The GI Bride (4 page)

‘At last,’ he gasped. ‘I
don’t think I could have waited much longer.’

‘Me neither,’ I croaked, and he
held me tightly to him. It was our honeymoon all over again.

Later that evening, I discovered that an
American friend, Mary Lou Loy, whose husband was in the same unit as Bob, was in the
same hotel. I had forgotten they were on the ship with us, perhaps because I had been
ill for most of the voyage. I was delighted when she offered to take me under her wing
while we were in New York and our husbands dealt with their army obligations.

The next day I was ready to see the sights.
The men had to check in at the army base early that morning, so we girls had a late
breakfast, then went off to explore the Big Apple. Fortunately, the hotel was within
walking distance of almost everything we wanted to see, including the Empire State
Building, Times Square, Radio City and all the department stores. We had two or three
days in New York and I wanted to squeeze in as much as possible.

As Mary Lou and I strolled around the
streets, I felt as though I had somehow landed on a movie set. I didn’t know where
to look first. If I had been an electrical circuit board, I would have gone into
overload and blown a fuse.
I had to keep reminding myself that it was
not a dream and I really was in one of the most famous cities in the world. Little Iris
Jones, the council-house kid, was in New York City, USA. Wow!

Besides sightseeing, shopping was high on my
list of priorities and that was where I got into the first of several embarrassing
situations. Before leaving England, I had purchased a traditional English tweed skirt,
one that would go with everything, of course.

‘Would a nice dark brown jumper go
well with this skirt, Mary Lou?’ I asked. She laughed. ‘You mean
sweater,’ she replied.

‘Yeah, whatever you call it.’ I
chuckled.

‘I’ll take you to Macy’s.
You should be able to find what you’re looking for there,’ she said, and off
we went.

We found the less-expensive sweater
department in the basement of what I now knew was one of New York’s most famous
shops. I hadn’t expected to find merchandise down there but Mary Lou explained
that most department stores had ‘bargain basements’. We soon found the
sweater department and I stepped up to the counter where a young black woman was
working. She smiled sweetly. ‘Good morning, ma’am, welcome to Macy’s.
How may I help you today?’

I smiled back at her. ‘Could you show
me a nigger-brown jumper, please?’ I asked shyly.

Immediately, I heard a loud choking sound
from Mary Lou. At the same time, I noticed that the assistant was no longer smiling.
Instead she looked shocked and visibly recoiled.

I don’t know who was more aghast, the
poor sales
assistant or Mary Lou, as they both stood there, caught in
a moment of disbelief at what they had just heard.

‘Let’s go,’ whispered Mary
Lou, once she had gathered her senses. She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me
away.

‘What’s wrong? What
happened?’ I protested, but her lips were sealed and she was shaking her head.

Once we were safely outside the store, I
learned what a terrible faux pas I had made. I had had no idea that the word
‘nigger’ was a derogatory term in America and was mortified. Tears of
embarrassment stung my eyes. The thought had entered my mind that I should have said
‘sweater’ instead of ‘jumper’, but I was completely unaware of
the magnitude of my linguistic error.

That incident was the first of many,
especially during the first months of my life in America. In the 1950s, there were no
such taboo words in England, or not that I was aware of, and I had never experienced the
racial sensitivity that was so much a part of American life. There were then no such
issues at home, as far as I knew, and I was in for a rude awakening: I was upset to
learn that in many places African Americans did not have equal rights and were often
segregated from white people.

When we had recovered, we set off for the
next item on our agenda: a trip to the top of the Empire State Building. The lift went
up 102 floors, but we got out at the eighty-sixth for the viewing area. It was awesome,
if a little scary, especially when I learned that the tower actually swayed in the wind,
but it was exhilarating and I was breathless with wonder at the panorama before me. I
squeezed Mary Lou’s hand until she yelped. Poor girl, I’d done the same
thing to her when we were riding up in the lift, which she kept
reminding me was an ‘elevator’.

The following day we visited Radio City. We
had received free tickets to attend a live show called
Beat the Clock
, hosted
by the famous Bud Collyer. During the show, he announced that a group of GI brides from
England was in the audience and we received a welcoming round of applause. Then he came
out into the audience to chat with a few of the girls, and wanted to know what an
English girl might have bought on her first visit to America.

‘What does this young lady have in her
big shopping bag?’ he said, into the microphone. ‘Welcome to New York. Now,
would you mind showing us what you’ve bought?’ he asked.

She had purchased a silk scarf with a
picture of New York on it. ‘It’s for me mum, back in England,’ she
told him.

‘Very nice too,’ he said, and
went on to another girl.

‘Hi, honey, and what do you have in
your bag?’ he enquired.

‘I bought a pink jumper,’ she
told him.

‘A pink jumper,’ he echoed.
‘That’s a strange colour for a kangaroo.’ The poor girl sank into her
chair as the audience roared with laughter. Then, just when I thought I was safe, he
stopped next to me.

‘And what American treasure does this
young lady have?’ he asked, and thrust the microphone into my face.

For a moment, I stared blankly into his eyes
and my mouth became an arid wasteland. After swallowing hard and blushing ninety shades
of red, I managed to conjure a squeak. ‘It’s nothing interesting,
sir,’ I said, but he
persisted and I had to let him peer into
the bag. It was then his turn to blush. He faked a laugh and said something about
English girls carrying their lunch around with them. In fact I had a large box of Kotex
sanitary pads.

When I told Bob about it that evening, I
thought he was going to bust a gut laughing. ‘It’s not funny,’ I said.
‘I thought I was going to die, or at least faint.’

‘I’d better get you out of New
York before you get into any more trouble,’ he said, having heard about the
incident in the department store.

I spent most of my time in New York oohing
and aahing at the shop windows. At that time, pink, black and grey were in fashion, even
in men’s clothing, which was a bit of a shock, considering the conservative black,
grey, brown and tweed worn by most Englishmen. I was even more surprised to see several
pink cars.

One thing that had always been high on my
list of ‘important things to do when I get to America’ was to have a banana
split. I’d heard of them and seen them in movies and they looked like works of
art. Mary Lou located a Walgreen’s drugstore with a soda fountain, and in we went.
My eyes must have been as big as saucers I had never seen anything like it, except in
the movies. You certainly would never have found food served in an English
chemist’s or pharmacy. I could hardly wait to write and tell the family about all
these weird and wonderful things.

When the ‘soda jerk’ placed the
banana split in front of me, all I could do was stare in disbelief. It was huge, enough
for several people. I dug into that dish of decadence and did my best to finish it.
After what seemed
like an hour, it looked as though I had just
rearranged it. Mary Lou was having a whale of a time watching me and laughing.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You’re just so funny,’
she replied, trying to get serious.

At the end of our stay in New York, we were
on the move again. This time a bus took us to a small airport where those of us going on
to Chicago boarded a military plane for the onward flight. I had never flown before and
I’m so glad that all planes are not like that one.

There were no passenger seats: we had to sit
on benches that ran lengthwise down the sides of the aircraft.

‘Blimey,’ I said to Bob.
‘I hope they give us all a parachute. This thing don’t look very safe to
me.’

‘Don’t worry, honey. I’m
sure the pilot wouldn’t fly it if it wasn’t safe. Just relax, we’ll
soon be there.’

Easy for him to say, I thought, and had to
remind myself that this, after all, was military transport and not a commercial airline.
The flight to Chicago was bumpy. If we hadn’t been strapped to our seats,
I’m sure we would have been injured. However, we survived, and I was relieved to
arrive in one dishevelled piece.

We arrived at Chicago’s Midway
Airport in the small hours. It was freezing cold so we were glad that Bob’s
parents were there, waiting to take us home to the suburb of Elmwood Park. We would stay
with them until we could find our own apartment.

I’d been excited about seeing
Bob’s mother again we had met briefly when she was in England for our wedding. She
had stayed only five days, during two of which Bob and I were away on our brief
honeymoon in London. We’d had a longer honeymoon planned but had to cancel it
because of Mother Irvine’s visit. Afraid of flying, she’d had to take the
long journey from Chicago to New York by train to board the ship. After the wedding
she’d had to get back to America for the birth of her first grandchild. Lucky her,
I thought. Her voyage on the
Queen Mary
had taken five days, compared to our
ten.

There was an emotional reunion between the
Irvines well, between mother and son. All his father did was grunt and shake hands. I
was to learn later that he never had much to say unless he was complaining: he was a
miserable, cigar-smoking curmudgeon and I was already intimidated by his abrupt
manner.

‘Welcome home, son,’ Mother
Irvine said, through squalls of tears. Then she turned to me. ‘Welcome to America,
dear.’ She gave me a quick hug. ‘Oh, my, you look awful.’

Thanks a lot, I thought. You don’t look
too good yourself. Could this be the same gushing woman who had come to England for our
wedding only months before? The first thing she said when she met me was how much
prettier I was than I appeared in photographs, which had endeared me to her. She had
hugged me and my parents and told us how happy she was to be there, meeting her
son’s new family. She almost froze to death while she was with us, but she got on
well with everyone she met and had nothing but praise for all that she experienced. She
had even laughed at the craziness of the traditional dances at our wedding reception,
especially ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’ and ‘The Lambeth Walk’,
although she wouldn’t join in. We had all thought she was warm and fun-loving,
just like us. I saw nothing of that now. Perhaps she’s as tired as we are, I
thought, giving her the benefit of the doubt. After all, it was the middle of the
night.

‘Yeah, hi, Robert,’ grunted his
dad, then grunted something else at me and shook my hand with just the tips of his cold,
bony fingers.

I’ll always remember my first
impressions on the journey from Midway Airport to the Irvines’ house. First, we
drove down Cicero Avenue, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, which still had
streetcars running on overhead electric lines. They reminded me of the old British
trolley buses, except they were not double-deckers. The streets were strewn with litter,
which I hadn’t expected, and the apartment buildings were dreary, all with open,
grey-painted back stairways. So far, what I had seen was ugly and disappointing. Also,
the street lighting was dim, which added to my impression of a city that was old and
tired.

We were in an industrial area on the south
side of the city, heavily populated by working-class people, but I was shocked to see so
many people living on top of one another. I wondered where all the lovely white
clapboard homes were, with their rolling lawns and white picket fences. I had expected
congestion in New York but, for some reason, not in Chicago.

Bob and his mother chatted on the drive home
but his father clutched the steering wheel as though his life depended on it; he
reminded me of a vulture, his head, atop a scrawny neck, thrust forward in grim
determination as he pulled towards the kerb at each corner. I later learned that he had
developed the habit during his years of driving buses and pulling over at the stops.

Bob burst out laughing.

‘What’s so funny?’ his dad
grunted.

‘Aw, nothin’,’ replied
Bob, stifling his laughter. He told me later that his mom had elbowed him in the ribs.
Her husband had a nasty temper when provoked.

I felt relieved when we left Chicago’s
inner city behind and entered the suburb of Elmwood Park. It was still drab and,
although it was not yet full daylight, it was clear that these monotone neighbourhoods
were unlike Hollywood movie suburbs. Here, the small square brick bungalows huddled
together in row upon row of sameness. The garages, at the rear of each property, were
accessed by way of alleyways that ran behind the properties; they’d been planned
that way, I supposed, so that they could be built close together on the narrow plots of
land. We had lived like that in England but in rented council housing. Somehow I’d
thought it would be different in America,
where people owned their own
homes, and my heart sank a little. This place was definitely not in Technicolor.