Once again, Margaret was leaving England for a new life in a foreign land – but she had no fears for the future. This time, she knew she had married the right man.
28
Gwendolyn
The pain was almost unbearable, a searing, ripping sensation that passed repeatedly through Lyn’s legs and lower back, leaving them feeling like dead weights after every ferocious pulse. Unfortunately painkillers were forbidden on the isolation ward, where suspected polio cases were kept so as not to risk further contagion. A hit of morphine could depress a patient’s breathing, putting them at risk of suffocation.
A young doctor arrived on the ward, decked out in a white surgical gown and face mask. ‘I’ve come to do your spinal tap,’ he informed her.
The words sent a shudder of fear through Lyn, and she wished that Ben could be there with her, instead of waiting outside in the corridor. As the doctor rolled her onto her side and wiped her back with iodine, she said, ‘I’m a bit scared. Do you think I could hold your hand?’
‘No, I’m afraid I need them both,’ the doctor replied, readying a needle.
A nurse standing by his side stepped forward. ‘You can hold mine instead if you like,’ she offered.
‘No offence, but it isn’t quite the same,’ Lyn said, with a weak laugh.
Suddenly, she felt a cold, sharp pain, as the doctor slid the needle in between her vertebrae. ‘This one’s just the local anaesthetic,’ he told her.
The second, bigger needle was much worse, and Lyn felt like a stake was being driven into her spine. ‘Just keep breathing,’ the doctor told her. ‘Not too deep, but constant.’ She tried to focus on her shallow breaths and ignore the horrific digging and scraping going on inside her back as the doctor tried to extract the spinal fluid. The procedure only lasted about ten minutes, but to Lyn it felt like hours.
The next time she saw the young doctor, he confirmed the diagnosis of polio. ‘I’m afraid it’s as we thought,’ he told her. ‘Now we just have to wait and see how severe your case is.’
Even the word polio was enough to strike fear into anyone living in America at a time when there was at least one major outbreak every summer, sometimes claiming thousands of lives. And assuming she survived the illness, Lyn wondered what kind of life she would have. She might spend the rest of her days confined to a wheelchair, or hobbling along with misshapen limbs – or worse, stuck in an iron lung forever. It was hard to believe that just a few days before she had been perfectly healthy, yet now she had no idea if she would ever walk again.
The doctor went out into the corridor to inform Ben of her diagnosis. Ben put on a brave face, but at his parents’ house afterwards he cried like a baby. What had his poor Lyn done to deserve this?
At the hospital, there was little the doctors and nurses could do beyond making Lyn as comfortable as possible as her fever increased and the pain grew even worse. She spent much of the next few days unconscious, as bit by bit the disease crept up her body, burning out her neurons as it went.
In her wakeful periods, Lyn lay staring up at the ceiling in terror, wondering if she would ever leave the bed she was in. As she felt the burning sensation shoot up her legs and into her back, she was haunted by an ominous shadow cast upon the wall of the ward. It was the outline of the iron lung, a terrifying metal coffin, which could well become her only means of breathing if the polio got as far as her chest.
In isolation, the only real distraction from the pain – and the delirious fever that accompanied it – came with the arrival twice a day of the hot-pack machine, an aluminium spin-washer that contained steaming woollen bandages, which a nurse would drape over Lyn’s legs. Many patients found the wool treatment unbearable – they hated the scalding heat of the packs and the clammy coldness that followed – but for Lyn the distraction they provided was blissful.
At first, Ben was not allowed to visit Lyn in isolation. He stood anxiously outside the room day after day, looking in through a tiny little window. On one visit he brought young John with him to show the boy that his mother was all right. John was too little to see into the ward, so someone found a stepladder for him to stand on, and he clambered up it and nervously peered through the window. ‘Look, there’s Mommy,’ Ben told him, pointing towards Lyn, who turned her head towards the window and smiled.
But John was traumatised by the sight of his mother laid out on a hospital bed, surrounded by mysterious machines and strange figures dressed head to toe in white with only their eyes
showing. ‘I want to go home,’ he wailed, so Ben picked him up and hurried him away.
Lyn’s doctor came to see her afterwards. ‘I think it’s best the boy doesn’t visit you here,’ he told her.
‘If you say so, doctor,’ she replied, doing her best to hide how heartbroken she felt.
After a while, the doctors and nurses agreed to let Ben onto the ward with her. After all, if Lyn had been contagious he would probably have caught the disease already – and in a country where polio outbreaks were frequent, the chances were that Ben had developed an immunity in childhood without ever showing any symptoms. Nonetheless, he was forced to wear the regulation white gown and mask on his daily visits.
As Lyn’s fever and the worst of the pain subsided, to be replaced by a dull, insistent ache, the damage done by the polio began to become clear. ‘Well, it could be a lot worse,’ the doctor told her. ‘The paralysis hasn’t reached your lungs, and your arms are strong. We’re going to transfer you to a convalescent ward, and there we can work on improving your condition with physiotherapy.’
‘Will I be able to walk again?’ Lyn asked him. It was the question that had been plaguing her ever since she had arrived at the hospital and she was terrified of what he might say.
‘I can’t tell you that right now, I’m afraid,’ the doctor replied. Then, seeing the devastated look on Lyn’s face, he tried to offer her a little more hope. ‘I’ve seen plenty of people in your condition get back on their feet and walk again eventually,’ he told her, ‘whether that’s with braces or throwing one foot out ahead of the other.’
Despite the doctor’s good intentions, every word he had said made Lyn feel worse. She didn’t want to be a cripple, hobbling along with mismatched legs. She just wanted to go back to how she was before.
GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love Page 25