GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love (13 page)

To her surprise, the family picked up the chicken drumsticks in their hands and began tearing at the meat with their teeth. Margaret tried to pick at hers daintily with a knife and fork.

‘No need to stand on ceremony round here,' Jack Cowart told her, smiling.

Seeing everyone turn to look at her, Margaret picked up the drumstick hesitantly and took a bite.

‘That's it!' said Jack approvingly.

‘Lawrence tells me you're quite a reader,' Ellen said. ‘Help yourself to any books you like in the house.'

‘Thank you,' Margaret replied.

‘Oh, my sister's got a real library,' Lawrence said. ‘She's always giving books to the help.'

‘I think it's important,' Ellen replied. ‘It's a chance for them to educate themselves.'

Margaret asked them how the war was affecting life in Georgia. She knew the family had around 2,000 acres of plantations, including several hundred that had belonged to Lawrence's late mother.

‘With young black men going off to war there's been a pretty bad labour shortage,' Jack told her. The Cowarts' sons, who weren't yet in their teens, had been helping with the cotton picking.

‘Industry's having a fine time out of this war, but we farmers are struggling more than ever,' Ellen said bitterly. ‘Very few of us are turning a profit these days. You won't find a more helpless, discouraged group of people in all of America.'

Margaret learned that most of the farming was still done with mules and Jack owned the only tractor in the county. She was shocked – when Lawrence had talked about his family owning plantations she had assumed that meant they were wealthy, but it seemed she was wrong. Despite the nice house and acres of land, money was a constant source of worry for the Cowarts, and their bill at the grocery store had been known to go unpaid for months.

She also discovered that being a ‘landowner' didn't stop Jack from having to get his hands dirty. On Monday morning, he and his sons were up at 5 a.m., going out in their pick-up truck to collect the farm hands and head out to help with picking the peanut crop. It was back-breaking work, and the boys were sent off with handfuls of salt pills to counteract the effect of sweating under the hot sun. They came home at lunchtime for their main meal of the day, but then stayed out again until almost midnight.

While the men were out at work, Margaret and Ellen sat on the porch, drinking iced tea and chatting. Margaret felt she had found a true soulmate in her new sister-in-law, who was intelligent and kind, just like her brother in his better moments. But she was taken aback by a comment she made about Lawrence. ‘He's always been able to charm his way out of anything – just like he did when they let him resign from the Army,' said Ellen.

‘Let him resign?' Margaret said, confused.

‘Yes, after he had the argument with the General and threw him down the stairs.'

Margaret realised Lawrence had told his family a tall story about why he had come back to America. But she didn't have the heart to tell Ellen about him defrauding the Red Cross.

Later, they went into town to run some errands. Margaret was surprised to discover that, as they walked along the pavement, black people stepped out of their way and into the gutter in deference to them.

Arlington was in the grip of segregation – there was a ‘colored' school and a white school, a ‘colored' church and a white church, and even the water fountains were marked as separate. Ellen told her that in the cinema, black people had to sit upstairs, unless they were a nanny accompanying a white child.

‘It's as if there are two separate towns in the same place!' Margaret exclaimed.

Meanwhile, although slavery was a thing of the past, the black workers on the plantations seemed to live the same life as their forefathers, living in board houses on small plots of land without plumbing or electricity. Ellen's husband Jack was more forward-thinking than most, and whenever one of the sharecroppers needed new clothes for their children or had to see a doctor, he would pay for them.

Over lunch, Jack told Margaret of his disgust at the way crimes within the black community were treated with little interest by the white justice system – when an employee of theirs had had her throat slit by her jealous husband, the man had escaped jail. Yet if a black man committed a crime against a white person all hell would break loose, and lynchings were still taking place in the region.

Because Jack was a respected member of the community, when disputes flared up people would often send for him to sort them out. Late one Saturday afternoon, the family were all home when a man came to the door asking for Jack to come and talk down Billy, one of the local farmers. Billy had got a mob together who were threatening violence against a white girl and a black man who had slept together.

The girl, Lila, came from one of the white sharecropper families, who lived in similar conditions to the black sharecroppers but were looked down on as ‘white trash' and accused of being less clean than their black counterparts. Lila was only thirteen, but like many of the girls she was already married, and her husband was quite a bit older than her. He had been approached by a local black man who wanted to sleep with Lila in return for payment. The husband had agreed, and had sold his young wife.

In such a small town the arrangement hadn't stayed a secret for long, and soon Billy had got a group of white folks together, outraged not at Lila's husband, but at her and the black man for having had interracial sex.

When Jack arrived, the mob had been whipped up into a frenzy by Billy, who had clearly had one too many beers. Jack went straight up to him and, drawing himself up to his full six feet two inches, told him, ‘You better shut your mouth and go home right now, if you know what's good for you. And take your buddies with you.'

Being publically admonished by Jack Cowart was enough to make Billy back down. Cursing under his breath, he left, and the mob began to disperse.

The sheriff had now arrived and was about to take Lila and the black man to the county jail. Jack knew there was a good chance he would throw the pair out on the side of the road, shoot them and claim they had been trying to run away.

‘If these two people don't get to the jail alive, you'll have me to answer to,' he warned him.

As a result of Jack's actions, Lila and the black man were neither lynched nor shot that day – even if they were later convicted of miscegenation and sent to the state penitentiary.

Margaret was beginning to realise that her in-laws were pretty special people. But after a while she discovered that Jack had one, rather familiar, flaw. Walking past the kitchen one day she saw him take a brown paper bag out of a cupboard under the sink, quickly pour himself a large whisky, knock it back and hurriedly put both the glass and bottle away again. Margaret was shocked. She had been led to believe that alcohol was shunned by the good Christians of Arlington. There weren't even any bars in the town for the white men.

It wasn't long before she started to suspect that Lawrence had discovered the secret stash too. He began staying up late, coming to bed after she had gone to sleep, and not emerging in the morning until ten or eleven o'clock. When he did, he seemed on edge, as if his nerves were jangled, and any loud noise hurt his head. But when she questioned him about it he claimed it was just the heat.

The children in the house were learning to avoid Uncle Lawrence in the mornings. One day, when young Lawrence Cowart was making a lot of noise, his uncle hissed at him, ‘Listen boy – if you don't be quiet I'm going to twist your head off, put it on the table and watch you wiggle on the floor!' The child made a hasty exit.

While Jack seemed to be able to manage his drinking and still go out and do a long day's work, Lawrence increasingly just hung around the house and wasn't helping on the plantation. Margaret had thought that once he was back in America, surrounded by his family, he wouldn't need to reach for a drink, but now she began to worry that he was slipping back into his old ways.

She decided to talk to her sister-in-law. ‘Have you known Lawrence to drink before?' she asked her.

‘Oh my dear child,' Ellen said, giving her a pitying look, ‘he's been tied to the bottle since his student days.'

She told Margaret that their late mother had gone up to the University of Georgia to try and straighten Lawrence out, but to no avail. He had been kicked out of the university for his wild antics. She also told her that the prominent scar across Lawrence's nose was the result of a drink-driving accident when he was in his early twenties, in which he had gone through the windscreen.

‘As soon as I heard he was getting married I was worried,' Ellen said, shaking her head. ‘I foresaw there would be problems for Lawrence's wife.'

Margaret had a sinking feeling. During his court case in England, Lawrence had blamed his drinking on the stresses and strains of his war jobs, yet now she realised the problem had started long before. What was more, it seemed entrenched in the culture of the South. As well as Ellen's husband Jack, she discovered it was an open secret that numerous men in the family and the community had drinking problems, or worse. One uncle had such a serious addiction to morphine that his wife had locked him in a room to go cold turkey, and his howls could be heard for miles around. When he was finally released, his iron bedstead had been twisted like spaghetti. Even the doctor in neighbouring Edison was an addict, and had got several of his patients hooked on drugs.

Margaret began to feel that if Lawrence was to have any chance of staying on the straight and narrow, they would have to leave Georgia, and soon. But she was torn: she loved Ellen and the Cowarts, and they had been so kind to her. She had felt more of a sense of family and community here than she had anywhere else.

But one day, she overheard a conversation that convinced her the time had come for them to go.

‘He's always taking advantage of you,' Jack was telling his wife. ‘You don't hear from him for years, but as soon as he's in trouble and needs money he shows up again!'

Margaret didn't need to be told who they were talking about.

Much as she hated the thought of upping sticks again when she was now heavily pregnant, she urged her husband to look for work elsewhere. Since Lawrence had squandered his inheritance, and they weren't getting any payments from the Army due to his dismissal, the only way they could stand on their own two feet was if he got a job.

Luckily, Lawrence announced that one of his old army contacts had offered him a position as a buyer at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company headquarters in Akron, Ohio. Many Southerners were flocking to the industrial northeast for jobs, and Akron – famous for its tyre companies – was booming thanks to the war.

Margaret was pleased, and with that weight off her mind she was able to enjoy a goodbye dinner with the Cowarts before leaving for their new home. Relations might be strained between her and Lawrence, but looking around the table at the faces of the people who had made her feel so welcome in America, she felt she couldn't have married into a better family.

With the war on the Continent now well underway, there was plenty of work to do at Chilwell Depot, where damaged vehicles were brought in for repairs before being sent back to the front. Rae had been shocked to learn of the number of amphibious tanks that had sunk on D-Day, despite all she and her colleagues had done to render them waterproof. But while many of those were now rusting underwater off the Normandy coast, new battle-scarred vehicles were arriving every day for repairs, and the men and women at Chilwell were busier than ever.

While her colleagues would replace broken tank tread or install new guns, Rae was responsible for repairing small holes and gashes in the metal with her welding torch. It could be a gruesome responsibility given the kind of action the vehicles had seen in France. As the muddy tank tracks warmed up, they would release the sickening smell of dried blood.

One day, a tank came into the depot that all the male welders seemed keen to avoid. Rae decided to investigate, climbing the ladder onto the top of the vehicle and looking down into it.

Immediately, she was hit by an odour even worse than those she had got used to, and soon she saw why. The inside of the tank was bloodied, and lying on the floor was a pair of human fingers that had obviously been ripped off at the knuckle.

Rae gagged as she stared at the bloodied stumps, and covered her mouth to avoid breathing in any more of the terrible smell. But there was work to be done, whatever the unpleasant conditions. She climbed down to fetch her welding torch, steeled herself for a moment, and then returned to get on with repairing the tank.

The months of waiting since Raymond had been sent to France had been difficult for Rae. She had volunteered to go to the Continent herself in one of the REME's (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers') mobile workshops, which were sent out on D-Day plus five, but her mother had refused to sign the papers. ‘I've enough children overseas with the Army,' she had told Rae firmly.