GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love (28 page)

‘Nah,' he said, putting one of his great big arms around her and giving her a squeeze.

But when the time came for Rae's first shift, Raymond didn't seem his usual laid-back self. ‘You sure you want to do this?' he asked her.

‘Of course,' Rae replied. ‘I'm looking forward to it.'

When she arrived at the bar, Mr Boyko talked her through the different drinks on offer at the bar, and the process for passing orders on to the kitchen. ‘Just turn on the English accent,' he told her. ‘You'll do fine.'

Rae's previous work as a welder had done little to prepare her for waiting tables, but with her confident, friendly personality she made a good impression on the customers, and before long she had made a decent amount in tips.

After an hour or so, Rae was surprised to see Raymond arrive with his brother Bill and Bill's wife Chi-Chi. Rae felt touched that they had come to support her, but she had little time to talk to them as the restaurant was already heaving.

When the three of them had finished their food, Bill and Chi-Chi rose to leave, but Raymond declared that he would stay for a drink at the bar.

‘You know I can't sit and talk with you,' Rae warned him. ‘I don't mind if you want to go home.'

‘It's all right,' Raymond replied, sipping on a bottle of beer. ‘I like to watch you.'

Rae went back to her work and tried not to worry about her husband, but as she dashed from table to table she could feel his gaze upon her, especially when she talked to male customers. He's keeping an eye on me, she realised.

The evening set a pattern for what was to follow. Every night, a few hours into her shift, the door would open and in would walk Raymond, taking up his seat at the bar alone. As Rae went about her work, she would feel his intense stare following her. The bartender, Tubby, began to make jokes about it, which only made her feel worse.

After a couple of weeks Rae could take it no longer. ‘I'm really sorry,' she told Mr Boyko, ‘but this isn't working out for me. You're going to have to find a new waitress.'

The proprietor was surprised, but he accepted Rae's resignation and she went back to the ironing, feeling bitterly disappointed.

A few days later, Rae and Raymond went out to a small club by the railroad track near his parents' house, which was run by a Slovakian family. They hadn't been there long before a man came up and asked Rae if she was the local English war bride he'd heard so much about.

‘That's me,' Rae laughed.

‘I was stationed in England,' the man said. ‘I sure did have a good time there.'

Rae could sense that Raymond was growing uncomfortable, but the other man seemed to be oblivious. ‘So what part of England are you from?' he asked her.

Raymond stood up from the table and looked the man straight in the eye. ‘Back off, buddy,' he said. ‘She's with me.'

‘Raymond!' she said. ‘What's wrong with you?'

The other man seemed equally perturbed, and he had no wish to start a fight with someone Raymond's size. ‘I didn't mean to make trouble,' he said, backing off and walking away.

Once the other man was gone, Raymond grew calmer, but Rae was shocked. Even at Boyko's she had never seen her husband flare up like this. What was causing these sudden bouts of jealousy in a man who was normally so easy-going that his army nickname had been ‘Hap'?

Before long, a thought had occurred to her – and once it had, she found it impossible to shake off. Maybe Raymond was nursing a guilty conscience of his own.

Rae hoped that her own sixth sense when it came to men was not as accurate as her mother's. But it didn't take long for her to discover that her intuition had been correct. Her sister-in-law Chi-Chi confided that while Rae had been on the boat coming over, she and Bill had seen Raymond drunk in the street outside Boyko's with one of his old girlfriends. ‘I'm sorry, Rae,' she said. ‘It's a disgrace.'

And there was more. When Rae and Raymond went to visit his best man Chet, who lived in the nearby town of Canonsburg, she fell into conversation with Chet's sister. ‘There's a girl at my factory who came in one day sobbing like crazy,' she said. ‘Raymond had told her his wife was coming over and he couldn't see her any more.'

The more people Rae talked to about Raymond, the more she came to realise that her husband had quite a reputation. ‘Oh, he was always a real run-around,' Mary next door told her. Now Rae realised why, when she had first arrived, a neighbour had remarked, ‘I hope she knows what she's letting herself in for.'

Faced with all this damning information about her husband, she was caught on the horns of a dilemma. Should she confront him and risk a huge row, or carry on as if she knew nothing? His indiscretions were in the past, and aside from stoking his jealousy when she spoke to other men, there was no reason they should affect things between them now. In any case, she felt sure he had been loyal to her throughout their time together in England, and now that she was living under the same roof as him there was little chance of him straying again. She decided it would be best not to make an issue of it.

In any case, another worry was playing on Rae's mind. After more than six months of trying for a baby, she still wasn't pregnant. She thought back sadly to the miscarriage she had suffered in the Army, and the unborn child she had never known she was carrying. Was it possible that the experience had caused lasting damage? She decided to make an appointment with a doctor.

‘There's nothing wrong with you as far as I can see,' he said, after examining her. ‘My advice is to try not to worry. Just let nature take its course.'

When Rae got home she found her husband in the midst of a game of cards with some neighbours. She was keen to tell him the good news, so she walked up to him and said quietly, ‘The doctor says there's nothing wrong with me.'

Raymond took the comment as an accusation, however. He turned round in his chair and, in front of the assembled card players, announced, ‘Well, it can't be my fault you're not pregnant. I've already got a baby in West Virginia!'

A silence fell on the room and the other couples all looked down at their cards. Rae ran upstairs and shut herself in the bedroom.

Up until now, she had avoided telling her family back home about any of the discoveries she had made about Raymond. She knew that they would only confirm her brothers' prejudices about untrustworthy Yanks and that her mum would be beside herself with worry. But she was beginning to feel at breaking point herself now, and if she didn't let them know what she was going through she felt like she was going to burst. She sat down and began writing them a letter.

She told them all about how Raymond had been messing around with his old girlfriend before she arrived, how he had a reputation as a womaniser and how he had fathered a child with a woman in West Virginia. As Rae wrote, her tears dripped down onto the page.

When she had finished the letter, Rae put it in an envelope and went downstairs. There was no sign of Raymond or any of the guests. She knew she wouldn't be able to post the letter until she had a chance to buy a stamp, and in the meantime she didn't want Raymond to find it in their bedroom, so she reached up on tiptoes and placed it on the top of a tall cabinet by the kitchen door. Then she went out for a walk to clear her head.

When she got back to the house a little later, Rae realised the flaw in her plan. The cabinet might be high for her, but at six foot two Raymond could see the top of it easily. She found him sat at the kitchen table with the letter in front of him, scowling as he poured over its contents. He looked up at her with fury in his eyes. ‘How could you write this about me?' he demanded.

She held his gaze. ‘Because I know it's all true.'

‘The hell it is!' Raymond shouted.

Rae took a deep breath. ‘I don't want to hear your lies, Raymond,' she told him. ‘I'm going up to pack my bags. I'm leaving.'

She climbed the stairs in a daze. Was she really doing this – really walking out on her husband? She went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed to compose herself.

After a while, Rae began looking for the duffle bag she had arrived with, but couldn't find it, so she headed back downstairs. Raymond was nowhere to be seen, but his mother was in the kitchen. ‘Have you seen my duffle bag?' she asked.

‘Oh, that,' Mrs Wessel replied. ‘I threw it out.' Then she added, ‘I think there's a note for you in the living room.'

Rae went into the other room and found a folded piece of paper with her name scrawled on it. ‘I'm sorry, Rae,' her husband had written. ‘Please don't go. I promise things will be different from now on. I've gone fishing with my dad, but I hope you're here when I get back.'

Rae felt torn. She no longer knew what to think. A few minutes before, she had been ready to walk out the door – but now she felt she owed it to Raymond to hear him out. She waited in the living room until he got back, and his parents went for a stroll to give them some privacy.

‘Rae, you've got to forgive me,' Raymond said, rushing over and taking her hands in his. To her surprise, he started crying, big tears rolling down his manly face. She had never seen a grown man cry before, and the sight shocked her.

‘It was so hard for me when I first came back after the war,' he sobbed. ‘The things I saw out there . . . I can't even tell you, but I saw some terrible things.'

Rae thought back to the Raymond she had first got to know in Mansfield, the cheerful man whose friends had called him Hap. It was true – he didn't seem like the same person now. She remembered the many months she had spent wracked with worry while he was away in France. Perhaps the horrors he had witnessed there were worse than she had ever imagined.

The sight of her big, strong man broken like this was more than Rae could bear. ‘All right then,' she said. ‘I forgive you, as long as things are different now.'

‘They are,' Raymond replied, wiping the tears from his face. ‘I love you. I don't want to lose you.'

‘I don't either,' Rae replied, and she meant it. She had crossed an ocean for this man, and she was determined to prove that it had been the right decision.

As Margaret sailed back across the Atlantic on the SS
Argentina
, she was filled with dread. She had escaped a drunk, violent husband in America, but with her father now away with the Army in Israel, the only place she had to go was her abusive mother's house in Ireland. She hadn't been there since the day she escaped with her father during the war, and her mother knew nothing of her real reasons for coming to ‘visit', nor that she was pregnant again.

Mrs Boyle was now living outside a little village called Tinahely in County Wicklow, and came with her donkey and trap to meet her daughter's bus at Carnew. To Margaret's surprise, she seemed quite pleased to see her, but it wasn't long before the reason became clear. ‘Will your rich American husband be gracing us with his presence?' she asked hopefully.

‘I don't think so,' Margaret replied.

Mrs Boyle was renting a little house on a farm called Greenhall, and conditions were even more primitive than they had been before. There was no running water, so it had to be pumped into buckets, which were kept lined up on the table in the scullery.

Margaret's younger sisters Bridget and Susannah instantly fell in love with their little nieces Maeve and Rosamund, but Mrs Boyle wasn't pleased to hear that another child was on the way. She had intended for Margaret to wait on her hand and foot during her stay, and was furious when she said she needed to rest.

Margaret was not only exhausted, but was suffering from headaches and shortness of breath. She begged her mother to call a doctor, which she eventually did, and was told she had high blood pressure – hardly a surprise given all she had gone through in America. ‘Complete bed rest is what you need,' the doctor declared.

But before long, Margaret was feeling even more tense. Lawrence wrote begging for her forgiveness, and announcing that he was coming over to Ireland to win her back.

Margaret was horrified, but her mother was delighted. On the day of his planned arrival, Mrs Boyle set out on the donkey and trap to meet Lawrence's bus. As it pulled into Carnew, no one matching her son-in-law's description alighted, so she marched onboard and shouted, ‘Is there a Lawrence Rambo here?'

From the back of the bus she heard a groan, and spotted a dishevelled, dark-haired man who was clearly the worse for wear. She managed to get him into the trap and slowly they made their way back to Greenhall.

Once there, Mrs Boyle stormed up the stairs to the bedridden Margaret. ‘Your husband is drunk!' she told her.

‘I've never known him to drink,' Margaret lied. ‘He must be ill.'

The last thing she wanted was for Lawrence to incur her mother's wrath and make the awkward situation even worse.