GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love (42 page)

She never lied about who the father of her children was, but when people assumed that the three girls were Patrick's she didn't choose to correct them either. As far as she was concerned, he was more of a father to them than Lawrence had ever been. In the years after her first husband returned to America, he made no attempt to contact them or offer any kind of support.

Margaret and Patrick tried for children of their own, but without success. ‘I'm so grateful to you,' he told her eventually. ‘You've brought me a family I might otherwise never have had.'

But despite her happiness with Patrick, life wasn't always easy for Margaret. After several years in Switzerland, where she and her husband made the most of the skiing and beautiful mountain walks, she developed multiple sclerosis. It began with a trembling in her hands, but soon she was completely bedbound. She recovered well enough to walk with a pair of sticks, but then the disease came back. After three years of intermittent attacks it burned itself out, but Margaret was left in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

Never one to let misfortune get the better of her, Margaret was determined to make the most of her life. She began teaching English report-writing skills to officials at the ILO and the United Nations, and wrote the organisations' official booklet on the subject. She also took a course in freelance journalism and was soon writing articles for the
Times
and the
Guardian
.

Although she tore all the photographs of Lawrence out of her family albums, Margaret stayed in touch with her former in-laws in America, in particular Lawrence's sister Ellen. From her, Margaret learned the sorry details of her ex-husband's later life – a repetitive cycle of achievement followed by catastrophe. He had worked in public relations for a Florida-based theme park, advised on a notoriously successful political smear campaign and even set up two successful magazines,
Outboard
and
Underwater
. But despite his various successes, his life would always unravel when he went back to the bottle. He had remarried in Panama City, and fathered a son and a daughter, but that marriage, too, had ended in divorce. In a drunken stupor he had wandered in front of a moving car, shattering the bones in his legs and leading to a long, miserable spell in a nursing home.

One day in 1974, Ellen wrote to tell Margaret that her brother had died. He had fallen from a moored-up boat on a Florida quayside and been dragged under by the mud. As Ellen put it, ‘His soul went up and his body went down.' Whether he was drunk or sober at the time of the incident was a matter of dispute in the family.

In 1981 Patrick retired from his job at the ILO and he and Margaret returned to England, settling in Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire, in a beautiful single-storey house designed by his sister Elaine. At the age of seventy-five, Margaret fulfilled one of her life's great ambitions, taking a degree in Humanities with the Open University and achieving first-class honours.

Patrick died suddenly of a stroke in 2001, leaving Margaret to spend her final years alone. Throughout her life with him, she had rarely spoken about her first marriage, and many outside the family didn't even know that she had been a GI bride. But as time went on she grew more willing to share stories about her experiences in America.

Margaret died in January 2012, at the age of eighty-nine. With her at the end were her daughter Veronica and granddaughter Nuala – who promised Margaret that she would tell her story, along with those of the other brave women who crossed an ocean for the men they loved.

Acknowledgements

This book would not exist without our core interviewees – Margaret Denby, Sylvia O'Connor, Lyn Patrino and Rae Zurovcik – sharing their stories with us. We thank them, and their families, for their generosity and patience. Although we have tried to remain faithful to what they have told us, at a distance of seventy years many memories are incomplete, and where necessary we have used our own research, and our imaginations, to fill in the gaps.

Our research took us all over America, tracking down GI brides. In three months, we covered 12,984 miles in a rented Fiat 500, passing through thirty-eight states. Over sixty brides and their relatives were kind enough to speak to us: Itzy, Joy Beebe, Jane Bekhor, Elsie Blanton, June Blumenfeld, Jean Borst, Joyce Brown, Olga Brown, Mary Burkett, Doreen Burwell, Veronica Calvi, Dorothy Care, Lilah Contini, Pat Cracraft, Dorothy Cullins, Pamela Delleman, Phyllis Duerling, Catherine Fogarty, Thelma Fouts, Margie Franz, Doris Gallantine, Peggy Hamrick, Nancy Harrington, Eileen Harris, Doreen Heath, Bridget Henderson, Ivy Hettenhausen, Joyce Hinze, Daisy Hom, Joan James, Doreen Kamis, Betty Kranz, Doris Lindevig, Vera Long, Irene Maio, Elsie Mangan, Jessie McConnell, Dorothy McDaniel, Beryl McDonald, Edna McSpedden, Avril Meehan, Edna Mewton, Jean Mobley, Margaret Moody, Patricia Murphy, Ruth Murtaugh, Linda Myers, Alma Naff, Eileen O'Connor, Rodger O'Connor, Annie Olsen, Eileen Pample, Hilda Peters, Betty Phipps, Rena Popivchak, Michael T. Powers, Edith Reiss, Donna Richardson, Frances Ross, Joyce Russell, Vince Schoenstein, Agnes Sekel, Kathleen Smoker, Miriam Stage, Joy Stanley, Liberty Webb, Linda Webb, Barbara Werner, Grace Whitcomb, Alice White, Eileen Whitney and Avice Wilson. You can find their stories, as well as pictures and audio clips of Margaret, Rae, Lyn and Sylvia, at
www.gibrides.com
.

We are hugely grateful to the World War II War Brides Association, in particular Erin Craig, Diane Reddy and Michele Thomas, for all their help, and for the warm welcome we received at their 2012 reunion in Boston. Thanks also to Francine Thomas from the Daughters of the British Empire and Jean McKinney from the TBPA for putting us in touch with their members.

As we travelled around America we were aided by local historians Larry Evans, David Giffels, Walter Patton and Ralph F. Witt. Glenn Booker, Neil Bromley, Ivan Cutting, Valerie Jackson, Jamie Lewis and Jo Stanley offered valuable research advice. We are grateful to the staff at NARA College Park, the Montana Historical Society, the American Red Cross, the University of Georgia Library, the United Steelworkers Archive, the McKeesport Heritage Center, the Early County Historical Society, the Akron Public Library and the University of Akron Archive.

In America, we received support and kindness from friends old and new: Kelly Barrett, Michael Barrett, Barbara Beebe Jensen, Jane Bloemer, Lawrence Cowart, Jeanneen Anderson Cowart, Vivian Beebe Brown, Billy Cissel, Judith Cissel, Spike Cissel, Betsy Cissel Cosgrove, Melanie Cowart Collier, Gilly Furse, Dick Glendon, Annie Jones, Maria McCarthy, Lawrence Rambo III, Ellen Ross, Bruce Russell, Maureen Russell, Brooke Stearns and Daniel Walkowitz.

We are grateful to Becky Barry for her precise transcriptions, and to Clara Jones for research assistance. Thanks also to our agent Jon Elek, our editor Anna Valentine and our project editor Holly Kyte. For suggestions on the manuscript, we are indebted to Michèle Barrett, Nick Gill, Chris Rice and Jon Tillotson, as well as many of those already mentioned.