GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love (12 page)

The two women stood on the doorstep, holding each other close for several minutes, both sobbing. Then Mrs Bradley brought her daughter inside the house and gently led her up to bed. Exhaustion caught up with Sylvia, and before long she had drifted into a deep sleep, her mother sitting anxiously by her bedside.

For the next few days Sylvia was unable to get up, too shaken by her experience to face the world and barely aware of the days passing by. After a while she began to develop carbuncles under her armpits, which the doctor said were caused by the trauma of the bombing.

One day, after about a week, her mother knocked on the bedroom door. ‘You've got a visitor, love,' she said. She ushered in Sylvia's friend Vera from the train.

Sylvia gasped – she could hardly believe her eyes. ‘Vera!' she said. ‘I thought you were dead!'

Remarkably, Vera had survived the attack with only cuts and grazes, and she told Sylvia that two of the other girls had also been very lucky – they were in hospital, but had avoided any serious injuries. But Olive Kelsey had not been so fortunate – she had been sitting by the window when the rocket fell, and had died instantly.

Knowing that she should have been in the carriage with the other girls, Sylvia felt a tremendous sense of guilt. She was glad that Vera and the other two had recovered so well, but the thought of Olive dying just feet away from them haunted her, and she couldn't shake the image of the arm she had seen poking out of the rubble.

Slowly, the carbuncles went down and Sylvia began to regain her strength. She started spending more of the day out of bed, even going for short walks down to the river. Mrs Bradley could see she was beginning to think about returning to work.

‘Don't go back, Sylv,' she pleaded. ‘It's too dangerous. You don't know what trains might be hit next.'

‘I could be somewhere else and the same thing could happen, Mum,' Sylvia replied. She loved her jobs at the hotel and the Red Cross club – they were her social life – and she didn't want to give them up.

‘All right then, love,' her mother replied reluctantly.

That first morning getting back onto the 8.10 to Charing Cross was the hardest thing Sylvia had ever done. Her stomach was doing somersaults and her heart was racing as she stepped up from the platform, and she spent the whole journey feeling like she was about to throw up. But she managed to get into work on time, and as the weeks and months passed, bit by bit the morning journey became easier.

Every day as she boarded the train, she remembered what her mum had told her when Carl had died: ‘You just have to get back on your feet, and keep going.'

Margaret stood on the deck of the RMS
Mauretania
and watched England fade into the distance. It was four months since her husband had been kicked out of the American Army for defrauding the Red Cross and failing to pay his debts, and he had been repatriated shortly afterwards. In his letters to her since then he had repeated his promise that if she followed him to America they could start afresh and he would never touch another drop of alcohol. His apologies seemed heartfelt and sincere, and Margaret hoped that once he was away from the stress and strain of the war things would be easier.

As the wife of an officer, Margaret had been entitled to transportation by the Army, which had requisitioned Cunard's great ocean liners to carry troops from America to the theatres of operation and had spaces onboard on their return journeys. But the voyage was top secret – the passengers' bags were marked with a code number rather than their destination, and the brides had been instructed to tell no one at home when they were travelling, for fear of a U-boat attack. On some voyages, brides found the secrecy meant that even the crew didn't know who they were and assumed they must be prostitutes brought onboard for the officers.

Margaret soon learned that as well as taking British war brides to New York, the
Mauretania
was bringing German prisoners of war to Canada. ‘Do not attempt to communicate with the prisoners,' the war brides had been told sternly when they boarded. But they watched with interest as the Germans were allowed up on deck once a day to take the air, and could hear them singing German folksongs at the tops of their voices down in the hold.

‘Sounds like they're pretty happy down there,' Margaret's cabin-mate said. ‘I bet they can't believe their luck, going to Canada!' Like Margaret, the woman had a baby with her, and though their cabin was clean and pleasant, it was hard to get any sleep with both infants crying at night.

Margaret was suffering from morning sickness, and combined with the motion of the boat she felt queasy almost all the time. To add to her discomfort, on the first day onboard the women all made the mistake of overeating at dinner. After years of rationing they were unable to control themselves at the sight of the tables laden with bowls of fruit – a rare treat in England – and the enormous portions of steak and potatoes. The children onboard, meanwhile, gorged themselves on sweets and chocolates, and soon the whole deck the GI brides were on smelled of sick. Luckily the plush carpets that had once lined the floors had been removed when the
Mauretania
had been requisitioned.

The ship had also been robbed of other luxury trappings, including its silver, crystal and china, which were now languishing in a warehouse. Tiers of canvas bunks had been installed in the first-class cabins in order to squeeze in as many troops as possible in rooms where once only one or two well-heeled guests had stayed, while the ship had been painted a dull battle grey and fitted with armaments. German U-boats still lurked in the waters, and it had to zigzag to avoid being targeted, setting a new course every few minutes.

Its grand restaurants had been turned into mess hall cafeterias, with narrow tables that could seat large numbers of troops at a time. But even these attempts at wartime economy couldn't mask the
Mauretania
's beauty. The ship wasn't as big as the
Queen Mary
or
Queen Elizabeth
, but when it had been built just before the war it had been the largest vessel ever constructed in Britain for the newly combined Cunard White Star Line, and had been intended to bring glamour to the Atlantic crossings. It still had its exquisite chandeliers, grand staircases and glittering ballroom, and Margaret enjoyed simply wandering around gazing at them.

Among the
Mauretania
's passengers was the well-known bandleader Spike Jones, who was being transported home after having entertained the American troops in Europe. He and his band performed in the ballroom every night of the voyage, but with young babies to look after, Margaret and her cabin-mate usually retired early.

During the day, Margaret did her best to get up on deck as much as possible to assuage her seasickness. Staring out across the endless miles of ocean, she was reminded how cut adrift she had always felt in her life. Some brides might feel the ache of homesickness, but she had never had a real home to miss.

Thankfully, the
Mauretania
was one of the faster Cunard vessels, and after just seven days at sea they approached New York. Margaret rushed up on deck with the other war brides to catch a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. Some of the women were moved to tears by the sight of it, and it gave Margaret a rush of hope for the new life she was embarking on.

One woman, however, was incredulous. ‘You mean it's
green
?' she exclaimed. Having only ever seen the statue in black-and-white photographs, she had assumed it was silver.

When the
Mauretania
pulled into Pier 86, those brides who were being met by their husbands were allowed to disembark. Lawrence had told Margaret he would meet her in New York and then take her by train to Arlington, in Southwest Georgia, where he was staying with his sister Ellen.

Margaret and the other brides waited to have their documents stamped and to undergo a medical check. Standing in line pregnant, with little Rosamund in a carrycot, she felt exhausted. Army transportation had not yet taken account of the needs of war brides and their children, and there was nowhere she could change the baby, who cried pathetically as she got wetter and wetter.

It was well into the evening by the time they got through, and representatives from the Red Cross were waiting to link them up with their husbands. Some had come to the port to meet their wives, while other women were being taken away in cars by the Red Cross to go to their husbands' addresses.

Margaret scanned the faces of the men, but she couldn't see Lawrence anywhere.

‘Are you sure he didn't expect you to go to him?' a Red Cross girl asked her, after she had waited for about half an hour with no sign of her husband.

‘I don't think so,' Margaret replied. ‘He said in his letter he would be waiting for me.'

‘Do you have the address where he's staying?' the girl asked her.

Margaret produced Lawrence's latest letter from her bag, which gave the name of the hotel. ‘Let me drive you there,' said the girl.

Margaret was too tired to argue, so she climbed into the Red Cross car, doing her best to soothe Rosamund as she started crying again.

‘Any sights in New York you'd like to see?' the girl asked, cheerily.

Margaret felt like asking whether she would want to go sightseeing if she had spent seven days at sea and had a baby crying to be changed, but she merely shook her head.

‘This is the one,' the girl said eventually, as she pulled up in front of a rather seedy looking hotel.

She picked up the luggage while Margaret took the carrycot. The receptionist gave Margaret a key to her husband's room, and they travelled up in the lift.

When they arrived, the Red Cross girl knocked on the door but there was no reply. Margaret put the key into the lock and pushed the door open.

‘Hello?' she called. ‘Lawrence?'

Margaret flicked the light switch, and at last she saw her husband. He was passed out on the bed, an empty glass in his hand, and on the bedside table was a half-finished bottle of Scotch.

When they stepped off the train at Arlington, Margaret felt for a moment as if she was in a completely different country. It was Saturday, and the town was so busy that it was almost impossible to walk down the street – and almost every face she saw was black.

‘Welcome to the South!' Lawrence said.

He was back to his funny, charming self and was doing his best to smooth things over between them. He had pointedly avoided alcohol in the train's dining car throughout the long journey, and Margaret just hoped that now she was here he would keep his promise not to drink any more.

The heat was unbearable, even though it was late in the day, and the smell of cooked fish rising from stalls set up in the street was overwhelming. In between the crowds, carts drawn by mules moved slowly along the uneven roads, which Margaret noticed had not been paved. She felt as if she had stepped back in time by a hundred years.

They made their way down Cedar Street, a road along the railway line that divided grand houses owned by white families on one side of the tracks from the main black residential area on the other.

Lawrence's sister Ellen and her husband Jack Cowart lived in a beautiful white wooden house with balustrades and columns and a large front porch. As Margaret opened the gate in the white picket fence and walked into the front garden, two blond-haired boys ran past shooting BB guns. ‘Those are my nephews, Lawrence and Jack,' Lawrence told her.

Ellen emerged on the porch. She had short red hair and was wearing a dark patterned dress and elegant little heels. Her husband, following her, was a tall lanky man with an open, honest face.

‘Why,
Margaret
!' Ellen cried, with a strong Southern lilt, her arms outstretched. ‘You are just as pretty as Lawrence led us to believe. Welcome to Arlington, my dear!' She embraced her and kissed her on the cheek.

Jack Cowart also greeted Margaret warmly, although she noticed he was slightly cooler in welcoming her husband.

‘This here's my daughter, Jane,' Ellen said, as a slim girl of around thirteen with a shoulder-length brown bob came onto the porch, ‘and I'm sure Rosamund will have a friend in baby Daniel.'

A black nanny appeared with a little a boy who wasn't much older than Margaret's own child, and offered to take Rosamund.

‘Y'all must be hungry,' Ellen said, leading them into the house. They crossed a large hallway with hardwood floors and went into a pine-panelled dining room with an enormous table. ‘I hope you like chicken because I've been busy frying up a whole heap,' she told Margaret. ‘It's just about the only meat we've had since the war started.'

Margaret had never heard of frying chicken before, but did her best to keep an open mind as it was brought onto the table, along with rice, broccoli, sweet corn and bread and butter. She was relieved to see there was no alcohol.