© 2004 Velma Weiss
All Rights Reserved

Note to Reader:

This book was written about events occurring from the 1930’s to the mid-1980’s.  I wrote it for several reasons: many friends had told me I should write a book;  I had just gone through a rather scary illness and was feeling certain that I was not long for this world;  and I wanted to leave something for my grandchildren to read about me when they grew up.  I finished writing the book in 1986, and lo and behold! I didn’t die.  My grandchildren grew up hearing my stories, and there was nothing to do with the book, so I put the draft away for about 14 years.  

During those years I lost my beloved husband, and by moving into a large residence for seniors, I made a lot of new acquaintances.  After about two years of listening to my stories, several of them said that I ought to write a book.  “I have,“ said I and was persuaded to dig out the moldering pages.  All of those who read the draft insisted that I edit it and preserve it in some form.  I agreed to put it on a floppy disk because I had bought my first computer (for my 84th birthday) and really needed something to do on it besides trading jokes and e-mail with my few computer-owning friends and relatives.

It soon became obvious during the editing of the manuscript, that there might be some chronological confusion for the reader.  I have therefore added some notes designed to bring some things up to date.  If I have thereby only added to the confusion, please forgive me.  I also would like to point out that many things I described have changed.   Culture and mores have changed in the countries where I lived.  I might write quite differently were I able to revisit them.  How I wish I could!

I would like to acknowledge here the enormous amount of support and assistance provided by my good friend, Jane Dunn.  Not only was she a talented and tireless editor, but the book would never have made it into the computer without her.  Thanks also to my daughter-in-law, Marney Swan, for her cover drawing.

My book is available for reading on my web site and also on audio tapes for the visually or otherwise handicapped, published by the Library of Congress. For those who already have qualified and have the equipment and arrangements for acquiring these tapes, the number is AZ2534. Simply give this number to your local branch. For those interested in initiating this wonderful free service, contact the National Library Service For The Blind and Physically Handicapped at 1291 Taylor St. NW, Washington D.C. 20542 or call 1-800-424-8567.
         

I dedicate these memories to my beloved Werner who helped make most of them.



                                                                                      VELMA
                                                                                       January, 2001
 


Foreword



My father was a voracious reader of paperback mysteries and westerns.  He could choose four or five of them in as many minutes, while I am a browser who takes forever to pick out a couple of novels.  I finally asked him how he was able to select his reading matter so rapidly.  “Well,” he replied in his slow Texas drawl, “if no blood is spilt on the first page, I just move on to something else.”

In loving memory of him, I shall try to let you know right up front what this book is, or perhaps more accurately, what it is not.  It is not an autobiography—I am neither famous nor infamous enough, nor am I related to a famous person.  It is not fiction; everything is as factual as my memory will allow, but it is not a learned work backed up by hours of research.  It is just a collection of anecdotes and memories culled from fifty years of personal experience and some observations based on that experience.  It encompasses more than a year of pre-war England and all the years of wartime England as seen through the eyes of a young American bride of an Englishman—a sort of war-bride in reverse.  My new husband didn’t bring me home from a war; he brought me home to one.

After spending the post-war years in England, Switzerland, France, and Franco’s Spain, I started a new life, working for and later marrying into the Central Intelligence Agency.  This led to my living in Germany, Japan, and of all places, Las Vegas, Nevada (while my husband worked in the Nevada Test Site).  It also led to some very interesting experiences while living in Paris.

Finally, there were the years of going back to England, with the inevitable comparisons of then and now, here and there.  I hope to strike some nostalgic chords among my contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic and to answer some of the questions asked by young people like my grandchildren about what it was like all those years ago. 

If this does not appeal to you, just follow Daddy’s example.
 
 Chapter One


If this were an autobiography, I suppose it would begin with my birth or perhaps even earlier with an account of my parents, their parents, and so on, until we had climbed my whole family tree.  Fortunately, we don’t have to do that because what little I know of my antecedents is sketchy and probably very dull or worse.  My father always said that if a Texan insisted on digging into his family’s history, he was sure to find a horse thief somewhere, a theory that may account for the paucity of my knowledge of my forebears.

Although I loved my parents dearly, I am sure that, in the eyes of others, they were very ordinary people. .  They enjoyed, thanks to the entrepreneurial talents and hard work of my father, more than a modicum of financial blessings, which made my childhood years comfortable but not very exciting.  Their traveling to (to me) exotic places like Florida, Cuba, and California was mostly done in the winter, leaving me at home going to school and under the supervision of my grandmother.  Summers were almost always spent in Galveston at the beach, although I was once taken to New York, and we spent a summer in Chicago when my father had business there.

 I can say, with all due modesty, that I was an above-average student, blessed with better-than-average good looks, but that is about as far as I can go.  I had no special gifts or talents. In short, there was nothing that might foretell that my life was destined to take the unexpected and unusual turns that it did.

If I must choose the one event which was to lead eventually to all the others, it would be my father’s announcement that we were to move to New York City in April, 1933.  I was seventeen.  We had until then lived in Dallas, Texas, and I had planned to go to college in California in September.  The distance from there to New York was unacceptable to my parents and I had, in all fairness to them, to agree to look for a college in the East.  We eventually chose Wellesley College for Women, near Boston, not only for its fine reputation, but because I had a friend who was going there.  I became a member of the Class of 1937.

Sadly, since this is not an autobiography, I shall have to forgo reliving the whole four years of my attendance at this beautiful and nurturing institution.  For the purposes of this account, suffice it to say that, in my third or Junior year, I met a young Englishman who, having taken his degree at Oxford, was spending a year at Harvard Business School before entering his father’s business in England.   He was totally different from anyone I had ever met.  Before long we were “going steady,” and in the spring of that year, 1936, we became officially engaged, diamond ring and all.

My parents accepted all of this in the same manner in which they had always allowed me, within reason, to make my own decisions, but of course, with a private “wait-and-see” reservation.  We were both young and I had promised to finish college, which meant another full year at Wellesley while Douglas would be back in England.  That, if nothing else, should test the strength of our commitment to each other.

Doug’s parents, Mr. Thomas Swan and his wife Mary, arrived in June on a previously arranged visit.  I found them to be astonishingly unlike their son.  They even spoke with a different accent, and they seemed very cool toward me, but I was so engrossed in myself and my newfound happiness that it didn’t occur to me to worry about such things.  When Doug got his parents to second, (reluctantly, I suspect) his invitation to England at Christmas, I accepted wholeheartedly.  My parents gave their consent, still with some unspoken reservations, and we saw the Swan family, including Douglas, off home to England.

I spent the summer, as I had spent the previous ones, being a part-time photographic model.  I had applied for such work with the famous John Powers Agency the first summer I spent in New York, and while I had not reached the cover of Vogue, I got enough work to keep me occupied and in pocket-money.  One of my colleagues was a girl named Jane Wyman.  I never met her but learned that photographers or magazine fashion editors would often ask for one of us if the other was not available.  Miss Wyman, as we all know, went on to an illustrious career as an actress.  She also, I hate to confess, has kept her figure to this day much better than I have done.

It being summer and I being very slender, I did a lot of fur coat modeling for the autumn editions of the fashion magazines.  I will never forget one memorable day  in the Central Park Zoo.  The photographer was determined to match the coat with the animal; i.e., to take the picture of the model in the coat with the appropriate animal in the background.  Not surprisingly, the animals were of no mind to cooperate and retired to the cool comfort of their shady dens just as we got set to snap each picture.   It was a long and exhausting process, and it could not possibly happen today when the exploitation and killing of animals for their skins is anathema to so many.  It would also cost a great deal more today.  I received $25.00 for a whole day’s work in fur coats in August!

I returned to college in September, counting the days until I was to sail on my first trip abroad.  I was lucky that a passage on the recently launched Queen Mary was available.
 

Chapter Two


I realize that relatively few people cross the oceans by ship nowadays.  But the drawing power of the permanently docked Queen Mary as a tourist attraction in Long Beach, California, suggests that there still is a great deal of nostalgia and curiosity about those magnificent floating palaces which provided intercontinental travel prior to World War II.  With intercontinental air travel, speed has supplanted grace. Today’s travelers are herded like cattle into ever-larger airplanes where they spend hours on runways waiting for clearance to take off.  Then they must circle interminably in the crowded skies waiting their turn to land.  There is very little comfort, much less elegance, left in today’s travel.

Those majestic ships, like small cities or resorts, provided every degree of comfort and every imaginable amenity:  shops, gyms, beauty salons, swimming pools, ballrooms, orchestras, movies, and even kennels for one’s dog.  Every conceivable game or sport which was possible to provide at sea kept passengers entertained, and there were libraries and card rooms for the less active.  One could, if so inclined, retire to one’s bed for the entire crossing and be fed and coddled by a motherly stewardess.  Many people managed to “drop out” for a few days without feeling disapproval or guilt.

There is still the Queen Elizabeth II, but few can afford her with air travel so much cheaper. There are, of course, cruise ships, including the QE II, but there is a subtle difference in atmosphere—cruises are for fun, relaxation, or just getting away.  Before intercontinental air travel, the ocean liners were the only game in town, as far as getting to Europe was concerned.  As a result, not just vacationers but all kinds of people were aboard, people from all walks of life. I never made a crossing without meeting interesting persons, and five or more days at sea gave one a chance to know them, at least a little bit better than one knows one’s seat companion on a plane.

The competition between shipping lines and individual ships resulted in a standard of service and comfort which has not been duplicated. I have been lucky enough to stay in some of the world’s great hotels, but give me a pre-war transatlantic liner every time.  Even in Tourist Class, where I spent most of my earlier voyages, the food was delicious, the quarters comfortable, and the service impeccable.  As you will learn, not all the ships I traveled in were of the luxury class; over the years I made at least a dozen crossings in an almost unbelievable variety of ships, and I can truthfully say that every one of them was memorable in one way or another.  My initiation on the Queen Mary seems, in retrospect, to have inaugurated a sort of pattern which I came to expect of sea travel—none of it would ever be dull.  The Queen Mary, of course, set the standard against which I measured all later voyages.  I can promise you, however, that there was an enormous diversity among my later voyages which I will describe in due course.

On this first voyage, I was assigned by the chief dining steward to a table for eight. I did not expect to meet very many people of my own age group at that time of the year. The Christmas break at American schools is much shorter than in England or Europe, and summer is a better time for extended travel for students. My tablemates were all middle-aged and pleasant enough, but no one really grabbed my interest until the man on my left revealed that he, although British, lived and worked in Paris. I did not ask him at what he worked, but was very interested to learn what life was like in the City of Light, so we had an absorbing conversation throughout dinner and went to the movies afterwards. 

The next morning when the stewardess brought my breakfast (you didn’t think I would pass up breakfast in bed, did you?) there was an envelope on my tray.  It contained an engraved invitation, which stated that the Honourable Mr. Seymour-Bell, Chairman of the Cunard Line, requested the presence of (my name in ink) for cocktails that evening in Suite such-and-such, First Class. Out of my vast experience I jumped to the conclusion that he was inviting all of the passengers, perhaps alphabetically. My cabin-mate agreed.  I skipped lunch to unpack my prettiest cocktail dress and otherwise prepare myself to mingle in a large gathering of passengers A through J. (I was a J.)   When I showed my invitation at the First Class barrier, I was ushered through as if I were a person of importance, but I had already become accustomed to the flattering deference which seemed to be a hallmark of the courtesy on British ships, no matter what class one could afford.

I eventually arrived at the designated door, knocked, and was admitted by a man I took to be a steward, but who, as I later learned, was Mr. Seymour-Bell’s valet (the first gentleman’s gentleman I had ever encountered.) As he announced my name, I had time to notice that I was in the living room of a luxurious suite, very elegant, but not really large enough to accommodate passengers A through J. While I was digesting this, Mr. Seymour-Bell advanced upon me cordially with outstretched hand, saying “Good evening, I’m Seymour-Bell; do come in and meet the others."  The others turned out to be a Duke and Duchess, a Lord and Lady, and two others, also titled.  I was horrified.  Obviously, a mistake had been made, and my invitation had been intended for someone else.  I was about to impart this information to my host and beat a hasty retreat when my table companion from Tourist Class was admitted.  He rushed to my side, apologizing for not having been there when I arrived.  He had asked the Chairman to invite me and would have explained at lunch but I was not there.  It turned out that he was an upper-echelon employee of the Cunard Line who was traveling in Tourist Class to check out the food and service there.  He was naturally entitled to free run of the ship, knew the Chairman well, and thought I might enjoy attending the party.  I not only enjoyed the party, which was extended to include dinner, but I returned to my cabin with a card which gave me entrance to First Class and its amenities for the duration of the voyage.  No wonder I fell in love with transatlantic travel.

Even Paradise must have some pitfalls; about mid-voyage we ran into some very bad weather, and it soon became apparent that the Queen Mary was not handling it very well.  The ship rolled from side to side until she reached an alarming list.  Velvet-covered ropes were hastily placed for passengers to hold onto, although most of them stayed in their cabins.  Since I am fortunately not subject to seasickness, I was able to roam around the ship with my friend and to observe some of the results of our predicament.  A grand piano had been wrenched from its moorings; armchairs  rolled around like huge upholstered dice, and carpets  not held down by furniture slid back and forth on the parquet floors, folding up like accordions.  Several passengers had been hurled into glass doors, sustaining cuts.  A number of ambulances were lined up at Southampton, and the Queen Mary went into dry-dock for several weeks to have her ballast adjusted.
 

 
Chapter Three


Upon the Queen Mary’s arrival at Southampton, I was met by Douglas and two of his friends and, after clearing customs, we set off by car for the Swan family home in Chorleywood, a suburb northwest of London.  We bypassed the great city, so I really saw nothing much but countryside, small towns, and suburbs for my first glimpse of England.  As it was December, the countryside was not at its best, so I paid more attention to the occupants of the car, especially Douglas.  That, I am somewhat ashamed to say, remained true for the rest of my brief visit.  It being Christmas week, we spent most of our time going from one party or gathering to another so that I met lots of Doug’s friends, but we spent practically no time with his family.  The day after Christmas, the Swan family departed for another house they owned in Essex.  Several acres of shooting (birds) belonged to the property, and it was here that Mr. Swan did most of his business entertaining.   Doug and I drove down for one day but were not able to follow the sport, because I was not equipped with the boots required for slogging across the muddy fields.  The cold was bone-chilling, and I was glad to head back to the suburban comfort of Chorleywood.  Doug’s sisters (Nancy, the elder, and Mary, still a teen-ager) were so busy with their own friends that I never really had much contact with them, and we ran about so much that I can’t recall learning much about them during that visit.

That visit to England occurred just a few days after King Edward VIII had abdicated so that he could marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson.  The English were so preoccupied with this subject and with their new Royal Family that little else was discussed.  Once or twice I overheard, or gathered that my presence stifled, some uncomplimentary comments about Mrs. Simpson, but none of them seemed intentionally meant to offend me.  So much interest was shown in the two little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, that I carried away a lasting impression of the continuity of the monarchy and what that institution meant to the British people.  Unfortunately, and to my shame, I carried away very few other meaningful impressions.  So frenetic was my brief visit and so confined to Christmas and general levity, that I could have learned as much about the real issues with which the nation was confronted by staying at home and reading the newspapers.

I returned to New York on the United States Liner Washington.  I remember two things about that crossing.  One was a father and son, recently bereaved of wife and mother, who remained my good friends for many years.  The other was the peculiar influence of Union Rules.  I could not get a stewardess to bring my breakfast or to help me fasten an evening gown.  When I rang for the stewardess I got a sort of bellboy.  When I asked him why no stewardess, he muttered, “Union Rules.”  A bit of maritime trivia I learned is that ships pitch when sailing westwards; the Queen Mary, sailing eastwards had rolled.  In fact, she had almost rolled over!

I returned to Wellesley and settled down to my studies, preparing for that terrifying trademark of our college, the General Exam. without passing which one could not graduate.  So that my friends from all over the country could be present at our wedding, Doug and I were to be married the day after graduation in the college Chapel.  To avoid distraction while studying for the exam, I had asked Doug to sail on a ship that would get him there just in time for the wedding, but Doug, as the saying goes, “missed the boat.”  Mrs. Swan had a timely heart attack and had him paged off the ship just before it sailed. There was no way he could make it to the wedding on the proposed date.  My friends dispersed to their homes.  Mrs. Swan made a swift recovery.  I was left at the altar.

I spent the summer in New York, licking my wounds and having long, wrangling discussions with Doug on the telephone and by letter. Our engagement was on- again, off-again more times than I could count.  In the end, Doug arrived in October and installed himself at a small hotel near my parents’ apartment.  We resumed the wrangling, breaking up and making up, until my poor parents were about at their wits’ end.  Finally one night, during an interval of peace, we decided to drive the next day to Baltimore in Maryland, a state whose laws made it popular with elopers, and get married before we had time to have another fight.  My parents received the news with relief tempered by doubts but gave us their blessing.  After a short honeymoon in Canada, where my loving bridegroom turned me (on skis for the first time in my life) over to an instructor while he demonstrated his prowess on skis, we returned to New York and found a furnished apartment in suburban Pelham.  Doug went to work for my father, and I started learning how to cook. 

All went smoothly for nearly six months until Doug had a terrible accident at work, crushing the knuckles in his hand, which then got infected.  He was saved from losing his arm by the new sulfa drugs, but he was very ill, and I had to inform his family.  As a result, he was bidden to come home in time for his sister’s June wedding, and we booked passage on the German liner Europa.  The notable thing about that crossing was that the much-anticipated Louis-Schmeling return bout took place on our second night at sea.  Before we could make our way to the lounge after dinner to listen to the fight on the radio, it was over.  Louis had already avenged his previous defeat at the German’s hands by knocking him out cold.  For the rest of the crossing we were surrounded by a very surly Nazi crew and were delighted to disembark at Southampton.  We were met by the Swans’ car and chauffeur who drove us to the family home.
 
Chapter Four


Nowadays we have a new name for homesickness.  We call it culture shock.  However, I believe that they are not really synonymous because culture shock adds something to homesickness.  Not only does one miss the people and the place that one has left behind, one is also faced with new customs and ideas which are so difficult to assimilate that a period of very real and traumatic disorientation ensues. I had not married an Arab and found myself in a harem, but life in the bosom of the Swan family brought me face to face with fundamental differences in social and cultural attitudes to which I had not previously given any serious consideration.

Before I could take time to examine these differences, I had to cope with simply trying to integrate myself in the day-to-day operation of the household.  Corone House was situated in Chorleywood, a residential suburb northwest of London.  It was a modern house of about five bedrooms and a couple of servants’ rooms.  It sat in about three acres of garden and orchard and faced a common, an area forever closed to construction of any sort.  At that time Chorleywood consisted of a railroad station, a small hotel/pub, a church, and one or two small grocery stores.  All major shopping was done in Rickmansworth, the nearest small town; otherwise, one went to London. (or up to town, as the British put it.)  Most residents of Chorleywood were families of successful business or professional homeowners or other persons of considerable means—people to whom the British referred as gentry.  In other words, poor people did not abound in Chorleywood, nor did young marrieds such as Doug and me.  I was totally dependent on the occupants of Corone House for any kind of companionship.

There was no movie theater, no public library, nor drugstore.  Drugstores in England were called chemists and sold prescriptions, medical supplies, toiletries, and sundries.  They did not have soda fountains or magazine stands.  Some of the larger chain chemists, such as one called Boots, did have lending libraries, but there was no Boots in Chorleywood.  In other words, there was nowhere for a displaced person, such as I felt myself to be.  It is said that “everybody’s gotta be somewhere,”  but I could not find a place to be.

The day started with the arrival of Nellie, the upstairs maid, who opened the heavy draperies and left a tray with morning tea.  Breakfast was served an hour later in the dining room, and Doug and his father left immediately afterwards, taking the morning newspapers with them.  Mrs. Swan and her daughters simply disappeared; Nancy, the elder sister, was being married in a week, so it was natural that they had a lot to do and left me to my own devices.  The real “living room” of the house was called the music room, having a grand piano on a raised platform at one end.  It was very large and comfortably furnished with a huge sofa and armchairs facing a now-empty fireplace.  I decided to go there, find  a book, curl up, and read.  Unfortunately, it was being “turned out” by a maid. I had already gone upstairs to our bedroom, intending to make our beds, only to find a maid there making them; it was clear that this was the established routine.  Adding to my discomfort was the cold.  Every window in the house was thrown wide open to what the natives called a beautiful June day.  To me, straight from a New York summer, it was a decidedly chilly day, insufficiently warmed by those bright intervals beloved of British weather commentators on the radio news.  Doug had not warned me about the English summer nor advised me to bring some warm clothes.  My entire cool-weather wardrobe was in New York, being packed and shipped by my mother.  I had with me a white cardigan which I came to wear with everything and even in bed.  There was no place to shop in Chorleywood, and I was not up to bothering Mrs. Swan for help in adding some warm clothes to my wardrobe. 

Of course, the others in the household did not find it cold, but if they had, no kind of heat would be turned on between March and October.  This would amount almost to Original Sin in the British Isles.  So I was not only displaced without a place to be or a thing to do, but shivering as well.  Occasionally, as I wandered about, I would encounter Mrs. Swan or Nancy and ask piteously for something I could do, but the answer was always negative.  In desperation, I returned to our bedroom where, at least, the maid had finished and departed.  If I expected to find comfort there, I was to be disappointed.  There was no chair, just a stool for the dressing table.. One would not have dared to disturb the grandeur of gold, lace-trimmed taffeta surmounted by white mousseline de soie, which comprised the bedspreads.  There was a sort of bench, done in needlepoint, footstool-height, in front of the empty fireplace.  Muttering “any port in a storm,” I arranged myself on it in the fetal position, hugging myself for warmth.  One of the already low points of my life, got even lower when the door opened and Mrs. Swan entered.  I didn’t know eyebrows could rise so high.  She had come to tell me that morning coffee (to become known as elevenses) was being served in the drawing room (instead of the music room which was still being cleaned.) The drawing room was furnished in French period furniture.  There was an enormous breakfront containing china and figurines.  With one exception, the entire room looked totally unused.  The exception was a massive black and gold Chinese lacquer desk in the bay window facing on the front garden. This was Thomas Swan and Company’s Chorleywood office.  The firm’s head office was located in Consett, County Durham, in the north of England.  The drawing room was seldom used except for display of wedding gifts or rare tea parties. 

Morning coffee, or elevenses, consisted of last night’s after-dinner coffee, boiled with milk which had formed a skin.  It was the color of water in which grey socks had been washed and tasted about the same.  By contrast the cookies, or biscuits as they called them, which accompanied the coffee were delicious. While we were having elevenses, I asked again whether there was something useful I could do.  Once again, this was denied me; the wedding plans were well in hand.  I was to be a bridal attendant and to fit my gown later that afternoon when the dressmaker arrived.  They suggested that I take a walk in the garden before lunch.  Figuring that I couldn’t be any colder outside than in, (actually, it was warmer outside during the bright intervals) I wandered around the garden and tried to find the reason for my malaise, other than the obvious ones of having nothing to do, nowhere to be, and freezing.

 I was baffled by the number of servants. I had not learned about the English and servants.  Corone House was a family-sized house, but it was by no means a mansion.  It was not a great deal larger than the house in which I had grown up in Dallas, and while there were two more in the Swan family than in ours, that didn’t seem to justify the large difference in the number of staff. We had done quite well with our Jessie (who had been with us since before my birth) and a “yard man” (yard being a term never associated with a private home in England.) The Swan household employed a cook, a kitchen-maid, a parlor-maid, an upstairs maid, a visiting charwoman, and a weekly laundress.  Outside, there was a chauffeur-gardener and a garden-boy.  At that time I was unaware of how little they were paid, so it seemed to me that the cost for such a large staff must be enormous and I simply couldn’t see the justification for it.  I came to learn that servants were an important status symbol in England and that, because they came so cheaply, it was common to employ a larger number of them than was necessary in order to maintain one’s standing in society.  This, in turn, brought about the existence of rigidly defined boundaries circumscribing what chores a servant would and would not do.  I have since read that, especially in the Victorian era, the genteel poor would indeed scrimp on food and heat in order to have at least a single servant to open the door to visitors.  This was hard for me to assimilate.  Although my own family had always had a maid, I knew many families equally or more affluent who chose not to have any live-in servants at all, preferring their privacy and their “own way of doing things.”  Coming from such a background, it was to be expected, I suppose, that the presence of so many servants would somewhat intimidate me and contribute to my culture shock.  However, being waited on hand and foot is very easy to get used to, and it was not to make me uncomfortable for long. 

As the days passed and I still felt uncomfortable and uneasy, I realized that it was not just this change in lifestyle which was affecting me.  For a while, I concentrated on blaming my in-laws.  The problem, I decided, lay with them and their attitude toward me, which made me feel something hostile in the air around me.  I had not, of course, expected Mr. and Mrs Swan to receive me with open arms; they had been decidedly cool towards me on previous occasions.  I assumed that they, like my own parents, had hoped that the romance between Doug and me would fade with separation.  They had not even pretended to be pleased when Doug left for America and subsequently married me.  However, when, after six months and upon learning of Doug’s accident, they had summoned us to England, I assumed that all was forgiven and that I would be accepted as a member of the family.  I realized that it wasn’t going to be easy; There were preconceived ideas on both sides, largely gleaned from the movies, about what each other’s characteristics would be.  I think that they really thought that American girls did little but drink cocktails and do the Charleston; if indeed they ever prepared a meal for their husbands, it would come out of cans (or tins as they called them.)  I wasn’t much more realistic, basing my ideas of Englishmen on Herbert Marshall or Leslie Howard.  I couldn’t remember ever having seen a film featuring a blunt, hard-nosed, north-country businessman like Mr. Swan.  Nothing had prepared me for my mother-in-law.  She was, as far as I could determine, a one-of-a kind individual.  When I first met her, I had thought that she was painfully shy.  Now, in her own home, I realized that she had a will of iron.  She was implacable in her determination to keep me at a distance, and she succeeded in making my sense of isolation complete during the hours when the men were away from the house.  When they returned, Mr. Swan was so good at making me feel foolish that I yearned for the daytime luxury of being ignored.  Perhaps from nervousness, I had an enormous appetite.  When I accepted a second helping, Mr. Swan would announce that he’d rather keep me a week than a fortnight.

Another cause of painful embarrassment for me was the plumbing.  All the toilets (called WC’s—water closets) were in small separate rooms next to the bathrooms.  There was also a WC in the downstairs cloakroom.  The windows were kept open at all times and in all seasons.  There were times, later, in winter, when I was sure I would freeze to the seat.  All the toilets were flushed by pulling a chain which issued from an overhead tank.  There was a knack to getting the thing to flush on the first pull, a knack reserved to persons of British birth and upbringing.  When I pulled it, it made a horrible screeching noise and refused to flush.  Every call of nature, requiring numerous loud yanks on the chain, was followed by an ignominious return to the others.  In a warm and welcoming atmosphere, this sort of thing could have been laughed off, teased about, and eventually become a family joke.  Such was not the case; when I returned from a trip to the cloakroom WC, or even one upstairs, there was a smirk on every face except Doug’s.  A good part of my time was spent figuring out how to time my visits to the WC’s, so that the family members were either out or scattered about the house.  Fortunately, I never had to use the facility during the night.  I would surely have awakened the entire household.

I decided that only the passage of time might improve the relationship between me and the Swan family.  After all, I was certainly not the first young woman to receive a cool reception from her in-laws.  I determined to relax and felt confident that, when we all got better acquainted, we would be a happy family.   Having made that resolution, I became increasingly aware that this would not be a happy family even if I had not intruded upon it.  There was something basically wrong with the relationships within the family itself.  It took me a while to define and understand the problem.
 

 
Chapter Five


Looking back with the advantage of hindsight, it’s hard for me to believe that a young woman of some intelligence and quite a lot of education could have been so politically, economically, and sociologically illiterate as I was when I arrived to live in England.  In my own defense, I can only plead that, up to now; I had had little time to concentrate on anything of consequence except my studies.  Due to my own preferences, these had consisted chiefly of languages and certain sciences to the exclusion of any formal study of politics and/or history.  My knowledge of English history was almost entirely restricted to the American Revolution.  I really hadn’t thought much about why our founding fathers had made it so clear that “All men are created equal.”  I knew little or nothing about the system of class distinction which prevailed in England.  I was not able to recognize that the Swan family was, in fact, divided within itself by that very system
.

I knew, of course, that England had a monarch and an aristocracy, but it had a parliament and a voting population; as far as I could discern, it was a democracy such as we enjoyed in my own country.  What was new and relatively unknown to me was the concept of class distinction and the role that speech accent played in delineating and identifying classes.  I, like most Americans, am uncomfortable about using the word “class.”  To us, unless it refers to a group of students or inadequate objects, “class” is a word we avoid.  Although we don’t mind referring to the middle class, we avoid saying lower, working, or even upper class; we grope for such substitutes as privileged/underprivileged, haves/havenots, VIP’s and John Does, to name a few.  Of course, we have a kind of class distinction, as implied in the designation WASP, but we do not like to call it such.  We might joke about the Cabots and the Lowells and ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower, but we really reserve our homage for the self-made business man or the doctor or lawyer who worked his way through college waiting on tables. This seemed to me to be in direct contrast to the British attitude, which until quite recently, was one of disdain for persons “in trade.”  I say “quite recently” as acknowledgement that there have been significant changes since the end of World War II.  It is not my purpose to discuss these changes here; I am interested in describing how I found such attitudes in pre-war England and their impact on me.

In America. it seemed to me, once a man had worked hard and achieved success, as had my own father, he could take his place in the community without fear that the stigma of humble birth would become apparent every time that he opened his mouth.  His grammar might be flawed and his conversation more colorful than educated, but this would not likely be a matter of shame to him or his children.  In England, I learned, no matter what a man had achieved, he could rarely overcome the disadvantages caused by his regional accent with its implications of humble origins.

I was of course aware that the speech of Mr. and Mrs. Swan was different from that of their children.  Somehow, I had failed to see the significance.   I simply assumed that the difference in accent was the result of the family’s having moved to the south of England when the children were quite young.  In fact, the difference was due to the children’s having gone to private schools.  I was blissfully unaware of the social implication of accent.  Some English people spoke like Herbert Marshall or David Niven, while others retained their regional accent.  I had not yet been exposed to “My Fair Lady’ or “Upstairs-Downstairs,” and actors who spoke cockney were rare in Hollywood.  I was accustomed to regional accents in the States; indeed, I had had a marked southern one when I arrived at Wellesley.  There, in our first semester, we had a required course in phonetic speech.  As far as I was aware, though, there were no social implications of accent in my country.  It was quite different in Britain.  A child  learned to speak “the King’s English” either at his mother’s knee or by attending the right type of school where it was spoken. 

What had happened to the Swan family was what I came to think of as the self-made-father syndrome.  I think it must have started to manifest itself with the industrial revolution which produced many self-made, wealthy men of humble origins.  They sent their children to expensive schools, inexplicably called public schools, and then resented them for having the more socially desirable accent. I am certain that the Swan children loved and respected their parents and were never ashamed of them.  I am equally convinced that the parents were never sure of this.  In the case of Mr. Swan, this situation brought about a measure of resentment of his son, who not only would inherit a thriving business but who would also be more socially acceptable than his father. 

Not surprisingly, this state of affairs affected the atmosphere of the entire house. Mr. Swan spoiled his daughters in order to humiliate and punish the son whom he resented so bitterly.  This produced a contempt in the girls toward their brother (and incidentally explained some of the lack of friendship I had sensed in the daughters toward myself.)  The father played his children off against one another unmercifully, almost always to the disadvantage of the son.  Mrs. Swan didn’t help matters.  The normal jealousy of the mother whose son is newly married was intensified by her own feelings of inferiority, and she was therefore more than willing to follow her husband’s lead.  She was diffident, almost to the point of subservience, to her daughters who, as a result of this double-barreled indulgence on the part of both parents, inevitably became temperamental and arrogant.  It is little wonder that this kind of sibling rivalry and parental favoritism eventually resulted in emotional problems and broken marriages for all three of the Swan offspring.

The only person who seemed to like me was dear old Grannie, Mrs. Swan’s mother.  She had been widowed for many years and was now in her eighties.  When Mr. Swan made a business trip by car up north, he would bring her back for a visit.  This time she came for Nancy’s wedding.  What a joy she was!  She still lived in the cottage which Lord Redesdale had provided for her husband, his gamekeeper.   Mr. Swan had bought it for her.  It was in a tiny village named Rochester, near the Scottish border.  When she met me and saw how I suffered from the cold, she produced some green wool from somewhere and proceeded to knit me a sweater in three days.  It was most welcome, although the body was at least three inches too short and the sleeves six inches too long.  I adored her, and so did the rest of the family.  When she came for a visit, which she continued to do until her death, she brought something healing to the family table.  Everyone exchanged indulgent smiles as she busily  (and audibly) scraped her plate for the last bit of pudding and insisted that one helping was enough while willingly accepting another.  In later years, when I had gained some maturity, I often speculated on how much her daughter might have resembled her in character had her husband not acquired the wealth that sat so uneasily on her shoulders.

Meanwhile, the wedding was upon us.  It was also the occasion for me to distinguish myself by shivering so violently with the cold in the church that the rattling of my bouquet almost drowned out the ceremony.   I looked enchanting, too, with my blue and mauve dress that matched my skin and lips.

I did get the chance, however, to observe a large number of English men and women at one of their rituals and at play.  There was a seated luncheon in a vast marquee on the lawn and an orchestra to play dance music afterwards.  It was quite a large affair, what with all the children’s friends and many of Mr. Swan’s business acquaintances as well as quite a large contingent of old friends from the North.  A great deal of wine and liquor was consumed, and by the end of the day, I had learned a few things more about the British.   They could put away an incredible amount of alcohol, and they became quite uninhibited on a dance floor.  The Lambeth Walk had been a very popular result of a recent stage musical, and all that I had ever heard about British reserve went out the window at the spectacle of some 200 men and women performing and singing it with abandon.  In spite of their exuberance, they still liked some organization in the procedures; a large white card, placed in front of the orchestra, announced what type of dance was in progress—waltz, foxtrot, one-step, two-step, and something called the Valeta (my spelling is phonetic.)

The lavish luncheon which preceded the dancing was punctuated by the services of a professional toastmaster, the first such person I had ever encountered.  Resplendent in brilliantly colored ceremonial attire, he proposed all of the toasts, chanting  “Ladies and Gentlemen, charge your glasses” before each, introduced the speakers and generally orchestrated the event until the final toast to the sovereign.  It was only after that toast that smoking was permitted and the dancing and mingling began.  Altogether it was a very enjoyable affair, but I had a curious feeling all through it that I had somehow been transported backward in time.  This was a sensation which stayed with me until some time after the beginning of the war.
 

 
Chapter Six


Shortly after the wedding, Doug and I were invited to a dinner party given by a titled couple whose son had been at Oxford with Doug.  It was a small, but very formally served and somewhat stilted dinner; it was probably restrained by the presence of our elders (the hosts) and a number of servants, uniformed and wearing white gloves. 

The hearty meals and my nervous appetite had begun to have an effect on my waistline.  As I was being seated for dinner, the large snaps at the back of my wide, gold leather belt came apart with a sound like a pistol shot, and the belt landed on the table’s centerpiece.   At home in the States, I am sure that the resultant burst of laughter, including mine, would have helped to assuage my embarrassment. Such was not the case here. Doug’s spontaneous (Americanized) laughter died as the entire company froze in silence.  A maid retrieved my belt and handed it to me.  I hastily shoved it into my lap as someone finally broke the silence with a remark about the weather, and conversation resumed.  I wanted to die, but I came to realize that, according to their code of mannners, the kindest thing to do was to ignore my mishap.  Doug insisted later that they would probably have behaved quite differently if such a thing had happened to one of themselves, without the presence of a stranger.

With the wedding over, life eased up a bit at Corone House.  Rooms weren’t turned out so often, and the family members made a few forays into London for the theater, followed by supper in a good restaurant.  Mrs. Swan relented enough to take me shopping in London, and I began to learn some of the odd quirks and habits of the British.  I shall never forget my first visit to the beauty parlor or, as the English say, the hairdresser.   This took place in the town of Ricksmansworth.  Many of the salons in small towns were in the process of installing the reclining type of shampoo chair to which Americans were accustomed.  British ladies had previously bent forward and rested their foreheads on a folded cloth on the edge of the wash basin.  “Back or front, Madam?” asked the young assistant as she conducted me to the shampoo area.  “Oh,” I blurted, “I want my whole head washed.”

The months at Corone House came to an end (don’t all good things?)  The firm was to open new offices in Cheltenham, a hundred miles northwest of London.  Doug was to be in charge there.  Before the offices were ready, we had some free time, so we flew to Paris.  It was the August Bank Holiday weekend and Paris was nearly empty, it being the time when the French take their national vacation. We managed to have a very good time until I left my handbag in a taxi. It contained Doug’s wallet (safer there than in his hip pocket.) This was in the days before credit cards, and we needed money to pay our hotel bill.  We were about to throw ourselves on the mercy of the British Consulate, when I remembered my friend from the Queen Mary.   We found his listing in the phone book and were happily astonished to find him at home at that time of the year.  This kind man lent us enough money to pay our hotel bill and get home, proving that friendships made at sea are not always as ephemeral as shipboard romances are said to be.  We gratefully repaid him by wire when we got home and, sadly, I never had the pleasure of renewing our friendship.

Later in the month of August, the Swan family lent us a car for a trip to Scotland.  It was The Season there, and I was enchanted with the Highlands in all their purple heathery glory.  Most enlightening was my first foray into the North of England, always spoken of with much respect by the Swans who had their origins there.  As we drove north and northeast, I was astonished to learn that there were 56 counties on this small island, and that every one of them had its own physical characteristics as well as its own speech accent.   The northern areas of England share a common border with the Scottish lowlands, but they could be an ocean apart, judging by the difference in their speech.  Northumbrians speak an argot called Geordie (my spelling,) which was as unintelligible to me as Chinese would have been.  Later I learned that these variations of English occur in all of England; I often wondered how a soldier from Somerset could converse with one from Northumberland.  I am sure that they manage to communicate as they must always have done in the armed services, but I don’t know how.  We found in Scotland that some persons still spoke in their native Gaelic, and I was told that Welsh was still alive in Wales.

Another thing that impressed me was the infinite variety of scenery to be found within a very few square miles.  The Lake Country stunned me with its awesome beauty which seemed to be a stone’s throw from the patterned fields of nearby farmlands.   I began to think of England and Scotland as a miniature continent rather than a small island.

On the lighter side, I was daily encountering what, to me, were amusing oddities.  One of these was the chamberpot.  I first discovered one of these relics from what I thought was the distant past in the bedside nightstand of a Midlands hotel room.  I had seen the little pair of closed doors in the lower half of many bedside tables, but I had never opened them.    Now, looking for a place to put my book, I discovered a large chamberpot.  When I pointed out my find to Doug, he was neither surprised nor amused.  He said that nearly all bedrooms had them because bathrooms were often far from the bedrooms, having, in most cases, been added years after the house was built.   This accounts for the often enormous size of bathrooms which were converted bedrooms themselves.  Private bathrooms were a rarity in small provincial hotels, many of which were centuries old.   Doug pointed out that there had been a chamberpot in the nightstand at Corone House.  “Why?” I asked, noting that the WC was just across the hall.  “Tradition,” said he.  That was an answer I was learning to expect to a good many questions.

Another learning experience concerned the drinking of water.  I had noticed that water never seemed to be on the table at Corone House and, at any dinners I had eaten at other places, wine had been served.  I hadn’t really thought much about it so it was quite casually that I asked a little country hotel waitress for “some water, please.” She departed for a minute or two and returned to ask whether I wanted the water hot or cold.  I said cold and she departed again only to return and ask whether I wanted it to drink or to wash in.  Bemused by now, I kept a straight face and said I wanted it to drink.  Off she went but back she came a third time.  Did I want it in a cup or a glass?   I finally got a glass of water and Doug managed to keep me from laughing until we left the dining room.  He explained to me later that drinking plain water at the table was not generally done in England, especially in those areas still unreached by American tourists.  In restaurants, one ordered either wine or beer or soft drinks such as ginger beer or fruit drinks they called squashes.  I now recalled that a selection of these beverages was always available on a side table in the dining room at Corone House.  At breakfast, one drank tea or coffee.  If one wanted water when dining out, one ordered and paid a small price for bottled water, as we had done in Paris.  As far as I know, this custom is unchanged in England except in establishments that cater to a large number of Americans.

On our way to Scotland, we passed through the tiny village of Rochester which was the girlhood home of Mrs. Swan and where Grannie still lived.  We didn’t stop as she was in Chorleywood visiting the family, but I was to come to know this small row of cottages, with a pub at one end, which made up the entire village.  By the way, I learned that the term  “cottage” in England usually meant a small but two-storied dwelling, often one of a row, attached to one another.  A one-storied small dwelling was called a bungalow.  Nancy moved to the Rochester cottage with her small son when the war broke out.  As a result, we spent at least one Christmas there and the first stands out as one of my treasured memories.  Nancy said that we should go out and call on the villagers on Christmas afternoon, which she, Mary and I proceeded to do.  One cottage contained two elderly ladies who insisted on giving us a cup of tea.  When we left, I commented on how bossy the elder sister was to the younger.  “They’re not sisters,” said Nancy, “they are mother and daughter.”  The daughter was at least seventy-five!  People in that part of the country tend to live to a ripe old age.  One last memory lingers from my first visit to the north of England—the name of a small mining town, “Pity Me.”  To my everlasting shame I must confess that I laughed.  It pains me now to realize how ignorant I was of the unemployment and suffering with which parts of England, particularly the coal-mining areas, were afflicted in those days.  I had of course been aware of the American depression, but, cocooned in luxury as I had been at Corone House, I had apparently assumed that the depression was a purely American tragedy.

Shortly after our return from our brief tour of the North and Scotland, we set off for our new home and Doug’s job in Cheltenham.  We had been provided with a company car.  It was small, but at least it was ours to use at will.
 

 
Chapter Seven


Cheltenham turned out to be a pretty town in the picturesque Cotswold Hills.    It was originally named Cheltenham Spa, and one could drink the rather sulfuric water drawn from a local spring.  The town had been a popular resort, a smaller Bath, during the Regency.  It had now become a favorite place for retirement, especially for former military officers and civil servants, most of whom had served in India or other far-flung outposts of the British Empire.  There were many fine Regency residences, some of which had remained intact, others having been converted into apartments (flats in British) or hotels.  There was a well-known  girls’ school, a racetrack of some standing, and The Promenade.  This beautiful avenue was adorned with flowerbeds and boasted branches of some of London”s more exclusive shops.  We couldn’t have chosen a nicer town.  We checked into a residential hotel and started looking for a flat.

It was in the course of our move to Cheltenham that I became more knowledgeable about two important British institutions, the residential hotel and the pub.  Other countries, I have since learned have residential hotels and call them pensions or some variation thereof.  I don’t believe the British pub is wholly duplicated anywhere else in the world.  Of course I had been in pubs, and we had stopped in several small provincial hotels on our trip north, but I hadn’t realized the importance of the pub in the social life of a community. And I had lacked any idea of the value of the truly residential hotel such as the one we chose for our first few weeks in Cheltenham.

There has been in the last several years an enormous increase in the number and type of living facilities for the elderly.  Living, as I do, in an area which is extremely popular with retired persons, I am aware of the range in price, comfort and amenities offered to our elderly today.  I refer to those who are able to afford even the most austere of these establishments.  There is, however, one drawback common to all of them, no matter how elegant and luxurious they may be:  they are still provided for the elderly. They have a minimum age requirement.  In contrast, the English residential hotels, as I came to know them, were able to fill many of the needs of the elderly without that atmosphere of existing solely for those above a certain age.  Although they were indeed used predominately by older persons, they were open to anyone.  Doug and I were in our twenties when we found a temporary home in one of them.

The residential hotel served a very definite purpose in a country where there seemed to be a multitude of what I thought of as displaced homemakers, mature or elderly women of genteel background who, for one reason or another, had been displaced or had moved voluntarily from the family home.  For the most part, they were ladies who had run their former homes with an appropriate staff of servants.  Now, although they were still active and able-bodied as well as skilled in the domestic arts, they preferred this type of hotel to the loneliness of a small cottage, flat, or “bed-sitter,” with or without cooking facilities and/or meals prepared by a landlady.  The amount of luxury and comfort in the hotel depended on the resident’s means, which could be a pension from her deceased husband or an allowance from a son or daughter who now inhabited the family home. Large estates often had what were called “dower houses” for the heir’s mother. Of course, the residents were not poor.   Really poor families usually kept the elderly mother living with them.  Doug and I were content to live in the hotel we found, which was comfortable but not luxurious.  Mr. Swan was not exactly throwing money at us.

 
The hotel provided a comfortable bedroom and a lounge; the latter offered a warm fireside and companionship.  One had one’s own table in the dining room and afternoon tea was served in the lounge by a waitress in a black uniform and frilly white cap and apron.  Not all of the residents were elderly ladies; there were one or two widowers and an occasional traveling salesman (commercial traveler) who had made the hotel a regular stopping place when in Cheltenham.  There was also a family, a retired clergyman of ninety-two, his fiftyish wife, and their twelve-year-old son, who was the spitting image of his father.

I later visited pensions, pensiones, paradors, and such places with various names in other countries.  The only American equivalent of such a place in a small town would be, as far as I knew, the boarding house. Without meaning in the least to disparage these establishments (my maternal grandmother ran one after she was widowed with four children in Fort Worth, Texas,) I am sure they were not exactly the same as the English hotels to which I am referring.  My father had lived in many boarding houses in his bachelor days; his description of the need to develop a “boarding house reach” at the communal dinner table shows nothing in common with the graceful way of life we found in our temporary home in Cheltenham.

For the first time since my arrival in England I felt at home.  At the lounge fireside, I had a “place to be” after Doug left for work.  An elderly widower launched me onto my life-long love affair with bridge, and my knitting prowess grew rapidly with the expert help of several ladies who happily picked up my dropped stitches. I shall always remember that hotel with gratitude.  It put an end to my culture shock.  I do not know how the residential hotels have fared in modern Britain, but if one should find oneself to be a stranger in an English town or city, there is no better place to find a home away from home.

The other institution was the pub.  I already knew that there was a pub on almost every corner in urban England and that they were equally abundant in villages and in the deep countryside, but until now, I really had no idea of their place in British life, nor of the scope, in social terms, to be found in them.  Most pubs have at least two bars. One is the public bar where the beer is cheaper and the clientele is therefore at the lower end of the socio-economic scale; the other is the saloon bar with higher prices, upgraded décor, and more affluent patrons.  One of the charms of very small one-bar isolated pubs is that people from all walks of life rub elbows and get to know one another in a relaxed atmosphere. Some pubs are in hotels and may have attractive cocktail lounges which cater not only to transients but to local citizens as well.  Each pub seems to have its own type of clientele and there is almost as much variety in the character of pubs as in people.  Every neighborhood has its share and choice of pubs and they serve as meeting places and social centers for their habitues.  When a Britisher refers to the “local,” he means his neighborhood pub, not his union hall.

The British male is born with an unerring ability to locate, within minutes of finding himself in a new community, exactly the type of pub which suits his needs and befits his station.  Pubs, therefore, make a real contribution in enabling a newcomer to meet and make new friends.  Our hotel, being strictly residential, had no bar, so we were forced to seek refreshment abroad in the town.  No problem.  Doug, with the instincts of a homing pigeon, located the favorite watering holes of several groups of people who became fast friends in no time.  Through them we joined a small, fashionable club, about six miles out of Cheltenham.  They served excellent food and held a dinner-dance every Saturday night.  This club’s members formed the basis of our social life in Cheltenham. Through them we met a growing number of people and soon felt ourselves to be well launched in the community.  It all started with finding the right pubs.

Our first priority was to find a home, and we were fortunate.  One of our new friends mentioned that a block of flats was nearing completion.  This was quite a departure in conservative, period-style Cheltenham.  Modern flats, with up-to-date kitchens and bathrooms, were almost non-existent.  We signed a year’s lease without hesitation.


We had been given permission to purchase what we needed (within reason) by using the family’s charge account at a large London furniture store.  We bought conservatively, choosing reproductions of period furniture for the pieces made of wood, and a contemporary sofa and armchairs. We installed wall-to-wall monochrome carpeting, another departure in England, but it made the rooms seem larger and was quieter than the parquet floors.  We were quite pleased with what we had done and proud when we received many compliments on our first décor.

So absorbed had we been in the finding and feathering of our nest that we had not taken the time to realize that we were living in what we later described as the “lull before the storm.”  Of course I had come to England aware of what was happening in Nazi Germany, but I was still under the influence of the American sense of distance and isolation from what was occurring across the Atlantic.  I had not absorbed the fact that I now was in the front row of the theater of international affairs.  At Corone House I had never had access to the daily newspaper, and I had no radio of my own.  Perhaps Doug and his father, along with Nancy’s husband, discussed the mounting Sudetenland crisis, but they had never done so in my presence.  I was so intimidated by my father-in-law that I wouldn’t have dreamt of being the only female to join the pre-dinner sherry session early in order to hear the evening news on the radio.  By the time the ladies arrived, the broadcast was over.  I was therefore quite isolated from any discussion of world affairs.  When Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his umbrella went to Munich to meet with Hitler and returned with “Peace in our Time,”  Doug and I were in the Highlands in Scotland.  We were so happy to be away from Corone House that we were not about to spoil our idyll by seeking out the unpleasant news to be found in the media.  It is hard nowadays to recall the days before the portable transistor radio,  later to be found in every car and hotel room. Most houses and hotels had but one radio, in a public room, where family or guests gathered at the appropriate times in order to be informed about current events.  Of course we could have bought a daily newspaper, had we been really concerned about the war clouds gathering over Europe.

Now, as a British housewife, I had scarcely a care in the world beyond learning how to make a steak and kidney pie.  At social gatherings I tended to do the normal thing by joining the other wives at one end of the room, discussing recipes, children, and for my part, where to find what in Cheltenham.  No doubt, the men were discussing current events at the other end of the room.   As for the growing threat of war, when I did hear it mentioned, I dismissed it as unthinkable; it simply couldn’t happen.

In August 1939, I went to France with two women friends and their three children. My only previous visit to France having been a year earlier, when Doug and I had flown to Paris for the weekend, I had not had much chance to practice my classroom French.  On this trip, therefore, I remained for the most part silent (unusual for me!) and let my more experienced companions do the talking.  A couple of days convinced me that my French was much better than theirs, but none of this seemed very important as we enjoyed a spell of very good weather and the pleasures of the beach at the small seaside resort of Sable d’Or Les Pins in Brittany.  This quiet holiday contentment was suddenly shattered when Germany and Russia signed their infamous “accord,” announced on 23 August.  France began mobilization immediately, and Britons on holiday all over the Continent converged on the Channel ports in a frenzy to get home.  As our scheduled passage was not booked until a week later, we joined the hordes besieging the Channel boats departing from St. Malo.  We had to abandon the car which we had brought over, leaving it in a local garage.  It was retrieved some weeks later during the lull which came to be called the “Phony War.”

Leaving our luggage with two porters on the quayside, we managed to get on board and find deck chairs for the children for the over night voyage.  One of the mothers stayed with them while I and the other went ashore to get the luggage.  We finally located our two porters at a dockside café, where they had obviously  “drink taken” and were in a playful mood.  Our luggage was nowhere in sight, and the porters professed to have forgotten where they had left it.  It was pretty obvious that a tip much larger than usual would restore their memories.  It was at this point that I, hot, tired, and worried, made a discovery that led to what I have since named the reiterative method of dealing with recalcitrant foreigners.  I hereby offer it to frustrated travelers everywhere.

It being obvious that you cannot win an argument with any foreigner in his native language, you must develop other tactics.  The first is to go on the offensive.  To do this, you must dominate the proceedings by making it impossible for your adversary to get a word in.  (You probably won’t understand it anyway.)  Equip yourself with a few simple phrases in the appropriate language which will cover most of the circumstances likely to arise.  Some examples are “Not a centime (peseta, mark, etc.) more;” “You are going the wrong way!” for taxi drivers; and “I made a firm reservation” for headwaiters and hotels.  You can add to these as your knowledge of a language grows, but do try to get the pronunciation right. Remember that George Bernard Shaw said about the French, “They don’t care what you say as long as you pronounce it properly.”  When confronted with a desperate situation, take a deep breath and repeat your phrase over and over again at top volume.   Never allow your adversary to get a word in or to outshout you. 

I used this method successfully for over 40 years.  I realize that it is more difficult for shy retiring types, but it is even more effective when such individuals resort to it.  The two tipsy porters at St. Malo were completely taken aback when the “quiet one” suddenly started screaming, “Ou sont nos baggages?” (Where is our luggage?) over and over again.  Heads were turning our way, and their discomfort was being observed by their peers in the café.  They turned tail and ran around the corner, to reappear almost immediately with all our luggage.  My astonished companion and I followed in their wake as they mounted the gangplank and deposited our bags in the heap indicated by a crew member.  The porters accepted their tip without argument and scuttled away.  I headed for the bar.

We were lucky enough to get three seats there, and as seats were at a premium anywhere on the boat, we stayed there all night.  This required that we justify keeping our seats by drinking all night.  Every cloud has a silver lining.  Ours was that no customs inspector wanted to deal with three inebriated women at 7:00 a.m., so we were spared declaring and paying duty on the considerable quantity of French perfume with which we had stocked up in the face of the oncoming war.  A few hours later we were in Cheltenham, hung-over but safely at home.  A week later, Hitler invaded Poland and we were at war.
 
Chapter Eight


My memories of the first days of the war are a blur of blackout materials, ration books and gas masks.  The latter were issued in unwieldy cube-shaped cardboard boxes which were worn suspended over the shoulder by attached strings.  They were pesky appendages, always getting in the way. Most of us were relieved when it was considered safe to abandon wearing them.  As for blacking out our homes and businesses, we grabbed at anything handy, such as blankets, cardboard, etc., until suitable materials, curtain lining, and other more durable devices could be installed.  As blackout went into effect immediately, there was a certain amount of frantic activity, but British calm and muddle-through ability rose to the occasion.  Some people, expecting an immediate rain of bombs, taped the glass in their windows.  Fortunately for the rest of us, the bombs did not materialize at that time.

One of my first problems was a short-lived but frequently embarrassing ignorance about British military uniforms and insignia.  I mistook an Admiral for the doorman at a London hotel and asked him to get me a taxi.  He didn’t.  At another hotel I thought a young officer in the short-jacketed formal mess kit was a bellboy.  I asked him to show me the way to the ladies’ room.  He did.  I realized how little the American public knew about such things.  In the States, I had never seen a serviceman in uniform.  The English were much better informed, service in their armed forces, even in peacetime, being a popular career choice.  Second and third sons in aristocratic families, even in the Royal Family, traditionally entered either the military or the clergy.  Older people still remembered uniforms and insignia from the first World War.

As I kept no journal or written account, a fact I deplore frequently, I cannot recall the precise order in which commodities were rationed.  Petrol coupons came very early and were issued to the car, according to the size of the engine and the legitimate needs of the owner.  This did not affect me very much at the time.  We lived in the center of the town, and I could walk to the shops.  Doug was never allowed to serve in the military because of his injured hand.  His work, however, was considered essential to the war effort, and he received a generous ration, enough for his business needs and for our modest personal ones as well.  The family firm was heavily engaged in the building and maintenance of airfield runways, which required him to travel a great deal throughout the country.  I was very fortunate that he drove to the London area often enough for me to go to Town for shopping beyond that which Cheltenham afforded.

Food ration books were issued and each had to be registered with a particular merchant for the purchase of the rationed foods.  The first to be rationed were sugar, butter, lard, bacon, and meat.  There was rigid price control for such items.  The size of the weekly ration varied from time to time, becoming increasingly smaller as the war went on.  There were seasonal increases in sugar so that jams and jellies could be made, thus avoiding wastage of seasonal fruit. 

Supermarkets did not exist in pre-war England.  Routine shopping entailed visits to the butcher, the grocer, the greengrocer, the fishmonger, the ironmonger (hardware store) and the sweets (candy) store.  The latter was often combined with the tobacconist.  Bread and milk were still delivered, but most other deliveries became a thing of the past.  English housewives carried large shopping baskets and cloth or string bags to accommodate their purchases.  As the war went on, paper came into short supply, and merchants could no longer wrap what they sold.  One took along one’s increasingly smaller newspaper for fish and meat and tried not to find oneself buying soap flakes, scooped out from a large bin, with nothing but a string bag in which to carry them home.

It was important to stay in the good graces of the merchants, not to get any increase in one’s ration, which was unthinkable, but to be on the receiving end when he was doling out rare unrationed goodies.  Cookies (biscuits), especially chocolate ones, soap flakes, canned meats (later to be rationed), cigarettes, and candies (also rationed later) were among the items for which we were constantly on the prowl.  We were like the females in a pride of lions.  Here was where the custom of elevenses became invaluable.  Around that time, during a morning’s foraging, housewives gathered at their favorite cafes or tearooms to drink coffee, and to impart to one another which grocer had had a delivery of chocolate biscuits and which butcher had just slaughtered a pig and had some unrationed liver or other parts of the pig’s anatomy.  I called it “awful offal.”  Partnerships were forged.  I found a non-smoking lady who had, nevertheless, a good relationship with her news stand owner who also sold cigarettes.  She had an insatiable sweet tooth, while my nicotine addiction outweighed my craving for sweets.  We traded cigarettes for chocolates over our elevenses.  It would have been a good time to give up both candy and cigarettes, but the medical profession had not yet warned us of the perils of these pleasures.

Elevenses were thus an important factor in a housewife’s life.  Newcomers joined the group from time to time, and one could belong to several groups. Some of the women invited me to their homes, and our husbands became friends as well.  There were other women whose husbands I never met.  Whether or not we extended the scope of our relationships did not in any way interfere with our common preoccupation and purpose.  This was the feeding (and later, clothing) of our families.  For clothes rationing was on the way, and it was to come as quite a shock.  It never failed to impress me how well the British Government managed to keep such things under wraps until they were ready to announce them to the public.  We had all been prepared for food and petrol rationing, but I never met anyone who expected clothes, shoes, fabrics, and even babies’ diapers to be added to the list.  The immediate impact was, of course, more psychological than actual.  We had to find food every day; the need to buy clothing was more sporadic.  Gradually, however, the realization grew that civilian life in wartime was really getting down to the nitty-gritty.  If memory serves me, we were given some forty-odd clothing coupons per person per annum. 

A man’s suit took 26; a woman’s dress 18; and diapers cost one coupon each.  Shoes were also high in coupons, but that didn’t bother me since I was unable to buy any for myself.  If I had had any advance knowledge that they were to be rationed, I would have dashed to London and bought every pair of American shoes I could find, because British or European shoes would not fit me.  The British government, quite understandably, stopped the importation of American shoes, and I did without new shoes for five years.  For the most part, I made do with fleece-lined ankle boots whose width didn’t matter much; my dressier shoes and summer sandals were resoled and reheeled until they became a cobbler’s nightmare.  You might wonder why I didn’t write to my parents to send me shoes and any other little thing I might be missing.  Good question!

All overseas mail was censored.  As Britain had to import many food and military items, they weren’t about to allow precious shipping space to be taken up with treats for people with American connections.  My parents could send me small packages, but I couldn’t write and ask for them.  Even a letter thanking someone for the lovely shoes and lingerie or the lovely parcel of assorted goodies was returned from the censor with a printed notice explaining that the thanks could be interpreted as a request for the items mentioned.  As far as I know, there was no transatlantic telephone service for personal use.  The only request I ever got away with was made quite unintentionally.  I had been asked by the BBC, who had moved some of their operations and personnel to Cheltenham, to write the scripts and to record some broadcasts for their Overseas Program to America.  I mentioned that I would have to use clothing coupons for shower curtains and received three curtains from American listeners.  Because of the “no hinting” restrictions, I couldn’t even write to thank the senders!
 

Chapter Nine


The reason I needed the shower curtains was that, at long last, after many months of searching, we had found a house in the country.  Some months previously, Mr. and Mrs. Swan had visited us for the first time at our flat in Cheltenham.  They were obviously surprised at the unostentatious but good quality of the furniture, the tidiness of the flat, and the simple but delicious lunch I had prepared for them.  Mrs. Swan asked me who had cooked the roast chicken, and I told her that I had.  I told her that my only help was a cleaning woman one morning a week.  She obviously approved, and I sensed that her opinion of me had improved.  This was confirmed later when I was told of the contents of a letter she had written to her younger daughter at boarding school.  I never had a chance to enjoy her approval.  She was killed in a minor motor accident shortly after their visit to us.  I believe that all of this influenced Mr. Swan to offer to have the firm buy a comfortable country house where Doug and I could live and he could stay on his visits to Cheltenham.

The house, named The Gorse, was only about three miles out of Cheltenham, enabling us to continue to enjoy the friendships we had made there.  I was provided with a tiny Austin car which had belonged to the firm for several years.  It was good enough for me to get to the shops and my elevenses.

I now began to learn wartime housewifery in earnest.  The house came with 100 acres and a cottage, as well as stables, a tackroom, and a greenhouse in a large garden.  It being obviously more land than we could handle, we leased out 90 acres and the cottage to a Mr. Chatham.  He had turned his large farm over to his son but wanted to continue to work a few acres for himself.  A nearby cottage belonged to a wonderful gardener/handy man who had worked for every owner of the house.  I doubt we would have survived without him.  His wife, although she didn’t “go out” to work, always came over to help with the larger projects upon which I was to find myself embarked during the coming years.  We had an enormous fruit and vegetable garden, and it was essential that we preserve its summer abundance for use in winter.  I learned to preserve (mostly without sugar) plums, gooseberries, raspberries, red and black currants, strawberries, and tomatoes.  I learned to layer green beans with coarse salt in large containers and to put fresh eggs, when the hens were laying, into large crocks containing isinglass.  Isinglass was a repulsive slimy substance which somehow made the eggs edible months later--and preferable to the powdered ones that were the lot of those unfortunates without chickens.

All of this was mere child’s play compared to what I had to do when we killed a pig.  First, of course, we had to get enough food to feed the pig.  Wartime table scraps were not enough.  We acquired pig feed by giving up the family’s lard and bacon rations for the time it took to raise the pig to a suitable size for slaughter—about a year, if memory serves me.  When the poor animal’s day of destiny approached, the proper permit was acquired, and an appointment made with a butcher who would come and do the grisly job.  Mrs. Hayward and I were left with rendering the lard and dividing up such edible by-products as the liver, feet, etc., most of which I considered to be the aforementioned “awful offal,” but which the Haywards enjoyed.  Hayward smoked and cured the bacon and hams, which were then stored by hanging them from large hooks in the ceiling of the larder.   Hayward also kept us supplied with freshly killed and beautifully dressed poultry from the chickens which he had purchased and raised for us.

The larder was an essential component of most English dwellings.  Larders ranged in size from tiny cubicles in small houses and flats to large storage rooms with stone floors and shelves in country houses.  They all had one thing in common:  permanently open, screened windows.  I learned that relatively few people had refrigerators in those days.  We were without one for years at The Gorse because we were not on the electric mains.  We made our own electricity with a Diesel generator, and the DC current was wrong for the available refrigerators. 

In winter, our larder was unbelievably cold, and the kitchen felt blissfully warm after a trip to the nearby larder.  Actually, the kitchen was the only room in the house which could always be relied on to be warm.  This was because of the AGA.  How to explain the importance of owning an AGA if you lived in rural England?  AGA cookers, which originated in one of the Scandinavian countries, were fueled only twice daily by very economical quantities of hard coal such as anthracite.  Therefore they required no electricity or gas.  (Today, many AGA’s are fueled by oil, but I never saw an oil-fueled AGA until after the war.)  As many country houses were, like The Gorse, without power and gas from the mains, appliances that did not require such fuels were a necessity.

Another virtue of the AGA was that it was never allowed to go out; i.e., it maintained a constant heat throughout the 24 hours.  The kitchen with an AGA was always warm—a disadvantage only in hot weather, a condition rare in England.  Even if a house was supplied with electricity or gas, an AGA was preferred since they cooked splendidly and with much less attention than other types of ranges.  They were clean-burning and self-cleaning.  They had hot ovens and simmering ovens which, when used in combination, produced perfectly cooked roasts.  There were baking ovens which turned out splendid cakes (if you could acquire the ingredients.)  The top-of-the-stove functions were performed by hot and simmering rings which were insulated with hinged steel lids when not in use.  The AGA also provided a constant supply of almost boiling water.  The only thing an AGA owner misses is an electric toaster.  You can make toast on an AGA, but absentminded cooks burn a lot of bread.

The AGA was never referred to except by name; it was never called just the range or stove or oven.  I don’t know of any American appliance which is regarded with such reverence or given such name recognition.  The nearest equivalent would perhaps relate not to appliances but to automobiles whose owners would never refer to them except as “The Rolls” or “The Caddy.”  The AGA is the only item I can think of which totally escapes that curious reverse snobbery so prevalent in certain English circles.  Persons who would bite their tongues before mentioning that they owned a very expensive car—or indeed would even refuse to own one—have no problem at all about owning and referring to their AGA.

Lacking central electric or gas heating at The Gorse, we had a fireplace in every room.  The trouble was that coal was strictly rationed, and wood sufficiently dried for burning was very scarce.  The dining and drawing rooms were closed except for special occasions.  We scraped the ice off the inside of our bedroom windows each winter morning.  I acquired a kerosene- or paraffin-burning space heater for the worst winter days, but it smelled so awful that freezing was almost preferable.  There was just enough hot water for one bath per morning, so while Doug warmed up in that, I thankfully headed for the kitchen and the AGA, postponing my personal ablutions until the water had heated up again.

We ate in the study, a smaller room than the drawing room and the one room where we kept a fire going, except for early mornings.  Last night’s ashes had to be removed and a new fire laid and started.  This was done by a servant if there was one, but it was one of the first and most important things I learned to do.  Laying a coal fire properly and getting it to draw and stay lit is a matter of survival in English country houses.  There was a servants’ sitting-dining room next to the kitchen which shared some of the AGA’s warmth, and we used that room for breakfast.  I took to wearing woolen underwear and could even be found making beds and dusting with woolen gloves on my hands.

I really believe I survived World War II because of a garment for which I still have no name.  It was of a woolen knit material, similar to that used for “long-johns,” but it reached only to my knees.  The upper half of the one-piece beauty had wide shoulder straps and a neckline scooped low enough to accommodate the décolletage of most blouses and dresses.  Instead of the better known “drop-seat” to enable the wearer to answer the calls of nature, there was a long, overlapping opening which extended from the waist in front to the waist in back.  As a result of this construction, one was able, with careful arrangement, to avoid contact between one’s flesh and the freezing toilet seats.  Cold lavatory seats, as the British called them, were de rigeur  (pun intended) in the British Isles.  The windows of the little rooms that housed them were kept permanently open, even in dead of winter and even in the rare house that was centrally heated.  Going to the John (or to the loo as the British call it) was therefore an excrutiatingly uncomfortable experience in winter (and even in some summers I can recall,)

We had no such thing as a clothes dryer, but we did have a small room that housed our hot water boiler.  A wooden rack could be raised and lowered by a pulley system to provide limited indoor drying in a fairly short time.  My undergarment spent all its nights on that rack.  Clothes rationing precluded my buying another.  In fact, I never saw another one to buy.

Another garment which I found to be absolutely indispensable was called a “Spencer” (perhaps spelled “Spenser,” but not to be found in my American dictionary.)  This was a knitted wool garment to be worn as an underblouse.  It was gossamer-light and had sleeves that stopped just short of the wrists as well as a deeply scooped or Vee neckline so that one could wear it under a silk blouse or a long-sleeved silk dress or dinner gown for extra warmth.  I still have a spencer which I take with me to any place where it is likely to be cold.

Even with these two treasures, I never got used to the cold and still find it hard to understand why English cold seems to be so much more bone-chilling than any I ever suffered in New England, although the temperatures dropped much lower in the latter.  I guess it is a combination of humidity and lack of heating, but I’ve   been colder just walking down the street in London that I ever was in a blizzard in Boston.  So I don’t think it is just the lack of heating indoors but also a different kind of cold outdoors. 
 

 
Chapter Ten


Besides the Haywards, two other helpers were found in the neighborhood. Our house was situated in a small community which probably would be called a hamlet. It didn’t qualify as a village, having no shops or any other public buildings except a small Norman church.  There were two or three farms, and at the corner where one turned off the main road, a row of council houses.  These were cottages built and subsidized by the government for qualifying persons of low income. 

It was because of these houses that I acquired the services of Mrs. Turner.  She appeared at the kitchen door a day or two after our arrival, announcing that she had always done the laundry for The Gorse because she (I quote) “had the gas.”  Correctly interpreting this to mean that her house was on the gas mains, I learned further that she had a gas-fueled iron, an item I didn’t even know existed.  As our homemade electricity would not run to an electric iron, or anything else with a heating element, Mrs. Turner was a Godsend.  Remember, this was long before the days of drip-dry and permanent press.  Every Monday, Mrs. Turner would arrive with an empty wheelbarrow.  She would go through the house like a cloud of cloth-eating locusts, stripping it of any and all soiled linens and washable clothing.  At her house, she boiled and scrubbed on a scrubbing board and ironed even Doug’s underwear.  We never made a list, but she never lost or ruined a single piece of laundry in the years she worked for us.  She must have been well over 70 the first time I ever saw her, and she was still going strong the last.  It is hard to think of her succumbing to the Grim Reaper, but of course, she has had to at some time.  RIP, Mrs. T.

Our other helper was Dorothy, who became our live-in maid-of-all-work at the age of 15.  She was the eldest of seven children of a farm laborer and his wife   who lived in a tiny cottage on the farm where he worked.  Dorothy had finished the required number of years at school at 14 and was now considered ready to enter the work force.  She had had no training except for the simple cooking and childcare with which she helped her mother, so it was up to me to train her.  A case of the blind leading the blind.  My experience in running a household consisted entirely of living in a flat and having a cleaning woman once a week.  Dorothy’s training had to be accelerated when I learned of the impending visit of my married sister-in-law Nancy.  So assiduously did I drill Dorothy in how to serve Nancy at the dinner party I gave in her honor, that, in a classic demonstration of Freudism, she simply omitted to serve her at all.

In a way, Dorothy was responsible for a lot of my own growing up.  Here I was, little more than a girl myself, responsible for this young person without having any clear idea of her needs and her problems.  She had never been taught that, given any money, she could buy the items to provide for her personal, feminine needs.  She probably wouldn’t have bought them anyway; she gave the money she earned to her father.  I simply started to hand her certain items without comment, thus becoming an away-from-home mother figure for an adolescent, an experience I had not thought to confront for several years to come.
 
 

Chapter Eleven


Dorothy’s wages were, by American standards, a pittance, but they were the going rate for one of her age and experience.  I knew better than to fool around in that area.  As I have noted, my days of culture shock were coming to an end.  While I still had a lot to learn, I had already absorbed enough of the English attitude about servants and other characteristics that I had come a long way toward being completely assimilated.  By the time the Americans arrived to join the war effort (known as the Yank invasion,) I must have seemed as foreign to them as all those other “Limeys” who actually chose to live on this wet little island where the pubs closed at ten o’clock. 


Of course, I had wanted to be assimilated.  What young bride in a new country would not want to learn the customs and the cuisine and to understand the inside jokes of her adopted homeland?  I was anxious to be accepted, to be one of them.  I embarked, with the help of a friendly librarian, upon improving my knowledge of British history.  She sugared the pill by lining up a number of historical novels which, if read in the right order, would give me a very good grasp of the subject.  I ended up besting many of my English friends (and Doug) at rattling off the names of monarchs in their proper order of succession.

Other aspects of my Anglicization were acquired without conscious effort on my part.  I had always had the facility of taking on accents or changing accents in a matter of moments.  When my family visited Chicago for several months when I was about nine, my father had chided me for “mimicking” the playmates I had found in our apartment building.  At Wellesley, we had a phonetic speech class, and I was very quick to lose my Texas accent.  I wasn’t long in England before I had acquired such a British accent that I was seldom recognized as being American.  To this day, the moment I hear an English voice on the telephone, I echo it right back to the amusement of anyone present.  I didn’t try to develop an English

accent; it just happened.  I was, as a result, very annoyed when some Americans jumped to the conclusion that I was consciously trying to change my speech.  Exposure to the “Yanks” during their invasion of England threw me into a veritable linguistic mish-mash.  Spending an evening with both American and English friends, I would often use both accents in one sentence. In any case, I was now an English housewife, with an English accent, in an English country house, with English friends and domestic helpers.  The only thing missing was an English baby.  We attended to that matter on 7 May 1942, by producing a son who looked exactly like Winston Churchill.  He outgrew it.
 
Chapter Twelve


The prospect of motherhood brought its joys, but in wartime, also its problems.  They started with the need for baby and maternity clothes.  These were all subject to clothes rationing.  As even diapers were rationed, a certain amount of ingenuity was required.  English babies wore two diapers, or nappies, as they called them.  The outer one was of terry cloth, and here I was in luck.  Somehow I acquired a number of pre-war white bath towels.  Those were made into the outer nappies.  The inner ones were of a soft gauze material, and I had to give a coupon each for them.  There were no disposable diapers and no diaper services.  Mrs. Turner came to the rescue, arriving every day to collect a pail of diapers and take them away in her wheelbarrow, returning with them clean the next day.  As for other baby clothes, I knitted like crazy, even though I had to give coupons for the yarn.  Here was where I really chafed under the censor’s rules.  American relatives who asked what I needed went unanswered.  My mother, without being asked, sent a few useful things, but my aunts, bless their hearts, tended to avoid the practical, like diapers, and send cute and pretty things.   I really didn’t need silver spoons and bowls in an England almost weighed down with antique and unrationed silver.  I needed maternity clothes and baby blankets, all requiring coupons.  I clumped through my pregnancy in my fleece-lined boots, wearing a red smock over a black maternity skirt.  I also had two dresses that wrapped around to accommodate my growing girth.

When I could no longer get behind the wheel of my car, I turned it over to a friend who lived in Cheltenham.  She came and fetched me when I needed to go out, but I had no on-the–spot transportation.  Doug could be reached by phone at his office, so we didn’t worry too much about my isolation.  Two weeks before the baby was born, I was upstairs one morning in my bedroom, getting dressed.  I heard Dorothy’s voice from the bottom of the stairs, calling, “Madam.”  I went to the landing and looked down to where Dorothy was standing with her hand wrapped in her apron.  “I’ve cut me thumb off, Madam,” she said in a small, scared voice.  “Nonsense,” said I, in my most British matron’s voice, “let me see it.”  I descended as fast as my condition permitted, and Dorothy unwrapped her hand.  Slight gasp from Madam before she remembered her stiff British upper lip and the first aid course she had taken. ”So you have,” said I. “Wrap it up and come out to the kitchen.”  I tore a towel into strips and made a tourniquet.  Then I tried in vain to reach Doug, but the line was busy.  My friend with my car was not at home.  I threw a coat on over my underwear and went over to Mr. Chatham’s cottage.  He immediately brought his car over and took Dorothy to the hospital.  Later, Doug and I picked her up and drove her home to her mother, where she wanted to go.  Doug found her thumb in the woodshed.  She had wanted something to stick down a clogged sink and had tried to chop off a piece of packing wire with a 14-pound axe.

Our son was born two days later and two weeks early, but none the worse at a bit over eight pounds.  As I had never had a baby, I had no means of comparing the process in the US and the UK.  I had an excellent doctor, known as a GP, who was also one of our new friends.  By the way, he and my girl friend, who drove me to his office from time to time, fell in love, and two divorces resulted.   Tommy broke up two marriages before he was born.

Small nursing homes were more popular for childbirth than hospitals.  Unless there were complications, it was quite customary to have one’s GP serve both as obstetrician and later as pediatrician.  Other small differences from American child production were that the baby was born in my room instead of in a labor room and that the baby remained in my room with me instead of in a nursery, behind glass.    The staff of this nursing home consisted of four sisters who were also Sisters, as nurses are called in England.  The Maternity Sister was very short and obese, truly five by five.  She had an enormous bosom which was so commodious that she could walk around with a baby lying on its tummy as it peered blissfully over her shoulder, while her hands swung free.  At that time one stayed much longer in the nursing home or hospital than in these days of astronomical costs.  I stayed for ten days, during which time Maternity Sister taught me how to care for my baby, including breastfeeding.  By the last few days, I was free to come and go, out to lunch or dinner or shopping, but I slept at the nursing home and was there at feeding times.  This use of the nursing home as a sort of halfway house was of infinite value to a first time mother before she took her baby home.  In my case, having no mother, sister, or other female relatives, it was a Godsend.

Since Dorothy was at her home nursing her hand, and Doug was away from home a great deal, a friend brought her little boy and moved out to The Gorse to give me moral support and the benefit of her experience.  We managed quite well between us until Dorothy returned after a few days.  She pronounced herself able and willing to work again, and we happily surrendered the chores of cooking, bedmaking, and the handwashing of tiny baby things which were not Mrs. Turner’s responsibilities.  Our delight in having Dorothy back was short-lived.  She broke out in a rash which the doctor diagnosed as impetigo, a very contagious skin disease which children sometimes caught and brought home from school.    Apparently one of Dorothy’s little siblings had brought it home to Dorothy.  She was again sent home, and we set about sterilizing everything she had touched.  We did a good job as none of us caught the disease, and Dorothy returned as soon as she was cured.  My friend thankfully returned to her neglected husband.

Dorothy more than made up for her mishaps by saving Tommy’s life a few months later.  It was the custom to put babies in large prams and keep them out of doors for a large part of every day, regardless of the weather.  The prams came with leather raincovers so the baby would stay warm and snug, even in a downpour.  I am convinced that this practice immunizes English children to the miserable climate they are called upon to face for the rest of their lives.   I am equally convinced that the British climate was the force behind the creation of the far-flung British Empire.  You will agree that most, if not all, of the Empire was located in warm climates.  When a child got too active to leave alone .in the pram, he was provided with an upper-body harness.  Hooks were provided for attaching the harness to the pram.  Tommy must have been unusually active because Dorothy looked out of the window one day when I was out.  She saw Tommy hanging upside down over the edge of the pram.  When she reached him he was turning blue.  She carried him into the house and immersed him in tepid water.  He resumed breathing and was playing happily in his playpen when I got home.  When I asked Dorothy how she knew what to do, she said that her mother always did that when anything happened with one of the children.  Everyone has heard about the English nanny, but having the eldest of seven children around can be almost as useful to a new mother.  Dorothy taught me many of the country or old wives’ ways to deal with an infant.  A bit of treacle (like corn syrup) on the fingertips and a small feather will keep a baby bemused for long blessed periods of peace.  Tommy kept falling asleep while breastfeeding, causing the process to take an hour.  Placing him on a pillow and not holding him in my arms reduced it to 20 minutes.
 

 
Chapter Thirteen



While I was adjusting to motherhood, we were all constantly adjusting to new developments of the war on the home front.  One of these was the arrival of large numbers of children, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes not.  The children were being evacuated to Cheltenham from the more vulnerable cities and coastal areas.  Coming largely from slum neighborhoods, they brought some rather unwelcome things with them, one of which was head lice.  The eggs were deposited on the headrests of the Cheltenham bus system.  One of my friends, a doctor’s wife, often rode the bus to save her precious petrol ration.  She had glorious hip-length hair which she wore in a magnificent coronet.  One day she told her hairdresser that her head itched as if it had a million live things in it.  On being informed that it indeed had, she had to have her hair cut very short so that the prescribed medication could reach her scalp.  Another casualty of the war.

The so-called phony war, that first autumn and winter, with a surprising lack of violence, had given us time to learn about rationing, shortages and all the other, in truth, minor problems of war.  There was a great deal of movement and relocation of families.  Two of these resulted in our inheriting two dogs from displaced families.  The first dog was an adorable miniature Pekinese named Peanut.  We acquired her before moving into The Gorse and fell in love with her, although neither of us would have chosen a Peke if left to our own devices.  She had several endearing personality traits and adored playfully teasing our other orphan, acquired after the move to the country.  This was George, an enormous Great Dane.  He was a gentle beast, and when Peanut had pestered him long enough, he would lift one paw and effortlessly roll her head-over-heels to some distance away from his immediate vicinity.  His vicinity, alas, was confined to the distance between the garage and the tackroom, an area wide enough to include six loose-boxes which were supposed to contain horses.  One of them was George’s kennel.  A wire was strung across this area, and to that was attached a 15-foot chain, which in turn was linked to George’s collar.  The reason for this restraint on this normally gentle animal was that George had killed one of Mr. Chatham’s sheep.  As this was a distinct no-no in meat-starved England, it was either restrain George or have him put to sleep.

To my almost inconsolable sorrow, Peanut was run over and killed in our long driveway by the baker’s delivery van.  As the war went on, George suffered more and more from hunger.  What table scraps could be gleaned from our meager meals were totally insufficient to appease his appetite.  The horsemeat (treated with blue dye to preclude human consumption) which was sold for pets was informally rationed and in short supply.   The amount obtainable per week was barely sufficient for about two days for George.  No wonder he had attacked Mr. Chatham’s sheep.  The poor dog got thinner and thinner; he howled for food day and night; and we finally had no choice but to put him to sleep.  We replaced him with a bull terrier who got eczema on his back as soon as he was full-grown.  He would rub his back raw under a fence and constantly had to wear an application of a greasy, smelly ointment which made him unwelcome in the house. 

Our final canine effort was with an adorable small Dachshund which Doug got for me.  His name was Schnapps.  He killed chickens—always Mr. Chatham’s chickens which, unlike ours, were allowed to run free.  Schnapps didn’t kill them out of hunger; he killed them from the same instinct that had made his breed valuable as hunting dogs in Germany long before they became popular as house pets.  (Years later, in Bavaria, I saw some old hunting prints, and there they were, a pair of Dachshunds, clinging tenaciously by their teeth to the ears of a wild boar.)  We sent Schnapps to obedience school.  He came home and promptly laid a dead chicken at my feet.  Mr. Chatham, strictly within his wartime rights, threatened to shoot him.  I regretfully gave him to some London friends who didn’t live within miles of a chicken.  At this point I ruefully concluded that, living in the most dog-loving country in the world, I was never going to be the successful owner of one.  For some reason, I had the equivalent of a gardener’s black thumb where dogs were concerned.
 

 
Chapter Fourteen


We carried on, making adjustments in our small world as events in the larger theater of war required.  After the fall of France, when it seemed inevitable that Hitler would forthwith attempt the invasion of England, we set about learning how to disable our cars, before leaving them parked, by removing some necessary part under the hood.  We were also fined (as I was) for forgetting to lock all doors of the vehicle.  Signposts were taken down so that, if a German landed by parachute, he would not be helped to orient himself by our own directional aids. 

The public accepted these minor inconveniences with scarcely a mention.  They were supposed to be shaking in their boots under the threat of imminent invasion by an implacable foe.  What did they do?  History has recorded what their armed forces did, and what thousands of small craft owners did at Dunkirk.  We all knew about and admired the bravery of citizens in the areas targeted by the German bombers.  I can tell you what the women of Cheltenham did.  They did what had to be done, accepted what had to be accepted, and went right on with their ceaseless search for their families’ needs, alleviated and assisted by their elevenses.  I can not recall a single word said in fear or discontent.  The women of Cheltenham didn’t get much chance to show the magnificent courage of their sisters in London who faced bombs and fire, but as Milton wrote, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”  Staying at home and trying to develop a taste for whale meat and what one columnist described as “strange and malignant sausages” took more intestinal fortitude than you might imagine. 

Out at The Gorse, changes were about to take place.  We went out one night, leaving 14-month-old Tommy in the care of Dorothy.  For some reason, we returned much earlier than expected and found that Dorothy had slipped out to meet a boy and left Tommy alone.  Doug fired her on the spot.  I probably would have given her a second chance, but my confidence in her was so severely shaken that I let her go, sadly, but without protest.  She had, by the way, been generously rewarded for her lost thumb by our insurance company.  She had, therefore, a handsome nest egg for a girl of her age and background.  She was quite content with this outcome, saying that she only missed her thumb when she was cracking eggs.  As a matter of fact, we would have lost her soon anyway, because the government was starting conscription of childless females between 18 and 60-odd years of age. 

As Tommy had started walking, it was imperative that we find someone who could keep an eye on him at all times.  The property surrounding the house was a minefield of potential hazards for a youngster.  There were ponds, the odd bull or boar, and a host of other pitfalls which magnetically attract a child.  Before I could find him a full-time guardian, he turned on the tap of a 50-gallon container of kerosene (liquid paraffin in England) and took a shower in it, fully clothed.  Hayward led him into the kitchen warning me not to light a match.  Tommy found a large pile of chaff, which Mr. Chatham had separated from the wheat, and rolled over and over in it, embedding thousands of little barbs in his knitted coat and leggings.  He threw his first pair of rationed, hard-soled shoes, for which I had stood in line for two hours, over the firescreen into the fire, five minutes after I had put them on him and injudiciously turned my back.  He managed, through the bars of his playpen, to steal and eat all of the small cakes off a cakestand, while I was giving the vicar afternoon tea.  I needed help.
 

 
Chapter Fifteen


The Russians had been crying out for a second front for some time, when I opened one by engaging Miss Braun.  She was a woman of some 60 years, thereby being exempt from conscription.  Her age did not lessen one whit her quite extraordinary vitality and stamina.  She was obviously from a genteel background, and she had impeccable references from all sorts of persons, either titled or of undoubtedly elevated station.  This should have warned me, but I was desperate.  She insisted that she be called Miss Braun and that she be described, not as a nanny, but as a nursery governess.  I agreed, not really knowing what that implied.  I soon found out. 

Miss Braun was to eat with the family, but, under no circumstances, was she to help with the preparation of the meals, except for the child’s.  Normally, she wouldn’t even had done that, but as cooks and kitchen maids were rare in wartime, she made an exception, considering this her contribution and sacrifice to the war effort.  It was also obvious that she found that preferable to trusting me with a helpless child’s food.  I was happy enough to have her do it, except for the problem of the burning milk.  All of our milk came from a neighboring farm, unpasteurized, indeed warm from the cow and with an occasional wasp floating in it.  It had to be boiled for Tommy’s use.  A day never passed that Miss B (now I can call her that) didn’t let the milk boil over on the hot ring of the AGA.  After all these years, I associate those days more with the smell of burning milk than with almost any other of the war’s minor vicissitudes. 

We clashed from the outset, and there were only two reasons why she remained with us for as long as she did: The first was that she was an excellent child’s companion and mentor.  Her patience with and devotion to Tommy were total and without reservation.  When it was noticed that the child was developing knock-knees, the doctor said that he would have to sleep in leg braces or have a great deal of massage on his legs.  Miss B. provided the massage tirelessly and with complete success.

To the rest of us she was dedicatedly difficult.  When I came down with chicken pox at a time when we had no other help in the house, she refused even to prepare a tray for me, isolated in my room.  She was willing to cook for herself and Tommy but considered it demeaning to do anything for me.  Fortunately for Doug, he was away on business most of the time that I was ill.  I ended up in the isolation ward in the hospital. Miss B. allowed Hayward to spend hours constructing a large wire-enclosed play area, complete with swing and sandbox, a safe, private playground which would have afforded Miss B. much more free time.  When he had finished it, she refused “to put Thomas in a concentration camp” and never allowed him to use it.  I took great pleasure in using it on her days off.  Tommy loved it.  We had an orphaned baby lamb for a while and he could bottle-feed it and cuddle it to his heart’s content in the enclosure where it couldn’t scamper away.  Miss. B. would never have allowed him to do anything like that.

She was punctilious about asserting her place in the household as upstairs, not downstairs.  If we had dinner guests, she would not intrude on the cocktail hour or the after-dinner part of the evening but would appear, just at the right moment, to take her place at the table.  I must admit that her behavior was impeccable.  She never overstepped her self-imposed boundaries, but she never failed to claim her privileges, according to our original agreement.  If I had the King and Queen for dinner, I would not have dared to ask Miss B. to forgo joining us at the dinner table.

She had many other endearing qualities.  One that has stuck in my memory was her habit of pointedly wiping the passenger seat of my car whenever I gave her a lift to town on her day off.  As I have said, the primary reason she stayed with us so long was her devotion to and her excellent care of Tommy.  The second reason was simply that I never was able to fire her.    I presented her with her notice and a final check at least twice a month.  She simply tossed her head, said “Nonsense,” and tore up the check.  Short of calling in the police, I just could not get rid of her.  Doug was of no help at all.  She treated him with the deference English women have traditionally accorded the male head of the house, and she never goaded me to distraction in his presence.  Stupid, she was not.  So in spite of our personality clash (a euphemism if I ever heard one,) we resigned ourselves to an armed truce punctuated with frequent skirmishes.  I needed her, and she adored my son, so we stayed together for the duration.

Other household help came and went.  As conscription had taken all of the young childless women, one was left with mothers with small children or elderly married couples.  We tried them all with various results.  There was one child who systematically uprooted every flower he could get his hands on.  I really began to fear that Hayward would do him or his mother serious harm.  I did have one delightful young woman and her charming little boy, but her husband was invalided out of the Air Force, and she gave up working outside her home.  As for the married couples, we could never find one in which both husband and wife were tolerable.  One husband had such a voracious appetite that his loving wife gave him the entire family’s meat ration for a week at one sitting. 

The husband of another couple appointed himself Air Raid Warden of the household when Doug was away.  We had a few air raids, mostly caused by mistake when Gloucester Aircraft, about nine miles from us, was the target.  Harcourt, on the occasion of the first air raid, insisted that we take cover in the small copse on the property, as if trees would protect us from bombs.  The copse was the bailiwick of a large and ferocious boar who sired all of Mr. Chatham’s pigs.  When I declined to take shelter in the copse, Harcourt marshalled us into Mr. Chatham’s cowshed because it had a corrugated iron roof. (Mr. Chatham remained in his cottage.)  As each bomb whistled down, Harcourt would order us to hit the deck, the deck being the cowshed’s floor.  When I refused to continue this kind of behavior and put Tommy under a sturdy oak refectory table, Harcourt’s machismo got hurt, and he restored his pride by beating up his wife, following which they departed.  As they quarreled fiercely and audibly almost every waking moment, it was a relief to see them go.
 

 
Chapter Sixteen


From time to time, when Doug drove to Corone House to see his father on business, I would accompany him, grateful for the chance to do a little foraging in the London shops like Fortnum and Mason.  In this sh