The Girl from Station X (36 page)

On 17 October, she went to Frankfurt to see Joe. One of his army colleagues found her in Joe’s bed in his flat in Höchst, and laughingly called Joe a ‘wolf’. She and Joe
tried to visit Berchtesgarten, Hitler’s mountain hideaway, but it was too misty.
No wonder Hitler felt like God
, my mother wrote, impressed by the grandeur of the
scenery.

She had decided, with some doubts, to get ‘demobbed’ at the end of October, since she had by now spent over six years in the WAAF. Joe spent her last evening in Germany with her,

drinking wine and talking. He loves me to such an extent that it frightens me sometimes and seems to need me in a way that nobody ever has before. It is a strange
combination of friend, lover and wd. be husband. He is v. sweet with me nowadays and deals with me in a way which is v. tender and makes me feel happy and contented. Joe has been such a part of my
life that I don’t know quite how I’m going to do without him.

Part 4

Post-war Life

M
y mother’s war work was now over. Despite frequent complaints about her various jobs, she had had a good war, clocking up six posts in
Intelligence and receiving three medals. In those six years, she had changed from a pleasure-seeking ingénue to a woman of thirty-one who had experienced things that she never would again
– the expectations and rewards of a high-pressure job, obligations and duties towards others, and, importantly, bonding with colleagues in a way that she had not done at her various schools,
since her mother had removed her from them too quickly.

I thought of my mother as I now knew her – a confused and helpless old woman. And, for at least three-quarters of my life with her, she had often been drunk, self-indulgent and a burden to
me. Yet in 1945 Anne Veronica Hamilton-Grace, as a result of the war, was very different. I wondered, as I opened the next diary, whether, in these crucial months after demobilisation, she would go
back to her old life.

There was another factor to consider. At thirty-one, she had lost her virginity and fallen in love with a man from another country who was married with three children. Would she remain as Joe
Darling’s mistress, or consider becoming his wife – he had offered to get a ‘clean’ divorce – or would she now want to look for a man who was single, whom she could
marry respectably and start a family? Most of her close women friends were now wed and naturally my grandmother was hoping that her only daughter would, at last, find a loving husband.
My mother really can’t understand why I can’t marry someone suitable and settle down to a nice English country life. But that is just the one thing I can’t do at
present, if ever. It seems to me that that way of life is dead and I don’t want to be tied down to something that is past. One must fit into the new world,
Anne wrote on 24
November 1945.

I read how Anne returned to England from Germany in early November 1945, sailing from Ostend to Tilbury on a Landing Ship Tank, which took nine hours. Here, as the only senior
WAAF officer on board, she performed her last task in the forces,
in charge of WAAFs, ATS, and other bods, including some immigrant Hungarians
– all she had to do was
to supervise their lunch. She went on to Birmingham to complete the paperwork necessary for her final demobilisation.

Back at home, she did not really settle. Having been very patriotic when her country was under attack, Anne now suddenly wrote in her diary that she
hated every stone of
London
. (In April 1940, she had written
I love every stone
!
) Joe continued writing her love letters, sent her an orchid and, in a letter of 5
December, urged her to rejoin him:
There are various things you could do in a conquered Germany . . .
He arranged to visit her at Knowle for Christmas:
I pray that you will wear a band
of gold for me. Maybe Xmas tide will be the time.
(He was not even divorced!)

Not only did Joe revere Anne’s womanliness – he praised her for being
so understanding
–
but he also wanted her to fulfil herself intellectually,
something I don’t think my father ever cared about. And I noted that Joe, instead of starting his love letters
Dear Anne
, began each simply
Anne Veronica.
I do not know of
anyone else who called my mother by her two Christian names, and the fact that
Ann Veronica
was the title of H.G. Wells’s novel about an emancipated woman – although I cannot
prove that Joe Darling knew the book – influenced me towards his view of Anne as intelligent and independent-minded. He wrote:
I would never try to cage your independent spirit
, and
praised Anne for being
so capable
, a quality I had never associated with her. She, however, only mentions Joe once in her diaries before and during that Christmas period of 1945, when he
did spend two weeks in England, in a flat she had found for him in London, and at Knowle.

Although on 12 December Anne had written that she was looking forward
terribly
to seeing Joe, by late November her diary is full of a Russian, whom I
shall call Olga, who had been found as a teacher by Aunt K. She was Anne’s age, and even had the same birthday. ‘
That’s perfect! Now I understand a lot of
things!
’ said the Russian, on learning this. The diary recounts Olga’s praise of Anne’s
real gift for languages
and Olga’s affirmation
that she would therefore go on teaching her
even if I wasn’t v good some days
. Anne, who never could see when she was being buttered up, wrote:
This is
the biggest compliment I could have possibly have had, as she doesn’t pay them idly, in fact just the opposite
.

Olga’s various remarks to Anne in late 1945 –
‘As usual, I can’t tear myself away from you!’, ‘I have never been jealous of a man in my
life’, ‘My relations with men are governed by my head and not my heart’
– made me wonder if she was even testing the ground for a physical love affair. Olga
certainly confided a great deal to Anne about her own unsatisfactory relationship with her English husband, whom, she implied, she had married to get a British passport. Then, in mid-February 1946,
Olga sprang on Anne the news that she had just had an abortion, of a baby that was not her husband’s, adding dramatically:
‘I’ve left the door on the latch for you to
come in, in case I can’t get up to open it.’
Nursing was not my mother’s strong point and, on going to Olga’s north London flat, she was
scared to
death
when she found her
lying on the bed and suffering agonies, white as a sheet . . . and rolling from side to side. It was like a nightmare and . . . I cursed myself for
my lack of medical knowledge.
Eventually Anne had the sense to telephone both a doctor and her younger cousin Meg, who had nursed during the war. Anne then took Olga down to Knowle for
four days, where she recovered, after
terrible pains
and a
haemorrhage
.

In late February 1946, Anne travelled to Brussels with Olga, who had a friend there. The three of them gorged in a tea shop, Chez Buol, on
mille feuilles, eclairs etc and hot
chocolate. We made pigs of ourselves.
Anne’s friend Yseult de Jonghe told her that in Belgium
everyone has as much food as they want here now.

England was still in the throes of severe rationing and would be for several more years. On 2 March, Joe arrived in Brussels, in deep snow, from Germany. However, his meeting with Anne’s
Belgian friends – Lettice had also come from Germany, with a friend of hers and of Anne’s – was not a success. Joe, Anne wrote, quibbled about the price of drinks, although he had
more money with him than the others, and Anne was
ashamed and furious with him.

She decided at first not to accompany him to Switzerland, where Joe had booked himself on a short skiing holiday with a group of other Americans – Yseult had told her that she would be
‘making herself cheap’ if she went as his mistress. In the diary, Anne lamented that she was so easily influenced and still so unsure of herself. Olga, though, was clever enough not to
criticise Joe. Anne wrote that Olga was
the most sympathetic friend I have and it seems we always have great fun together.
However, Olga’s husband was back in England
from Japan, so she would have to return. Anne decided to join Joe in Switzerland after all; her last night in Brussels was spent in a Russian nightclub. The Soviet Ambassador was there with his
wife and Anne wrote snobbishly that she looked
like a cook
, adding that these two Russians behaved in an undignified way by chatting to
a completely drunken
couple.
Meanwhile a party of White Russians sat separately,
as usual drinking bottles of champagne and looking very sad.

On the train to Basel, a Belgian man living in Holland told her that there, if you did not have money to buy black market goods, you could almost starve. Anne wrote:
It is natural that one feels bitter about having to go without those things oneself when one sees a country like Belgium with everything, especially when we put our all into the war and
ruined ourselves in doing so.
She was echoing the understandable sentiments of many back in Britain, from where, the following year, as recorded in David Kynaston’s book
Austerity Britain
, 42 per cent of people wanted to emigrate.

Switzerland was even more lavish than Belgium. In Davos, she felt compromised by appearing publicly as the mistress of a married man – she and Joe attended a gala night with the group of
Americans he was with – and was conflicted about their relationship. However, the morning that he left for Germany she was
in the depths of depression
. . .
I don’t know whether I am in love with him or not, sometimes I can’t bear him at all, at others I lean on him a great deal, as he is so crazy about me.
She
added that he felt almost like a husband now but
it is queer that it is he and not I that wants to legalise this liaison.

Back in Brussels, Anne received a cable from Aunt Dita asking her to come to America. In England she saw Millie; the first time since November 1944, when Millie had left for Egypt, though they
had exchanged letters. On 26 March 1946, they met again:

Met Millie at Piccadilly Circus, she is just the same except she looks thinner and is rather nervy. Apparently her mother said immediately when she heard I was back
‘Well thank God Anne is back, she is the only person who has any influence over you,’ she even spoke to me over the phone and said ‘Make her go to America with you.’ Mrs S.
so M. tells me thinks I am the only person who has a sane and sober influence over Millie! I love her dearly and was delighted to see her again. We spent the whole day together.

But her thoughts and feelings now were given over to Olga and, without admitting it, she seems to have been almost in love with the Russian woman, writing, very much as she had done two years
earlier about Millie:

no vice could possibly be attached to such a friendship . . . it is just a v. beautiful thing, more of the soul than anything else. It is the nearest thing I know
to being one person, instead of always being alone and it is so delicate a thing that one is almost afraid to touch it. When that person is away from you, you feel as though you were only half
there. That feeling must be the ideal marriage but it is only given to a few to find it perhaps and I am surely not one of them and yet I feel I could love someone a great deal if only I could find
the man.

Anne did not write her diary at all in April, which she must have spent in England. In May, Olga went to the English countryside with her husband, to try to make her marriage a success. She
wrote to Anne: ‘
You’ll never know how much I’ll miss you’,
and confessed that she was
miserable
at the idea of sleeping
with her husband, who, Anne wrote, was
rather common and bourgeois
, whereas Olga was
highly sensitive and refined.
(I began to feel sorry for the
poor husband, whom I later got to know slightly. Olga never struck me as particularly sensitive or refined.)

My mother and Olga’s strong feelings for each other naturally made me wonder again if Anne was really only able to fall for someone of her own sex. But they both wanted to be married and
have children and, to make things even more complicated, Olga had confessed to Anne that she was really in love with a man in Yugoslavia. Anyway, I am sure that my mother would not have pushed her
love for a woman to its obvious conclusion, which would have been to settle down as part of a lesbian couple. She was not strong enough to defy convention in this way; perhaps few women then were.
Certainly, such a decision would have horrified my grandmother, as well as most of Anne’s friends, and I suppose I cannot blame her for weakness in that area.

On 20 May, Anne set off by plane to visit her American relations. Her mother, her cousin Meg, Meg’s brother Patrick,
Joe
– presumably Joe Darling, over from
Germany – and Olga came to 40 Belgrave Square to see her off. Olga, dramatic as usual, was
so upset at my leaving that she had to take ‘drops’ and wear dark
glasses.

Joe Darling was also going to the US, to visit his wife and children. He was still mad about Anne, and wanted her to regard his country as hers, which to some extent she did.
Here in
America is my mother’s family and the memories of my grandfather and it is here that I feel I belong in part.