They Left Us Everything (31 page)

She describes her apartment on East 52nd Street that she shared with three other girls: the rent they paid, the full-time maid they hired to cook for them, and her many dates with handsome young men who had names like Bass Bridgeforth, Truman Welling, Rucker Ryland, and Howze Haskell. They take her dancing to places like the Rainbow Room, the Stork Club, El Morocco, and the Cloud Club atop the Chrysler Building. She describes paying the exorbitant sum of $1.50
for scrambled eggs at four-thirty in the morning at Reubens, where she runs into Lana Turner at the next table. I read about Noel Coward’s wonderful new play
Blithe Spirit
and the movies Mum watched, like
That Hamilton Woman
and
Target for Tonight
, a documentary showing an actual bombing raid over Germany. I smile as I notice that at the end of every letter Mum delegates a task to her mother:
I sent you my laundry two weeks ago but it hasn’t come back! Where is it? … We’re having a house party next weekend so if you could get Edmonia to cook us some food and send it up by train, it would be much appreciated!

Then, on December 9th, 1941, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, she describes New York City’s first air raid warning. Instead of diving for cover, as I would have done, she runs up to the roof of her office building to scan the skies for German bombers because she doesn’t want to miss any of the action. Within a month the streets of New York are filling up with men in uniform. Mum decides to join the American Red Cross, but they tell her she isn’t a suitable candidate. Instead, she’s accepted as a Junior Hostess for an Armed Forces program that operates out of the Hotel Delmonico on Park Avenue. Her job is to entertain officers in transit.

In her letters home to Rokeby, Mum complains of being “danced off her feet”:
On Friday, I went to Radio City Music Hall with a Navy flier who has just come back from Pearl Harbor. They all say, “This might be the last time you’ll see me,” which is a pretty worn-out phrase by now, if you ask me.

With America’s entry into the war, and to Mum’s delight, the Red Cross now tells her she’s exactly the kind of candidate they want. She signs up, but it takes a year before she’s finally deployed. During that year she continues to work as a Junior Hostess—being danced off her feet.

I switch to the binder marked “1942 Falling in Love” and find the letter she wrote to her mother the night she met Dad—the letter the boys and I had already read.

I know you probably think I’ve lost my mind, but it’s only my heart! Nothing like this has ever happened to me before & I still don’t believe it’s real …

Now that she’s met Dad, she’s determined to be sent to England, so she gets her brother Langbourne to make a phone call. He’s friends with Norman Davis, who had once been President Woodrow Wilson’s undersecretary of state and is now chairman of the International Federation of the Red Cross. A few months later, Mum is sailing happily for England aboard the Cunard liner
Queen Elizabeth.

I read hundreds of letters and cables documenting her war years: how she became program director of the Aero Club for the famed Eagle Squadrons of the American Air Force 4th Fighter Group stationed at Debden and how she later organized entertainment for convalescing officers at Rest Homes in the countryside, getting to know “the Clivedon Set”—influential friends of Lord and Lady Astor, many of whom had contributed the use of their country homes to the war effort. She describes greeting Bob Hope and Ike Eisenhower; having tea with the famous political theorist Harold Laski; “bumping into” Field Marshal Montgomery at Claridge’s; chatting to Noel Coward in a pub. War highlighted her resourcefulness: she had a talent for putting herself in the right place at the right time—and then making the most of it.

She reassures her mother that although her fighter base is only about forty miles from London, the Germans don’t know where it is:
Don’t worry—I don’t like bombs any more than you do. We haven’t been bombed yet.
Her letters are full of
enclosures: maps, pub menus, local leaflets, advertisements, and autographs and snapshots of famous pilots like Don Gentile and Johnny Godfrey. In one letter, she describes a gift that I recognize, the galoshes she wore to my grade two Christmas party:

Col. Malone has given me some RAF escape boots—They are fleece-lined and warm as toast—only they’re about size 20, so I look like a cartoon. Whenever I wear them everybody laughs, and all the dogs start barking!

The first Christmas at her base she organizes a party for local children—evacuees, whose fathers have gone off to war. She scrounges a Santa suit and carol music and asks the GIs to play “Daddy-for-the-day,” donating their rations of food and candy. Toys have become scarce in England, since most factories have been retooled to produce munitions, but Mum drives a truck into London where she manages to forage masses of toys from a wholesaler. Word spreads throughout the county, and on Christmas afternoon over four hundred children show up.

We had a grand time. They looked more like 4000 than 400 but the GIs grabbed one each, and were so attentive and the kids so responsive that there was a wonderful festive atmosphere. Many of the kids had never seen ice cream. One little girl said she’d give anything to have that party over and over again, if only in a dream.

There is a slew of letters from strangers to the family at Rokeby—introducing themselves … and announcing their upcoming arrival. It seems Mum’s habit of welcoming waifs and strays to Oakville when we were young was nothing new. She casually suggested to many GIs that they go stay with her family whenever they went back to America on leave. Nonplussed, Granny always welcomed them in. One letter
describes “a nice Minnesota farm boy, who looked after the guns on Annie’s Post.”

By early summer Mum has still heard nothing from Dad, but she manages to commandeer army jeeps on her time off and enjoy an astonishing social life with various boyfriends. One night, she’s invited to dinner by the editor of the
New Statesman,
Kingsley Martin, and the author Dorothy Woodman.

They live in the cutest house out in the country—a 300-yr.-old pub, practically all thatch roof with a lovely lawn and garden, full of beautiful old furniture—all very simple. They’re both fascinating people, terribly intelligent, though in the middle of a heated discussion on Japan’s economy or something, one of them would suddenly grab a pair of field glasses and shout, “Look—I do believe that’s the little woodpecker we were looking for!” Before I left, K. asked how I had managed to get a jeep ... was my visit “important business”? I told him I thought anything was important, if it helped you to survive. He pondered this, picked me a lovely bunch of flowers from his rockery, and said “I think that is a very profound remark!”

Then suddenly, just before closing time on Monday night, June 6th, 1944, the whole base is put on lockdown: no one can go home or use the phones; everything becomes “strictly business.” Mum is suspicious—she’s seen the boys painting the planes all afternoon. By midnight she’s convinced something’s up—that this could be D-Day. Determined not to miss such a momentous event, she stays up to watch. Soon she hears the concentrated engine noises of dozens of planes and rushes outside to watch them zoom off. This is the event that they’ve been waiting for, and planning, for three long years …
our Allied Air Armada, disappearing into the vastness of the sky until they just became part of the huge roar overhead. I wouldn’t have missed being here for anything in the world!

The next morning, ground crews are racing round the clock. Pilots are looking tired and haggard from continuous flying. Now they’re dashing in and out, dressed in gear, grabbing a sandwich, and boasting about the thirty-sixhour stretch they’ve just put in. To Mum, all activity prior to D-Day seems like child’s play.
The awful
waiting
is over. It’s as though you’ve been treading water in the surging seas for hours on end and suddenly you’re picked up and rescued—and life begins again!

The awful waiting was over in a more personal sense, too, because that very evening she’s called to the front gate. A man, claiming to know Mum, is being held in the guardhouse, and needs to be identified. It’s Dad. She hasn’t seen him since they first met in New York, two years earlier, but their life together is about to begin again—prophetically, on D-Day.

He looks a little yellowed from Quinine, but otherwise much the same. He wants me to spend a week with him at his sister’s. Will let you know what I think of him after that!

She slips up to London with Dad and stays in a hotel. As the bombs start falling, she calmly tells Dad to “have faith in God.” He replies, “I think God would tell us to go to an air raid shelter.”

A week later, I notice with relief that she’s finally spelling his name correctly.
Alex and I want to get married—OK? I know you will think we should wait till after the war but I hope you understand how impractical that is. You’ll think I’m nuts, but it’s a screwy world anyway!

They plan their wedding for September. Mum delegates her trousseau to her brother’s secretary in New York, asking her to buy and ship over “the most impractical clothes you can find,” one of which is a wedding dress.

… something simple—maybe organdy or taffeta—I don’t really care. Also I’d like a pretty afternoon dress—possibly navy blue with white fluff and a hat to go with it. I need some perfume, a slip that swishes, and two or three risqué nightgowns … I’m pining for frills.

Then she delegates the wedding announcements to her mother:
I wonder if you could get them printed over there and send them out. I’ve forgotten most of my friends’ names, so will you be thinking up a list? Also, can you suggest something for me to give to Alex? My mind is a blank on the subject.
She apologizes for being such a “screwball daughter.”
If only someday I could come near to being the kind of mother you are, I’ll be satisfied.
She encloses a letter from Dad, which she says took him several stiff drinks and six pipes full of tobacco to compose.

In it, Dad asks permission to marry Mum, even though he warns that the first year or so of married life will include long periods of separation and no definite home. He says he has tried “in not too gallant a manner to put Anne out of my thoughts the past two years, and failed.” Then he adds his own P.S.:

I shall never be anything but English, but then, thank God, Anne will never be other than American, and if we don’t always understand each other that’s probably what we love about each other.

With Dad’s week-long leave ended and their wedding still three months away, Mum busies herself opening a Rest Home for American pilots at Eynsham Hall, a colossal, Jacobean-style home in the country near Oxford. In peacetime, she says, it needed 240 servants to run it. Now it’s known as the “Flak Shack.” Mum describes the grounds as particularly lovely, with lake and boathouse, swans and wild ducks, indoor and outdoor tennis courts and a house that can easily accommodate a hundred people. She also describes the fragile
emotional state of the men, who “wake up in beds soaked with sweat, describing their nightmares.”

There are interleaved letters and cables from Dad, as well—most of them written aboard destroyers in secret locations and heavily censored. They are full of love and longing. If Mum was missing Dad, there is little mention. She’s sketching portraits of the pilots, tagging along with the recently widowed war artist Frank Beresford, whose famous painting of George V lying in state has just been bought by Queen Mary, and she’s still being feted by admirers from her old fighter base.
I’ve been jitterbugging till 3 am … and playing “Sardines”—you should have seen me and a Colonel hiding on a shelf in the broom closet … whattanite!
By now the owners of Eynsham Hall, who have relocated to a smaller house on the property, are fans of Mum’s, too, so Mrs. Mason offers to host her wedding reception there, putting kitchens and cooks at Mum’s disposal.

Mum’s descriptions of her wedding sound like the original blueprint for my own wedding, which she organized thirty years later. Her dress arrived with shoes that didn’t fit, so she wore her old tennis shoes; she asked friends to donate booze and hitched a ride in an army truck to get to the church on time. Dad arrived at the last minute.

I also discover that we’ve inherited Mum’s genes for altering church services, as we did at her funeral:
The cute old vicar told Alex that I had made history by insisting my bridesmaid precede me down the aisle (apparently it’s the reverse here) and cutting out most of the service (he was referring to the C. of E. stuff) and tho’ Alex insisted on putting back in the word
obey
, the vicar said, “I don’t believe this could have been done snappier in America!”

Once she’s married she gushes about her new husband, in ways that take me by surprise:

He’s so wonderful, Mum, I don’t see how one man can have so much of everything. He’s the only person I’ve ever known who completely fulfils all the principles you’ve always taught us to live by. All the girls are crazy about him, saying they’d marry him, even if he was a Russian! I certainly never expected to marry a man who takes such complete charge of me. He’s a combination of stern mother, indulgent father, and loving husband, all rolled into one. He reminds me a lot of Daddy in his desire to help others. He even picked up an old hitchhiker in our dash from the reception to our honeymoon, and threw him in the back seat, atop our rice-covered luggage!

I certainly recognize Dad’s generosity toward hitchhikers, but “indulgent father” is news to me. She writes,
We will only have two weeks together—but however long or however short, I’m grateful.
Then she adds a curious afterthought—one that we’d seen her put into practice the whole time we were growing up:
How do you build up an impression of bold indifference to a husband like mine??? That’s what he needs!

After their brief honeymoon, Dad was ordered to Belgium and they were separated once again. Mum went to work at a second Rest Home—Knightshayes Court—where she came down with a chest cold and developed full-blown pneumonia, apparently turning blue and spewing streams of nonsense for ten days while delirious.
I’m told everyone came by to listen. Isn’t that funny? I was the main entertainment again, even tho’ I was unconscious!
Dad was given leave to visit his dying wife—an event that saved his life since, during his brief absence, the rest of his unit was blown up in Antwerp. At the eleventh hour Mum received rare penicillin reserved for U.S. troops, and now both their lives had been spared.