The GI Bride (14 page)

After what seemed an eternity, I had the new
photographs. There were no words to express my gratitude to Will Ebert for his kindness,
but I’ve never forgotten it.

The next morning I was at the passport
office in downtown Chicago when it opened its doors. With tears streaming down my face,
I showed them the damaged passport and explained what had happened. At first, they said
there was no way they could help me, but a senior clerk overheard our conversation and
stepped in. ‘Don’t panic,’ she said. ‘Let me call Washington to
see if we can get around it. I seem to remember doing this for someone before.’
She vanished into an inner office. When she reappeared, there was a grin on her
face.

‘Good news! I’ve been given
permission to issue you an emergency status passport and we can have it ready for you by
late this afternoon.’ I thought I would implode with relief as I thanked her and
cried some more. I wanted to leap over the counter to hug that wonderful woman.

Back home, Cindy made cups of tea and
encouraged me to be positive. ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’
she
told me. ‘You’ll see. The worst part’s over.
You’ll soon be on a plane heading for England.’ I wanted and needed to
believe her so I just gave her a hug and told her how much I appreciated her. Then I
went and put my arms around Wayne.

He had been sitting quietly, just staring at
the floor while Cindy and I talked. Now, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes.
‘I’m sorry, Mommy,’ he whispered, and I just held him in my arms and
rocked him, knowing how awful the little fellow must feel and how frightened he must
have been at my reaction to what he had done.

‘It’s okay,’ I told him.
‘Everything’s going to be just fine.’

The next step was to contact the airline
again, to see when they could get us on a flight. They gave me little hope since it was
Christmas and everything was booked solid, but they promised to call me if anything
opened up. I sat beside the telephone, willing it to ring. When it did, I jumped a foot
in the air, and my heart was in my throat. It was good news. They had us booked on a
flight that left Chicago on Christmas Eve and would get us to London on Christmas Day.
It wasn’t perfect but it would do. We were finally on our way home.

The flight was long and I was exhausted, but
as we approached my beautiful England, my heart was bursting with joy: I would soon be
with my family. Then, after we’d begun our descent into Heathrow Airport, the
captain made an announcement that changed my joy to despair: ‘Good morning, ladies
and gentlemen. We’ve been informed that we cannot land at London’s Heathrow
due to heavy fog. We’re going on to Frankfurt,
Germany, where
we’ll stay until weather conditions in London change.’ Groans came from all
around but none was more desolate than my own. How could this be happening after all we
had already gone through? I was numb with disappointment.

We landed in freezing Frankfurt, where buses
transported us through heavy rain to a small, luxurious hotel. Here we were to remain
until further notice. Our stranded group appeared to be the only people staying there.
Of course we are, I thought. Everyone else is enjoying Christmas at home with their
families. A thoughtful older man offered to help me with Wayne but I declined. I had sat
next to him on the plane and, looking over his shoulder, I’d seen in his passport
his profession listed as ‘Executor’. Just the thought that he might be a
hangman gave me the willies. I felt a bit silly when I later learned that he was an
executor of estates and wills.

The hotel’s limited staff were kind to
us, understanding our plight, and we passengers tried to enjoy our delightful
surroundings, but we were frustrated and frazzled. The most memorable part of my stay
was being served pheasant-under-glass for our Christmas dinner. I had never had it
before, and have never had it since.

The following day, we had been cleared to
fly, but this time to Glasgow; more groans. From there we would travel by train to
London. Could it get any worse? We trundled back to the airport and were soon in the air
again, this time filled with dread at the thought of the circuitous journey that still
lay ahead.

It was inky black as we flew over England.
My eyelids were heavy from lack of sleep but Wayne had slept all the
way. Suddenly I was wide awake. The captain was making another announcement:
‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We have good news for you. The fog has lifted
at Heathrow and we will be landing there shortly.’ A great cheer went up
throughout the aircraft. We were no longer on our way to Scotland. We were finally going
home.

I looked down at my little boy, who grinned
up at me. ‘Are we nearly there, Mommy?’

‘Yes, we are.’

Theoretically, that was true, but the
adventure, or misadventure, was not yet over. After gathering our luggage and clearing
Customs, we emerged into the airport. I scanned the few people waiting there but saw no
familiar faces. By now, it was after midnight. Where was my family? The airline and
hotel had promised to send telegrams, notifying them of our new arrival time. My family
still had no telephone so I couldn’t call them. What could have happened? We sat
on our suitcases and waited until we were the only two people left in the terminal. It
was an eerie feeling, sitting alone in that alien place. I found a member of the airport
staff; few were working at that time of the night it was the wee hours of 27
December.

‘Sorry, love, there ain’t no
transport at this time of night. You’ll have to wait till mornin’ unless you
can get a taxi willin’ to take ya,’ he informed me.

Where are they? Have they forgotten
we’re coming? My emotions ran the gamut, from anger to disappointment and back
again. What about my poor child? Didn’t anyone care about him? I’d been sure
they were as excited as I was. Could I have been wrong? I sat Wayne on a bench just
inside the terminal door, went outside and vomited.
The stress had
finally got to me and at that moment I wanted to scream. As I stood at the kerb, wiping
tears, snot and vomit from my chin, a small miracle happened. A taxi pulled up in front
of me and the driver rolled down his window. ‘You look like you need ’elp,
mate,’ he said, and I proceeded to explain my predicament. ‘Where do you
need to go?’ he asked, and I gave him the address.

‘I know just about where that is, and
it ain’t all that far. Do you want me to take you?’

Oh, my God, did I! ‘Yes,
please,’ I replied. He got out of the cab and helped me gather up my son and the
luggage, and off we went. I hadn’t a clue how much it would cost, and at that
point I didn’t care.

With little traffic on the road, it was
about half an hour later when we arrived at Little Oxhey Lane, where Mum and Dad had
recently moved into a new council house.

‘What number is it?’ the driver
asked.

‘A hundred and three,’ I
replied.

There were very few houses on this new
residential stretch of road but it was pitch dark and we couldn’t read the
numbers. The taxi stopped. ‘I’ll wait while you find the right ’ouse,
mate,’ he offered. ‘I can’t just drop you off and leave, can
I?’

I left Wayne in the taxi and went to find
number 103. It wasn’t there. None of the houses had numbers. The doors were
freshly painted and all the numbers had been removed. I went back to the taxi and told
the driver, who agreed to wait a little longer. My only hope now was to peer through any
open-curtained windows to see if I could recognize anything inside. Why was this
happening to me? I wondered. Did they still not care enough to be
there for me? Had nothing changed? Then, at last, I noticed something on the
windowsill inside one of the houses that I was sure I remembered.

‘This is it,’ I called to the
driver.

‘Hooray.’

The kindly taxi driver unloaded our luggage,
brought Wayne to me and perched him on a suitcase, while I knocked on the door. There
was no answer. I told the driver it was okay for him to leave, that it might take a
while to wake someone, and I felt sure everything would be fine. I paid him, thanked him
for his help and patience, and he drove off into the night, leaving a forlorn twosome
standing in the lonely darkness. The cold began to penetrate my coat and I started to
shiver. I crouched down, unlocked our large suitcase and, after rummaging for a while,
found what I was looking for, a thick woollen cardigan, which I wrapped around Wayne he
was shaking with cold, too.

I continued hammering on the front door,
then went around to the back and pounded on that. I tried calling through the letterbox
and throwing gravel up at the bedroom windows but to no avail. By now, Wayne was crying
so I sat next to him, put my arms around him and tried to comfort him by telling him
what a grand adventure we were having. It occurred to me that with my big woolly
cardigan wrapped around him, he looked like a little old man as he sat there, trying to
be brave. I had dressed him in the American style of the day: he was wearing long grey
flannel trousers, a red blazer with a crest on the breast pocket, a white shirt complete
with clip-on tie, all topped off with a little fedora hat. The poor lad still looked
amazingly fresh and smart while I’m sure I looked, as my mother
would have said, like something the cat had dragged in.

‘I’m sorry, Wayne, are you warm
enough? I can get something else out of the case if you like,’ I told him.

‘It’s okay, Mommy. I’m
just tired and I want to go to sleep.’ He choked back a sob. He’ll get
pneumonia if I don’t do something soon, I thought, but what could I do? My teeth
were chattering so I knew Wayne must be freezing.

Fear gripped me. What if no one’s at
home? I thought. What if we’d passed each other on the road and they’d gone
to the airport and wouldn’t be back for hours? What if they’d had an
accident? Perhaps I should start knocking on other doors. Maybe someone would have a
telephone and I could call the police. Just as that thought entered my mind, a car
pulled into the driveway, which was shared with the house next door. I jumped up, my
heart almost leaping out of my chest.

‘They’re home, Wayne! Nanny and
Granddad are home!’ I shouted to him, but I was wrong: it was the neighbours
coming home from a late-night party and they were very drunk.

When they learned who we were, they invited
us into their house, made me a cup of tea, then laid Wayne on their sofa and covered him
with a blanket. In seconds, he was asleep. They told me that they knew we were expected
and that Mum and Dad had made two trips to the airport to meet us but each time
they’d been told that there was no information as to when our plane would arrive.
In fact, they’d been led to believe that we were still in Germany. The airline had
promised to phone them when more
information became available but, of
course, Mum and Dad had no telephone: they’d had to rely on calling the airport or
airline from the corner phone box. By that time, and completely exhausted, they had gone
to bed, planning to start ringing for information early the next morning. No wonder I
hadn’t been able to rouse them.

It was several hours before we managed to
wake Mum and Dad. There were lots of apologies and tears, but they were tears of joy: I
was home. The last thing I remember from that traumatic night was Mum telling me how
sorry she was that they’d already eaten our Christmas dinner.

Wayne and I slept well into the next
afternoon and only woke when Mum came upstairs with a cup of tea and said that everyone
was anxious to see and talk to us.

After more tea, ‘breakfast’ and
everyone trying to talk at once about our nightmare journey, I wandered around the
house, touching and looking at everything, as I had done on my last visit home. I
grinned and cried alternately at the sheer joy of being at home, the simple pleasure of
familiarity, hearing my family’s Cockney accents, gazing into their eyes and
smelling the usual smells. The thought of having to leave it all behind again crept into
my consciousness and I had to blot it out. I’d worry about that later.

My time in England was all I’d hoped
it would be. It was wonderful visiting my relatives, all of whom seemed eager to hear
about my life in America. Wayne had his fourth birthday while we were there and the
family made a big fuss of him. I also visited as many of my old friends as possible but
mostly I spent time with my school pal Sheila McDonald, who was now married to Ray
Jukes, a friend of
my older brother Peter. They were still living,
with their baby, Jane, on the Oxhey Estate with Ray’s parents.

Besides having Sheila, Ray and baby Jane
living with them, the Jukeses also had a lodger. He was a nice-looking man named Chuck
and I developed a bit of a crush on him; my visits became even more frequent, always in
the hope of seeing him. Finally, Sheila suggested he should ask me out, which he did. We
had several dates, and he was kind to my son. Dad didn’t like him at all and I had
a big falling-out with him when he called Chuck ‘a toe-rag’. The pot was
calling the kettle black I hadn’t forgotten about Dad’s past.

I continued to see Chuck, even though a
cloud now hung over my stay at home. I probably spent too much time with him. He took me
to nightclubs and occasionally we didn’t get home until the wee hours of the
morning. We sometimes made love on the couch in the living room, only parting when we
heard sounds upstairs. I knew that, in my parents’ eyes, what I was doing was
wrong, that it was unfair to them, but I had missed so much by marrying so young. I
suppose I was just trying to make up for it. I couldn’t expect them to approve:
they saw only a fun-loving man who was still single at the age of thirty there had to be
something wrong with him. They couldn’t understand that, in a way, Chuck had
become my lifeline. He was giving me some of the fun I had missed as a teenager, some
excitement and a break from the depression of the years spent trying to fit in with life
in America and a family who couldn’t accept me for who I was. I knew he was no
angel, but he had a well-paid job and no other obligations, he was known to be a
one-woman man, and
best of all, he seemed to care about my son. At the
time, most importantly, he gave me back my confidence. He also gave me hope.