GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love (21 page)

Suddenly the difficulties and insults of her epic journey melted away, and Lyn felt it had all been worth it.

As Ben began loading her bags into his father's Buick, a thought struck her. ‘Oh, there's something I'm meant to tell you,' she said. ‘The porter on the train knocked me up every morning, and I gave him a good tip for it.'

Ben's jaw dropped momentarily, but then he laughed as he realised the misunderstanding. ‘Lyn, whatever you do, don't tell my parents that!' he said.

While other war brides were waiting patiently for passage to join their husbands, Rae was secretly beginning to dread the day that she received her orders to sail.

She had found waiting for the war to end almost unbearable, and even after victory had been declared in Europe it had been another three months before Raymond returned from France. There hadn't been much time for a proper reunion, however – he had been given two days' leave to visit her before being shipped back to the States.

Rae had been shocked to see the husband she had worried about so frantically for fifteen months sitting on the sofa in her house as if nothing had happened. Suddenly, relief had overwhelmed her – now that Raymond was finally with her again, she could accept that the war was well and truly over. For the second time in recent months, the normally tough Rae had burst into tears.

‘Hey, aren't you pleased to see me?' he had joked, as he put his arms around his sobbing wife.

When they first met, she had slammed the door in his face every time he turned up at her billet asking for a date. Yet here she was crying on his shoulder. She felt like she had become a different person.

There had been other changes too. As a welder in the Army, Rae had found an identity and a vocation that suited her, but now she was no longer in uniform. At the end of the war, she and a few other ATS girls had been called into the office at Chilwell and asked if they would like to stay on. Reluctantly, she had turned down the offer – she knew that as a married woman she couldn't commit to several more years in the Army.

With Raymond about to leave for America, Rae had been gripped by a new worry. ‘Promise me you won't go back down the mine,' she pleaded. ‘It's too dangerous.'

‘Okay, baby,' he had replied. ‘I'll get a job at the steel mill instead.'

As Rae waved him off again, it had suddenly dawned on her that the next time she saw him they would both be in America. When they had married, it had been in the midst of a war that seemed never-ending. She had accepted Raymond's ring without considering the fact that one day it would mean following him halfway across the world. But now, as she waited for her orders to join him in America, she began to question what she had done. She loved her country passionately – even more so after serving in the forces – and she was also worried about how her mother would cope with her departure. The family had been disrupted so many times already – by death, by the war and by her stepfather's betrayal. The thought of leaving them now was intolerable.

By the time her orders to travel finally came, Rae had found an excuse to stall her departure. She wrote to Raymond telling him that her sister Liz was about to give birth, and she had offered to help out until she had the baby. In the meantime, she had requested a delay from the US Army.

Raymond accepted the disappointing news, and Rae moved in with Liz. She was there when she went into labour, helping the midwife deliver the baby. Raymond sent his congratulations, and asked if Rae would now be ready to leave. But she replied that she couldn't possibly leave Liz now, in the early days of motherhood, when she needed her help the most.

As the weeks slipped by, the normally laid-back Raymond sounded more and more uneasy in his letters. ‘When are you coming?' he kept demanding, but all he received were updates on the baby's progress.

Eventually, Rae's mother confronted her, and asked what was going on.

‘I don't want to go to America, Mum!' Rae blurted out.

Mrs Burton didn't want her daughter to leave either, but she felt the decision had been made when Rae and Raymond had married. ‘Your place is with your husband,' she told her sadly. ‘No matter where he is.'

Reluctantly, Rae wrote to tell Raymond that she was ready to leave, and accepted passage with the Army.

Rae's mother and her siblings Vic, Mary and Ron came to see her off at Waterloo, from where she was to take the War Brides Express to Tidworth. The station platform was busy with war brides from all over Britain, and the Women's Voluntary Service bustled about, ticking their names off lists before they were handed over to the care of the Red Cross.

Suddenly, Rae's brother Ron started running back down the platform to the exit. ‘Where are you going?' she called.

‘I have to meet my mate,' he shouted back, and to Rae's dismay he was gone. Saying goodbye had proved too difficult for him.

A whistle blew and everyone in the crowd started giving each other a last hug, before the women made for the doors. ‘Goodbye, love,' said Rae's mother, wiping away her tears with a hanky.

Mary looked utterly desolate as she watched her sister disappear onto the train. This latest loss to the family proved so hard to bear that when Mary returned to her ATS base she spent three days in the camp hospital.

When Rae's contingent of war brides arrived at Tidworth, they handed over their luggage, ration books and identity cards, and endured the endless checking of paperwork and the humiliating medical examinations that were the price of passage to the States.

They were told that their stay at the camp would be for only three days, but three days came and went and still they had not been taken to a ship. Every afternoon they were promised they would be boarding the following day, but the next morning they were always disappointed. Some of the brides became desperate, hearing stories of women who had waited at Tidworth for nearly two months. Unable to bear it any longer, several walked out, declaring, ‘If our husbands want us, they can come and get us.'

Finally, after six days, Rae's group of brides were taken to Southampton to board the
Bridgeport
, an old steel-hulled German passenger vessel that the US Army had been using as a hospital ship. When Rae and the other brides went to investigate their quarters, they found that they were in the former psychiatric ward, and their dining area was enclosed within a wire cage – hardly the most welcoming of environments. Before the boat left, five or six brides had a change of heart and demanded to be let off.

As the boat began to pull out of port, Rae and the remaining women rushed up on deck. A ship of wounded British soldiers was coming in, and seeing the war brides, they started yelling, ‘You'll be sorry!'

But the brides drowned them out by singing ‘There'll Always Be an England' at the tops of their voices, and Rae joined in with gusto, doing her best to blast away the aching sadness she felt as she watched her homeland slide out of view.

Although the
Bridgeport
's voyage began relatively smoothly, a few days into the journey it hit a storm. The boat lurched violently in the water and waves came crashing over the deck, causing the majority of the brides to suffer terrible sea sickness. One Jewish bride, who had been in a concentration camp, was suffering more than most and as the storm worsened she became increasingly distressed. She had previously spoken in fluent English, but now the language seemed to escape her and she began ranting at the Red Cross girls in German and wailing inconsolably. The girls did their best to calm her down, but it was clear that the fear caused by the storm had triggered memories of her previous trauma and she had to be taken to the sickbay, where she lay delirious for three days.

Even those who had not suffered atrocities in the war could sometimes be driven crazy by the rough seas. During the first ever war-bride voyage on the
Argentina
, a terrible storm had made one bride so hysterical that she tried to throw herself overboard. Her life was saved by another bride, who managed to grab her before she succeeded, and she was taken to the sickbay and sedated.

The closer they got to their final destination, the more troubled Rae felt about having left her home and her family, and the more anxious she became about what was before her. She was not alone. In the last few days of their voyages, many brides began to panic. As well as their other duties, the Red Cross provided a counselling service, and their caseload became heavier as they approached New York. Often these worries simply needed ‘talking out', but some cases were more sensitive than others. One Red Cross girl was charged with explaining to a twenty-three-year-old French woman the trouble she and her ‘Negro' husband, a bag handler at Grand Central station, could expect to face in America as a mixed-race couple. Many war brides had no idea that mixed marriages were still illegal in some states.

As the
Bridgeport
arrived at the mouth of New York Harbor, the brides rose early to see the Statue of Liberty. For some it was an exciting moment, but the sight filled Rae with dread. She stood up on deck and cried, wishing that she could jump in the water and swim back to England.

In New York Rae was put on an overnight train heading west, which had been commandeered for the brides. Red Cross girls were onboard handing out candy, doughnuts, fried cakes, peanuts and newspapers – in which some brides spotted pictures of themselves that had been taken by the press on their arrival. The Red Cross had become vigilant in guarding against journalists and photographers after hordes of them had jumped a war-bride train in Chicago, which led to the women becoming separated and stranded without their baggage.

The Red Cross girls took good care of the brides, staying up all night and preparing baby formula, comforting those who were ‘train sick', talking to the women about their destinations and handing out maps so they could see where they were going. On one train, the women were so grateful to a Red Cross worker that at the end of the trip they made a collection of $23 and suggested that she and the male medic onboard use it to go out for dinner together.

Meanwhile, the Red Cross girls also continued to fulfil their role as counsellors. One tall, blonde bride wept as she told a caseworker how she and her GI both wanted a divorce. She said she intended to leave him and marry a relative in America – who, it soon transpired, was on the train already. The Red Cross called the immigration authorities, who said that if she did not go to her husband she would be deported. When she arrived at her destination, the unwanted spouse, who did not want a divorce after all, was there to meet her. Reluctantly, she went off with him, leaving her boyfriend behind.

As the train pulled into Pittsburgh, Rae saw that the sky was thick with smog and the buildings were blackened and grimy – it was even worse than she was used to in London. The city's steel mills had been booming during the war, and smoke-control laws, passed in 1941, had been put on hold. Not for nothing had the city garnered the nickname ‘Hell with the lid off'.

Rae was the only bride who got off at Pittsburgh, where the Red Cross handed her over to a woman from Travelers Aid, who put her on the train to her husband's hometown of Hackett. After about half an hour, the train was passing through woodland, in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, when it came to a stop. Rae peered out of the window. There was no station, just a road running alongside the railway line. She was wondering if they had broken down when a man came running along the tracks calling, ‘Rae Wessel?'

Rae grabbed her bag and ran to the door, and the man offered a small stool so she could step down onto the gravel by the side of the tracks. She wondered what kind of a place she had come to, where there weren't even platforms for the trains.

As the train departed, Rae saw a little group of people heading towards her, and at the front of them was Raymond. He was dressed not in his old army uniform but in a white shirt and loose-fitting trousers, which made him look even more laid-back than she remembered.

‘Rae!' he called, running up to her, his familiar big grin on his face. She reached up to hug him, but couldn't help feeling a little like she was hugging a stranger. It had been so long since they'd last seen each other.

He took her bag. ‘This is my mom and pop,' he said, introducing a short thin man and a little chubby woman, both of them dark haired.

‘Hello, Rae!' said Mrs Wessel, giving her a hug.

‘Welcome!' said her husband.

‘And these are my brothers, Jimmy and Charles,' Raymond continued. Both were shorter than Raymond, like their parents, and all of them greeted her warmly.

‘Everyone's going to be calling the police, wanting to know what's wrong with the train,' her father-in-law told her. ‘It's the first time in history it's stopped here!'

They walked up to a little road, where Charles's car was parked. Raymond put Rae's bag in the boot and they all squeezed in.