The GI Bride (2 page)

On 1 May 1948, the Jones family trundled off
in a borrowed truck, loaded with all our worldly possessions, and headed for the South
Oxhey estate, which was near to Watford in Hertfordshire. We were met with a troubling
situation: the houses were new, modern and inviting, but with little of the
infrastructure of the new town in place, we all wondered how we would survive. The
houses sat in a sea of mud and building detritus; there were few roads and no pavements,
schools or shops. We looked at one another, each of us thinking, What’s Dad got us
into now? Our new life was about to begin, and at that moment, we all dreaded it, none
more so than poor Mum. I can still hear her saying to Dad, ‘And they call this
progress?’

For us children, life in the countryside, in
spite of the mud and lack of amenities, was exciting. There were fields and woods to
explore, berries and bluebells to pick, trees to climb and camps to build. Even Mum
seemed to relax a little. She made us all laugh one morning when we awakened to find
that cows from a nearby field had trampled down our flimsy fence and were wallowing in
the garden. ‘Blimey, them’s big sparrows,’ she said. It was wonderful
to hear her make a joke because it didn’t happen often, especially in those early
post-war days.

It was fun taking the bus to school in
Watford, even though we were not welcome there. The local people didn’t want us
so-called ‘dirty Londoners’, and we suffered a great deal of derision and
discrimination. That changed when we were provided with our own schools and the rest of
the amenities we needed to be independent of their
precious resources.
I felt much happier when I discovered that my best friend, Sheila McDonald, had also
moved with her family to the new estate neither of us could believe our luck.

Mum had never seemed happy. She battled
constantly with depression and was never able to show me the affection I craved. As a
family, we were always trying to make her laugh but she’d usually tell us to stop
mucking about. When I tried to get close to her, she pushed me away, telling me to stop
bothering her. It was worse after she gave birth to my youngest brother, Christopher,
and once again fell into a deep depression. This time it was so bad that she went away
with the baby to convalesce, leaving me, at the age of twelve, to take care of the
family. I loved being woman-of-the-house. For the first time ever, I felt wanted and
needed, but when Mum came home, I was invisible again.

In my early teens, I began to spend time
with some fun-loving young neighbours. From them, I received an extremely colourful sex
education; my mother never talked about sex, and certainly not to me. She was too
embarrassed to buy sanitary towels; she simply used pieces of old rags, which she
laundered and reused. Of course, I knew nothing of this: she was good at hiding the
things she didn’t want anyone to know about.

During our early years in South Oxhey, my
father worked at Odhams, the printing company, in Watford. He was instrumental in
starting the estate’s first Sunday school, perhaps trying to mend his philandering
ways. When that affiliation ended, he joined the Watford Spiritualist Church and was
soon involved in healing and clairvoyance. He became increasingly popular and
respected in the world of spiritualism, and was eventually president
of the church. He spent more and more time away from home, while Mum became increasingly
withdrawn. She wanted nothing to do with the church and wouldn’t join in when Dad
wanted to talk about it so I became Dad’s audience at home. I loved listening to
him: at last, someone was paying attention to me. He and I drew closer, but that, I
believe, drove a bigger wedge between my mother and me. She was jealous, and if
I’d thought she didn’t like me before, I was sure of it now.

When I reached fourteen or fifteen, I began
dating. According to Mum, I was boy crazy, and she told me off endlessly. I talked back
to her now, telling her that at least someone was paying me some attention because she
certainly wasn’t. ‘What do you want from me?’ she’d shout.
I’d tell her that a few kind words would be nice. She would turn her back and walk
away, shaking her head as though I’d asked for the impossible.

Yes, I went out with lots of boys, and
sometimes young men who were far too old for me, even though I was soon tired of
fighting off their demands for sex. I was also fed up with insults about my virginity.
But just when I’d decided that my mother and grandmother were right when they
claimed that men were after only one thing, I met my Mr Wonderful. Not only did he prove
them wrong, he brought a ray of sunshine into my life, which began to change.

I’d been to the cinema with a
girlfriend and we were on our way to catch the train home when we heard someone call out
to us. Two American soldiers asked us for directions. Neither of us wanted anything to
do with American
servicemen because girls seen with them were called
‘Yanks’ meat’. No one with any self-respect wanted that label attached
to her. We tried to ignore them but we were finally convinced that their intentions were
honourable: they really needed directions. Well, one thing led to another: they ended up
taking the same train as us and then they walked us part of the way home. We talked
until the street lights went out, leaving us in the pitch dark, and we still
hadn’t given them directions back to their base. It was after midnight by now and
my friend and I knew we’d be in big trouble if we didn’t get home soon. We
scribbled directions on a piece of paper and off they went.

At that time I was just fifteen, had
recently left school and was working in a dress shop in Watford. There was no way I
wanted to get involved with American soldiers and I didn’t think they’d be
interested in me. I assumed they were after the older girl I was with, but she was less
interested even than I was because her father was an abusive brute he would have killed
her if he’d found out she’d been talking to them. As it happened, he gave
her a black eye for being out late, then threw her and her clothes out into the
street.

The only thing my mother worried about was
what the neighbours would think about me coming home late. She would have been mortified
if someone had seen me talking to Americans.

The next week I was putting new stock away
in the shop when the manageress called me into her office and told me there was a
telephone call for me. I was shocked and thought it must be a mistake, especially since
I didn’t know anyone who had a phone. I was even more shocked
when the caller turned out to be the good-looking American soldier I had met the
previous weekend; he wanted to take me out on a date. I was almost speechless. He
explained that he had remembered where I’d said I worked and had looked it up in
the phonebook. My God, I thought, he’s either desperate or actually interested in
me. I knew I couldn’t talk to him for long on the phone so I agreed to see him the
following Saturday. Until then, I had to keep it secret from my parents and control the
butterflies and palpitations that stayed with me for the rest of that week.

At last Saturday arrived and I wondered if
he would turn up. He did. He was waiting for me outside the shop when I finished work.
We grinned like Cheshire cats, and although we had planned to go to the movies, we never
did. We had dinner at a little café and talked until it was time to catch the last train
home. His name was Bob Irvine, and not only was he a perfect gentleman, he was funny and
kind. Above all, he treated me like a real lady. He asked if he could see me again and I
told him I’d have to think about it because I knew my parents wouldn’t
approve. I asked him to phone me the following week. I also explained that we had no
phone at home and that he would have to ring me at work. He was shocked that anyone
could still be without a telephone, but he hadn’t been in England long enough to
learn of the many differences between our two countries.

After one or two more dates with Bob, I
mustered the courage to ask my parents how they would feel if I invited a young American
soldier home for Sunday tea. Eyebrows shot up, mouths flew open, and I thought that the
house
and my parents might explode. The inquisition began. How did I
know an American soldier? What was I thinking? Was I insane? And, of course, an unspoken
question hung in the air: what would the neighbours think?

Where we lived, it was almost impossible to
avoid meeting Americans. Their military bases surrounded Watford. There were air force
bases at Bovingdon and Ruislip, and an army base at Bushey. I believe there were then as
many as twenty-four US bases in southern England, and most of the young men and women
stationed there were serving their mandatory two years’ national service; they
were almost all single and undoubtedly ‘feeling their oats’. The Second
World War might have been over for seven or eight years but the American presence in
Europe was still strong.

In the 1950s the attitude to American
service personnel in England had changed: during the war years, I don’t believe
young women who went out with ‘Yanks’ had been stigmatized as they were now
because most eligible young British men were away fighting. The war had brought new
priorities: civilians as well as the military were at risk of losing their lives and
everyone seemed to grab what joy they could. When peace came, young British men resented
the American presence and their perceived domination in the area of dating; they
didn’t think they stood a chance against the Yanks with all their money, charm and
confidence. Most young Englishmen were serving or had just completed their own mandatory
national service; they had far less money to spend on girls. ‘Yanks’
meat’ implied that those girls were selling themselves to the higher bidder. I
hated the thought of acquiring that label, but what can you do when Fate steps in?

I knew how my family would react to my
friendship with an American soldier, but how must Mum’s friend, Mrs Gradley, have
felt when all three of her daughters married Americans and left England?

After I’d convinced my parents that
Bob was just a lonely boy away from home for the first time, they agreed I could bring
him home occasionally for Sunday tea.

Well, it wasn’t long before my family
and I had fallen in love with the handsome young American soldier, and our courtship
began. It quickly became apparent that our relationship was not just a passing fancy and
soon Bob asked me to marry him. When I told him I couldn’t because I was only
fifteen, he was angry and let me know it. About a week later, he came back to the house
and said he was willing to wait for me for as long as was necessary: he loved me and
would do whatever he could to ensure that we ended up together.

The original plan was for him to return to
the United States and for me to join him when I was eighteen. However, knowing how
miserable we would both be if we were separated, my parents reluctantly allowed us to be
married. We became engaged on 5 July 1954, my sixteenth birthday, and were married on 16
October.

Within a few months of our wedding, I sailed
away from England, away from my history and all I had known. Now, with the love I had
always lacked, and my heart full of hope, I looked forward to a new and better life in
America.

‘Seasickness: at first, you are so sick you
are afraid you will die and then you are so sick you are afraid you won’t
die.’

Mark Twain

Oh, my God, if anyone had told me how ill I
would be on that voyage, I might still have been an unmarried, virginal teenager. But,
there I was, sixteen years old, the child-bride of an American soldier, about to sail
across the Atlantic Ocean on a troop ship to a new life and an uncertain future in the
United States of America.

The USS
General R. E. Callan
was a
converted battleship. Its voyage had originated in Bremerhaven, Germany, and it was
transporting GIs and their families back to the United States after their tours of duty.
The lumbering vessel had none of the luxuries found on large commercial liners and, of
course, everything was painted the regulation battleship grey. The gangways leading to
the cabins were narrow, barely allowing room for passing. The four-berth cabins were
tiny, and when I first saw where I would be living for the coming days, I could almost
hear my mother saying, ‘Crikey, you can’t swing a cat in ’ere,’
and she would have been right. Dependants, and perhaps officers, were assigned to those
cabins, while lower-ranking servicemen travelled, slept and ate separately, on a lower
deck referred to as the hold. My cabin was equipped with two
double-tiered bunks, four narrow lockers and two small washbasins set into a
vanity-type counter. I shared this small space with three other women, all of them older
than I was, of course.

We shoved our suitcases under the bunks,
then introduced ourselves. First, there was Barbara McCarthy, who sounded posh and was
very attractive; she was from Leeds.