© 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 shop, internationally known for its food department, one was served by elderly men, very dignified in their cutaway coats and pin-striped trousers.  Of course, one could get no more of rationed items there than at one’s local grocer, but Fortnum’s could always provide some kind of unrationed treat, such as brandied peaches or hot-house melons, if the buyer could pay the price.  Such luxuries came from private greenhouses and were not price-controlled.  When I was pregnant, Doug had paid an arm and a leg for a small cantaloupe for me.  Unfortunately, I was still in the throes of morning sickness (which with me lasted all day,) and he had to eat it himself.  He said he felt as if he were eating money.  We never saw oranges or lemons during the war, but babies and young children were issued an orange juice concentrate and cod-liver oil to ensure their vitamins C and D.

By this time, the so-called “utility” concept had come into being.  The term applied to those items still manufactured because of the real needs of the populace, but made from materials of less quality and durability than would have been insisted upon in peacetime.  “Utility” covered everything from furniture to clothing to bed and bath linens.  The items were price-controlled and acceptable as a last resort, but one would much prefer better quality.  So we were always on the lookout for a good “find” whether it was a piece of antique furniture at an estate sale (auction) or even a lot of old tea towels, much-used but still soft and absorbent.  Real linen sheets, even when mended from years of service, were preferable to the rather coarse texture of “utility.” 

The lovely soft wool that had made British blankets so deservedly popular was now needed for military uniforms and blankets.  Pots and pans were made from strange alloys.  In those pre-plastic, pre-synthetic days, there was a great difference between the good, i.e., pre-war, and the make-do, i.e., “utility.”  We were always glad to see the arrival of a group of gypsies or “tinkers” as they were also called.  They would set up camp for a few days and mend our old but good pots and pans.

So we braved the bombs to go “up to town” (the British always go “up” to London even if they live 200 miles north of it) as often as we could manage it.  It was in the course of our return to Cheltenham one night after dark that we noticed a glow from the back window of the car.  We pulled over on the top of a hill and stood in horrified silence as we watched the first of London’s really bad fire-bombings.  As I stood there, I realized that no matter how much you read about war or listen to the news on the radio, there is nothing that brings it home to you until you have had a glimpse of it with your own eyes.  In those moments, one recognizes all of the inconveniences, the petty sacrifices and discomforts for what they really amount to—not even a hill of beans. I think that this was what I admired so much in the attitude of my English friends—they kept their priorities straight. 
 

 
Chapter Seventeen


I had known for some time that my mother was dying of cancer, and I had been going about my daily routines with an underlying grief, which was intensified by a feeling of helplessness and guilt that I would not be able to see her once again.  Now that Tommy was two years old and (inextricably) in the capable care of Miss Braun, Douglas and I decided to explore the remote possibility of a trip for me to New York.  All my life I have believed in the precept of “nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and I resolved to make every effort to see my mother before she died.  Even if I failed, the fact of my having tried would perhaps help to assuage my guilt.

Although married to a British citizen, I had kept my American citizenship and passport.  The latter had expired during the war years as I had had no occasion to travel.  The first step, therefore, was to get my passport renewed, and I set forth to visit the US Consulate in London, innocently confident that there I would find any number of my compatriots sympathetic to my cause and eager to help me.  I was soon disabused of this fantasy. 

I was received at the Consulate by a middle-aged civil servant who made the word “civil” anything but appropriate.  She almost sneered at my ignorance as she informed me that my passport could only be renewed if I was going to the US and that I wasn’t going anywhere without a British exit visa.  That visa would only be granted to me if I intended to remain in America for the duration of the war. The British authorities had never, since the war began, granted permission to anyone to travel to another country and return to Britain. She washed her hands of me and was turning away when I asked her where I could apply for the exit visa.  “The British Passport Office in Queen Anne’s Gate, but you’ll be wasting your time,” was her reply as she bustled away to undoubtedly more important affairs than mine.

I took a taxi to Queen Anne’s Gate and asked to see someone at the Passport Office.  The contrast between the imposing grandeur of the American Embassy Consulate and these unpretentious offices was underlined by the difference in my reception at the latter from the cavalier treatment I had received at the former.  After a short wait, I was taken in to see a Mr. Faro, a quiet man who heard me out without interruption.  When I had finished, he thought for a while before he spoke and then told me in as kind a way as possible that the harridan (my word, not his) at the Consulate had been technically correct.  No British exit permit had ever been issued since the war had started except to those who wished to evacuate themselves for the duration.  

My spirits fell, and I prepared to leave, thanking him for his time.  “Just a minute,” he said, “there just might be a way.  It’s very far-fetched, but what have you got to lose by trying?”  He then proceeded to explain that rules and regulations could always be appealed.  One did this by applying in writing to the relevant board or committee which reviewed such appeals.  He asked if I could write such a letter that night and bring it to him the next day.  I promised to do so, thanked him fervently, and left.

I was staying at the flat of a friend, and I wrote the letter there that night and read it to her.  When I finished, she had tears in her eyes.  I had really pulled out all the stops in appealing to the board’s sympathy.  I said that my mother was too ill to understand why I couldn’t come to her, and that she would surely die grievously hurt at my neglect.  I was shameless in my calculated appeal to every board member’s love of his or her mother, but I was totally sincere in everything I  wrote.  It was undoubtedly that sincerity that carried the day.

A week after I had returned to Cheltenham, Mr. Faro called me to say that the board had recommended approval of my appeal.  Because of the lack of precedent, the recommendation had been forwarded to the office of the Home Secretary who had to make the final decision.  Another week passed, and then Mr. Faro called to say that we had won.  I had been granted the first such permit since the war had begun!

All that was necessary now was to get my passport renewed.  When I showed proof of the British exit visa to the witch at the US Consulate, she couldn’t hide her fury.  But she had her revenge before I got my passport renewed.  She declared that Bristol was the location of the Consulate for Americans living in my area.  I went to Bristol.  They, alerted to the vendetta against me, said I was mistaken—I had to go to London.  They kept me on this sort of merry-go-round until they ran out of ideas.  Then one day, when I was about at the end of my rope, they grudgingly issued me a new passport with some snide innuendoes about how I had obtained the exit visa from the British.  I was very near to tears and only wanted to get out of that awful place, so I grabbed the passport and ran out of the building.

There was an empty taxi just about to pull away, and I stopped it and threw myself onto the back seat.  I was in Mr. Faro’s office before I discovered that I didn’t have my passport.  I was supposed to bring it to him to be stamped with the exit visa, but when I opened my handbag, it wasn’t there.  I had, in my mixture of relief and anger, failed to put it actually in my purse.  Instead, I had clutched it alongside the handbag and tossed both onto the seat of the taxi, allowing the passport to slide behind and under the seat cushion.  Horrified, I burst into tears.  Mr. Faro was a Rock of Gibraltar; he immediately plied me with that all-purpose British panacea, a cup of tea, lent me a handkerchief, and told me to go home and not to worry.  I straggled back to Chorleywood, where I was staying, and phoned Doug.  It took some time for me to convince him that I had really done anything so incredibly careless, but once he grasped the situation, he was quite sympathetic.  He told me Mr. Faro was right and that I should come on home. 

I had been back in Cheltenham for four or five days when Mr. Faro called to report that the taxi driver had turned in my passport.  A lost US passport was not something to be allowed to fall into the wrong hands; the British police had put out an all-points request to taxi drivers, and it had succeeded.  My relief was enhanced by the fact that I would not have to crawl back to the American Consulate, a fate I considered just short of death on the rack. 

I got my passport back just in time to catch the next sailing of a troop ship, now called the Grey Ghost but formerly known as the Queen Mary.  What a different lady she had become.  Even getting to her proved to be quite an adventure.  Our little group of about 15 civilians entrained in London, headed for Glasgow.  Having arrived there after sitting up all night in blacked-out carriages, we were loaded, exactly like cattle, into the back of a truck.  There we stood in the bitter early-morning cold and darkness until we reached the small Scottish port of Gurock.

At the port, we were herded onto a tender which took us out to the ship.  To our dismay, we were told that we could only take aboard whatever pieces of luggage we could carry ourselves; the rest would go into the hold for the duration of the voyage.  Smart aleck me!  I had decided that one piece would be easier to keep track of, so everything I had was in one steamer trunk which I couldn’t even lift, much less haul up a gangplank which looked as if it could easily reach the top of the Empire State Building.  I sat down on the trunk and watched my fellow travelers board the ship.

There were very few men in our group of civilians—the military had already boarded—and they showed no signs of wanting to help any of the women with their luggage.  The poor ladies hastily chose what they could carry, leaving the rest to be put in the hold.  I remained seated on my steamer trunk, trying to look calm but shaking inside.  When I was the only one left, a steward called down to me from the top of the gangplank, asking if I was going to come aboard.  “Not without this,” I called, pointing to my trunk.  We locked gazes for what seemed an eternity.  Then, with a shrug eloquent of his opinion of women, he ran down the gangplank, hoisted my trunk onto his shoulder, and ascended again with a very relieved female in his wake.

Down some corridors, around some corners we went until he stopped and dumped my trunk outside a door, taking off before I could thank him.  I opened the door, and there were all my female traveling companions milling about in what seemed to be a sort of dormitory with double-decker bunks.  This was where we were to sleep, all together.  Even though the Queen Mary was going to sail westwards and was therefore nearly empty, such personnel as were aboard were all berthed in such shared accommodations.  There was never any privacy except for a modicum in the washroom and lavatories.

All of the Queen’s former elegance was gone.  She had been stripped within and painted gray without.  Because she was so fast, she didn’t travel in convoy—at least on this voyage—as did other, slower troop and supply ships.  The contrast between my two Queen Mary crossings was about as great as it could be.  The most outstanding characteristic of this crossing was the fact that there were about 1200 men and 200 women aboard.  The men were either in military units going to the States or to Canada for special duties and/or training or civilians with some kind of government chores upon which they did not elaborate.  The women, other than me, were going Stateside for the duration.

There were a number of ferry pilots, men who flew much-needed new aircraft from North America (Canada) to the theaters of war, returning by ship or military aircraft to make the round trip again.  One of these pilots often flew the hazardous northern route to the Murmansk area.  He would call me to say hello on some of his trips through New York and take me to lunch.  Then there was silence, and I never heard from him again. I hope that it was just because his routine had changed, an outcome far preferable to others I could think of.

I was very much envied by my dorm-mates because I had my whole wardrobe with me, but they forgave me when I lent them anything that would fit.  One poor lady had mixed up her bags and had brought nothing but shoes to the cabin.  All her other clothes were in the hold.  We all did the best we could for her, so there was quite a circulating selection of clothing going on.  You got used to seeing your own outfits approaching you on the deck.

One would have thought that the romance department would flourish with so many men and so few women aboard.  Such was not the case.  There was, as I have said, little or no privacy within the ship, and the decks were totally blacked out at night—fine for short walks, but quite dangerous in the total darkness.  Not even a lighted cigarette was allowed on the deck at night.  The thought of the German U-boats was never far from our minds.  We were all relieved and pleased to arrive safely in New York. 
 
Chapter Eighteen


Now it was almost culture shock time again for me.  I was so used to the austerity of our life in England that I couldn’t at once accustom myself to the absence of it in New York.  It seemed to me that New Yorkers didn’t even know that they were at war.  In my own family’s home, the table was laden with goodies I hadn’t seen in years:  rice, catsup, all kinds of incredible luxuries such as fresh oranges and lemons.  I ate as if there would be no tomorrow.  I couldn’t spend too much time with my mother as she tired very easily, so I slipped out to explore the neighborhood shops and the marvelous American drug stores.  It was an almost sybaritic pleasure to watch simple purchases like toothpaste actually being wrapped up in paper.

One day I really had difficulty restraining myself from attacking a woman customer at a drug store soda fountain.  As I slipped onto the stool beside her, she was telling the counterman to take back the two boiled eggs in front of her.  The reason?  She had specifically ordered brown eggs, and these were white.  When I thought of all the English people eating powdered eggs and the lucky ones with chickens coping with eggs preserved for months in that slimy stuff, I wanted to shove those two offending white eggs down her throat, shells and all.

Eventually, of course, I had to come to terms with the fact that my compatriots were simply not called upon to make do without the things which had all but disappeared from English life.  After all, England was a tiny island nation which had always had to import things like oranges and lemons, and she certainly didn’t have the resources of a huge country like the United States.  I recognized that Americans made their own sacrifices; they were just different from those I had become accustomed to. The shortage of tires seemed more serious than in England, probably because of the greater distances.

 My sense of humor came to my aid in an incident when I was a friend’s guest for lunch at the famous Stork Club.  I was contemplating an enormous menu which included roast duckling, pheasant under glass, filet of sole in Champagne sauce, and like delicacies, when I heard my host gasp with dismay.  “What’s wrong?” I asked, fearing that he had remembered a previous engagement.  “I am so sorry,” he replied with obvious sincerity, “I forgot this is our one meatless day per week.  I should have invited you tomorrow.”  I laughed so hard that the people at the next table turned to stare.  They had never heard of the five-shilling English wartime restaurant meal. 

I myself never quite understood it, but it was supposed to stop restaurants from profiteering by placing a limit of five shillings on a three-course meal even at the best hotels and restaurants.  There were a few items allowed “a la carte” at extra charge, but they were very scarce, and a menu like the one I was holding simply could not exist in wartime Britain. 

The choices were a bit better in the really deluxe restaurants and hotels in London, but they operated under the same rules.  They just had the money and connections to buy such a la carte (and unrationed) treats as game, Scotch salmon, and exotic greenhouse fruits not available to the small-town restaurateur.  Doug and I spent a week at a reportedly deluxe fishing resort in Wales, where a typical dinner would be soup followed by baked beans on toast and topped off with artificially sweetened stewed fruit and custard made from powdered eggs.  (Saccharin was the only artificial sweetener, and it was used universally, especially in bottled soft drinks.  As I hated its taste, my consumption of many items was severely curtailed.)  We were supposed to catch trout in the lake and have the chef cook them for us, thus augmenting the hotel’s offerings.  Unfortunately, even after furtively resorting to live bait (not considered “sporting”) we never caught a fish.  What we did find, however, was a farm about a three-mile walk from the hotel, which served a marvelous high tea. 

Many Americans use the term “high tea” to describe the elegant meal of dainty cakes and sandwiches served around four to five o’clock.  This is correctly called “afternoon tea” and is usually consumed by people who intend to dine at eight o’clock or later.  “High tea” is much heartier; it is the sole evening meal of people like farmers and workers.  It can consist of anything from fish and chips to a baked ham or other meat dishes, boiled eggs, sausage and mashed potatoes, baked beans, and the like, which are followed by cakes, pudding and/or pastries.  In the South and in the cities, this meal is called supper; in the North, in Scotland, and on farms, it is more likely to be called “high tea.”  High tea at a farm was considered a Lucullan feast during the war.  Lack of petrol was the only thing that kept the farms deep in the countryside from being overrun by hordes of hungry city-dwellers. 

Remembering the austerity of the five-shilling wartime meals, I cannot avoid recalling some of the pre-war feasts in comparison.  One that springs to mind was my first all-out full-course dinner which was a pre-war feature of the Lyggon Arms Hotel in the beautiful village of Broadway in the famous Cotswolds.  As I recall it, we started with appetizers (starters) and proceeded with soup, fish, entrée (probably meat,) and roast (probably game like pheasant or grouse, according to season.)  These were accompanied by a generous choice of vegetables.  Then followed the sweet (dessert to Americans,) savoury (something like Welsh rarebit—not sweet,) dessert (fruit to the English,) and cheese and biscuits.  Sherbet was inserted somewhere between courses, to “cleanse the palate.”

Perhaps I dwell too much on food.  But because its acquisition had been such a preoccupation for the last four and one-half years, I needed time to take the American abundance in stride.

Ever since my arrival in New York, I had been mailing weekly packages to Doug.   They consisted chiefly of the two things we had been missing most—catsup for him and American toilet paper for me.  As a matter of fact, I had been missing American toilet paper since my arrival in England, i.e., even in peacetime.  If anyone ever wants to prove that the British are a masochistic people, he needs only to recall pre-war (and in some places still existent) lavatory paper. I was convinced that a lifetime of using the stuff was responsible for the British ability to endure almost any hardship with that well known stiff upper lip. 

There was one firm which printed little rhyming ditties on each sheet of the product, rather in the manner of an American maker of shaving cream who tried with versified road signs to relieve the tedium of long automobile journeys.  I can only assume that the manufacturer hoped that reading these little verses would make the product more bearable for the customers. 

It failed to work with me, and I was almost relieved when the shortage of paper made it permissible to use newspaper pages in the lavatory.  That is, if you could spare it from wrapping up your purchases of fish and meat.  Nowadays, even the change-resistant British have, for the most part, revolted, and a facsimile of the American product is in fairly general use. 

When I finally got back to England, I learned that, in almost all the packages, the catsup bottle had broken, saturating the paper with catsup.  Doug swore that he cried his first adult tears when he opened the first package. Unfortunately, because of the censor, he couldn’t even write to tell me to be more careful with the packaging.  So tragedy followed tragedy, with catsup saturating soap powder and anything else absorbent which I packed with the catsup.

 
Chapter Nineteen


My mother died in June 1944, the same month as D-Day and four months after my arrival in New York.  I am sure that my visit gladdened her last days, and I shall be eternally grateful to the British authorities whose empathy made it possible.

Mother had been ill for so long and so hopelessly that my father and I had, in essence, already done our mourning.  Therefore, when we returned from her burial in Texas, we decided that I should accept some of the invitations I had received from old college friends.  I had been told that it would be some time before a return to England could be arranged, so I had time on my hands.  My father spent a lot of his free time with his gin-rummy cronies at the Athletic Club. Off I went to the Boston area where several of my co-alumnae still lived—all by now married and with young children.

It was a delightful interval of pleasure at seeing old friends and enjoying an absence of responsibilities such as I had not experienced since the beginning of the war.  A very special treat provided for me was a party at which each guest couple brought me a shoe coupon.  I had been dismayed to learn that shoes were the only clothing item which was rationed in America.

I was turned loose in the cars of friends to run errands, meet commuting husbands at the station, and do some visiting with former professors at Wellesley.  This involved relearning how to drive on the right.  Subsequent visits back and forth have made me what I guess could be called ambidextrous with cars, and I can drive comfortably on either side of the road, with or without stick shift.  This is perhaps the only physical accomplishment about which I can boast.

After a pleasant round of visits in the Boston area, I returned to New York to await the sailing date for my return to England. Money was something of a problem.  I had been prevented by law from bringing more than 50 pounds sterling with me, and my father had just about exhausted his resources on the care of my mother.  She had had 24-hour private nursing plus the care of her maid throughout the long illness, and it was to take my father at least a year to rebuild his financial reserves.

The result of this lack of funds was that I had enough of a problem using the shoe coupons without having anything left over for new clothes.  I had brought very little in the way of dressy items and depended mostly on one good little “basic black” wool dress for my after-dark wardrobe.  One night I went to a cocktail party given by some friends who had two Siamese cats.  In the way of cats, who can tell at once if one is not a “cat person,” they climbed all over me all evening.  The next night I was invited out to dinner by old friends.  Actually, it was by the father-and-son pair I had met on the SS Washington on my return from my first visit to England.  The son, Chester, was to pick me up and take me to the apartment of his father and stepmother for dinner.

My father had gone to his club for dinner and it was the maid’s night out, so I was alone when I took my black dress out of the closet and discovered that it was literally covered with cat fur.  At that moment, the doorbell rang.  Throwing on a robe, I let Chester in and asked him to wait for me in the living room.  I frantically tried to brush off the cat fur to no avail.  In desperation, I grabbed the vacuum cleaner with its brush attachment and achieved some degree of success.  We were quite late for cocktails and had a pleasant but rather restrained dinner.

Usually, after dinner, Chester and I would stop in at a nightclub before he took me home, but tonight he silently drove directly to my father’s apartment building.  As he opened the door of the car for me, I asked if I had done something to offend him.  After a moment, he rather sulkily confided that he didn’t enjoy cooling his heels while I vacuumed my bedroom.  All was forgiven when I explained, and we had a good laugh.  Although he was a very rich man, he had the good taste not to offer me a loan.

I managed to get myself shod for the foreseeable future and began to get very anxious to return to England.  Finally, after eight months in America, I got my sailing notice.  The ship was to be the Rangi-Tiki, sailing in convoy.  We would be at sea for about two weeks before landing at Liverpool.

If I had thought the wartime Queen Mary spartan, I was in for a real shock when I boarded the Rangi-Tiki.  She had been in peacetime a New Zealand meat boat with a human capacity of fewer than 200 passengers and crew.  On this crossing, she carried about 800 passengers, all women and children except for three businessmen who didn’t qualify for or couldn’t wait for a more comfortable vessel.  The women were mostly British wives of American GI’s; they had apparently evacuated themselves and their children (some unborn at the time) to the US for the duration.  Apparently the rules about returning to England, which I had to fight so hard to circumvent, had been relaxed sufficiently to allow the women to return, with their little ones, to England. 

We slept far below deck, in the hold where the meat had been hung—the hooks were in the ceiling.  We had triple-decker bunks, row after row.  Dressing space was limited to the area between two berths.  We had communal showers, but they only had salt water.  I made friends with an English woman with two small children.  We found a bucket which we filled with fresh water at the wash basins.  Then we would soap ourselves in the shower and throw buckets of fresh water on each other to rinse off the soap and salt.




The ship was indescribably dirty.  The presence of the many military men aboard the Queen Mary had imposed a certain discipline; there was no discipline aboard the Rangi-Tiki.  The few overworked stewards simply threw up their hands in disgust, and chaos ruled supreme.  You could not find a seat that was not smeared with melted chocolate bars; so much toilet paper was unrolled in the washrooms that you returned from a visit to the lavatory with paper trailing in streamers from your heels.  Small children were being sick everywhere--when they were not screaming.  We were in slow, blacked-out convoy for two weeks of this.  There were times, I am sure, when many of us thought that perhaps bombs or torpedoes would be a relief.

Because the danger of attack increased as we neared and then entered British waters, we were told to sleep in our clothes that last night at sea.  We were due to land very early in the morning at Liverpool, where Doug was to meet me for the drive home.  I went to bed in a tweed skirt and sweater, leaving only my shoes and coat to throw on upon arising.  After a short while, my bra became uncomfortable, so I pushed the sweater up around my neck and slipped the bra off.  About 30 miles from Liverpool, on the way home in the car with Doug, I clutched my chest and let out a cry of dismay.  Doug thought I was having a heart attack and came to a screeching halt at the side of the road.  His alarm turned to hysterical laughter when he learned the reason for my agitation—I had bought my first pair of falsies in the States and had left them in my bed on the Rangi-Tiki. 

Having always been so skinny  (five foot seven and 98 pounds,) I had really been delighted to discover these very popular items available in the States. Now I was condemned to stay flat-chested for the duration of the war.  By the time I could buy new falsies, I didn’t need them because I had at last gained some weight.  I have often wondered what was the reaction of the cabin steward when he stripped my bed.  I hope he had a wife or girlfriend who could profit from my loss.

I was delighted to be home, ecstatic to see Tommy, and predictably at war with Miss Braun in no time at all.  The chief bone of contention was an object which I had lugged all the way home with me.  It was called a “Toidy-Seat.”  It was, as I am sure most parents know, a seat which could fit onto a regular commode, allowing a small child to use the same plumbing as adults without falling through. All of my friends in the States had had them for their children, and I was determined to get one home for Tommy.  Miss Braun refused to let him use it.  She claimed that sitting on his regular "potty” with his feet on the floor was a more natural position for a small child and more conducive to regularity.  I would hide the old potty; she would find it.  I would throw it away; she would buy another.  The battle of the potty went on for at least another year until Miss Braun decided that Tommy was ready for the Toidy-Seat.

Insufficient luggage capacity prevented me from bringing many other treasures home besides the Toidy-Seat, but I did bring home some lima bean and iceberg lettuce seeds for Hayward to plant.  I had never understood why we did not grow these in England.  I found out that the lima beans required a longer growing season than the English climate afforded.  An early or late frost could kill them.  The problem with the lettuces was different: the moisture so abundantly provided in that “sceptered” but damp isle produced iceberg lettuces two feet across.  I couldn’t give them away.  Nobody wanted to eat lettuce for a week, and people without their own gardens often had no refrigerators for preserving freshness of such items.
 

 
 
Chapter Twenty


In the other war, the real one outside our nursery, a new development was the advent of the rockets or V-bombs.  These were mostly limited to London or to the southern areas, so I didn’t experience them until I went to London.  One of them, the V-One I think, had an audible motor.  When the sound of the motor stopped, one dived for shelter because the bomb was about to come down.  My father-in-law slept alongside the grand piano in the music room at Corone House.  His little Skye terrier had always been able to hear the whistle of the regular bombs before his master could and had alerted him.  They would both dive under the piano until the raid was over.  Now Skye learned to recognize when the V-One engine cut out, and he would bark furiously to warn his master.  The V-Two was a different matter.  If you heard it at all, you were safe, because it had already exploded.  Skye was never able to hear it before it landed.  A cartoon in a London newspaper at the time depicted all of the pedestrians on a crowded London street as having long rabbit ears as a result of straining to hear the engines of the V-One cut off.

In spite of the V-bombs, the smell of victory was in the air when I returned in the autumn of 1944.  Although the enormous effort of preparing for D-Day, to say nothing of the uncertainties of its outcome, was of paramount concern, the general attitude seemed to indicate that the end was in sight. However, life didn’t get any easier on the home front, except perhaps psychologically. 

Because petrol was so severely rationed, Doug had bought me, at a farm auction sale, a dog-cart, a light two-wheeled vehicle.  Hayward scrounged some red and yellow paint from somewhere and made the cart look like new.  During my absence, Doug had bought a horse to ride for exercise, since we could grow a bit of hay on the few acres we hadn’t rented to Mr. Chatham.  Hayward hitched the horse to the dog-cart and took me shopping in Cheltenham, he holding the reins and sitting solemnly beside me, whip upright.  We looked like something straight out of a Victorian novel.

One day, out of a clear blue sky, I received some 30 to 40 letters.  These were followed on subsequent days by many more letters until there were finally several hundred.  After reading the first few, I was able to piece together what had happened.  In my senior year at Wellesley, I had written the lyrics to a song for a college song contest.  A talented fellow student wrote the music.  The theme of the lyrics was the variety of clothes we Wellesley girls wore on a rainy day.  The contest was a fun thing, not meant to produce anything remotely serious, but our song won first prize (no doubt for silliness) and the lyrics were printed over my name in the next issue of the college magazine.  That was the end of the matter as far as I or anyone else was concerned until seven years later in 1944.
 


In that year, LIFE Magazine apparently ran an article on the zany clothes worn by college students.  This prompted someone (I know not whom) to dredge up the lyrics of our old song and to send them to the Letters-to-the-Editor column of LIFE.  There they were printed with my (maiden) name and Wellesley College below—no year or date of any kind—to be read by thousands of homesick servicemen around the world.

Hundreds of them wrote to me at Wellesley, and the college forwarded the letters to me, using the military mail service (APO.)   I had letters from sailors and Marines on ships and on remote islands in the Pacific; from soldiers in training camps in the States; and even from Airmen stationed right there in England!—in short, from wherever there were lonely young men, starved for mail, looking for a young college girl as a pen pal.

Those letters really made me realize that in wartime we not only send our young people off to shoot and be shot at; we also send them off to homesickness and loneliness.  These young men did not write flippant or flirtatious letters.  They wrote of their favorite sports and hobbies, their musical preferences, their hometowns, their dreams and plans for the future.  What they seemed to want was to be answered in kind by someone of their own age.  I would have given much to be able to write to each of them, but aside from the fact that it would be such a monumental task that I would never finish before the war ended, I knew that they didn’t want to hear from a seven-year-married woman with a child, who happened to be living in England.

I wrote an explanatory letter to LIFE, and the magazine published it.  I have no way of knowing how many young men read it or how many waited in vain for an answer to their letter without ever knowing that they wouldn’t have wanted it anyway.  All in all, it was a moving and an enlightening experience.  My hope is that some young women might read this and then sit down to write a young man somewhere in the service.  If you don’t know one, the various services can provide a list of names to write to.  It may turn out to be as rewarding for the writer as for the recipient of the letter.  End of sermon. 

What did I do, you might well ask, to help provide aid and comfort to my compatriots stationed in England and waiting for D-Day?  Well, aside from making many of them welcome in our home, I responded to a request concerning pumpkin pies.  My friends who managed the club we frequented wanted to invite their American friends stationed in the area to an American Thanksgiving Dinner.  They had obtained a typical menu and had almost everything well in hand, but they had no recipe for pumpkin pie.  They called me to ask if I had one.  I did, although I had never made one—a fact I neglected to mention.

When I arrived the next morning with the recipe, I was conducted to the kitchen where I learned with dismay that I was supposed to make the pies.  The Americans had provided mess-kitchen-sized cans of pumpkin, pastry ingredients, spices, everything necessary to make the pies except a cook who knew how to make them.  I had to multiply my recipe for one pie sufficiently to feed 100 homesick Americans.  We had no calculators in those days, and arithmetic had never been my strong point, but I managed somehow.  I don’t know if my effort, especially the pastry, would have stood comparison with Mom’s back home, but it certainly was not left on any plates, so I was relieved and satisfied.  The pumpkin pies joined a cheese soufflé as one of my culinary efforts which turned out so well the first time that I have never tried either again.  I believe in leaving success unchallenged by an attempt at repetition. 

The unstinting generosity of the Americans made them very popular guests in English homes, including ours.  Although none of us liked to admit it, it was much easier to offer hospitality to guests who invariably arrived bearing gifts than if it had been otherwise.  Firm friendships were formed on be basis of a piece of steak or a pound of butter just as many a romance was launched by a pair of nylons.

There were of course incidents which did not enhance mutual admiration between the “Yanks” and their hosts.  Some GI’s, stationed or on leave in London, had an unfortunate habit of waving a fistful of pound notes at taxi drivers, thus enticing them away from British would-be fares. I deplored this but tried to defend my countrymen by saying that the greed of the cab drivers was equally responsible.  This only earned me a lecture on the difference in pay of the poor Englishman compared to the grossly overpaid Yank.

A lot of American servicemen had trouble dealing with the pub closing hours which were decreed by law.  Some were accustomed to drinking at home; others were not.  In either case, the practice of knocking back as many drinks as possible before the publican called “Time, Gentlemen, Please” resulted in a lot of very tipsy GI’s on the streets just after closing time.  Englishmen drank as much but had learned to pace themselves to accommodate the abrupt closing of the bars. 

On the whole, I like to believe that many more friendships than enmities arose from the “American invasion” of Great Britain.  At least, I often pointed out, we didn’t burn down Buckingham Palace as the Brits had done to our White House in 1812. 

Some of those friendships came to an abrupt and tragic end on the beaches of Normandy or elsewhere in or over Europe during the following months.  But others have endured the test of time and distance.  Witness the number of reunions which have taken place.  One that particularly interested me was held in September 1986 in Southampton, England.  The participants were the many English war brides still happily married to their Yank husbands and by now veteran residents of the USA.   I have to wonder how many American brides who married Englishmen just in time for the war would convene for a similar get-together.  I am sure I am not the only one in existence, but I have never read or heard of another.  I wish I had, for reunions for one are not much fun. 

The last months of the war, including the liberation of Paris and culminating in VE-Day and VJ-Day, must have so preoccupied all of us that I cannot seem to dredge up memories of anything else from that period.  One day it was over.  Now we had to cope with Peace. 
 
 
Chapter Twenty-one


Although to others, wiser and more informed in world affairs than I was, the outbreak of World War II had been the culmination of a long chain of events, to me it had seemed to happen very suddenly.  One day we were at peace; the next day we were at war, and things changed rapidly.  The end of the war was not quite the same.  One day we were at war and the next day at peace, but the changes for those who had stayed at home came very gradually.  The shops were not suddenly bursting with unrationed goodies, and even demobilization seemed, especially to those awaiting the return of loved ones, to take forever. 

There were, however, some opportunities which presented themselves to a few of the luckiest among us.  One of these was travel outside England.  We were among those lucky ones because Douglas entered into business negotiations with several foreign firms, which necessitated his presence on the Continent.  I was allowed to accompany him (locking me up in a dungeon would have been the only alternative) and was, therefore, afforded a very early glimpse of post-war Paris and eventually several years of residence in both Switzerland and Spain. 

The French visit introduced me to that country’s wartime version of coffee.  I was told, and found no reason to disbelieve, that it was made from acorns.  It was accompanied by a hard rusk-like piece of bread, no butter, and a thickened sugarless substance to take the place of jam.  From what fruit the jam substitute was made I was quite unable to imagine. Wistfully remembering the croissants, brioches, and wonderful sweet butter, with steaming cups of café au lait, which had made the Continental breakfast such a treat on my previous visits to France, I concluded that, austere as life had been in England, the food-loving French had probably suffered more than we had, at least as far as culinary deprivation was concerned.  Paris had not been bombed, but it had been occupied.  Having to surrender their sweet butter and croissants to the occupiers must have been very traumatic for its citizens. 

Having decided all of the foregoing on the basis of one hotel breakfast, I was shortly given a lesson in what a true daughter of France can accomplish in her kitchen, war or no war.  I spent a week alone in Paris under the avuncular wing of a M. Cocherie, Doug’s French business associate, and his charming wife.  I slept in my hotel room but lunched and dined at the Cocherie house every day.  I was completely bemused by the ambiguities in their lifestyle.  They were very rich.  They had a whole house in the elegant suburb of Neuilly with a garden overlooking the Seine.  They had two cars, with his and her chauffeurs.  They had several maids to do the housework and clean-ups in the kitchen.  But Mme. Cocherie cooked every morsel of food that was served at her table. 

She was a brilliant and gifted cook, although a little heavy on the garlic.  Doug swore that it was exuding from my pores when he returned.  I did not know and certainly did not ask how Madame got the raw materials for her exquisite cuisine so soon after the war.  I assume, but cannot say for sure, that there was a thriving black market in Paris for those who could afford it.  I am sure that some of you will think that I am very naïve if I don’t think that such a black market existed in England.  All I can say is that I never personally saw it or heard of it.  Of course, some people had a little farmer tucked away who would supply them with the occasional pound of butter or some cream.  But as far as I know, these were small individual transactions, and there was nothing like a readily accessible black market such as I had heard existed in other countries. 

Mme. Cocherie took me to her dressmaker where I had a lovely black wool suit made to order with nary a mention of coupons.  The unbidden thought that perhaps occupation wasn’t so bad after all popped into my unruly head.  It made me feel so like a traitor that I was about to look for a wall to stand up against and be shot. 

The Cocheries took us with them to a small hotel near Metz in Alsace Lorraine, where several of M. Cocherie’s friends and their wives joined us for an overnight stay.  We had a positively sumptuous dinner which featured an enormous langouste and the wonderful wines of the region, and the next day the men went to hunt wild boar in the forest. The ladies took me on a tour of the village, which had suffered a good deal of war damage.  As I contemplated the pock-marks in the wall of a small corner house, its owner informed me that at least half of them were from World War I. This lovely area on the French-German border has had to suffer the ravages of war many times over. I wondered if one could hope that there would ever be a last one. 
 
Chapter Twenty-two


Shortly after our return from France, sometime in 1946, the United States government leased the Swedish liner Gripsholm and made it available on a first-come, first-served basis to Americans or relatives of Americans who wished to travel to the United States.  It was a one-way offer, but transatlantic air travel was beginning to be available by then, and I would be able to return to England by air.  In any case, I applied for Tommy and myself as I was anxious for my father to meet his grandson who was by now four and one-half years old.

Choice of cabins was not available, but women with small children were promised the more comfortable quarters.  So much for promises.  Tommy and I were put into a tiny cabin which must have formerly been in steerage.  This we were to share with an elderly lady in unbelievably cramped conditions.  I protested vociferously to the purser, and we were moved the next day to a spacious upper-deck cabin with a private bathroom.  I shared the cabin with two other ladies, and a crib was put in for Tommy.

This incident only served to confirm my growing and long-since sustained conviction that it is stupid and vain to protest things that cannot be helped, like the vicissitudes of war.  But it is equally stupid not to speak up loud and clear when promises are ignored and there is no good reason for accepting less than that to which one is entitled.

The crossing was uneventful except for the hazard of Tommy’s agility in climbing the deck rails to indulge his fascination with the ship’s cleavage of the water.  After several exhausting days and nights dreaming of his heels’ disappearing over the side, I put him into one of those child harnesses with a leash.  This drew critical comment from my cabin-mates, but I didn’t hear any offers to take him off my hands for a brief respite.

Aside from the fact that it was physically exhausting to keep up with an agile four-year-old, it was a new and not unpleasing experience for me to have Tommy all to myself for the first time.  No Miss Braun, no servants, no Daddy—just the two of us.  We began getting to know each other much better than our few hours on Miss Braun’s days off had afforded.  I learned how inquisitive a small boy can be and how poorly equipped an adult can be to answer all the questions those young minds can formulate.  An example:  Out on the deck, gazing at the horizon, I somehow mentioned that we were traveling west.

“What is west, Mummy?”
“West is a direction, Darling.”
“What is a direction?”
“Well………….we are facing west now.”
“I don’t see west.  What does it look like?”
“Well…………..we can’t actually see it.  We are just looking west.”
“Why can’t I see it?  Is it too far away?”
“Well……………not exactly………  Tell you what; when you are a bit older and go to school, they’ll teach you all about west.”
“All right, Mummy.”  Sly smile.  “And I’ll come home and teach you.”

The first night out, in the Irish Sea, we ran into a storm, and it was very rough.  The next morning, the lady in our cabin gave Tommy an apple to eat before we went up to breakfast.  As we made our way into the dining saloon towards our table, I noticed how many people seemed to be absent and how green some of those present looked.  In the few seconds that I had taken my eyes off my child, he too had turned green and was suddenly sick.  "Look, Mummy,” he crowed, “the apple!”  The few people in our vicinity departed abruptly.  Tommy recovered just as quickly and enjoyed a large breakfast.  I learned a useful trick which I pass on to those with small children or pets.  The stewards all had boxes of soap powder handy and immediately dumped the contents on an “accident” which the soap powder rendered quite inoffensive until the mop and bucket arrived.
 

 
Chapter Twenty-three


My father was delighted to see us, enchanted with his grandson, and in much better financial condition than on the occasion of my previous visit.  He insisted on engaging a woman to look after Tommy so that I could do some shopping and visit my friends.  We found a very personable lady who had experience with children and settled down to enjoy ourselves.  We lived only about ten minutes’ walk from Central Park, and each day Tommy and his companion set off for the playground there. 

After several days, the new nurse came to me with a mild complaint.  It seemed that they would have to allow more time for their visits to the park.  Tommy’s rosy cheeks (all those hours outside in the pram) caused many people, chiefly elderly ladies, to stop them to ask where he had acquired such a complexion.  Upon being told that he was English, they would insist on hearing him speak and were so fascinated with his English accent that the poor nurse and her charge often never got to the park at all, but had to turn around and come home to lunch.  Tommy’s appearance did little to suggest Britain’s wartime privations.

In case anyone is wondering what had happened to Miss Braun, the answer is that she was still with us.  Because we were to be away for a few weeks, she had announced that she would take a holiday while we were gone. Since she had refused to take one for the duration of the war (afraid I would lock her out?), I felt she was justified and resigned myself to her being there to greet us upon our return. She was.

The return marked my first transatlantic flight.  Looking back after all these years, I am tempted to quote that astute Frenchman who commented on the fact that the more things change, the more they remain the same.  The airline managed to prove the forthcoming popular phrase that “if you have time to spare, go by air.”

 We were supposed to fly to Shannon, stop there briefly, and proceed to London.  Upon arrival at Shannon, we learned that our plane was going directly to Amsterdam and that the last plane to London for the day had already departed.  We must spend the night and take a plane to London the next day.  “Spend the night where?” I asked.  Shannon was a small airport in those days, and there was no hotel in the vicinity—at least not one that could accommodate us that night.  After endless telephoning around the area by the airline’s agent, we were put into a black Daimler limousine/taxi and taken about 20 miles to a very rustic fishing lodge, which was without electricity and very short on plumbing.  We went supperless to bed in a freezing bedroom and fell asleep to the sound of the relentless rain which had been falling since our arrival in Ireland.

The next morning we were jolted out of sleep at six o’clock by a loud knocking on our door and the news that the taxi was on its way to pick us up.  After such an early and urgent trip to the airport, we expected to enplane for London immediately.  (I told you this was my first transatlantic flight.)  Of course no such thing happened.  We sat in the airport lounge until two o’clock that afternoon.

First of all, our plane was very late in arriving from New York.  Then a religious war almost broke out when I learned the cause for further delay.  A group of Catholic clergymen, including a bishop, had arrived in Shannon that morning en route to Rome, and the local town and church officials had insisted on delaying their departure (on our plane) long enough to regale them with a sumptuous lunch.
 

 
Chapter Twenty-four


The next few months were spent getting used to peacetime and enjoying the gradual return of some of the things we had lost during the war.  Rationing was still with us, and it seemed at times that austerity had become a permanent way of life.  Until all our military were demobbed, we still had to maintain them abroad, and this meant continued shortages on the home front.  So it was still Spam and canned US pork-sausage meat, lend/lease staples which, upon the surrender of “points,” had augmented our meager meat rations over the years.

“Points” were a slightly different type of rationing for those items not covered by our regular ration books.  They could be used at any merchant’s, not just where one was registered.  This gave a little more range to our foraging.  I cannot face Spam to this day, but there were many British children who were quite literally weaned onto it and continued to love it for the rest of their lives. 

Gelatin desserts were another treat.  They became almost extinct but were available just often enough to be remembered and considered a rare delicacy.  When my son made a visit to the States at the age of 12, he unwittingly offended his host at dinner in a fine restaurant.  The poor man wanted to order one of those seven-layered ice cream parfaits for him, but Tommy insisted on Jell-O!  He still likes it as much as he loathes bread-and-butter pudding which was Miss Braun’s culinary tour de force.  It is, I believe, the only unhappy memory he has of her, as she would have died before she would have spanked him.

More important than the return or the delayed return of prewar pleasures was the British electorate’s rejection of the indomitable patriot and statesman who had led them to victory.  The defeat of Mr. Churchill at the polls boggled my mind and came close to negating many of the virtues which I had ascribed to the British character.  Which is another indication, I must admit, of my political ignorance.  Eventually I realized that I had underestimated (or worse, ignored) the festering unhappiness and unrest of the so-called lower classes which expressed itself at the post-war polls.  I came to believe that Mr. Churchill was not so much rejected by an ungrateful nation as that his party of the privileged was ousted by the underprivileged who had put their lives on the line for their country.  I recalled the name of the little mining village, “Pity Me.”

At any rate, the post-war elections and the continuing austerity disenchanted many Britons whose chief preoccupation became how to get out of England for the longest time possible with the 50-pounds-sterling monetary export which was in force for quite some time.
 
Chapter Twenty-five


One of the first to flee to the pleasures of plenty was my father-in-law, who betook himself and his younger daughter to Wengen, Switzerland.  Wengen was a ski resort much favored by the British before the war.  As Doug was traveling all over the Continent and back and forth to the States on business, he decided to send me and Tommy to join his father and sister in the Alps.  Thus began my long (although, in retrospect, rather dull) love affair with that tiny country which always manages to remain an island of peace (and profit!) when the whole continent around it is engulfed in the turmoil of war.

The fact that my father was able to send me enough money for an extended visit to Switzerland provided an opportunity to bring about a final separation between Tommy and Miss Braun.  I told her that we were going to, in effect, close the house for an indefinite period, and she accepted the inevitable at last—along with a very generous severance check. 

I don’t want to put Miss Braun behind us without paying due tribute to her dedication and to her true worth to Tommy.  She had no peer in these areas, and though she and I had our differences, her devotion to the best interests of her charge was never in question.  Lately, however, we had been forced to admit that Tommy was not as advanced in some areas as other children his age, and we had to put the blame on Miss Braun.  In her, (no doubt, subconscious), desire to keep him dependent on her, she had failed to teach him to tie his shoes and to perform other simple tasks which he should be able to do for himself.  We were proved right in this conclusion—within a short period of separation from Miss Braun, he could do all those things which he should have been able to do much earlier.  In no way, however, does this outweigh the valuable things she did teach him or the really quite extraordinary physical condition which her nurturing care had produced.  His cheeks were so rosy that they show up in the black-and-white photographs I still have of him, and he had his first cold at the age of nine when he was in boarding school.

We arrived in Wengen late on an afternoon in December.  We had flown to Zurich from Croyden Airport near London.  Since our take-off had been delayed for at least two hours (always a joy to a mother with a small child,) we arrived in Zurich too late to continue our trip by train up to Wengen. We had been prepared for this contingency and had been recommended to spend the night, if necessary, at the Dolder Grand Hotel. 

This hotel was an experience in itself, especially to people from England who had been a little short on luxury for several years.  It even had, for use in summer, an outdoor swimming pool which had a wave-making machine.  I must admit that the average long-suffering Englishman, with his 50-pound monetary limit, was unlikely to get anywhere near the Dolder Grand.  I was immensely fortunate to have the advantage of my father’s generosity with the almighty American dollar which could travel anywhere.

After one night in the lap of such luxury, we took the electric train to Bern and thence successive trains to Wengen.  The first train went to Interlaken.  There one changed to a train to Lauterbrunnen, from which one took another train to Wengen.  The scenery was breathtaking, especially for a Texan.  The highest mountain I had ever seen was either in the Ozarks or in Scotland.   When I proudly showed the Alps to my father a year or so later, he remarked that they were indeed impressive but pointed out that I had never seen the Rockies.

Our hotel’s porter met us at the station in Wengen, and we followed him on foot to the hotel.  There were no motor vehicles in Wengen.  We were shown to a pleasant twin-bedded room with a private bathroom in which Tommy saw his first bidet.  For those many Americans who do not yet know what a bidet is, you will have to draw your own conclusions as a result of the following incident, take a trip to Europe,  or visit your local plumber’s showroom. 

I was anxious to get unpacked, to give Tommy a bath and the light supper I had ordered sent up to the room, and to get dressed for dinner.  In order to speed things up, I started the bath water and told Tommy to get undressed.  He wandered off into the bathroom and came running back to ask me what was that thing next to the washbasin.  Realizing that he was referring to the bidet, I told him briefly, but in essence quite truthfully, that it was mostly for ladies.  What did they do with it, he wanted to know.  So I said they filled it with water and then sat on it to wash their “wee-wees” which was our family name for that part of one’s anatomy.  Next, of course, was could he wash his wee-wee in it, and I, preoccupied with unpacking and putting things away, said yes.  Longish silence from the bathroom until a piping voice informed me, “Mummy, my wee-wee is too short!”  Laughing, I plucked him from the bidet and put him in the bathtub.

Finally, he was fed and tucked into bed, and the floormaid having promised to listen for him, I joined Mr. Swan and Mary for dinner.  During after-dinner coffee in the hotel lounge, I met a charming middle-aged Irishman with whom I and a group of others spent a pleasant evening getting acquainted.  When we called it a day and went upstairs, Patrick and I discovered that we were next-door neighbors.  As he had been in Wengen for several days, he knew the ropes and volunteered to steer us to the proper areas of children’s ski-school and beginners’ class the next morning.  For the next few days, Tommy and I labored in our respective classes while Patrick enjoyed the more advanced ski slopes. 

Mr. Swan was busily occupied with curling, and Mary was kept busy by several young men, who came and departed but never left her without an escort.  Indeed, she married one of them, a young Swiss from Zurich, a couple of years later.

Patrick joined Tommy and me for tea (which was supper for Tommy) and after dinner, he took me out to sample the local bars.  A few pleasant days passed thus, and the day came when Patrick had to leave.  We walked over to the railroad station to see him off, and it was not until we could see his train rounding the last curve, that Patrick turned to me and said with a curious urgency, “Velma, there’s just one thing I must ask you before I go.”  As there had been no hint of anything other than casual friendship between us, I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about, and it was with a certain reluctance that I said, “Ask away.”  “What,” he demanded to know, “is Tommy’s wee-wee too short for?”  I explained, and we were both laughing as he boarded the train.  That was the last I ever saw of Patrick.  What a nice man he was, with such a sense of humor and of the timing to go with it!

Mr. Swan and Mary also departed, and Tommy and I moved to a very comfortable but less expensive and chic hotel.  I found a reliable Swiss girl who would take Tommy to ski-school and spend the rest of the morning with him. I tried the less perilous runs with my own class, which had at last graduated from the nursery slopes.

In this manner, January and the first part of February passed very pleasantly with both Tommy and his mother improving their skiing prowess and getting to know, by virtue of our extended sojourn, some of the year-round residents of this beautiful Alpine resort.  Wengen was a wonderful place for me to wean both Tommy and myself from Miss Braun.  Since no automobiles or motorized vehicles existed in the town in those days, one did not have to keep a constant eye on children.  Before long, everyone knew Tommy, and I could go shopping or curl up with a book in the afternoons, knowing that he could play in the snow in the hotel garden, ride his sled up and down the nursery slopes with other children, or even wander about in the village with no more supervision than the kindly eyes of the shopkeepers or the local photographer who, by the way, found him to be a favorite subject.  I have some delightful photographs from the association which sprang up between the two.

From time to time, Doug dropped in on us for a day or two, but otherwise we were quite alone and undisturbed in our Alpine Shangri-La until one day in the latter part of February.  I awoke with a dark suspicion that all was not well and rang for the chambermaid.  I asked if she could find me a thermometer, and she did.  I had a temperature of 103 degrees.  My younger sister-in-law had returned to Wengen and was staying in the same hotel, so I sent for her to take charge of Tommy while the doctor was summoned for a look at me. 

This good man, well-meaning but essentially a bone-setter, pronounced that I had a severe case of “La Grippe” and sent for a nurse to give me what I can only describe as a medieval treatment called “cupping.”  Long paper spills were set alight and the flame allowed to burn for a few moments inside small glass cups.  The cups, when sufficiently heated, were then inverted on my bare chest.  The suction thus created caused the flesh to rise within the cups.  If the flesh turned purple, it meant that I was ill with a respiratory disorder.  Two days of this determined what I already knew, i.e., that I was indeed very ill with a respiratory disorder.  The doctor at last ordered me into the hospital.

Getting to the hospital was not an easy feat in those days in Wengen.  First I had to be loaded onto a stretcher and then, swathed in blankets, taken on the hotel’s luggage luge to the railway station where I was placed on a train for the 15-minute ride down to Lauterbrunnen.  There an ambulance waited to take me farther down the mountain to the hospital in Interlaken.  It was a Catholic hospital, staffed by nuns who fed me herbal teas to reduce my fever.  My doctor was a leonine man in a wheelchair.  He was pushed around to visit his patients by a young doctor who was his apparent protégé.  I am willing to swear that these two were models for Mr. Lionel Barrymore and Mr. Richard Chamberlain in their roles in “Young Dr. Kildare.”  I am positive that whoever conceived that TV series had been a patient in the Interlaken Hospital.

I did indeed have “La Grippe” accompanied by pleurisy, and I was in the hospital for three weeks.  My sister-in-law later told me that they did not expect me to survive when I was admitted, so I must have a lot to thank the young doctor and his mentor for.  The nurses were wonderfully gentle and kind and took very good care of me.
 
 
Chapter Twenty-six


I spent several weeks recuperating, during which time Doug dropped in on us for a visit.  As soon as I was strong enough, Tommy and I returned to England.  We found that we could get an overnight sleeper express from Interlaken to London via Le Havre.  It turned out to be an interesting trip in more ways than one.  As we had flown from England to Switzerland, we had not needed a transit visa stamped in our passports to permit us to travel across France.  The same was not true of train travel, and I had just got Tommy tucked into his upper berth when we reached the border where the French immigration/customs officials boarded the train.

When I heard them in the next compartment, I realized that I had neglected to get the transit visa.  I immediately implemented my method for dealing with foreigners, which I described in an earlier chapter.  Telling Tommy to pretend to be asleep, I opened the door and handed the uniformed man my passport.  He leafed through it and took a breath in order to ask me where was my visa.  Before he could speak, I hissed, “L’enfant dort” [the child is asleep] with my fingers to my lips.  Every time he started to say, “But, Madame. . . “ I repeated the phrase and the gesture.  Eventually came the surrendering shrug; he handed me back my passport, turned smartly on his heels, and departed.  Since there was no further passport inspection until we reached England, we got through France without a transit visa.  The requirement for transit visas was later rescinded.

Another incident occurred on this journey, and because it consists of a mystery which to this day remains unsolved, it has continued to hold an important place in my collection of travel stories.  I had a very distinctive wardrobe trunk.  There was no way it could be confused with another trunk, and once seen, it was not soon forgotten.  I watched that trunk being loaded into the baggage car of the express train from Interlaken to London.  The only stops were very brief pauses to take on the French officials at the border and to load the train itself onto the cross-Channel ferry which took it from Le Havre to Dover, whence it departed at once for London.

Upon arrival at Victoria Station in London, all the luggage from the baggage car was placed in an enclosure until claimed by the owner.  After a sufficient wait, my trunk had not arrived at the enclosure.  The baggage master asked me to describe it.  When I had done so, he said that that trunk had arrived five hours earlier and, being unclaimed, had been sent to a storage room for unclaimed baggage.  “Impossible,” said I.  The trunk had been on the train with me.  The baggage master insisted that I follow him to the storage room, and there was my trunk.  I still lie awake at night trying to figure out how my trunk got off an express train and reached London five hours ahead of me.

Home at The Gorse, I not only faced a house without help of any kind except for the Haywards, but soon found myself to be pregnant as a result of Doug’s brief visit.  Unfortunately, I lost this child, and it was discovered that one lobe of one lung was collapsed as a result of the pleurisy.  The doctors (bless their hearts) recommended that I return to Switzerland where I could get nourishing food and more sunshine.  I was ordered to take long walks in the mountains, breathing deeply to reinflate my lung.

My father had flown over to England, concerned for my health.  He made it possible for me to rent a very nice chalet in Wengen and to employ an excellent housekeeper to look after Tommy and me.  I was accompanied by a friend from England who was delighted to spend several weeks in Switzerland with no financial outlay for hotel accommodations.  We walked and walked during the beautiful summer months, picnicking or having lunch in tiny mountain villages.  My lung did indeed reinflate—how could it not?

The summer season in Wengen was very different from winter.  It was essentially a ski resort, and the few summer visitors were mostly climbers or people who were just enroute to the top of the huge glacier on the Jungfrau.  It was a much quieter season marked by the melodious sound of cowbells, and it afforded me the opportunity to get to know the residents much better.  In those days, before the airplane had made neighbors of us all, the Europeans were slow to invite strangers into their homes.  They would meet you in the bars and cafes, but it took a long time before you were honored at the family table.  I was delighted when this finally happened, and this acceptance richly enhanced my time in Switzerland.

 I must, in all honesty, confess that the Swiss do live up to their reputation of being rather on the conservative side (not to say dull.)   As we all know, their women at that time did not have the right to vote.  But they were very caring and kind people, and I am glad I had a chance to be more than just a tourist to some of them.

While I was thus enjoying myself in my Alpine aerie, Doug was becoming more and more involved in a business deal with the Franco government in Spain.  It finally became apparent that we should prepare to spend at least a year or two there as the firm had contracted to do extensive road construction work.  And so, after nearly two years, the Swiss idyll ended.
 
Chapter Twenty-seven


Having spent my life trying to curb my tendencies toward hyperbole and embellishment, I have a healthy respect for the masters of understatement. I was therefore very proud of the sentence with which I originally started this segment.  It read:  “Switzerland had not prepared me for Franco’s Spain.”  Unfortunately, I must abandon that statement because, in truth, nothing in my entire life had prepared me for the Spain I encountered in 1948.  I can, however, say that coming directly from a squeaky-clean Switzerland, where poverty and crime appeared non-existent, to a Spain still suffering from the results of a devastating civil war, provided a contrast of such proportions that I was plunged into a renewed bout of culture shock.  Switzerland (which, of course, had remained at peace and had suffered no war damage) had trains that ran on time, streets that were nearly empty by ten p.m., and such a well regulated way of life as to be almost boring.  It was the worst possible jumping-off place for the Spanish experience in store for me.

I am sure that almost everyone is familiar with Murphy’s Law, but for the benefit of those who are not, it simply states that anything that can possibly go wrong will.  I have always assumed that Murphy was an Irishman, and although at the time of our move to Spain I had never heard of Murphy’s Law, my two visits to Ireland would have made it seem quite logical that the Law would have originated in that green and frustrating land.

I am still willing to recognize Ireland as the natural birthplace of Murphy’s Law, but a couple of years ago, my son acquainted me with a comment an unidentified source had added to Mr. Murphy’s pronouncement.  Put succinctly, it stated that Murphy was an optimist.  I am convinced that this “rider” originated in the Spain of the late 1940’s.  The saga of our two years there is a litany of mishaps on every possible level from the ridiculous to the very serious, if not tragic.

It would be charitable of me to credit most of the miseries and misfortunes we suffered in Spain to the lingering effects of the terrible civil war the country had undergone.  This was true of many which were mere inconveniences, but there was really no excuse for just as many others.  I can only hope that some of the grievances to which I refer were not indicative of the character of the Spanish people, but were the direct results of the regime under which they lived at the time.

We didn’t make the move to Spain all at once but in a series of visits designed to get our cars there, find housing, and return to England to bring out the things we needed to set up our household.  Our troubles started enroute to Madrid in my small car which Doug had brought over to Switzerland from England.  In it, accompanied by my father who was visiting from the States, we set off for Spain and, ultimately, Madrid. 

All went well until we were trying to make the town of Zaragossa before dark one evening.  Just outside a small village in what must have been at that time one of the most desolate areas of northern Spain, we sprang a leak in an oil pipeline and just managed to coast into the village before losing every drop of our oil.  There was a garage of sorts with a pit dug into the dirt floor to enable the mechanic to work on a car from underneath.  There was, however, no mechanic, just a young woman who sold gasoline from the village’s single pump.  Her husband, the mechanic, was away.

Almost the entire population, including many children, gathered to watch the Englishman handle his predicament.  Doug located the leak but could find nothing in the garage with which to repair it.  We were on the verge of despair when I remembered some sticky stuff I had for repairing broken fingernails, a product of my last visit to the States.  Doug tore a handkerchief into strips, saturated them with the whole bottle of sticky stuff, and wound them around the pipe where the leak was.  By now it was quite late, and we needed a place to catch a few hours of rest until daylight when, we hoped,  the stuff would have dried and hardened.

There was no hotel or guest house of any kind, but the villagers made us as comfortable as their limited means would allow.  They produced their most comfortable armchairs for us to sit in in the office of the garage.  To my amusement the next morning, I learned that, had a bedroom been available, they would have offered it to me and my father.  Because I was so solicitous of him, they had assumed that he was my husband and that Doug was my brother!  (Not, I hoped, my son.)  In the morning, lo and behold!, the strips had hardened sufficiently to enable the pipe to function without leakage, and we made it all the way to Madrid.  A blowtorch was required to remove our improvised repair work!
 
Chapter Twenty-eight


When we arrived in Madrid we stayed at a very good hotel while Doug introduced my father and me to the sights and customs of Spain.  His frequent business trips had given him some familiarity with the language, and I profited greatly from the years I had spent studying it in college.  As was usual with me, my accent was much better than my vocabulary and grammar, but the natives appreciated the former and didn’t seem to care about the latter.

Without any doubt, the most striking aspect of a first visit to Spain, especially to an American, was the overwhelming number of beggars.  I had, as a child of the depression, seen a few beggars; I couldn’t recall seeing any in England—war tends to find something better for almost everyone to do—and I had never seen one in Switzerland where I believe they were as extinct as dinosaurs.  In Spain, it seemed at times that at least half of the populace was in the begging business.  This, I was told, was because of the huge number of people of Moorish descent.  (A visit to Morocco many years later confirmed what I had at the time thought to be a rather prejudiced characterization of the Moorish people.)

To live in Spain, one simply had to learn how to deal with the beggars.  I had a rather shocking initiation the day after my arrival.  I was seated at a table at a sidewalk café when a very old lady, of at least 80 years, toothless and very wrinkled, approached me with outstretched hand.  In one arm nestled a baby of about three months.  As I fished for change, I started to give an admiring glance at the baby, which I assumed to be the great-grandchild of its bearer.  The baby was contentedly chewing on something which, to my horror, I realized was a long, thin, wrinkled bare breast!  I hastily put some coins in her hand and turned in dismay to Doug and an English friend of his who had been in Spain for years.

The friend explained to me that babies were rented from their mothers for use in begging and that beggars like the old crone I had just seen would do anything for shock value.  It had certainly worked with me.  I was to learn further that the children who begged in the streets were employed by men who ran gangs of child beggars and that the money I gave to a child was immediately taken around the corner and turned over to his boss.  I have seen a child turn up at my door barefoot, begging for shoes.  Having given him a pair of Tommy’s, I have then seen the same child turn up, barefoot, at a friend’s door a few hours later.

Reading Dickens in school had somehow not prepared me for facing the reality of organized begging, run by a master.  Moorish women selling carnations abounded at places like the outside of the bullring and nightclubs.  They could throw a flower with a pin in it in such a skillful way that it would attach itself to your collar or lapel.  Then they would claim that you had bought it and should pay for it.  You had to learn to throw it on the ground very quickly and be tough enough to endure the resultant vituperation.  The persistence and ingenuity of the beggars, irritating as it was, aroused a certain grudging admiration which one had to force oneself to overcome.

Such was not the case with the thieves.  I shall never forgive those who stole Tommy’s puppy at least five times. After taking the dog, they would wait a few hours and then send someone to the door saying they had seen our little dog and could get it back for us at a price.  We ransomed it over and over again, but inevitably the day came when it was not returned, and we had to assume that it had been sold or, unthinkably, eaten!  We could only hope that the poor thing had found a good (and more permanent) home.  This was, especially for Tommy, one of the tragic extremes to which I have referred.  He was heartbroken, but we could see no point in getting him another puppy.

The maids in Spain like to spread their white laundry on bushes around the garden so that the sun will bleach it as it dries.  Doug’s underwear was stolen so often that I had to insist that all the wash be hung on lines which were in the shade but visible from the windows.

In laying straight lines for road building, Doug’s workers stretched string between wooden pegs.  Pegs and string would disappear overnight until a night watchman was hired.  One also employed a watchman to patrol the streets of one’s neighborhood.  He kept the key to your garden door or apartment building and came running when you clapped your hands loudly.  With much bowing and scraping, he opened your door and wished you a good night, implying that you could sleep soundly and safely only because of his ever-watchful presence.  He was probably right; I hate to think how long we would have avoided being robbed or burgled if we had stopped paying for the service.  I should say here that we never feared or heard of violence in Spain.
 
Chapter Twenty-nine


The stealing became a problem only after we had moved into our own house.  Meanwhile, we were still in the hotel and just getting acquainted with some of the other customs of this colorful country. Among the more striking differences from other places we had been were the hours for lunch and dinner.  Lunch was rarely served before two o’clock, and restaurants didn’t open for dinner until ten o’clock at night.  My father simply could not and would not adapt to these hours and therefore ate all his meals via room service in his hotel room.  Doug had already accustomed himself to the Spanish schedule, and I soon found myself falling into line, especially after I had learned to take a long siesta after lunch.

The summer hours were especially strange to non-Spaniards.  Offices opened at seven with employees working until one or two o’clock, when they closed for the day.  Shops closed from one o’clock to five or six, allowing for the late lunch and long siesta practiced in most households.  Theater and cinema matinees started at five or six, as did ladies’ afternoon bridge games.  Dinner was never served before ten, often at eleven, and it was common to see whole families, including children, out and about in the cafes and restaurants until midnight.  As they had had several hours of sleep since lunch, it was considered perfectly all right to keep the children up so late.

My father and I flew back to England.  He was to spend a few days there with me and then return to the States, while I started arrangements for the move to Spain. Unfortunately, he had a stroke which left his speech and right arm and leg severely affected.  My wonderful English doctor not only got him safely through the first days but also agreed to accompany us by plane back to New York where the patient badly wanted to go. The doctor stayed only one night before returning to his patients in England.

Thus my move to Spain was delayed for quite some time, and Doug was forced to find a house without me.  By the time I finally arrived in Madrid, the furniture and most of the other household items had arrived, and Doug had moved into the house with his English foreman for company and permanent houseguest.  Tommy had gone out in the company of a young woman who served as part nanny and part secretary for Douglas.  Two Spanish maids had been found through friends.  They were sisters, Antonia and Maruja, and they were the only treasures we acquired in Spain.
 
Chapter Thirty


Poor Doug.  In his haste to provide a home for his family and his employees, he had rushed into an unwise choice of a house to rent.  He disliked apartments and thought that a house with a garden would be better for Tommy.  The house he rented was on the very outskirts of Madrid and thus very vulnerable to the dust that abounds on the elevated plain upon which the city sits.

Madrid was quite unlike any city that I had ever seen in that it really had no suburbs.  It just ended.  If one drove on for a few miles and looked back, there sat the city, like a cup on a tray.  It was surrounded by a vast nothingness, except dust.  The contrast was striking.  There were areas where the poor and homeless lived in caves no more than 200 yards from an elegant house or apartment building.  Where the city ceased, vegetation ceased, and there was no protection when the wind blew, which was often.   Our house, being situated on the very edge of this dividing line between city and nothing, was frequently engulfed in dust.  Although it was brand new, it was very poorly constructed, and the dust literally seemed to come through the walls. We lived under a constant blanket of it.  I immediately became ill with, oddly enough in that dry and sunny climate, the same bronchial troubles which had always been blamed on the cold and damp of England. [Note: It was not until 1984 that a Scottish physician in England diagnosed the asthma which has been my problem all along.  I learned at that time that dust triggered the asthma and that I should never have lived in a house with a thatched roof such as The Gorse].


This illness brought about our first contact with a Spanish doctor.  He gave me a prescription for what we presumed to be a cough syrup.  After a day of it, I was literally climbing the walls, tossing and turning to an alarming degree.  The doctor was summoned.  He glanced at my medicine, then picked it up and sniffed it.  “Por Dios!” he exclaimed.  It turned out that the pharmacist had misread the prescription and had given me an elixir that consisted solely of a highly concentrated form of caffeine!  I told you, Murphy was an optimist in Spain.

Another reason why Doug had chosen the house was that it had room for our three cars, his, mine, and the foreman’s station (estate) wagon.   We were soon relieved of the need for a garage.  The Spanish government confiscated all three of our cars in a masterfully contrived Catch-22 situation.  Automobiles were the most unobtainable items in Spain at that time.  Apparently they did not manufacture them and the import duty on foreign cars was astronomical.  Few people, outside the very rich and highly placed government officials, had cars. The public had to rely on trams or taxis.  The trams were so crowded that passengers clung to the outsides, and to each other.  The taxis were so antiquated that one had to wonder how they functioned at all

The Catch 22 worked as follows:  because Doug had a contract with a government department, he was promised a work permit for himself and his employees which would allow our three cars to be imported legally.  Meanwhile he was told to bring the cars in on tourist permits.  The problem was that the work permits were mysteriously delayed, snarled in a mass of bureaucratic red tape, but the work had to proceed in order to meet deadlines spelled out in the contracts.

One day, without warning, all three of the cars were seized and confiscated on the grounds that the drivers, including me, were using them for work while they were operating in Spain on tourist permits.  There was apparently nothing we could do.  Neither England nor the US had sent ambassadors to Franco’s government, with the result that we had no embassies or consulates, just a Charge d’Affaires for each country.  They were totally powerless to help us.  The cars were “auctioned” by the State to persons who were favored by the regime.  The same sort of thing happened to an electric refrigerator which we had had shipped out from England.  It sat on the dock for months, denied an import permit and then was “auctioned as abandoned.”  If I gained nothing else from living in Spain, I learned the pitfalls of living under a dictatorship and the real meaning of state-sponsored corruption. 

After a few weeks in the original house, we found another which was more centrally located in the city, only about a block from a main thoroughfare, so that one of the maids could run out and hail a taxi when one was needed.  The thoroughfare also boasted a tramline, and we learned to fight for access to the trams.

Shortly after we moved into the house, I went back to England to bring back some more furniture and other items, including the above-mentioned refrigerator.   I took Tommy with me, and we returned via a small coastal freighter/passenger ship to the Spanish port of Vigo.  The first night out, having put Tommy to bed, I had dinner in the dining saloon and was having my coffee and a brandy in the lounge when I was joined by two Spanish businessmen, one about my own age and the other much older.  The younger insisted on accompanying me to my door.  I knew perfectly well what his intentions were but allowed him to hope until we reached my cabin.  There, as he spoke perfect English, I didn’t try to use my reiterative method of out-talking a bothersome foreigner.  I just flung the door open, hit the light switch, and woke up a glowering six-year old.  My would-be Casanova departed hurriedly.

Back at the new house, with a few more of the comforts of home, (but not the refrigerator) we stayed on to complete our contract.  The loss of the cars had its pluses and minuses.  On the plus side was the relief I felt at not having to drive any more in Madrid.  Spanish men were not used to seeing a woman behind the wheel.  If you could afford a car, you could afford a chauffeur.  The result was that I became a target in the game of “chicken.”  Taxi drivers and truck drivers took sadistic pleasure in coming straight at me to see if I could be forced up onto the sidewalk.  Knowing the condition of the brakes in most Spanish vehicles, I usually turned chicken.  On the minus side were occasions like a Christmas Day when we had a houseguest and had been invited to at least four parties.  Neither taxis nor trams worked on Christmas Day.  As we had no telephone (new telephones were unobtainable in Spain) and could not call anyone to ask for a lift, we stayed at home.

Lack of transportation and a telephone were not the only problems.  Both the electricity and the water were cut off for whole days on a regular schedule.  When water was to be cut off, we filled all the tubs, washbasins, and cooking receptacles in the house in advance.  Here was where the bidets came in handy.  One could have a bath of sorts by using the bidet and a pitcher of water.  The toilets wouldn’t flush, so a jug of antiseptic was kept available and some of it poured into the toilet after each use.  This was even practiced in nightclubs and restaurants to the extent that the smell of antiseptic overpowered that of the food.  All of this was the last straw for our above-mentioned houseguest who was simply unable to tolerate such inconveniences and departed in disgust.  Which only goes to show that one should be very careful in choosing one’s houseguests.

As for the electricity, we fared much better than most of our friends, for we lived in a house while they lived mostly in apartments on the upper floors of buildings.  When the electricity was cut off, they had to use the stairs.  Many of the ladies planned their entire social lives around the days when they had electricity and could either go out and return by elevator or invite guests who could use the elevators to reach them.

The British contingent had a club in a building in downtown Madrid which they used to such an extent that they seemed to remain quite removed from the rest of the population.  It was as much their home as their house or apartment, and if they were not at home or in the office, they were invariably to be found at the club.  There were fewer Americans, but they too kept pretty much to themselves except for socializing with the British. 

 I was never invited to a Spanish home either with or without my husband.  The Spanish people we knew were mostly men whom Doug had met through business.  We met them at restaurants or cafes, usually without their wives.  They were charming and friendly, but I don’t know from where came the expression “Mi Casa es Su Casa” (which means “my house is your house”.)  I had even heard that one must be careful not to admire an object in a Spanish house lest the host insist on giving it to one.   Privately, I decided it was perfectly safe for them to promulgate such myths about their hospitality because they never invited anyone into the sanctity of their homes, thus endangering the probity of the myth.

Having said all of those negative things about the Spaniards and their habits, I must prove the futility of generalizing by relating one of the most extraordinary examples of kindness and hospitality I have ever received.  Tommy, during the first summer, suddenly began to sicken before our eyes without any apparent reason.  He lost appetite, then weight.  He slept badly and became very pale and listless.  The doctor simply shrugged and said that the summer in Madrid did not agree with some foreigners.  This appeared to be true.  There was an affliction called “Madrid Tummy” which occurred only in summer.  The prevailing opinion as to the cause of this unpleasant condition (described on the western side of the Atlantic as “Montezuma’s Revenge” on North American visitors to Mexico) was that it resulted from eating raw fruits and vegetables and drinking the water. 

However, a dowager Englishwoman, who had married a Spaniard and lived in Madrid for 30 years, had a different theory.  She was fond of quoting a Spanish proverb which stated that the night wind in Madrid was not strong enough to blow out a candle but could blow out a man’s life.  She swore that the cause of “Madrid Tummy” was sleeping in the raw because it was so hot when one went to bed, but that in the small hours of the morning, the drop in temperature caused a chill on the stomach and produced the symptoms under discussion.

I cannot offer any scientific proof of the validity of her theory, but I can attest to the fact that I was the only person in our house who never slept in the raw, and I was the only one who never contracted “Madrid Tummy.”  We all ate and drank the same things.

Tommy, however, did not exhibit the same symptoms as did those afflicted with “Madrid Tummy.  He was just pale and listless and had no appetite, which was most unusual for him.  I was on the verge of packing up and taking him back to England when Felix Azpilicueta came to lunch as was his custom when in Madrid.  Felix was the mayor of San Sebastian, a lovely seaside resort town on the north coast of Spain.  He and Doug had met on one of Doug’s first visits to Spain, and helped by Felix’ perfect English and schooling in England, had become fast friends.  On this occasion, he took one look at Tommy and told me to pack the child’s clothes for a long visit to San Sebastian.  He would brook no argument and would accept nothing in the way of remuneration.  He took Tommy north that night to his home where he and his wife had four little boys with two nursemaids to care for them.  Tommy spent the whole summer with them, not only regaining his health but also learning Spanish as only a child can learn a language when totally immersed in it.

So maybe there really is something in “Mi Casa es Su Casa” if one is lucky enough to meet the right casa owners.  I should also allow for the fact that the political climate of the totalitarian regime, which was in control of Spain at that time, may have had a lot to do with the attitudes of people toward foreigners.  I have no idea what life is like in Spain today and am the first to admit that my opinions of those days were colored by the negative experiences we had there.  Of course there are some good memories.  We were able to see the Escorial at Toledo with its wonderful Goya tapestries and the Prado in Madrid.  Without our cars, we never got to the more distant cities of Seville and Granada.  But I treasure the memory of a magnificent tenor voice singing “Granada” at an outdoor nightclub, and I remember the bullfights. 

I know I should be ashamed to admit enjoyment of such a cruel sport, but I, like the Spaniards, began to regard it as an art form rather than as a sport.  I read Hemingway’s  “Death in the Afternoon” and then was privileged to see Luis Miguel Dominguin at his very best in a special exhibition for the press.  If that is not poetry in motion, I do not know what is.  I have since seen some very bad bullfights which aroused in me the same revulsion as in the most vociferous critics of the “sport;”  I can’t help wondering, however, whether those protesters had ever seen a performance like Dominguin’s.  I guess it is destined to remain one of those things about which I am ambivalent, and the number of those increases with each day that I am granted. 

The longer I live, the more I learn that few things in life are really as good or as bad as they seemed at first.   Spain was in many ways a nightmare of corruption, extremes of rich and poor, bureaucracy gone amok, breakdown of any kind of law or justice; yet there was beauty, kindness, and loyalty.  Our two maids, for example, stayed with me through thick and thin, even to the extent of tearfully sabotaging their own feminine attributes of beauty.

Doug insisted that I do something about the underarm body odor of the two young women.  When I spoke to them about it, they insisted that they washed every day but that they also worked very hard.  I gave them some cream deodorant, which I used, but it didn’t work because it couldn’t penetrate the luxuriant growth of underarm hair which is considered a distinct feminine asset in Spain.  When I presented the girls with a razor and shaving cream, you would have thought I was asking them to shave their heads.  They cried; they begged; they tried every argument to get out of it.  But I remained obdurate because Doug had told me  “either fix it or fire them.” 

They finally gave in because they really didn’t want to lose their jobs and the chance to go to England with us when we left.  Their one ambition was to get out of Spain and earn enough money to send back to their parents for their future.  I believe that, in the end, they felt that their sacrifice was repaid, as I did take them to England with me, and they were introduced to a far better life than they had ever imagined having.
 
Chapter Thirty-one



The day finally came when we could leave Spain, but even that had its problems.  Airline tickets were not allowed to be purchased with Spanish currency, and Spanish currency could not be taken out of the country.  Franco’s government had (typically) paid its bill to the firm in pesetas that could only be spent in Spain (where, by the way, we were not allowed to stay once the work was completed.)  Previous payments had gone toward rent and living expenses, but now we had a lot of pesetas that we either had to spend or leave behind. 

We decided that I would take the maids, the secretary, and Tommy by first-class train from Madrid to Paris.  This journey could be paid for in Madrid with pesetas.  Doug managed to scrape up enough French francs to take care of incidental expenses from the border to Paris, and there was French money (left over from Doug’s previous business in France) in the safe of the Hotel Plaza Athenee in Paris.  We would purchase airline tickets with that money to get us to London.

All went well until we changed to the French train at the border.  I found myself in a terrible argument with the French porters about the size of their tip, and no amount of my tried-and-true reiterative method seemed to be working.  When I finally had to draw a breath, I learned that there had been one of those unheralded currency reforms in France overnight; I was offering the porters a pittance under the new currency values.  That settled, we proceeded to Paris without a sou and arrived COD at the hotel in two taxis.

We spent one night there and flew to London the next day, but only after another hair-raising experience.  As I had been directed by Doug to leave every French franc I didn’t need in the hotel safe, I had the concierge weigh our luggage and assess what would be the charges for excess baggage.  I took that amount with me and left the rest of our funds in the hotel safe for Doug.  When the luggage was weighed at the Paris terminal, it was obvious that the hotel porter had erred,   and I had to race back to the hotel, get more money, and get back to the Paris terminal in time to catch the bus for the airport with my charges.  We just made it, and I reached Cheltenham with my little group.  The maids had never flown before and were airsick all the way.  I still think it was mind over matter because they were absolutely terrified of flying and started being sick before take-off.

Once arrived at The Gorse and put to work, they were themselves again and settled down happily, although they didn’t speak a word of English.  The only problem arose when dear old Mrs. Turner arrived to collect the laundry, prompting a territorial dispute.  I had to convince the Spanish girls that no criticism of their laundry methods was intended or implied, but that Mrs. T. had always done the washing for the house and that it would be taking bread from her mouth to force her to give it up to them.  This argument won them over, and we settled down to a period of serenity and had things well in hand for the return of the head of the household.

Doug’s younger sister had married a Swiss while we were in Spain, and her father remarried shortly after his last child had left home.  His new-found contentment kept him at home more, so we were spared the upheavals of his frequent visits which we had suffered when last we had lived at The Gorse.  Things really did seem peaceful with only one cloud on the immediate horizon.
 

 
Chapter Thirty-two


It had been too long since I had seen my father.  He had recovered quite well physically, except for the use of his right arm and hand, but Doug, returning from a business trip to New York, said that he had seemed lonely and depressed.   As Doug planned to be on the Continent on business more than at home in England for the next several months, he suggested that Daddy fly over and that he and I rent a villa in the South of France for the winter.  Due to the ongoing currency restrictions, there were many of these villas available at very low rentals, because the normally large contingent of British visitors to the Cote d’Azur could not afford them on a 50-pound (sterling) allowance. 

Daddy flew to England, and he and I proceeded by air to Nice with a two-hour stopover at the Paris airport.  It was there that my poor American father had his first experience of a French public restroom.  He was horrified to find it had a female attendant, and he emerged with the self-conscious expression on his face that I must have had at Corone House all those years ago when I returned from swinging on the chain in the W.C.

We found a very nice house about halfway between Nice and Monte Carlo.  We had brought the two Spanish maids with us and then learned that we were committed to take on a married couple as cook and houseman/caretaker with the house.  We were certainly overstaffed, but it actually worked out very well as Antonia became Daddy’s handmaiden, and her sister took care of the laundry.  She also took care of Tommy who was with us during school holidays. He had recently become a boarder at boys’ school as was customary in England for boys of his age.

The house was a virtual Tower of Babel; the married couple was Italian but spoke French as well as their native tongue; Antonia and her sister spoke only Spanish.  Tommy spoke Spanish and English, and my father spoke only Texas.  It was an interesting learning experience to see how the servants could manage with their Spanish and Italian; each simply spoke his or her own language, and somehow they understood each other because of the Latin basis of both languages.  I was rarely called on to interpret among those four, but with Daddy it was different.  The only language he understood was English.  As a result, he often felt left out, and to combat this, he insisted upon an immediate translation of every word spoken in his presence.  If, for example, Maruja asked if I wanted her to wash my pink dress, this had to be translated for Daddy.  I soon began to lose my voice and to get very tired.  I ended up with a bad case of flu. 

The much-vaunted mild and sunny Riviera winter, which had lured Britons for centuries, failed to materialize for us.  The winter was, for the most part, cold and damp.  The villa, which was just a short flight of steps up from the beach, was often engulfed in fog.   My father, because of poor circulation, suffered very much from the cold, and we spent more money on logs for the immense fireplaces than on rent.  Poor Daddy wanted every room kept at about 100 degrees, so he stayed mostly in his bedroom next to a roaring fire, while I fled to mine which I kept totally without heat except for that which drifted down the hall from his.  

It was the heat problem that made our one effort at entertaining a disaster.   I had met two very nice French couples who spoke English and invited them to dinner.  Daddy had Pierre replenish the fireplace logs in both dining and drawing rooms so often that the poor guests started to melt like figures in a wax museum during a fire.  They gulped their after-dinner coffee and fled.  Daddy said French people sure went home early.

There were some nice days and good memories to take home from that beautiful part of the world.  The casino at Monte Carlo provided some entertainment, and the surrounding countryside provided many delightful outings in our rental car.  The flower markets in Nice were such a joy that I couldn’t keep away from them.  The food was superb.  Bouillabaisse was a local speciality, and I learned to enjoy it no matter what unusual sea creatures it contained.  My father, the Texan, commented that he never would have believed that he could have produced a daughter who would eat anything if it didn’t bite her first. 
 

 
Chapter Thirty-three


The end of our French sojourn and our return to England coincided with the abrupt end of my marriage.  The deterioration had begun some time before, but it was a last-straw telephone conversation with Douglas that decided me not to return to The Gorse.  I informed my father of this decision.  He, although naturally saddened, offered me his wholehearted support.  As there was no question of ousting Douglas from The Gorse, I simply did not return there except to pick up my personal belongings.

I do not propose to discuss any of the details of my own divorce except as they serve to illustrate what the divorce process was like in England in the 1950’s.  It was very different from American divorce.  There were, essentially, no sure-fire grounds except adultery.  Mental and physical cruelty and incompatibility were occasionally successful but had to be proved beyond a shadow of doubt.  As a result, defended divorces could be prolonged and very difficult, not to say downright messy.

Couples who could agree to a “friendly divorce” often made an arrangement in which the husband did the “gentlemanly” thing and allowed himself to be caught spending the night in some hotel with a lady other than his wife.  The floor waiter or the chambermaid testified to this behavior; the lady in question was paid for her time and her name; and with luck, the divorce was granted.  Luck was indeed needed as the whole arrangement was illegal, and getting caught in such a mockery of the law could have very undesirable consequences, including denial of the divorce.  Of course, such an arrangement was not desirable when the husband’s career was such that he must appear to be of blameless character and spotless reputation.  Divorce was considered so reprehensible that divorced persons could not be presented to royalty and were barred from the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

Our divorce was not agreed upon.  Doug remained adamantly opposed to it and determined to defend against it if he could not succeed in keeping it from ever reaching court.  Daddy and I moved to London to wait it out.  I eventually found a charming small house to rent furnished in St. John’s Wood, a very nice neighborhood, and I gradually started to make some new friends.  The two Spanish maids came with me, and Daddy felt at last that he could return to the States.  I rented a bedroom to Dorothy, a young woman who worked at the American Embassy.   She was a good friend and companion and convinced me that all employees at that institution in Grosvenor Square were not witches or worse.

As I have previously observed, the local pub was an indispensable place to meet one’s neighbors.  There was a pub very near our house, and Dorothy and I soon had made some very nice friends.  Don’t even think of comparing our pub to a modern singles bar.  Most of the people we met were married couples, but their friendly overtures and acceptance made us feel at home in the neighborhood.  We were very grateful for the institution that was the British pub.

Through a good friend of mine in Cheltenham, I had found a lawyer (or solicitor, as they are called in England) to handle my divorce.  Mr. L. A. Wingfield (Lawrie to his friends) was a diminutive man who was of such towering stature in the broad arena of his many activities that he would merit a book written solely about himself.  His accomplishments and contacts in the legal, financial, aviation, and philanthropic circles of the City of London are too numerous to cover.  So I will just touch briefly on the fact that he was on the Court of the Innholders’ Company in the City (he was Chairman of the Company) and on the board of the Guild of Air Pilot’s Benevolent Fund.  For his work with these institutions, he received the Queen’s Jubilee Medal in 1976.  I saw him greeting his sovereign (as he described it) on my TV set at some time during the Jubilee festivities.  He was for 26 years Solicitor to the Government of New Zealand.  During World War I, while he was in the British Air Force, he was taken prisoner and made such an inventive escape that the method was still classified during World War II.

That I should be lucky enough to find a man of such ability and stature to represent me I regard as one of the greatest pieces of good fortune of my entire life.  He not only worked untiringly on my behalf, but more importantly, he became my lifelong friend. 

However, not even the genius and resolve of a Wingfield could change the facts of British divorce law of those times.  Working within the law, it took a full year before Lawrie’s patience and strategy finally induced Doug’s attorneys to convince their client to give up his opposition to the divorce, eventually leading to a Decree Nisi, followed six months later by the Decree Absolute.

During the year, Lawrie got me a small amount of “maintenance” money from Douglas, but I was really supported by money from my father.  When the divorce was finally granted, I was given custody of Tommy and a sum which was supposed to be alimony for me and child support (including school fees) for Tommy.  The total amount just covered the school fees, and the way this came about paints a rather interesting picture of the way property and income were handled in English divorces.  It was very different from the American way in that respect. 

There was no Community Property; every item acquired during the marriage belonged to the husband unless the wife could prove to the court that the item was a gift from him.  Thus a businessman could keep the mink coat his wife wore if he could successfully maintain that it was, in fact, only “on loan” to his wife as evidence of the husband’s position in his business or professional world.  Because of this quaint law, I left my marriage without a stick of furniture, a bed sheet, or a bath towel.  All I could take were my clothes and such wedding gifts as had come from my own friends and family. 

But thanks to Mr. Wingfield, I also managed to retain my husband’s most prized possessions!  Doug had a passion for collecting antique silver.  For each of my birthdays, anniversaries, and Christmases, I had received pieces of Georgian silver: a pair of Georgian candlesticks, a soup tureen, a set of silver cruets (four salts, four peppers, and two mustards,) a pair of sauceboats, and so on.  After 13 years, I (really Douglas) had amassed quite a valuable collection.  Mr. Wingfield obtained the dates of purchase from Doug’s favorite supplier of antique silver and proved that they coincided with the dates when I would normally receive gifts.  Poor Douglas!  Actually, all of the silver will eventually be Tom’s (some of it already is) so it didn’t really leave the family. 

Mr. Wingfield also succeeded in getting me (and later Tom) a one-third share of the income from a marriage settlement which Mr. Swan had set up for each of his children.  I believe it was for this, rather than for the divorce itself, that Mr. Swan never forgave me, although the last time I saw him (at the time of Tom’s wedding) he was pleasant enough.

Alimony was based on the husband’s income, which seemed fair enough until one realized that many young executives took a large part of their salaries in “perks” such as cars, housing (including The Gorse,) telephone bills paid, etc.  One third of the actual take-home pay therefore came as a distinct shock to many divorcing wives.  I was warned of this early in the game (by Douglas, as a matter of fact) and spent the entire year before the divorce trying to get a job.  I would need one if I were to support myself and keep Tommy in his expensive boarding school.  There was, by the way, no question of taking him to America.  This would deny Doug his visiting rights and deprive Tommy completely of his father, something I was never prepared to do.  Tommy had a right to a father and to his English heritage, and I vowed never to take those away from him until he was old enough to approve of such a move. 

The English job market was not waiting for me with bated breath.  I tried everything.  With no secretarial skills, I was limited to trying for other kinds of work but was even rejected as a saleswoman in dress shops where I had formerly been a customer.  One owner of a fashionable Bond Street shop, who was in fact a personal friend, told me quite bluntly that employers were reluctant to hire anyone who had been out of the workforce for ten years or more.  I had hardly even been in the workforce except for the bit of modeling I had done while in college.  I was offered a modeling job in a good couture house in London, but it was seasonal work, only available when the collections were shown.  Besides, I was a bit too old to think of starting a career which so depended on looking young. 

Finally I had some luck—I thought!  Based upon my early wartime broadcasts to America for the BBC was an offer to be the head of their North American features section.  I was on Cloud Nine!  Then suddenly the offer was withdrawn.  The BBC didn’t even bother, in those pre-Women’s Lib days, to conceal their male-chauvinistic reason—the salary was too high for a woman.  It should go to a man with a family to support.  It amounted to about $40 a week, not much by today’s standards, but it would have enabled me to remain in England and make a home-away-from-school for Tommy.  As it was, as soon as the divorce case had been heard, I determined to go job-hunting in America.

I was able to make excellent arrangements for the Spanish maids who wished to remain in England.  Through the good offices of a convent of Spanish nuns, Antonia was placed as cook to a wealthy South American family, and her sister went as personal maid to the Spanish-speaking wife of an Ambassador.  It was a wrench to part with them.  Their devotion had seen me through some bad times.  They had even testified (through an interpreter) on my behalf at my divorce hearing.  At least I had the consolation of knowing that they were well placed and had each other.

The decision to go to the States also meant that I had to make some kind of arrangement for Tommy’s summer holidays.  I could not realistically expect to go to America and find a job which would put me back in England or Europe (which was of course the kind of job I was looking for) in time to provide a summer home for him.  Since Doug was not yet in the mood to be cooperative, I turned to the Headmaster of Cheam, Tommy’s school

I went down to Cheam on a cool and blustery April day and arrived just as the boys were being herded into an unheated outdoor swimming pool.  They were not allowed to come out of the water until a whistle was blown.  The school’s headmaster accompanied me to witness this aspect of the shaping up of the young British male under 13 years.  One boy in particular caught my eye.  He had red hair with that particularly white skin that usually accompanies it.  That skin was blue at the moment, and he stood, frozen in misery, his teeth chattering and his eyes fixed pleadingly on the sports master’s whistle.

My eyes sought out my own son. Tommy was like a young seal, cavorting happily and rosily in the frigid water.  Turning to the headmaster, I remarked that I now believed that a boy who could survive an English boarding school could survive whatever life could do to him.  The headmaster laughed and provided me with the name of a woman (the mother of one of Tommy’s schoolmates) who took in other boys as boarders during holidays when their parents could not be with them. 

Leaving Tommy with strangers so soon after the divorce was the emotional nadir of the entire break-up of my marriage.  Only the absolute necessity of finding work which would allow me to support myself, keep him in an expensive school, and provide us both a home bolstered me during this painful time. 
 
Chapter Thirty-four


My plan, as I have said, was to go to Washington and get a job that would send me to some European location where I would be reasonably near to Tommy.  I had no idea of how to go about getting such a job, but I remembered that Wellesley had a department, which helped alumnae find employment.  So after a few days with my father in New York, I went up to visit with some of my old college friends who lived near Wellesley.

The alumnae employment people were the first to mention the Central Intelligence Agency to me.  The agency had been actively recruiting on college campuses and had provided the office with application forms, one of which was given to me.  It was quite lengthy, and I was back in New York before I had finished filling it out.  I was feeling very depressed and dubious of being employed as I had nothing in the way of secretarial—or any other marketable skills.  At that point, I had a telephone call from an old friend in Texas, who had received my letter with news of my divorce and my job-seeking visit to the States.  He told me that a mutual friend of ours was the current Assistant Secretary of the Army in Washington.  Within two days I was in Washington, and an appointment had been made with a personnel officer at CIA. 

President Truman had established the Central Intelligence Agency in 1948.  It succeeded the OSS, which had been our intelligence agency during World War II.  Since it was now 1951, I cannot claim to have been present to witness the birth pangs, but I believe that I can assert, without fear of contradiction, that I participated in, and indeed profited from and was a victim of, its growing pains.  

At this point in the process they were, as the saying goes, hiring anyone who was warm and breathing.  The Agency needed personnel for every conceivable kind of work, and there seemed to be a recruiting contest going on between the persons doing the hiring for the various divisions, with those responsible for finding clerical workers the most relentless in pursuit of recruits.  I was first interviewed by a woman a little older than I was, who worked in the Personnel Office of the German Section of the East European Division.  I made it very clear to her that I was seeking a job that would place me in Europe at the earliest date possible.  She said that she had only clerical jobs to offer, and I told her that I had no typing or shorthand skills.  That seemed to end the interview.  I apologized for wasting her time and waited for my next interview.

This one proved to be more encouraging.  It was with a personnel officer from the Western European Division, and he asked me if I had any foreign language skills.  When I said that I spoke both French and Spanish, he asked if I could stay overnight in Washington in order to take some tests the next day.  I agreed and was given an address at which to present myself the next morning at nine.

I had been told, by the way, that I could not get a job in England.  It was against Agency policy to place employees in countries where they had relatives.  Later, of course, I learned how often expediency overcame policy.  Case Officers for Germany had to be so proficient in German that they almost had to be natives.  This meant that many of them were Jews who had fled Nazi Germany but had been born and brought up there.   The sad and obvious fact was that they were not likely to have many relatives remaining in Germany.  The Agency also overlooked the fact that Werner, who was not Jewish but whose family had fled to America when Werner was nine years old, still had cousins and aunts and uncles in his native land.

My interviews with the personnel people had taken place in some old “temporary”  buildings left over from World War I, alongside the Reflecting Pool.  The tests in French and Spanish took place in a very old red brick building in another part of town.  The CIA in those days was scattered all over Washington.  I finished the tests and returned to my hotel where I met my friend for lunch before returning to New York.  He warned me that government mills grind slowly and told me not to panic if there were some delay in my learning the outcome of my interviews.  The waiting was made much easier when he called me a few days later in New York to tell me that he had been able to learn that I had passed the language tests with flying colors and would be receiving a job offer in due course.

Eventually I received a letter from the Agency which told me that I was being tentatively offered a position at the level of GS-5 and that my security clearance investigation would take several months.  The letter did not specify what the job was, and I had no idea what GS-5 meant, but the prospect of a definite job in Europe delighted me.  I hastened to accept.
 
Chapter Thirty-five


By this time, Tommy was back in school for the autumn term, having spent “my” share of his summer vacation at the place I had arranged for and the rest of the time with his father.  There was no point in my returning to England before his Christmas holidays, so I decided to take a secretarial course as I had ample evidence of how valuable was such training in the job market.  I spent the rest of October and the month of November taking typing and shorthand lessons, and while I didn’t have sufficient time to become expert, I did at least learn the rudiments. 

For many years I have felt very ambivalent about the value of having this type of training under one’s belt.  There is no doubt that it is invaluable if getting a job is paramount in one’s priorities.  But there is equally little doubt that having secretarial skills has pigeonholed many women in lower-paying jobs when they were quite as capable as their male peers of performing higher-paid duties.  Of course, nowadays things are a bit different what with computers, equal opportunity, and the upward mobility of young women in the job market.  When, however, push comes to shove and it’s a question of eating or going on welfare, I still think such skills are a good ace in the hole, even if it may at times seem best to conceal them until all other possibilities have been exhausted.

I sailed for England in time to spend Christmas with Tommy who had spent the first half of the month with his father.  On this voyage, I made my first acquaintance with the ships of the French Line, the Liberte and the Ile de France, and thoroughly enjoyed them, especially the cuisine.  I regret that I never got to cross on the ill-fated Normandie before she was destroyed by fire. 

An English girl friend, who lived at the seaside, took Tommy and me in for Christmas, which was a blessing as she had a little boy of about Tommy’s age.  We spent a few days after Christmas in London at one of those small but homey residential hotels, and then Tommy went back to school.  I took off with friends for a week in Wengen, my old Swiss haunt.

Before leaving London, I had a reunion with Antonia and Maruja.  They were very happy in their jobs and planned to work in London for another year and then return to Spain with their considerable savings.  We had a tearful final farewell.  I was enroute to Switzerland when we heard of the death of George VI.  It came as a shock and a sad loss.

From Wengen, I went to Paris to pick up the tickets for my return to New York on a French liner departing from Le Havre.  I got into a taxi in Paris and told the driver to take me to the “French Line” (La Ligne Francaise.)  He started to laugh and explained, with appropriate gestures and rolling of the eyes, that La Ligne Francaise meant the shape of a (very voluptuous) French woman!  What I should have asked for was La Compagnie Maritime Francaise.  For one as proud of her French as I was, it was a humbling experience, but an amusing one.

I arrived in New York just in time to receive a letter from the CIA telling me to report for duty.  I had just time to re-pack my clothes before setting off for Washington.  During my absence, the FBI had indeed been busy with my security clearance.  They had even visited the couple who lived across the hall from Daddy and who, in the way of New Yorkers, only knew me (or Daddy) by sight.  All of my own friends whom I had listed as references--and others whom I hadn’t—had also been questioned about me. 
 
 
Chapter Thirty-six


Although it may seem a bit of an exaggeration to others, I shall always equate my induction into the Civil Service with the same feelings of culture shock which I had formerly experienced upon moving to a new country.  It really seemed much the same to me:  a change of customs, attitudes, and personalities, plus a different lifestyle and even a new language.  The latter was a mixture of bureaucratese and what I came to call “spook-speak,” a collection of terms used particularly in intelligence circles.

Lifestyle was the first thing I had to confront.  Although I had checked in at the same hotel where I had stayed on my previous visit, it was obvious that I could not afford to stay there until I went abroad.   It was equally clear that I could not sign a lease for an apartment, as I had no idea when I would be going overseas.  According to my mentor, Fred, the answer was a boarding house.  I had the weekend to find a home.  I consulted the classified ads of the newspaper and set out to visit a list of possible lodgings. 

I was soon to learn that the Washington boarding house was as much an institution (although very different) as the English residential hotel.  The ones I visited sheltered only females, all single and all employed by the US Government.  At one house, I immediately took a liking to the down-to-earth landlady who showed me a very nice bed-sitting room on the ground floor of her three-storied house on 16th Street.  Just as we had about come to terms, she suddenly asked my age.  I had just turned 37.  There was a silence.  It seemed that she had a maximum age of 35 for her boarders.  “The older ones tend to boss the younger ones around,” she explained.  I stood in mute appeal.  “Oh, what the hell,” she said, “you don’t look the bossy type.”  I had found a home and a new lifestyle.

There were about 15 young women living at Daisy’s, ranging from about 20—30.  The very youngest of them was so much more knowledgeable than I was about life and work in the District of Columbia that they all took me under their wings as though I were many years their junior.  They drew a map showing me how to get to work by bus—I had to change buses twice.  They prevented me from going to work in a hat and gloves.  They threw my lingerie and blouses in with theirs to be washed, for I had not the faintest idea how to run the washer and dryer.  Daisy, bless her soul, watched me trying to iron them for as long as she could bear it and then did them for me, making me promise never to tell the other girls. Thanks to Jessie and Mrs. Turner, among others, I had never mastered ironing.

I don’t know how I would have survived those first few months as a working woman without the kindness and companionship I found at Daisy’s house.  It, like the residential hotel in Cheltenham, gave me a sense of security at a time when I needed it most.  Although most of the girls were young and attractive, I was surprised that they rarely had dates with young men their age.  I learned that most of the men they met at work were married.  The girls worked their five days, then washed their hair and clothes and did their shopping on weekends.  Daisy provided breakfast and dinner on workdays, and the girls ate out at weekends or made snacks in the kitchen. 

It seemed a rather sad and sterile life, and I said as much to Daisy.  She said that some of them would return to their hometowns and marry their childhood sweethearts.  Some would stay in the Civil Service, slowly rising in grade and making permanent careers for themselves.  I hoped that not many of them would turn out like my dragon-lady of the American Consulate in London.  I wondered, with a little shiver of fear, whether I would.
 

 
 
Chapter Thirty-seven


I started my career inauspiciously by getting a ticket for jaywalking while trying to change buses.  The policeman was adamant.  I had to stand in the freezing wind while he wrote out the ticket.  Of course, I arrived late to work, but the worst was yet to come.  When I had presented my name at Registration, I sat down to wait for the personnel man from the Western Europe Division to come and welcome me aboard.  The person who arrived was the woman who had interviewed me for a secretarial job in Germany.  When I protested that I was being hired by the wrong division (a bad tactical error,) her attitude hardened.  Her job or no job was the essence of her position.  When I reminded her that I had no secretarial skills, omitting the course I had taken in New York, she shrugged and said that they would send me over to Training.  It was obvious that she was angry with me, even disliked me, and that she was determined not to relinquish me to the other division, even though it was obvious that I would have a better job there and one for which I was more qualified.  Reluctantly, I surrendered and followed her to the administrative offices of the Eastern Europe Division.  After a few formalities and completing forms, I was left to cool my heels in a chair by the window.  I watched the squirrels on the lawn for the rest of the morning. 

While having lunch in the cafeteria, I spotted the personnel man from the West Europe Division.  I approached him tentatively and asked if I could have a word with him.  When I told him what had happened, he said that his office had applied to Central Personnel Office for me, but they were too late.  The German desk had already applied.  I had been a victim of the recruiting race.  I had been body-snatched.  The man was very nice and seemed genuinely sorry, but he said that there was a strict policy against “proselytizing.”  I wasn’t quite sure what that meant in this context but thought it was probably spook-speak.  I later learned that the position he would have offered was that of Reports Editor, starting at about four grades above my GS-5.

I spent three days watching the squirrels.  This, I was to learn, was the bureaucratic equivalent of having to stand in the corner like a naughty schoolchild.  Finally, the bodysnatcher, henceforth her name, gave me a slip of paper to take over to Training,  located in another set of buildings.  There I was put to work learning typing and shorthand.  I attended some orientation courses and had to take some physical exams.  Suddenly and blessedly, I was ordered to start processing for transfer overseas.

In the course of this processing a small, but very typical, situation arose.  As I have said, the CIA was young and had been hiring people in quantity at the expense of experience.  Sometimes the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing.  I had been told quite definitely, on my first day, that it was perfectly all right to tell acquaintances, such as my boarding-house mates, that I was working for the CIA.  Now in the hands of those who were to arrange my overseas service, I was told that, on no account, should I say that I worked for the agency.  The policy, in those early days, was to refuse to admit that there were CIA personnel abroad.  When I told them that the cat was already out of the bag at my lodgings, they actually told me to go home that night and announce that I had changed my job and was now employed by the Army.  When I did their bidding at the dinner table that evening, the laughter was raucous.  These girls knew how much time and red tape were involved in changing agencies in Washington.

Another problem was caused by the lack of knowledgeable personnel involved in the procedures for going overseas.  As I was going to Germany under Army “cover,” i.e., as a civilian employee of the Army, it was necessary for me to have official papers called Army Orders.  Unfortunately, the young woman who filled out the request for my orders was not sufficiently experienced, and I was to encounter tremendous difficulties as a result of her mistakes. With my lack of experience, I was not to know this until after I had arrived in Germany. 

Another problem loomed when I decided that I would like to buy a small foreign car in Germany.  I joined the CIA’s Credit Union and inquired about borrowing the money to buy a car abroad.  I was told that there was no procedure for such a loan.  When I asked why not, I was given what I was beginning to recognize as the standard bureaucratic answer:  it had never been done before.  Bolstered by my success with the British Exit Visa in 1944, I asked for an appointment with the person in charge of the Credit Union office.  This was granted and the difficulty was explained to me as follows:  to give me a loan on a car, they had to have the motor number and a full description of the vehicle on which they would hold a lien.  I suggested that, having found the car I wanted to buy in Germany, I would secure it with a deposit from my own funds until all the required information had been forwarded to Headquarters.  They gave me the pertinent forms, and I took them with me to Germany.  When I had filled them out with the necessary information, I signed the forms and returned them to the Credit Union in Washington.  This was all accomplished, according to CIA rules, by sending my real name and my Agency pseudonym under separate cover.   The whole thing worked out beautifully, and I was the proud owner of a Morris Minor in much less time than it would have taken to ship a car to Europe.  And a lot cheaper, too.

Finally, processing came to an end, and I was sent off to New York, where I spent a day or two with my father before boarding the Liberte.  I was assigned to share a First Class cabin with two other CIA employees, both young women several years my junior.  The CIA blithely ignored the fact that Army civilians of clerical status did not travel First Class.  This security faux pas was corrected later, and I was demoted to Tourist.

By the time we were finishing dinner the first night, I was acutely aware that my cabin mates thought that my advanced age would cramp their style.  I realized that they would like to dump me in the interest of finding unattached young men of their own generation.  I set about saving them the trouble of easing me out of their company.  I must confess that my actions were not solely prompted by sympathy for their problem. Many transatlantic crossings had enabled me to observe that, to put it bluntly, “she hunts better who hunts alone.” As soon as dinner was finished, I excused myself, picked up a book from the cabin, and repaired to the lounge, where there was music for dancing on a small dance floor. 

I sat down at a small table for two and ordered coffee and brandy.  I had only just been served when a voice from above asked if I would care to dance.  I looked up at a very tall, plain-faced man who looked to be somewhere in his mid-forties.  His dress and manners were impeccable, and he turned out to be an excellent dancer.  He invited me to join his party at their table and meet his friends, a group of fun-loving and wealthy Texans who had persuaded my new friend, widowed for a year, to join them on a trip to Paris.  They were delighted that he had found a partner, especially one who was Texas-born, and I was adopted into the liveliest group on board.  I moved to their table for meals, and we spent every meal challenging the Liberte’s claim that they could prepare any dish a passenger could order.  They had special parties in the bar each evening, drawing such notables as a famous actor and others.  My young cabin-mates never found any young men.  There is usually a severe shortage of them at that time of the year.  It seems that there are occasionally advantages in having lost the bloom of youth; not many, I admit, but some.

I disembarked in the pre-dawn darkness at Southampton, having arranged to spend a few days with Tommy, who was on his spring break.  My cabin mates went on to Le Havre and thence by train to Frankfurt, where I joined them a few days later.
 
Chapter Thirty-eight


Upon arrival in Frankfurt, I proceeded as ordered to the Excelsior Hotel, located across the street from the railway station.  The Excelsior taught me the true meaning of the word seedy.  It was the hotel for low-grade civilians and military officers up to and including the rank of captain.  There was no dining room or any other public room.  One went for food and drink to the Officers’ Mess in their hotel across the street.  As I was asking directions from the Excelsior concierge, I was joined by a tall and handsome Air Force Captain, who gallantly offered to accompany me.  We ended up having dinner together.  He was actually stationed in London but came to Germany periodically as a buyer for the Air Force base stores.  He knew Frankfurt well and took me for a stroll after dinner with a stop for a nightcap at a weinstube.  His name was Bill, and we arranged to have dinner together the next evening.  The next morning I found my way to the designated Personnel office in the IG Farben Building, where the US Army and our offices were located.  After reporting my arrival, I was given a list of offices to visit in order to complete my integration.  One of these offices was Billeting, and I found myself assigned to share a two-bedroom apartment with one of my shipboard cabinmates.  It was a somewhat less than joyous reunion, but we accepted the inevitable and manage to shake down together as good-naturedly as possible.

Workwise, getting me settled was a bit more complicated.  There was a CIA officer who was to run a two-man field office in Heidelberg.  The problem was finding a secretary, who was willing to be isolated from all the other Agency employees who were in Frankfurt.  It would mean giving up the chance to forge friendships and to enjoy the much more extensive amenities for Americans that existed in Frankfurt.  This secretary would have to be a loner, not only socially, but also in the office, as the men would be out and about for much of the working day.  My would-be boss drove me to Heidelberg, showed me the office in a gloomy basement, and took me to meet his wife over lunch.  I was not enchanted at the prospect of this job, but I was prepared to accept it as the luck of the draw and make the best of it.  Personnel had indicated that I could not be forced to accept it, but I gathered that they had been saving it for me.  (I later recognized the fine hand of my old friend, the bodysnatcher, but I was all set to give in gracefully.)  It was then that my would-be boss made a tactical error.  We had gone to lunch at a small snackbar run by the Army for their few personnel stationed in Heidelberg.  My hamburger and coffee cost less than a dollar in American script; they let me pay for my own.  That did it.  When we returned to the office after lunch, I said “thanks but no thanks” and was driven back to Frankfurt in stony silence. 

Arriving the next morning at the Personnel Office, I found that I was once more in the doghouse.  I was greeted frigidly, told that there was no immediate job for me, and given a chair to sit in and do nothing.  Again, I was the naughty child in the corner, but there were no squirrels to watch this time.

After several days of this disciplinary treatment, I was assigned as secretary to a unit that was located in a rundown old building some distance from the comfortable Farben Building.  I was to work for a small cadre of young men engaged in a very clandestine paramilitary type of operation.  My bosses were very young men, most of them just out of some Ivy League college, They were unseasoned and about as arrogant as any group of young people I had ever met.  Never having had a secretary before, they wanted to be sure of using my services to the fullest.  One would enter the office, remove a file from a cabinet near the door, glance at its contents and then walk all the way across the room to drop it in my filing basket.  It was almost comical and certainly wouldn’t be tolerated these days, thanks to Women’s Lib.  For me, at that time, it was just another aspect of being a round peg in a square hole.  My unsuitability as a secretary was becoming more obvious every day, although I struggled mightily to hide this from the others.  They were patronizing enough without being armed with the knowledge that I was scared out of my wits that my inadequacy would come to light.  It was a very discouraging situation, since there was apparently nothing I could do about it for the next two years.

I was grateful to have my new friend Bill.  He was at least making my evenings interesting and entertaining.  The first German restaurant to which he escorted me was located in an enormous wine cellar.  One descended a long staircase to reach the dining area.  We had a tiny table for two on a small balcony overlooking the other diners.  It was considered the most romantic table in the restaurant and had to be especially reserved.  I was seated next to the railing of the little balcony.  I was handed an enormous menu which, upon being opened, knocked a wineglass over the railing and into a dish of pommes frites on a serving table below.  Every head in the place looked up at us, and Bill murmured that he had guessed I would be an interesting dinner date.

Aside from my clumsiness, the dinner at the Kaiserkellar was a delightful experience and my introduction to German cuisine.  I liked it so much that I was sure it was on a par with French cooking.  We had little medallions of the venison family, called reh.  They were served with a sauce of berries I had never seen before.  They were called preiselbeeren.  I ate my way through three years of wonderful German food and gained 15 pounds.  After years of wartime English food, do you blame me?

This peaceful interlude of learning the best spots in Frankfurt, day-trips down the Rhine to the Lorelei, winetasting at Rudesheim, and lunch at the famous Koenegin at Asmanshausen was rudely interrupted.  I found out what was to be the result of my ignorance and the ineptitude of the young woman who had prepared my Army orders in Washington.  She had asked me if I had any dependents.  I replied that I had a young son who was in school in England and who would be joining me in Germany during the school holidays.  “Then he won’t be traveling with you?”  “No, I replied.”  “Then we needn’t put him on your orders,” she said, thereby sealing my fate.

A few weeks after I arrived in Frankfurt, we began to hear rumors of a housing shortage for married employees, which might result in single personnel being housed in Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, known in military parlance as BOQ’s.  In a BOQ, one got a room with a single bed and a minimum of furniture.  There were no kitchen or laundry facilities and one had to eat out.  There was no way to accommodate a ten-year-old.  Soon the rumors were confirmed, and we received a notice to vacate the premises by a certain date.  While the apartment was not large, we had agreed that Tommy could sleep on the living-room sofa during his visit.  We had a daily maid whom I could pay extra to stay with Tommy until I got home from work.  All of this would be lost if I had to move into a BOQ.  I was in trouble.

I went first to the Administrative Officer of my unit.  It was from him, an Army veteran, that I first learned of the immutability of army orders.  Once written, he told me, they could not be changed or circumvented.  I went next to the Army Billeting Office.  My sad story was met with stony indifference.  No amount of reasoning, pleading, or cajoling made the slightest difference in their flat refusal to change my orders or get around them in any way.  In desperation I went to our Headquarters Personnel Office, where I was not a real favorite after the Heidelberg incident.  They gave me the same bad news but, when I persisted, got rid of me by making an appointment with an Army colonel.  This individual was “on loan” to our agency, functioning as liaison between us and the Army.  I was to see him in his office at 9AM the next day. 

Our civilian (not Army APO) mail was delivered at our apartment quite early and on my way out the next morning, I picked up a letter from our mailbox in the hall.  The return address on the envelope was the Office of the Assistant of the Assistant Secretary of the Army?  Remember Fred?  He had got me my interview with the CIA.  He was answering a note from me which I had written several weeks earlier giving him my postal address.  At that time I had not foreseen my billeting problems.  The note in my hand was just a cheerful hello, and I stuffed the letter back into the envelope and into my purse and went on to my meeting.

The Colonel was adamant and, I suspect, well-primed by my admirers in the Personnel Office.  In no uncertain terms he reiterated, “Those are Army Orders.  They were issued by the Army; only the Army can change them, and the Army is not about to do so.” 

The repetition of the word Army triggered something in my brain, and without thinking, I pulled out Fred’s letter and showed the envelope to the astonished Colonel.  ”Can HE do something about it?” I yelled.  The Colonel”s face froze.  He sat like a statue while I waited for him to order my arrest. At last, through clenched teeth, he told me to return to my office and wait for a call from his secretary.  My knees were shaking as I stood up, but I managed to get out into the corridor before collapsing up against the wall.  I pulled myself together sufficiently to return to my office, wondering all the way what had happened.  I couldn’t believe that just the sight of the return address on that envelope had brought about such a reaction in a high-ranking military officer.  It finally dawned on me that he must have thought that I had written about my problem to a very high-placed friend.  I had no idea what the outcome of all this would be, but decided not to speculate.

Still in a state of shock at what I had done, I reached my office and tried to keep as busy as possible.   I really had no idea what I was waiting for.  The Colonel could be on the phone to Fred at this moment, and I could not in all conscience expect Fred to support me.  My phone rang.  I answered and identified myself.  A female voice instructed me to be at a certain two-bedroomed HICOG apartment at two o’clock. HICOG apartments were the most luxurious quarters in Frankfurt.  They had been especially built for American use and had originally been meant for State Department personnel.  They had been taken over by the Army for CIA employees and were now being restricted to married couples.  I pointed out that I didn’t need two bedrooms and that my son could sleep on the sofa in the living room. The voice on the phone was firm; a bedroom was required for each authorized dependent, except for siblings of the same sex.  I was to be at the designated address at two o’clock to meet the person who would take inventory and turn over the keys to me.  Click.

It was a beautiful, large apartment, elegantly furnished, with built-in cupboards and closets.  There were American style bathrooms and kitchen.  I had a lovely home for Tommy, who was due to arrive for his summer holidays in about a week.

My new home did not come free of cost, not in money, but in a number of intangibles.  When I arrived at my office the next morning, I had a visit from the Administrative Officer whom I had first approached with my  troubles.  He told me he had been working on my problem when he heard that I had solved it (no doubt by using some unsavory kind of clout.)  He warned me quite bluntly that I would not be very popular with the other female bachelors who were losing their apartments.  I replied that I had not come to Germany to be popular with female bachelors, but to make a living and a home for my son.  We parted in a less than a friendly manner.  His name was Werner and he will turn up later in my narrative.

Werner was right.  I was not popular with the female bachelors.  Word had gone out that I had pulled strings to get superior billeting.  Only a few persons knew how my orders had been fouled up and how great was my need for a home for Tommy.  As for the men, they were all married or years too young for me. So I didn’t suffer from their disapproval.  At the moment, I had Bill for my social life, although he was to return to England and then to the States in the autumn.  In the meantime, he introduced me to a number of people who lived in Frankfurt but were not connected to the US Government.  Among them was a pilot captain for a major airline that had daily flights into Frankfurt.  He and his wife provided a sort of home-away-from-home for the other pilots and crews who spent one or two nights in Frankfurt before flying back to the States.  Their friendship provided me with many a dinner partner and one or two lasting relationships with the bachelors.  I went out at least once a week with these acquaintances and was never lonely, even after Bill had gone.
 

 
Chapter Thirty-nine



Along with my work and social life, I tried to learn something about Germany and the German people.  I took language lessons from a tutor and engaged a  capable woman in her fifties as housekeeper.  Her name was Marianne and she became a very good friend, although I could never get her to discuss Hitler or his regime.  This was typical of most Germans I met, and I, like most Americans, never met anyone who had been a Nazi--or would admit to it.  In the long run, one must accept people as individuals.  I found Marianne’s friend, Hannah, to be a pleasant woman as well as an excellent dressmaker.  Marianne also provided a skilled masseuse who, like most Germans in those days, worked so cheaply that I provided an anomalous spectacle: a low-pay cleric worker who once a week had breakfast in bed after an early morning massage, before going off to pound a typewriter all day. It was a crazy, unrealistic life which could only be possible in that climate of ”to the victor belong the spoils.”

 Many thousands of Americans were living far better in Germany than they had ever lived in the States.  Everyone had a maid; food and other items were available at bargain prices in the military commissaries and post exchanges.  The German restaurants and hotels were very reasonable, due to the favorable rate of exchange the dollar enjoyed.  Americans also had exclusive use of the facilities in several beautiful vacation areas, known as Rest and Recreation Centers, where we could check in at formerly deluxe resorts for a pittance.  I took Tommy to Riesersee in the summer for mountain air and water sports and, at Christmas, we went up to the ski lodge above Garmisch, all at prices that were  a mere formality. 

It was a halcyon life outside the office and even that had improved for me.  My small unit of young autocrats had folded (their mission abandoned) and I got a job working for just one man, a political specialist, a German-born American.  We were joined by a younger man who aspired to do the same kind of work as that of our boss.  They were both very decent persons and the three of us remained friends for a long time down the years.  I was much happier because I never felt pressured, working for just the two of them.  Although my typing skill had grown, I still was not very speedy and worked much better not having to provide eight carbon copies for eight young men, each of whom thought his work should come first.

Life went along smoothly and uneventfully, interspersed with Tommy’s visits, but nothing much happened until my second Christmas.  Tommy and I were taking an early train the next morning to Garmisch as I didn’t plan to attend the Company Christmas party the night before our departure.  I was not dating anyone from CIA, so I had no escort and no desire to go alone.  Then Paul (my boss) insisted that I go with him and his wife and that they would pick me up.  It was thus that I renewed my acquaintance with Werner.  It had been over a year since he had warned me about my popularity, or lack of it, with female bachelors.  I had heard that his lovely wife had, heartbreakingly, died at the age of 32.  Although he and I hadn’t seen eye-to-eye, my heart had gone out to him when I saw him occasionally in the halls of the Farben Building.  Tonight, I was seated back-to-back with him, unaware of his proximity.  I was telling a table companion about the golf lessons I had been taking at the golf course, which was among the R&R facilities the Army had taken over for us.  Suddenly, the man at my back whirled around and demanded to know whether I was really learning to play golf. “Well,” I said, “I am trying,” thereby sealing my fate.

I shall forego reliving the growing closeness with Werner, who became, some four years later, my second and last husband.  Suffice it to say that, within a few weeks, we were “going steady.”  This was due in large part to the prodding of Marianne.  Every time I went out with someone else, I would have to eat my breakfast to the accompaniment of Marianne’s shaking a finger at me and insisting  “Herr Weiss is a good man.  You should not risk losing him.”  The only fly in this romantic ointment was the fact that Werner was due to transfer to Berlin in a few weeks, which indeed he did. 

After a month or two of commuting at weekends, which involved two overnight train journeys, I was persuaded to transfer to Berlin.  For me, it meant trading my comfortable, easy-going job in Frankfurt to working again for nine case officers, each intent on his work’s being done first.  As for Werner, the Chief of Station had designated him, a bachelor, to take care of the visiting VIP’s.  These were senators and congressmen from Washington whose main purpose, it seemed, was to take a generous sample of the famous Berlin nightlife.  There were several of them each week, and Werner became so exhausted from shepherding them around until the wee hours of morning that he counted the days until we could take our leave of Berlin, a year hence.  We did enjoy seeing what sights of the divided city were in the American Zone, sailing on the Wansee, and playing golf on a course where a bad slice could take one’s ball into the Russian Zone.  For the most part, however, I found occupied Berlin a sad and depressing city, even in its nightclubs.  We have never returned.

Our journey back to the States, including some leave, took us from Germany to Italy, where we were to board the Constitution for the much advertised Sun Lane Crossing which began at Genoa.  We visited Venice, Rome, Sorrento, Capri, Pompei, and Naples, doing all of the usual tourist things.  We survived the danger and beauty of the Amalfi Drive, made even more perilous by a loquacious chauffeur who drove the entire hairpin-twisting length looking back at us over his shoulder. We rode a gondola in Venice and explored Pompei.  At last, we boarded the Constitution for what was to be my last transatlantic crossing by ship.

I had had to use all of my persuasive powers to get Werner to agree to this mode of travel.  He was subject to seasickness and would have preferred returning to the States by plane.  My disappointment was profound at what turned out to be a far from happy voyage.  While Werner’s rank entitled him to a single cabin, I found myself sharing a cabin with a prim and proper elderly schoolmarm from Colorado.   When I was forced to spend a couple of days in bed with a cold, she refused to allow Werner to visit me, saying it was improper. 

By the time I was up and about, poor Werner was about ready to jump overboard.  The swimming pool, around which the brochures had shown passengers lounging and partaking of delicious luncheon buffets, was emptied and closed because of high winds.  It was never opened for the duration of the voyage.  We were unfortunate in our table companions.  We stopped at several ports before reaching Gibraltar, where two jovial couples we had met in the bar, jumped ship and flew home.  I had difficulty restraining Werner from joining them.  We were together for 40 years, and I was never able to get him on another ship.  I shall never know the joys of a Caribbean cruise, but as we all know, you can’t have everything.  The story of my transatlantic sea crossings, which had started with a bang, ended with a whimper.
 

 
Chapter Forty


Interesting developments awaited me in Washington when we checked in at Headquarters before setting out on a month’s leave, normal procedure when returning from overseas duty.  I was greeted coldly by my old friend, the bodysnatcher.  She informed me, in the presence of another employee, that she had received my efficiency report from Berlin and that it was the worst one she had ever seen.  She could not, in all good conscience, recommend me for another job, and she advised me to resign.  I was dumbfounded.  My boss in Berlin had not had time to prepare my efficiency report, show it to me, and have me sign it, as was customary.  He had assured me that he would write that I had performed my duties satisfactorily, although he thought that I was overqualified for clerical work and would recommend me for a position which would make use of my education and background.  I had been delighted and certain that this report would lead to a much better job at more pay.  When I met Werner in the cafeteria, I could hardly keep the tears in check.

We went back to our hotel and kicked the matter around for hours before I went to bed and cried myself to sleep for the first time in many years.  By the time I got up the next morning, Werner had made an appointment with Bill, the Chief of Support for the entire division.  He was not only Werner’s boss but also his friend.  We arrived at his office, and Werner told me to tell Bill what had happened.  When I had finished, he asked for my file to be brought in.  When he had examined it he seemed very puzzled and asked me if I was sure I had not misunderstood the bodysnatcher, calling her by name, of course.  I replied that he could ask the other person who had been present, luckily recalling her name.  His face went expressionless.  Finally, he said, “Why don’t you two just go off on your leave, have a good time, and come to see me when you get back.  I’ll have this all cleared up by then.”  He was as good as his word.  When we returned, I was given an absolute plum of a job.  I never saw the bodysnatcher again.  Perhaps she retired.

This incident was the last battle in my personal war with bureaucracy.  It lasted three years, from the day of my first interview with the late-lamented bodysnatcher.  It was a war with long quiet periods, interspersed with skirmishes, some of which I had won and others I had lost.  I never considered the billeting battle a victory because I hated the way I had “won” it, at least the way others had perceived it. In a way, I have always felt that I had lost the first battle, by being shunted into the wrong job, certainly not the one I had thought I was getting.  After all, I had wasted three years on work for which I was ill-suited, to say nothing of the difference in salary.  On the other hand, there was Werner, whom I would never have met if I hadn’t gone to Germany.  This most recent victory had really been won for me rather than by me, but I had learned that when fighting for survival in the bureaucratic jungle, you used every weapon and ally you could.  I was proud of my success in financing the car.  It had hurt no one and perhaps helped many by setting a precedent.  I don’t feel any bitterness about the SNAFU’s I had with the Agency.  After all, they were almost as new as I was and just as entitled to make mistakes.  Of course, I am referring to bureaucratic mistakes.  The other kind, I am not in a position to identify.  I would like to say, however, that it seems to be a shame that only the Agency’s failures seem to get attention.  Its successes go unheralded.  That, however, “goes with the territory.”
 


 
Chapter Forty-one


When we returned from our leave, I learned that my problem had indeed been taken care of.  I was going to work for a man whom everyone in the know considered the nicest man in the Agency.  Everyone loved Mike R. who had been with the old OSS and had such daring deeds under his belt as parachuting into Yugoslavia to fight alongside our friends there.  He was a thoroughly professional intelligence officer with a sunny disposition and lack of ego rarely characteristic of that breed.   His kindness and generosity of spirit were legend and were soon demonstrated to me. 

I had to wait several weeks before replacing the girl whose job I was to take over; she was leaving to get married.  Rather than make me feel the ignominy of sitting uselessly around with nothing to do, Mike arranged for me to take a series of courses which not only were interesting but also contributed in a positive way to my dossier.  I learned surveillance both in the lecture hall and on the streets, how to set up a “drop” or a meeting with agents, how to case a location, and all those other activities which were certainly more glamorous than typing and filing. 

I also took several courses concerned with Communism, especially as it was practiced in the Soviet Union.  We were graded on our performance and exam results in these courses, and I was so anxious to make Mike proud of me that I outdid myself, and Mike received a notice that I had come out tops in all the courses.  This led to a meeting with the Chief of the whole EE Division, who actually asked me what sort of job I wanted!   Shades of the body-snatcher!  I said that I was quite content at the prospect of working for Mike (until I could return to Germany) but would like to learn a little Russian in the meantime.  It was arranged, and I took a number of lessons but hardly got past the alphabet before having to start fulltime on my new job.

Mike presided over two entities known as the REG and the DRC.  I will say nothing about the latter as it was none of my concern; I shared the office with the girl (we were all called girls regardless of age—she was about my own age) who handled all DRC matters, but her work had nothing to do with mine.  I was in charge of the Headquarters desk of the REG, which concerned itself with the debriefing of the returning East German scientists who had been involuntarily taken to Russia from East Germany at the end of the war.  They had remained there, forced to assist in certain scientific activities, contributing their expertise and experience.  They were being gradually returned to Germany, their brains having been picked to the bone, as it were.  Now we were debriefing them on the work they had been doing in Russia and on their opinions of the status of scientific progress in the Soviet Union.  I couldn’t help wondering whether one or more of these scientists had devised the V-1andV-2 bombs which I had ducked in England.

Mike’s counterpart in Frankfurt was in charge of collecting information from these returned scientists, collating this material, and publishing it for use by the entire western intelligence community.  The reports were returned to my office for dissemination to the members of the allied intelligence community, and I attended meetings of a board representing them in order to serve as a conduit for their requests for more specific information from the field.  This is a simplification, but it is only intended to provide a general description of my duties.  Of course those duties included handling all correspondence with the field unit as well as with other members of the intelligence community.  Such correspondence required Mike’s sign-off, but he was a wonderful boss, giving me free rein and rarely if ever suggesting any change in my work.  This did a lot for my self-confidence, and I was very happy in my new job.

So sure did I become that I had the makings of a career with the Agency that I requested a psychological evaluation to bolster my own estimation of where my true niche in the agency might be.  As I had majored in psychology in college, I was fairly confident that I could slant my performance in such a way as to achieve my objective. It worked out that way.  In my final discussion with the Agency psychiatrist, we discussed a personality profile that I had been asked to prepare on myself.  With a wry smile, he said that anyone who could sum herself up as I had done deserved a chance to choose her own goals.  Since he of course knew about my psych major from my files, his flattery was delivered tongue in cheek and was taken that way.  Nevertheless, he wrote a report to my division that he thought I should be allowed as much leeway as possible in charting my future course.  At least that is what he told me he would write—I never actually saw the report.
 
Chapter Forty-two


After about nine months in Mike’s office, I asked him if he could get me the job of Reports Editor attached to our field office in Frankfurt.  I explained that I had decided that this was the kind of work I felt best suited for, in spite of the fact that I was about four grades under that of most beginning reports officers even with the promotion Mike had already obtained for me.  I also pointed out what he had always known—that I wanted to be back in Europe near Tommy.  I had had Tommy over to Washington for part of his summer holidays, but I really wanted to be within easier reach of him all the time.  Mike concurred and put in for my transfer to the field office as a reports editor. The transfer was approved by the field office chief, whom I had met on one of his trips to Washington, and duly confirmed by Headquarters Personnel.  I was to leave for Germany in about two months. 

I had mentioned none of this to Werner, preferring to wait until it could be presented as a fait accompli.  That evening, in the car on the way back to our apartments--we always went to work in Werner’s car because he rated a reserved parking place—I told him that I was leaving for Germany in eight weeks. I made a schmaltzy speech (which I still cringe to remember) about how he should forget me, marry a younger woman, and have children.  I was a bit disappointed at how calmly he took the news, and after a rather restrained dinner, I took myself off to my own apartment to retire rather weepily to bed.

We went to work as usual the next morning, saying little or nothing about my new plans.  About halfway home that evening, Werner asked casually, “What date did you say you would arrive in Frankfurt?”  I told him, and he said, “I’ll meet you at the airport—I’m leaving for Germany in three weeks.”   When I had recovered somewhat, he explained that a week or two earlier he had been offered a job that would take him back to Germany but had turned it down.  I was very touched because I knew he was bored with his Washington job.  That day he had inquired and, finding the job still open, had agreed to be in Germany in three weeks. He duly departed, leaving me a dozen frozen Del Monico steaks lest I should starve until we were reunited.   Marianne had been right about that man.

I worked up until the day of my departure except for a quick trip to New York to see my father.  I was to fly from Washington to Germany, but I had had my orders cut (I had learned about orders the hard way) to include a three-day stopover in England to see Tommy.  I had vacated my apartment about two days before my departure and was staying with a girl friend.  The day before I was to leave Washington, I received a phone call from another office asking if I would be willing to hand-carry a package to London’s airport where I would be met and relieved of it.  A ride into London with the person meeting me was a bonus.  I agreed; the package would be delivered to me that evening.  It was very definitely my impression that the package would fit into my carry-on bag.

That evening, my hostess had some mutual friends in for a small farewell party.  They were not all Agency people, so when the packet was delivered, I simply had to accept it dumbly without protest at its size.  It was almost the size of my largest suitcase, and was accompanied by several large luggage stickers proclaiming that it contained courier material and must be kept with me at all times. 

Did you ever try to fit into an airplane’s lavatory carrying a 30-inch suitcase?  To make things worse, we had to feather an engine and return to Gander to spend the night.  I had to sleep on a narrow dormitory cot with that suitcase.  By the time I reached London, I was exhausted and coming down with a cold.  Matters were not improved when I found myself booked into a well known mid-priced hotel, which has since been improved but in those days was taking advantage of the postwar excuses used by many English hotels for inferior service and amenities.  It had no room service, and the dining room had closed an hour earlier.  The room had no private bathroom, and when I attempted to use a bath down the hall, I found that all the baths had been locked for the night.  The desk used the excuse that the floor staff responsible for cleaning the tubs after each use had gone off duty.

This type of letdown in the quality of service which had been traditionally excellent in prewar England was one of the worst aspects of the postwar years.  While it was true that domestic staff was not as easy to find as it had been before the war, many hoteliers used this and other less valid excuses for shoddy service and lack of amenities.  I made frequent visits to England over the postwar years, and unless I was willing to pay for the most luxurious hotels, I found rooms with no soap, no towels, and no coat hangers.  After a miserable night in one such establishment about three years after the war ended, I complained to the front desk only to be given the usual whine, “But, Madam, people take them away.”  “Then replace them,” said I, “and charge it to overhead.”  (Ugly American!) 

The same sort of attitude permeated many other facets of British life.  Garages closed promptly at five o’clock and would not open to provide a part or a liter of petrol no matter how much money they were offered over and above the normal price.  This attitude was attributed to the high income taxes, which were said to kill incentive, but it seemed to me to go much deeper and to be more widespread.  At times it seemed as though the personality of the whole nation had changed.

Werner met me, as promised, at Frankfurt Airport.  He was not stationed at Frankfurt but at Wurzburg with frequent visits to Wiesbaden, which was very close to Frankfurt.  I checked in at an Army transient hotel which was a great improvement on the old Excelsior, which had sheltered me on my 1952 arrival in Frankfurt.

This time my orders included Tommy, but billeting was still tight.  I was asked if I could share a two-bedroom apartment until one was available for me alone.  I agreed to this and arranged for Tommy to stay with married friends when he arrived for my part of his Christmas holidays.

All of this was taking place at the time of the ill-fated Hungarian uprising.  All operational offices were severely overloaded with work.  When I reported to Personnel, I was asked if I would go to Stuttgart for three or four days to help out two field officers who were temporarily without a secretary.  My boss-to-be in Frankfurt was consulted, and he assured me in private that he would refuse permission if I didn’t want to go.  I saw no reason not to help out and set off for Stuttgart in a car furnished by Headquarters since mine had not yet arrived.  My help was greatly appreciated by the two lone operators in Stuttgart.  They took me out to dinner on my last night and argued so over the check that they knocked a cream pitcher over into my lap.  This voluntary help where help was needed got me off to as good a start with Personnel as my earlier Heidleberg fiasco had done the opposite.  That office was never anything but cooperative with me for the rest of that tour of duty in Germany.

I was enchanted with my new work and sure that I had at last found my niche.  My immediate boss and the unit chief were both men of great erudition, both PhD’s in fact, and I learned a great deal from them.  I started right in on preparing reports and had my first one published within a month.  I got an almost immediate promotion because of the nature of the work and was promised consideration for another as soon as it was feasible because I was several grades below my co-workers. 

Werner was doing interesting work also, being attached to the new U-2 project.  He was able to be in Frankfurt most weekends, and we were going along quite happily and had decided to get married if we could get permission.
 
Chapter Forty-three


In March, my father died suddenly of a second stroke.  The people in Personnel were very kind and helpful.  They arranged for me to go (space available) to the States and back via MATS (Military Air Transport Service) which would save me a great deal of money.  I flew out of Frankfurt to Travis Air Force Base and proceeded from there to Dallas by commercial plane.  Boarding the MATS plane was a humbling experience.  The passengers assembled on the tarmac alongside the aircraft and boarded as their names were called out.  They boarded by rank, starting with the generals, descending through colonels, and so on.  Any civilians came last and were called by some ranking method known only to those in charge.  It was very lonely and conspicuous to be not only the sole female passenger but the last person to board.  The Army’s gallantry did not extend to lowly female passengers catching a free ride.  But once on board, I was extended every courtesy and could have enjoyed myself if I had not been on such a sad mission.

I had formed the habit of buying a stack of prepaid postcards and typing a line or two of greeting to my father at least three times a week when I arrived in my office in the morning.  At my father’s funeral, the minister mentioned that he had found these cards in a drawer when looking for my address in order to notify me of Daddy’s death.  He said he had been gratified at this evidence of how Daddy was loved, and I was consoled and heartened by his words. 

I went from Dallas to Washington before I flew to Frankfurt in order to talk to the right person about Werner’s and my marriage plans. [Note:  Permission to marry was not usually required of CIA personnel, but because of the high classification of the U2 project, we had to ask for it.] Permission was granted with certain reservations; it was decided that we should wait until autumn when my first year of this tour would be up.  At that time I could interrupt my tour without having to reimburse the Agency for my trip to Germany.  If necessary, I could resign, marry Werner, and return to the States to wait for his release from the project.  It didn’t work out that way.

One Sunday in May 1957, I was in the bedroom of my apartment getting ready to go out somewhere with Werner, who was waiting for me in the living room.  The phone rang and he answered it.  He always left a number at his base where he could be reached, and evidently the call was for him as he spoke for quite a while.  Eventually he came to the door of my room and said quite casually, “We’ve got to get married right away.  I’m being transferred to the Far East, and you can only join me when your year is up if we’re married.”  I was so stunned that I started babbling something about having just ordered a nameplate for my front door, and the name would be wrong if I got married.  “How much is it going to cost?”  “Three dollars.”  At that point, the utter silliness of my reaction hit us, and we both laughed until the tension had passed and we could settle down to making some plans. 

By the end of the next day, we had learned the following:  German laws would require at least six weeks advance notice for us to be married there.  We could be wed in Switzerland in about three weeks if we were able to supply US Army permission, my divorce papers, Werner’s previous wife’s death certificate, and both our birth certificates.  I, having no permanent family home, had all of my papers with me, but Werner had left his at home with his mother.  We were able to get the death certificate from a copy of the one at the American Consulate at Frankfurt as Vivian had died in that city, but Werner had to phone his parents to get them to airmail his birth certificate.  This was not as easy, for they had not really been prepared about the proposed marriage, but we finally got the document about a day before the wedding was scheduled to take place.

We were married at the City Hall in Basel on 7 June 1957.  I was very impressed at how they handled this purely civil ceremony.  It was beautiful!  They had a room entirely furnished in French period furniture and containing large vases of fresh flowers. We sat at a gilt and lacquered table, facing the man who married us.  For a City Hall wedding, it couldn’t have been nicer.

After about a five-day honeymoon spent at some of our favorite places—Lake Constance, Baden-Baden, and Garmish—we returned to Frankfurt, and I saw Werner off to Japan early one morning and went to the office.  Not only was the honeymoon over, but I wouldn’t see my bridegroom for six months.

My work and my co-workers made the six months tolerable.  One of my co-editors, a woman younger than I but not a young girl, had never been to England and was longing to go.  I had to be present at Tommy’s Speech Day (last day of summer term) in July, so she and I arranged to spend a few days in London and then to hire a car to drive up to the school in Norfolk.  We enjoyed our time in London, highlighted by a guided tour to some of the most prestigious Guild Halls in the City with Lawrie Wingfield as our guide.  Finally, on a fine summer day, we picked up our small car and set off for Norfolk, expecting to arrive in Holt, the town near Tom’s school, in time to take him out to dinner.  It was not to be.

Just outside the famous horse breeding, horse-sales, and horseracing center of Newmarket, something went wrong with the car, and we came to a halt at the side of the road.  It was about a quarter to four.  A passerby drove us into town where we found an ancient limousine whose driver was an independent taxi chauffeur.  This kind man drove us out to our car and quite promptly determined that we had lost a small part that could be replaced for about the equivalent of a dollar.  It was here we ran into the aforementioned closed-garage situation.  All the garages were closed, but we were heartened when we saw lights in one and the owner working at a desk in his office. Neither pleading at the top of our voices through the door nor offering many times over the value of the part would get him to open his door.  We were forced to spend the night in Newmarket.

We had the misfortune to be stranded for the night in Newmarket at the time of an important race meeting, and our gallant driver drove from hotel to hotel, to B & B, to residential hotel without success.  By eight o’clock it was apparent that we were not going to find lodgings.  It was then, with old-world diffidence and courtesy, that our driver said that he and his wife would be pleased to offer us shelter for the night, if we would do them the honor to accept their hospitality.  To make a long story short, we spent a most comfortable night in their spare bedroom, were given a delicious breakfast by the lady of the house, and were not allowed to pay her for any of it.  But we did get the chauffeur to accept a large tip when he finally saw us off in our at-last-mobile car.  Hospitality has always been a hobbyhorse subject with me (no doubt due to my Southern upbringing) and I have never found it more wonderfully demonstrated than in that kindly couple’s humble semi-detached row house.

Back in Germany after our visit with Tommy, I worked hard and lived for letters from Japan.  There was a period when it was uncertain whether Werner would remain there or be transferred to some other place.  Cambodia was mentioned as one possibility.  Finally, however, it was decided that he would remain in Japan and that dependents would be allowed to join the men working on the U-2 project there as soon as quarters for families were constructed.  This was accomplished by December, and it was arranged that I would fly out to Japan during that month. 

As no women were allowed to work on the U-2 project, even in clerical positions, I tendered my resignation to the Agency, citing as my reason the fact that there was no work for me (or for any women) at the site of my husband’s assignment.  To my everlasting pride and gratitude, I was instead given a year’s leave without pay in case Werner might be transferred within a year to some assignment where I could resume working for the Agency.  Unfortunately for my career, we were two years in Japan, so at the end of the year of leave without pay, I again tendered my resignation, and it was accepted.  I fully intended to resume my work as soon as we were stationed where it was possible. 

Meanwhile, in a state of euphoric excitement, I set out on my first over-the-north-pole flight and managed to lose my luggage for the first time.  We had to detour to Malmoe, Sweden, for the night because Copenhagen was socked in.  (I was flying with SAS, the Scandinavian airline.)  Somehow, my luggage stayed on the plane, which went on to Oslo.  When this was discovered, the airline officials assured me that the luggage would continue on around the world and arrive in Japan shortly after I did.  What actually happened was that my bags somehow got offloaded and spent ten days in Karachi.  I was the worst dressed bride one could imagine for the first ten days.  It didn’t help that everyone kept taking me to Japanese restaurants where I had to sit on the floor.  My only dress did not have the full skirt necessary to do this with modesty and grace.

We spent a pleasant enough two years in Japan, although I confess it was my least favorite of all the countries I had lived in.  The problem was not so much with the country, its people, or its customs; rather it was that everywhere I went, I was still in Japan.  I had been spoiled by the easy variety of European life where a change in cuisine, language, and ambience was just over the border in many places.  I was also restricted by not knowing the language, so helpful in getting to know a country and its people.

 We were stationed on a Navy Air station at Atsugi, with the nearest town of any size being Yokohama.  As a result, we relied to a large extent on the amenities and amusements provided on the American military bases.  After several flower-arranging and oil- or watercolor-painting courses, those amenities were exhausted.  At first it was fun learning to eat sitting on the floor and, when traveling, to stay in Japanese inns where we slept on futons on the floor and wore kimonos provided by the hotels.  We learned to enjoy the sybaritic pleasures of the Japanese bath. You haven’t really had the Japanese experience until, after sharing a hot bath with your husband, you lie on a massage table being exquisitely tortured by tiny Japanese fingers while contentedly watching a young female in shorts walk up your naked husband’s spine.  One cannot spend two years in Japan and retain any sense of false modesty.  At resort hotels, it was common to share hot spring-fed pools with whole Japanese families, including grandma, all as naked as the day they were born and totally unselfconscious.

Japanese toilets also deserve some mention, but I shall abstain from describing them except for saying that Miss Braun would have approved of the therapeutic value of the position they required one to assume.

On a more serious note, we did visit some beautiful areas such as Nara, Kyoto, Atami, and of course Tokyo.   My memories of Japan are accented with the contradictions of a people of such demonstrated artistic achievement and good manners who can also stand urinating on the street corners in the center of Tokyo.  Because of this practice, it was wise to keep one’s car windows closed.

We were fortunate to have a golf course on our base, and I played several times a week.  Golf in Japan was unlike anywhere else I had played.  In the first place, we had female caddies who were amazing in their strength and endurance.  To see an 80-pound slip of a girl carrying, at her own insistence, two fully loaded golf bags without ever seeming to flag in energy or enthusiasm, was to make one ashamed of one’s own weakness.  Their single shortcoming was their habit of exclaiming, “Nice Shot!” even when one had shanked the ball into a trap.  It made me somewhat dubious as to whether sincerity was a characteristic of the Japanese personality.

We met few Japanese on a social level, but due to Werner’s job, we did have dinner in a couple of restaurants with contractors he dealt with.   He had to be very firm about accepting no favors from them as they seemed to expect him to do, but we were given the opportunity to try some of their less well known dishes and to be amused by the childish but charming little attentions of the professional geishas who were always present at those dinners.  The wives of our hosts were never included, and we were never invited into a Japanese home.  The only Japanese person I got to know well was our little maid Yoshiko.  She was painfully shy but did become very attached to us, and it was a wrench when we had to leave her behind.

The U-2 program, as is common knowledge by now, was a joint CIA-Air Force effort, and the stint in Japan gave me my first chance to get to know some of the wives of regular Air Force officers.   On the whole, I found them to be a long-suffering and sacrificing group of women who had had to be left behind for great lengths of time to keep the home fires burning and to bring up the children single-handedly.  They were, like any other group, not without their foibles, and their chief aim in life seemed to be to keep on the good side of the wives of officers who outranked their own husbands.  I recall with amusement a meeting where we were to elect a president of our wives’ club.  A major’s wife nominated her husband’s colonel’s wife from the floor, as an addition to an already prepared slate.  I was one of two to count the ballot slips.  No one had voted for the colonel’s wife, not even the lady who had nominated her.  This reinforced my lifelong distaste for clubs and committees which, with one or two exceptions, I have never been able to overcome.

At last the end of our two-year tour of duty approached, and we awaited news of our new assignment.   We had agreed that we would make a stopover in Hawaii and another at Las Vegas on our way to Washington, where we were to report in before home leave and then the taking up of new duties.  Where would that be?  We spent many hours of speculation as to where our new assignment would take us.  Would it be Washington?  Or back to Europe?  Imagine the suspense with which we awaited the cable from Headquarters.

One morning the phone rang in our quarters.  I answered it to find Werner on the line.  There ensued a conversation so silly that I can only report it verbatim to make it believable.
    Werner:  “Hi!  I’ve received our new assignment.”
    Me:  “Where are we going?”
    Werner:  “Las Vegas.”
    Me:  “Yes, I know that, but where?”
    Werner:  “Las Vegas.”
    Me:  Silence
    Werner:  “We are going to live in Las Vegas.”
    Me:  “Why?”
    Werner:  (sigh)  “Let’s just wait ‘til I get home tonight.”
    Me:  “Yeah, maybe we’d better.”

I had never heard of the Nevada Test Site.  That’s where Werner was going to work, on the SR-71 project.  The nearest place for families to live was in Las Vegas.  Up until now, all personnel had been bachelors who lived on the base in the Nevada Test Site, but now they were re-staffing and greatly enlarging the project with both Air Force and civilian personnel.  As a result, families were being brought in to live in Las Vegas but never to enter the Groom Lake area.  We wives simply said that our husbands worked in the Test Site.  No one ever inquired further.

There were still no female employees.  The men commuted by car or plane and, as a result, often were absent all week except perhaps for Wednesday night, coming home for weekends.  Werner and I were the first couple.  Eventually he and an Air Force colonel presided over a complement of more than 2000 men.  The assignment, which we had thought would be for perhaps two years, kept us there for nine years.  There went my CIA career.
 

 
Chapter Forty-four


Those nine years saw an enormous growth in Las Vegas. When we first arrived, we had to buy a house, as there were no apartments available.  Eventually so many new houses and apartments were constructed that the area went through a bad period of overbuilding, which caused prices to tumble dramatically.  I still moan with  thwarted greed when I remember one house, newly built on the Desert Inn golf course, which we could have literally stolen for about one-tenth of the price it would bring today.  We turned it down because we had just found a nice apartment and didn’t think we would be in the area long enough to warrant buying the house as an investment.  Oh well, we didn’t get rich in Las Vegas, but we did have some good times.  We played a lot of golf and saw a lot of shows on the Strip, but we followed the practice of most residents and stayed away from serious gambling.  There were slot machines at the exit end of every checkout line at the supermarkets.  Putting the change from my grocery bill into one of them satisfied my gambling urges.  In all my years there, I never had a jackpot.

Work progressed on the SR-71, which was to replace the U-2 as our most efficient intelligence-gathering aircraft and to become the fastest plane in the world.  We wives knew very little about the project, and we knew better than to ask.  If outsiders inquired, I simply said that my husband worked in the Test Site.  No one ever pursued the matter.  [Note:  The U-2 became public knowledge after one of the U-2 pilots, or “drivers” as they were called within the project, was shot down over the Soviet Union.]  I did not know Francis Gary Powers (Werner did) but I had known all of the drivers based at Atsugi, and of course, I knew their wives and children.  Some jealousy had been engendered, particularly among the military wives, at the large salaries paid to the drivers, but after what happened to Powers, I personally felt that they surely earned their pay.  Not to imply any less courage and dedication in other Air Force pilots, both in war and in peace, but I know I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be the wife of one of those drivers when they set out on a mission.

We had Tommy over several times, once a year in fact.  He had also visited us in Japan.  Perhaps I should mention that, at the time of my marriage to Werner, I had had Tommy tested in Frankfurt by the head of the school for American dependent children.  I did so because I had to decide whether to seek Doug’s permission to take him with me or to leave him in England.  Now that I was not working, I would have liked to have him with me.  I wanted, however, to do what was in Tommy’s best interest, and the American school tests revealed that he was scholastically about two years ahead of American 15-year-olds.  If he went to a school in the American system, he would have either to go to college (at 15) or to spend two years repeating work he had already covered. 

I chose to leave him in England.  He was in a very good school, and not only had his father remarried a charming woman whom I liked very much, but Tommy now had four step-siblings and two half-siblings.  It seemed the height of insensitivity to remove him from that kind of environment and companionship, so I decided against it.  I have had to put up with a great deal of implied criticism from women acquaintances (I do not call them friends) along the lines of “how can you possibly leave your little boy so far behind?”  This was engendered by the same American attitude which cannot understand sending little boys of eight and one-half off to boarding school.  I tried to convince my critics that the little fellows who stayed at home, especially “only” children, would be very lonely since their friends either would be away at school or would live too far away for daily contact. 

In proof of my assertion, Tommy, when going into a day-cum-boarding school in Cheltenham after our return from Spain, had said he was lonely when he came home each afternoon while the boys who lived at the school could play cricket together.  We compromised by sending him as a boarder during the week and having him home at weekends.  Not only was he very happy with this arrangement, but it prepared him for the time when he would go away to school as a fulltime boarder. In addition, I am convinced that the happy child is the one whose time is organized and occupied almost every waking hour.  Nothing beats an English boarding school in providing this as well as other advantages.

In any case, the only person whose opinion really matters is Tom,(no longer to be called Tommy) and he, after the usual spate of adolescent perversity, finally realized with gratitude, I am sure, that I had done the best thing for him.  He went on to win three scholarships to Oxford and took a degree with honors in chemistry and a Blue in the modern pentathlon.  We visited him at Oxford just before he finished his studies there and enjoyed being shown around his college, Brasenose.  After taking his degree, he worked for three years for Dow Chemical before joining the family firm.  He has had a very successful career which might not have happened had I insisted on tearing him away from his family roots.
 
Chapter Forty-five


My decision to leave Tom in England proved well founded when he met a girl named Marney, and they became engaged.  We made plans to go over for their London wedding, which was to take place in July 1968.  Werner was to make one of his many visits to an SR-71 base in Okinawa, so he arranged to return by circling the globe to meet me in Portugal.  We would spend a week on the Algarve (south coast) before going on to London for the wedding.  I met him in Lisbon, and we rented a car for the drive south.  We were booked at the Penina Hotel, which was surrounded by its own two golf courses.  It had been described to us in glowing terms by our travel agent.  Words cannot describe the pleasure we had during the week at the Penina.  Suffice it to say that we had wonderful weather, although the end of June is usually considered too far into the summer in that part of Portugal.  Indeed, the day that we left by air from Faro, a miserably hot wind from Africa had already started to herald the arrival of the “off” season.

Our hotel had a lovely swimming pool where one could be served lunch.  The beach was nearby, and one could reach it in minutes in the hotel’s minibus.  The food was delicious, especially the fresh sardines which were grilled over open fires in small restaurants, which consisted of only an awning and some tables right on the beach.  We fell in love with the Algarve and vowed to return one day.  (We made the mistake of doing so in 1984.   Not only were we appalled at the number of high-rise condos and hotels, but we couldn’t even get a grilled fresh sardine.  The British tourists so dominated the Algarve that fish and chips, British style, and roast beef with Yorkshire pudding were the prevalent gastronomic delights!)

We arrived in London several days before Tom’s wedding.  Absolutely everything went wrong from the very beginning.  To start with, we had the misfortune to hit one of England’s rare heat waves.  The British are not prepared for heat waves, and when they get one, they are as stubborn in not admitting to discomfort as they are in the depths of their damp and cold winters.  Air conditioning is rare, and hotels and restaurants run out of ice cubes in the first hour, while everyone who disdains ice in their drinks the rest of the year is demanding a Tom Collins or a Pimms No. 1, about the only two drinks the British prepare which require ice.

We had booked (at the suggestion of that same travel agent who had been so right about Portugal) at what was supposed to be a newly modernized hotel.  It was awful.  The closet space was practically non-existent, and there was no place to put half our luggage.  Since I needed so much more clothing than Werner, he had traveled around the world with half of my wardrobe in his suitcases, drawing some very funny looks from various customs inspectors.  We were buried under so much clothing, and it was so hot, that I simply couldn’t face trying on the dress and coat that I had had made for the wedding. In any case, there was no suitable mirror in the hotel room.  The dress had been delivered to me about an hour before I left Las Vegas.  Mistrusting the English climate and remembering how my shivering had almost disrupted Nancy’s wedding, I had had a short-sleeved dress and dress-length coat made in a silk and wool fabric in an attempt to be ready for any vagary of the British climate.

The morning of the wedding, I left Werner to dress in his rented morning suit and top hat while I departed for Elizabeth Arden’s where he was to pick me up en route to the wedding.  I took my dress on a hanger.  I wouldn’t be needing the coat in this hot weather.  Right?  Wrong!  Having had my hair-do and makeup at the hands of Miss Arden’s technicians, I donned my dress.  The dressmaker in Las Vegas had told me that she had taken it to be professionally pressed before delivering it to me.  The delivery was so late that I had simply packed it, because everything had been perfect at the final fitting.  Well, the professional presser at the cleaners had obviously stretched and steamed the seat of the dress over a rounded form.  I had a giant bubble on my rear end.  I had to return to the hotel so that I could don the coat in which I almost self-destructed from heat during my son’s wedding and reception.  I stood in the receiving line at the latter and greeted 400 guests who must have wondered how I could stand wearing that coat.
 

 
Chapter Forty-six


At one point during the Las Vegas years, we were flown back to Washington for Werner to receive the CIA’s Career Achievement Medal and the Medal for Merit.  They were presented to him by the Director at a ceremony in the auditorium outside the new CIA building at Langley, Virginia. Werner was allowed to show the medals to me and to hold them for a few minutes before handing them back to the care of Security until such time as he had been retired long enough to possess and display them.

When the SR-71 project was accomplished in June 1969, Werner was transferred to Washington, DC.  It was with mixed feelings that we left Las Vegas.  On the one hand, I was surprised, upon counting up the years here and there, that I had lived continuously in Las Vegas longer than in any other locality since my girlhood in Dallas.  I had lived continuously at The Gorse for only six years, having moved to the Continent soon after the war ended; I had been in Las Vegas nine and one-half years. 

To a nomad like me, that was almost the equivalent of taking root.  We had had some good times, especially in the early years before the big corporations took over most to the gambling casinos.  In those days, they were still operating under the aegis of the old professional gamblers who had created this fun-and-games oasis in the middle of the Nevada desert.  Although they had admittedly illegal gambling activities credited to them in the past, the Nevada Gaming Commission had granted them licenses under the so-called  “grandfather clause.” Therefore they ran their casinos with lavish generosity when it came to food, drink, and entertainment, in the firm belief that this largesse lured gamblers to the tables.

Complimentary (“comped”) drinks, meals, and star-studded shows were easy to come by if you had what was known as “juice,” i.e., the right connections.  Through my golf at the country club on Ladies’ Day, followed by hours of cutthroat bridge, I met the wives of many men who were well placed in the gaming business.  A number of the ladies were “graveyard-shift widows” whose husbands worked all night, and it was their wont to have all-night bridge games in their homes.  I was able to join them during the week, when Werner stayed up at the Test Site.   Many a morning I drove home at dawn.

We had a bachelor friend who worked with Werner.  Having no dependents, he could afford to be an enthusiastic gambler.  He became well known to most of the pit or floor bosses on the Strip.  Between him and my bridge-playing wives, we could get “comped” dinner shows in most of the major showrooms in town.  We even got to see the famous ratpack (Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford, and Dean Martin) all on stage together when they were all in town at once.  Reservations for that show were well nigh impossible, but we lucked out.  Several of the casinos sponsored golf tournaments, and they were very generous to the members of the Ladies Golf Association who helped.  Imagine getting a free dinner show for driving Ray Floyd to what I believe was his first major tournament!

On the other side of the coin, Vegas was changing, and it was this change that alleviated some of our sadness at leaving.  The big corporations and Howard Hughes were replacing the professional gamblers, and the bottom-line profit for each component—restaurant, bar, showroom—was considered more important than attracting the average gambler.  Only the known high rollers were offered free hospitality; employee friends could no longer get you into shows without standing in line.  The town was growing, but our enjoyment of it was not.  Crime and strikes increased while the fun and warmth we had known in the early years diminished.

After a detour to visit Victoria and Vancouver, we headed east for the long drive across the continent.  A few days after our arrival in Washington, we found an apartment high in the sky in Maryland.

Washington forced us to confront the fact that we had, in effect, sat out the 60’s insofar as those years were a time of turmoil, change, and divisiveness in our country.  I believe that we had been living in what was probably the most detached community in the United States.  Perhaps that was because most people came to Las Vegas to forget, at least for a few days, the problems which concerned them at home.  Events like the Chicago Democratic Convention, Kent State, and My Lai were what we read about or saw on the TV news.  The assassinations of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King horrified us, but we had no Watts-like upheavals or student rebellions.

Demonstrations of protest in Las Vegas were much more likely to take the form of strikes against the casinos.  Werner’s job had him dealing with the powerful labor unions, not with anti-war protesters.  Working among people as patriotically motivated and disciplined as the Air Force had not prepared us for the more politically oriented Washingtonians.  We were amazed and appalled when, at the theater, several young persons in the audience refused to rise for our national anthem.  I welcomed the surge of national pride engendered by our landing a man on the moon, but I realized that it had little effect on healing the breach caused by the Vietnam War.

Werner’s assignment was with the Glomar project, the effort to retrieve a Soviet nuclear submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.  It was not Werner’s favorite job, but it did get him the unexpected bonus of a month of temporary duty in Honolulu.  I accompanied him (at our expense) and we had a wonderful month, including Christmas and New Year, marred only by his beeper, which never failed to summon us from the beach or the golf course.  Poor things!

As the end of our second year in Washington approached, we both began to think longingly of Europe.  Although Tom and Marney had been over for one visit, I missed them, and the news that Marney was expecting put me into a fever of longing to get to the other side of the Atlantic.  Werner made some inquiries and learned that the post of Support Chief in Rome was to become vacant.  He immediately put in a request for it, and we waited on tenterhooks for a reply.  When we got it, we were in for a surprise.  We were offered not Rome, but Paris. 

I was delighted, but Werner was not so sure.  He had last been in Paris in the early 50’s, and he had been most unfavorably impressed with the rude behavior of Parisians toward Americans.  Diligently I set about convincing him that Parisians were like that to everybody who was not Parisian, even to other French people.  Also, I pointed out, they acted quite differently with people who spoke French, and I could do that.  Reluctantly, he gave in and was at once sent to spend time each day at a language training facility to learn French (in six weeks!)  He turned out to be one of those persons with absolutely no linguistic aptitude in spite of all the help I could offer him.  Finally, I fell back on my old method, described earlier, and taught him a few useful phrases, one of which was Au Secours (Help!!!)

We stopped off in England, traveling north to County Durham, to have a short visit with Tom and a radiantly pregnant Marney.  They lived in a charming house which had been made from two adjacent two-storied cottages.  It was small but quite adequate until their family should grow somewhat larger.  And it had an AGA!  After a few days, they saw us off for Paris, where it just happened to be April.

We were aware that Paris was probably available to us because it was not the most sought-after assignment in the world.  The reason was chiefly financial.  Paris was notoriously expensive, especially in the matter of rent, and even with housing and cost-of-living allowances, few families could manage to live really comfortably there and put money into the bank at the same time.  One of the greatest attractions of overseas duty is the fact that one can usually live rent-free, either in quarters provided by the government or by having a housing allowance over and above salary.  This enables most families to save considerably during the tour.  In cities like Paris, however, the actual rent often exceeds the housing allowance, and the difference must come out of one’s own pocket.  This, to many government employees, almost puts it under the heading of “Hardship Post.”

We were naturally as interested in saving money as anyone else, but we did have one or two slight advantages over most of Werner’s colleagues.  We were older, and while that is not my favorite advantage, it did have some beneficial results.  For one thing, Werner had reached a fairly senior grade and therefore had a higher housing allowance than his juniors.  For another, we had no children still to be educated and needing their teeth straightened.  We had also outgrown (being too old or too jaded from Las Vegas) nightclubbing and had long since lost interest in keeping up with the Joneses.  We were just a slowing-down, middle-aged couple of simple tastes, planning to retire in a couple of years.  We could certainly afford a small but comfortable apartment, do a bit of traveling, and still manage to put something by for the future.  We’d have a nice quiet farewell tour in Paris.  That’s what we thought, anyway.
 

 
Chapter Forty-seven

The first inkling that this tour was not going to be exactly routine came on our first morning.  Werner had gone to the office to check in.  He would visit the Housing Office for Us Government employees for a list of available apartments which we would look at that afternoon.  At about ten o’clock the phone rang in the hotel room.  When I answered it, I was greeted by Dave, the man whom Werner was replacing.  He welcomed me to Paris and then said that they would like to see me in the office right away.  I thought this was a little strange, but agreed to get a taxi and come right down.

After a brief meeting with Dave in his office, Werner and I were taken to meet two intelligence officers.  At this meeting we were asked whether we would be willing to live in a certain house.  It turned out to be a beautiful, completely furnished, five-storied town house on a very fashionable avenue between the Trocodero and the Bois de Boulogne.  All we had to do, ostensibly, was to take over the lease from the present “tenants,” a couple who had obviously been installed there for some reason  by the Agency.  We were to use our housing allowance for part of the very high rent.  The rest would be paid by the Agency. 

In accordance with the “need-to-know” policy, which is fundamental to intelligence work, we were never told why the Agency needed the house in the first place.  We surmised that they had had some use for it, that this requirement had ceased to exist, that the present “tenants” were departing, and that the agency simply wanted someone to finish out the lease, which ran for another year.  Apparently it was more practical and convenient for them to finish out the lease with the help of our housing allowance, than to default on the lease and pay a considerable penalty.   We were a little bewildered but could find no reason for refusing, so we agreed to see the house the next day.  It was really quite lovely, and while we did not really cherish the idea of climbing all those stairs, the house itself was more than compensation, to say nothing of avoiding the search for an apartment in a city notorious for its housing shortage and high rents.  We accepted and arranged a meeting with the owner.   She was a charming elderly French lady who had inherited the house many years ago.  She lived in a small suburban apartment on the proceeds of renting the house.  She was quite agreeable to our taking it over from our “friends” who were leaving Paris.  This kind of thing was fairly common.

We moved into the house early in May and spent the next two weeks getting settled.  Due to the comings and goings of men doing small repairs and electric installations, the arrival of our few household goods, and a broken toe, I was house-bound for several weeks.  The bed in the master bedroom was on a small platform (hence the broken toe.)  My only outings were to obligatory cocktail parties, where I looked very odd in a cocktail dress with one foot in a rubber thong sandal.  I called myself a bird in a gilded cage when Werner left for work in the morning, and I christened the spiral staircase “The Well of Loneliness.”

Loneliness was the price we had to pay for living in that expensive splendor.  Word got around rapidly, and since we were under orders not to reveal the Agency’s interest in the house, we simply had to accept being tabbed as people of private means (probably mine) who thought themselves too good to live as others did.  Invitations dwindled after we moved into the house.  The people who had already entertained us in their homes turned up on a list of persons we were not to invite to the house.  We couldn’t return our social obligations.  The people we could invite took one look at the house and decided not to compete with our splendor. We simply had to accept the fact that our social give-and-take with Werner’s colleagues would be limited. 

There were, of course, persons who were not colleagues and we often enjoyed the company of Marney’s Aunt Mary and her French husband.  We visited their suburban home and attended several functions at the school, which Mary had created for the children of diplomats who welcomed the chance of English schooling for their offspring.  Mary, by the way, was later named Dame by Queen Elizabeth for her work in Paris.  The French people we met accepted, with their marvelous “laissez-faire,” that we were just crazy, rich Americans; other Americans assumed that Werner was with the State Department and that the house came with his job.

This latter explanation also sufficed for Suzanne, our wonderful housekeeper, whom we acquired via an ad in an in-house Embassy publication.  She was highly recommended by the wife of a departing Embassy official, and she was therefore accustomed to working for Americans, although she did not speak a word of English.  At our interview, she said that she preferred to work from two to ten o’clock, as these hours coincided with the working hours of her husband, a taxi-driver.  He would pick her up at quitting time and take her home to the suburbs where they lived.  These hours suited us perfectly; she could prepare and serve our dinner and have time to leave the kitchen ship-shape for the morning.  This arrangement turned out to be more than just convenient for what was to come later.

I still think often of Suzanne, especially when I receive her long annual Christmas letter, entirely written in French.  [She is still writing to me in the year 2000, 27 years after we last saw her.] She was, and remains, one of the best friends I have ever had.  Her talents defy description.  Her sunny temperament was only ever dimmed when her intuitive empathy told her something was amiss, and her only curiosity was to learn how she could help. She was a Cordon Bleu class cook and could prepare and impeccably serve a five–course, seated dinner for 16 without extra help.  She and Werner didn’t speak each other’s language, but they got along splendidly, carrying on long conversations, nodding and smiling as though they understood one another perfectly.  If they got stuck, Werner would yell “Au Secours!” and I would translate.  Suzanne’s only complaint was that we did not entertain often enough.    We could not tell her why.

Nothing of great importance happened during our stay in the house except for a visit from Marney and my new grandson, whom I had met briefly at the time of his birth In July.  In fact, the whole business of our living in the house might have seemed relatively unimportant, except for the fact that it laid the foundation for what was to follow.
 

 
Chapter Forty-eight


We knew that we would have to leave the house by May.  Not only would the lease expire, but our landlady had died in December, and her heirs wanted to sell.  Aware of the tight housing situation, we decided to start looking for our own apartment by the first of March.  Accordingly, one day late in February, Werner arranged to pick me up so that we could visit several real estate agencies that afternoon.  He had consulted the Housing Office, but they had very little to offer and suggested that we consult the realtors who advertised in the International Herald Tribune.  Werner told me that we would be looking for two apartments.  One, at the request of the Deputy Chief (DC), a luxurious apartment with four bedrooms and a basement garage, would be for an unidentified person who had not yet arrived in Paris.  The other, of course, would be our own.  Basement garages were a rarity in Paris; most of the buildings had been constructed before the advent of the automobile.  Only new buildings had basement garages.  People simply parked in the street or a courtyard, or they rented space in a nearby commercial garage.

We set off to visit the real estate agencies which we had decided, from their ads or from recommendations from the Housing Office were the cream of the crop.  To each we described the need for two apartments, one with a basement garage and one more modest in price and requirements.  The agencies noted our requirements and said they would be in touch.  We drove back to the office because Werner wanted to check on something, and I wanted to do some shopping in the Commissary, located nearby..  I finished my shopping and sat down in the foyer of the Commissary to wait for Werner.

 After quite a long time he came through the door and I noticed at once that he had a strange expression on his face.  As I rose to leave with him he motioned me back and took a chair beside me.  He made sure we were alone, lowered his voice and said, “Something has come up.  Listen carefully.”  I nodded and he continued, “I just saw the Deputy Chief’  Things have changed a bit.  That large apartment is for us.”  I just gaped at him, and he went on.  “First of all, I want you to understand that what I am about to tell you is absolutely TOP SECRET.  Under no circumstances--none, you understand--are you to mention any of this to anyone.  Is that clear?”  After I nodded dumbly, he continued, “The large apartment, the one with the basement garage is going to be used for Henry Kissinger when he comes here for a new series of secret talks with the North Vietnamese.  We are going to live in it and put him and his people up while they are here.” 

I took a deep breath, but before I could speak, Werner continued, “The DC wants to see you up in his office.  Now.  Let’s go.”  Numbly I followed him next door  and up to the DC’s office.  The three of us went into a sound-proofed conference room, the famed bubble, like the one which was later described in the press at the time of a security breach in the US Embassy in Moscow. 

The DCS said, “Velma, I apologize for the way we have just dumped this thing on you.  I realize that we are not even asking you if you would like to do it.  It’s an order, simple as that, and I’m sorry we are having to do it this way.”  I made the appropriate sound of acceptance, and he went on to explain the situation.

Henry Kissinger was to come to Paris, under conditions of the greatest secrecy, to try again to break the deadlock of the Paris Peace Conference, by means of a series of private talks with the North Vietnamese negotiator, Le Duc Tho.  The CIA had absolutely nothing to do with these negotiations.  However, because of the need for secrecy, the White House had given CIA the directive to handle the physical, logistical, and security arrangements.  We were to find a place for Mr. Kissinger and his staff to stay.  Because of the secrecy of the talks, it was important that the press not know of Mr. Kissinger’s presence in Paris until after he had departed.  The man’s face was so universally recognizable, it was imperative that he be seen by no one. What was required was an apartment where the visitors, having arrived after dark at a small airport some distance outside Paris, could be driven to a basement garage and whisked upstairs without being seen by anyone.  This meant no lobbies to cross, no walking past a doorman or the unbiquitous concierge.  In short, swift, direct, unobserved access to the apartment from the garage.

What was needed was a couple to find, furnish, and live in the apartment.  They must be prepared at all times, at short notice, to receive Mr. Kissinger and his party.  Werner and I were made to order.  We were already established as a couple with private means who liked to live well.  It was known that our landlady had died, forcing us to find an alternative to the lovely house we had been renting.  We had no children (an absolute requirement) and our maid lived out.  I never did find out why they did not avoid our search for two apartments. Some SNAFU, I supposed, which we didn’t need to have explained.

The DC was emphatic that there should be no leaks about this operation.  He, the Chief, and ourselves were to be the only Agency personnel in Paris who were knowledgeable.  One of the Embassy’s military attaches was to be our contact with the White House.  He had succeeded then Colonel, now General, Vernon Walters, later to be our Ambassador to the United Nations. He was the person who had implemented this operation from the White House.  George, his successor, was now the person whom the White House would alert prior to each of Mr. Kissinger’s visits.  Later, when the number of visitors had increased, additional drivers were chosen from our own security personnel.  An amusing situation had arisen when one of these security men had seen Werner take me into the bubble. He dutifully reported this infraction of the rules by his boss, and Werner had to suffer his chiding until the man was recruited as a driver and learned that Werner was not just giving his wife a forbidden peek at the bubble. 

A senior CIA officer at Washington Headquarters was one of the very few knowledgeable persons there.  All correspondence pertaining to the operation would be channeled directly through him on an EYES ONLY basis.  Because of the very tight security measures, we had to operate with very little guidance.  All that Werner and I knew was the type of apartment required and that time was of the essence.  It was the end of February, and we were told to be ready by 15 March.

Anyone who has never tried to find an apartment in Paris, especially one with such specific characteristics, may find it hard to believe how difficult it was.  The only thing that made it possible was that we were given carte blanche as far as money was concerned.  This did not stop Werner from suffering terribly at the high cost of the entire operation.  He had spent close to 35 years trying to save the taxpayer money.  To him, the almost wanton expenditures of the next few months were a severe ordeal.

I was the one on whom the brunt of the search fell.  I spoke French.  It was up to me to talk to dozens of realtors, the final number being almost 40.  Unfortunately, that cream of the crop we had contacted the first day had to be eliminated.  We could not go back to them and tell them that the large apartment was for us when we had already told them otherwise.  We had to start from scratch.  I answered every ad in the paper and resorted to the yellow pages.  It could be very frustrating.  They would lure me out to see an apartment, swearing that it was just what we wanted.  I would drop everything and rush to see it, only to find that it had no garage at all. “But, Madame, there is a garage just around the corner where you can rent space for your car.  Just a short walk”.  They had no sympathy at all for me and Werner.  We were just spoiled Americans. 

One day a realtor suddenly demanded, in French and in Werner’s presence, some justification for the garage requirement.  I hastily invented a wealthy, disabled male relative who wanted to spend a year in Paris and would pay our expenses if we could provide his wheelchair access to the apartment door without his ever having to being exposed to prying eyes or to the weather. I will never forget the expression on Werner’s face as I translated for him this spur-of-the moment fantasy.  It must have sufficed and gone the rounds of the real estate community.  They finally accepted the fact that the garage was a real requirement.  What the original two-apartment searchers thought, when they inevitably learned of the whole thing, I cannot and do not want to imagine.  There was a sharp decline in any suggestions from the realtors.

One lady agent persevered, and we ran into a very difficult situation when she produced a really fine apartment, with basement garage, in suburban Neuilly.  We looked at the apartment first and it was perfect.  Then we learned that the elevator did not go directly from the garage to the apartment door.  It went up to the lobby where one had to change elevators under the friendly, ever-present, and curious eyes of the concierge.  All Parisian apartments are arranged so that the concierge can observe all comings and goings of the tenants.  They are always there and vigilant.  To keep Mr. Kissinger’s face from being recognized would be impossible.  It was not easy to explain to this agent why this apartment would not do. She washed her hands of us. 

I was close to despair when we found the perfect apartment  It was on the top floor of a new building, in an excellent location.  It was the only apartment on its floor and was reached by elevator directly from the garage.  We told the agent we would take it.  She said that the owner was out town and would return the following Monday, nearly a week hence.  She made an appointment with his office for us to sign the lease on that Monday, and we departed on cloud nine.

We spent the next six days looking for furniture.  The apartment being brand new, it had to be furnished and carpeted from scratch.  It would have been great if we had been able to rent a furnished apartment, but those would invariably be in older buildings.  New apartments, with basement garages, were snapped up almost before even being built and therefore almost never offered furnished.

When it came to buying furniture, we were in for a rude shock.  One didn’t just buy furniture, except for antiques.  One saw the store’s floor samples and waited three or four months for delivery.  I realize now that this is often true in the States, but I didn’t know it at the time.  Not having the faintest idea how to go about finding used furniture and knowing that antiques would cost a fortune, I turned in desperation to an interior decorator.  With dollar signs lighting up in her eyes, she assured me that she would be able to furnish the apartment by 15 March, although she would have to accomplish miracles.  I arranged to show her the apartment, and she took measurements for carpets and draperies.  I told her that I would give her the firm order and a deposit as soon as we had signed the lease. Thank goodness I decided to await that event.  It never came.

At noon on the Monday, the agent phoned and told us that the owner had sold the apartment.  We had lost a whole week; the decorator was furious; we were appalled.  I started frantically calling agents again, but most of them said that they had nothing which would meet our requirements.  Two or three days passed as I contemplated the ignominy of reporting complete failure.  Then two possibilities came up.  One was hideously expensive, so we looked at the other one first.  Eureka!  It would do.  We hurried to the office to tell the DC.  He was delighted until we told him the address.  The apartment was smack in the middle of the Soviet Embassy community.  Our headquarters man was consulted and agreed that it would be too risky.  As the building was almost 100% occupied by Soviet Embassy personnel, it was certain that they would carefully “check out” any new tenants.  Our car license plates would identify us as being US Government employees.  Once they learned, as they surely would, that Werner was CIA, they would watch us so closely that smuggling Mr. Kissinger in and out of the building would be nearly impossible.  We told another astonished agent that the apartment would not do and made an appointment to see the hideously expensive one.

By now, it was obvious that we could not meet the 15 March deadline.  If the visitors should come to Paris on that date, they would have to stay somewhere else.  We knew that we would only get a few hours’ notice before they arrived, so we needed emergency accommodations.  Werner remembered that a young man in his office had a small apartment in a building with a basement garage. The young man and his wife were told to take delivery of three folding cots, to make up these and their own beds, and to take themselves and their baby on a three-day trip.  All expenses would be paid and no questions asked.  They had a nice time in London.  Nobody turned up in Paris.
 

 
Chapter Forty-nine


Werner and I saw the expensive apartment.  Except for the rent, which almost gave Werner cardiac arrest, it was nearly perfect.  It had only three bedrooms, two doubles and a single, each with bathroom, but there was a servant’s room and bath on a lower floor of the building.  The apartment was well-located, very modern, and probably the most expensive in Paris.  In addition to the rent, there was a “reprise” which would have to paid to the outgoing tenant.

A reprise is what the outgoing tenant wishes to recover on the money he has spent on the apartment.  It is also a sort of inducement to him to give the lease up to the petitioner.  In some countries this is called “key money.”  In Paris, the reprise can be very high, because the original apartment is little more than a shell.  If the building is new, the first tenant must install the complete kitchen including the sink, paper the walls, carpet the floors, install light fixtures, and furnish the draperies and/or blinds.  In this case, Count B., the outgoing tenant, also wanted to sell his dining table and chairs.  He was, however, removing the chandelier, which would have to be replaced.  The reprise was very high.  I was sure that this was just the starting price and that he would come down in time, but he was in no hurry.  He had just put the apartment on the market.  He must have been astonished when we accepted.  We didn’t have time to bargain; we were under orders to get that apartment at any price and to furnish it at once.

By this time. I was close to nervous and physical collapse.  The strain of hours of telephone and face-to-face conversations in French was extremely tiring.  Although I speak French fairly well, I am by no means bilingual.  The responsibility of conducting this whole operation was weighing heavily on me.  I had absolutely no one to help me.  The DC was never present, and while Werner could prompt me with pertinent questions, I had to be sure I understood the replies and translated them correctly for him.  Fortunately, in the case of this apartment, Count B. spoke English, but I was feeling the strain and had a long way to go. 

Werner was not in much better shape.  He was suffering from the frustration of not being able to do the talking and constantly having to have his questions and the answers translated.  Moreover, he felt terrible that we had not been able to find something sooner and for less money.  He determined to keep the cost of furnishing down to a minimum.  I pointed out that it would look very strange for a couple to pay such high rent and have a lot of cheap furniture.  He agreed up to a point but still insisted that I would just have to find things that looked more costly than they were and that we buy just the bare minimum to make the place livable.  It proved to be a learning experience.  We had to buy pictures to cover the spots where the Count had hung his.  We had brought none of our own, so we haunted the smaller, less expensive galleries.  We dared not actually buy anything until after the lease was signed, and before that, Easter week was upon us. 

In Paris, practically everything stops during Easter week, and almost everyone goes away.  Our realtor, the Count and his wife, the building’s owners simply disappeared for a whole week.  Werner and I looked for furniture.  We had decided against another interior decorator, who would undoubtedly have assumed that such wealthy clients would want nothing but the best.  We went to  the Flea Market and haunted the Faubourg St. Antoine, the main thoroughfare of the furniture district.  Everywhere we went, we had the same problem: immediately available were antiques and custom-made creations, all astronomically priced.  In the medium price range, nothing was available without a waiting period. We finally found a store with its own workshops, which agreed to execute our orders with all possible speed.  We selected several items and promised to give them a deposit as soon as our lease was signed.  We did the same with a firm which made sofas and beds.

The Easter exodus over, we made an appointment to meet with the owners of the building, accompanied with our realtor.  Here, we were appalled to learn that, before approving us as tenants, the owners required assurance of our financial eligibility in the form of a banker’s reference.  They also wanted a statement from a local bank that we had at least enough on deposit to cover six months’ rent and a large deposit to be held until the end of our tenancy.  While we were not exactly paupers, this was obviously out of our league.  Our Paris bank account was just for current expenses, certainly not up to that kind of scrutiny.  We told the owners that we would furnish the necessary documentation in a few days and hastened off to theoffice to see the DC.  Our headquarters man was cabled and, in a matter of hours, a large sum of money was deposited in our Paris account.  It was the only time in my life that I “got rich quick."  Armed with this evidence of our wealth, we once again met with the owners and were approved as tenants.

The lease was horrible.  Most landlords renting to foreign government personnel would agree to a Diplomatic Break Clause, which would release the tenant with reasonable notice and/or a fair penalty in case of his transfer from Paris. Not these people.  Their prices were too high for most government employees.  In the event of our not keeping the apartment until the end of the Count’s original lease, another three years, we would have to give 45 days’ notice and find a new tenant within that 45 days.   Failure to do so would incur a penalty of three months’ rent (guaranteed by the deposit.)  In our case, it would also involve the loss of the reprise.  This represented the loss of an enormous amount of money.  It was the kind of lease no temporary resident of Paris, in his right mind, would sign.  But we had long since become accustomed to being considered insane.  Crazy, rich Americans, that was us.  Poor Werner, who had always liked to consider himself a hardheaded business man, hung his head in shame.  We consulted Headquarters and were told to sign anything, but get that apartment!  We had a new target date, 1 May, for Mr. Kissinger’s arrival.

At the last moment before the lease was signed, we learned that Count B. didn’t expect to vacate before 15 May.  Sounding tough while trembling inwardly, we told him that we must be in possession by 1 May or the deal was off.  He said that he must consult the Countess who was on the Riviera.  Two days of agonizing suspense followed before they capitulated.  He must have convinced the Countess that pigeons like us didn’t fly in every day.

Also at the last minute, I discovered that a large tapestry, which the Count planned to take with him, had no wallpaper behind it.  It was not a major matter, but it would have been very difficult to match and might have necessitated repapering the entire room.  Fortunately, the Count was able to contact the decorator who had installed the paper, and he had just enough left to fill in the hole.  By now, if I had been plucking out the gray hairs, I would have been practically bald.
 

 
Chapter Fifty


April 30th was a Sunday.  The following day, 1 May, is a rigidly observed French workers’ holiday.  Still operating with the possibility of our visitors’ arriving Monday, we literally bullied the Count to move out on the Saturday.  Werner had to pull all kinds of strings to get a moving firm to work on Saturday, with pay for overtime.  Somehow we managed to move in, with the Count and an indignant Countess scurrying out the door as our personal effects were being carried in.  We set up housekeeping with two single beds, two chests of drawers, one coffee table, and our cooking and eating utensils.  These were the only things we had brought over from the States, as we had planned to find a furnished apartment.  The items, which had been redundant in the house, were now all we had in a completely bare apartment.  Except for them and the dining room furniture which the Count had sold us, the apartment was completely empty.  If the visitors should materialize, we would get some rollaway cots from the Embassy warehouse.   I trembled at the thought of putting Mr. Kissinger on a roll-away cot.

We spent a frantic Sunday putting things away and listening for the telephone, but that day and the next, 1 May, passed without a word from the White House via George.  Apparently the visit had been postponed again, and we began a sort of race-for-time period, always wondering which would come first, Mr. Kissinger or the furniture.  The furniture won, and we were ready by 1 June.  To this day I do not know why the first visit was postponed foor so long.  Talk about “Hurry up and wait!”  My chief consolation was that it was not our fault if Peace were to be delayed.  It had been a constant worry to us that our inability to be ready could have delayed anything so important.

By the time the long-awaited first visit occurred, all the furniture was in place, even the bed linens I had ordered from the States.  (We had had all of the twin beds made to American measurements, French twin beds being presumably used only for children. French sheets would not fit the longer beds.)  By this time, we were lulled into a false sense of security, so we were somewhat shaken up when George informed us on Monday that our visitors would be with us Tuesday night.

We spent Tuesday shopping for and preparing food.  Dear George was free with advice, most of it well meant but misinformed.  First of all, he insisted that we lay in a supply of truly vintage wines.  He had it, he said, on good authority that Mr. Kissinger was a connoisseur, and he specifically mentioned a German wine that was one of Mr. Kissinger’s favorites.  We couldn’t find that wine, but we bought some other expensive wines, red and white.  During the entire course of the visits, Mr. Kissinger drank exactly one half of a glass of wine.  Another thing George had us searching for was a set of poker chips (which we eventually borrowed.)  The same “authority” had told him that the “boys” liked to have a poker session to while away the hours.  What hours?  Since they never arrived before eleven or later at night and had to be up and out of the apartment by about eight a.m., they preferred sleep to poker.  I also took George’s advice that first time about food.  “A hot meal,” he said, and suggested roast beef. 

July 18 was without a doubt the hottest and sultriest day of our entire stay in Paris.  Anyone who loves Paris “when it sizzles” couldn’t have been there on a day like that.  All day long the thunderclouds piled up, and the atmosphere was stifling.  Paris is not air-conditioned, and by nine that evening, Werner and I were exhausted and as limp as rags.  Suzanne was on her summer vacation, and we had no help at all in making all the beds, shopping, and preparing the food.  On subsequent visits, when Suzanne was there, I would tell her that we were expecting overnight guests on a late plane from the States, and she could help me with preparations.  It worked out very well, since she always departed by ten o’clock, well before the visitors arrived.  We couldn’t take the chance of her seeing Mr. Kissinger.

Werner had been asked to be down in the street near the entrance to the garage to guide the car into the garage and to accompany the visitors up to the apartment.   He went down shortly after nine, and I settled myself in the living room to wait.  The roast beef and vegetables were on a hot cart in the dining room, and the table was set.  The white wine was in coolers, and the red wine had been opened to give it an hour “to breathe.”  Just after Werner went down to the street, the thunderstorm broke.  Rain fell in torrents, and the thunder and lightening were the worst I could remember.  I peered nervously through the windows while Werner huddled, soaking wet, in a doorway.  Nobody came.  Nobody phoned.  Werner stayed in the street.  I stayed on the living room sofa, trying not to think of plane crashes or of sleep.  At two a.m. I heard voices from the kitchen.  A few seconds later a man came toward me with outstretched hand.  “I’m Henry Kissinger,” he said.

First impressions are curious things.  Here was this world-famous, long-awaited person, and all I could think of was “Where did he get that wonderful tan?”  He was followed in a moment by three younger men and by George, who made the introductions.  The first was Winston Lord.  We had been told that he would be Mr. Kissinger’s chief aide on these visits and that he was the one to consult about any details that might come up.  [Note: Winston came in for some notoriety later during the Watergate hearings as one of Mr. Kissinger’s staff whose telephone had been tapped.  Still later he later became our Ambassador to China and to the U.N.]  The other two were known to us as Peter, the baby of the group as Mr. Kissinger liked to call him, and John, a tall dark young man.  I suppose that I was told their last names, but as first names were always used from that time on (except for Mr. Kissinger’s) I quickly forgot them, accustomed as I was to the Agency’s first-name policy.

The hot roast beef, all dried up by now, and all that wine were never even seen, much less tasted.  The long delay caused by the storm had made the trip exhausting, and all the visitors wanted was to get to bed.

We put Mr. Kissinger in the single bedroom with private bath.  It was small and very simply furnished, but it offered privacy and was on the quiet side of the building.  Winston and John had twin beds in the large bedroom.  The only other bedroom was Werner’s and mine, but the sofa in the living room was convertible, and Peter slept on that.

It was almost four a.m. before I had cleared the dining room of the untasted dinner and had set the table for breakfast, which was requested for 7:30.  Ambassador Porter, the U.S. representative to the bogged-down Peace Conference, was to join Mr. Kissinger for breakfast.

The next morning, groggy from lack of sleep, I made a tactical error.  As my guests appeared for breakfast (Mr. Kissinger had mysteriously lost his tan,) I asked them how they would like their eggs.  I forgot that I was not exactly an experienced short-order cook.  I am sure that they would have been content with a continental breakfast of rolls, butter, jam, and coffee, with perhaps the addition of fruit juice.   Most experienced travelers are quite accustomed to this morning fare.  But no, I had to overflow with hospitality.  As a result, that first morning was a nightmare that I would like to forget.  Six fried eggs (two over easy, four sunnyside up) stuck to the pan and had to be thrown out.  Peter’s poached eggs were forgotten and came out like rocks.  The heat was stifling over my hot stove, and I’m sure that I panted audibly as I dashed from dining room to living room with fresh coffee.  My only prayer was that it was too early and they were all too preoccupied to notice.  At any rate, they all thanked me gallantly as they left, and Mr. Kissinger said, “You run a great hotel.”

After they left, I decided that Mr. Kissinger must have indeed been preoccupied.  His place at the table was a disaster area.  Admittedly, the hot French croissants (which Werner had fetched from the bakery) are flaky and untidy to eat, but few people manage such a fallout as had Mr. Kissinger.  The table, the floor, and even the seat of his chair were positively blanketed.  A large blob of marmalade lay on the tablecloth beside his plate.  “Good Heavens,” I mused, as I started to clean up, “I do hope he manages to be tidier when he dines tete-a-tete with Jill St. John.”   (This was before Mr. Kissinger married his present wife.)  I finally decided that, after all, he had been a professor, and if he lived up to that absent-minded image at the table, at least he hadn’t departed to meet M. Le Duc Tho with marmalade on his tie.

The next visit was on 31 July, just a day less than two weeks later.  Again we had very short notice, but I was better organized and had learned a thing or two.  Henceforth, no more hot dinners in the dining room; I set out a cold buffet in the living room.  It was much more relaxing for the guests, and it allowed me to lay the dining room table for breakfast even before the guests had arrived.  This saved time and let me get to bed earlier. 

The party was larger this time and for the rest of the visits.  We had two more men as regular overnight guests.  One was David, an interpreter, and the other was Mac, Mr. Kissinger’s Secret Service bodyguard.  David slept in the maid’s  room downstairs on the second floor, and Mac slept on a rollaway bed at the other end of the living room from Peter’s sofa-bed.  There were also two young ladies who were secretaries on Mr. Kissinger’s staff.  They arrived with the others and stayed for supper, but they spent the night elsewhere, probably in a hotel. 

Ambassador Porter came to supper for this and the rest of the visits.  He was a charming man who, if he arrived early, would tell me not to bother about him and would occupy his time studying Chinese.  George and Charlie, the extra driver, made up the party for supper.  There was no storm to delay them this time, and our visitors were not so tired.  They really seemed to enjoy the buffet, and I was inclined to be indulgent of our absent-minded professor as I removed the slice of tomato he had dumped on the tablecloth and followed in his wake, picking up bits of potato salad from the carpet.  Did he scatter debris like this at the White House?  It boggles the mind to think of him on his historic visit to Peking, with chopsticks!

Aside from his abandon when breaking bread, and the small matter of leaving the shower curtain outside the tub, he was a model guest.  Although he must have had a great deal on his mind, he seemed very relaxed at these supper parties and was invariably gracious and witty.  One morning I found that all the eggs I had bought had double yolks.  Decisions, decisions!  Should I give each person one egg or two?  I finally went on and gave each two eggs, but I felt guilty later when I learned that Mr. Kissinger was taking medication for cholesterol. He had eaten all four egg yolks without a murmur.  Each time, when they left, he told me that I ran a great hotel.

The visits continued in this pattern.  About every two weeks, we would receive one or two days’ notice, and the same group would arrive between ten and eleven o’clock, have supper, and chat awhile before going to bed.  All went smoothly, and I was becoming more and more proficient at breakfast.  Werner would bring several newspapers back when he went out to get the fresh rolls, and it was a fairly silent meal except for Mr. Kissinger’s teasing Peter about his appetite.  After breakfast, they would leave for the meeting with M. Le Duc Tho.

These meetings were held in suburban villas, sometimes in one belonging to the North Vietnamese, sometimes in one where the U.S. was host.  Mr. Kissinger and his party were driven by George and Charlie in rented French cars, with ordinary French license plates, to avoid attracting attention.  Since no one knew how long each meeting would last, the poor drivers spent hours waiting and then drove the party to their plane.  The talks were made public each time, but only after Mr. Kissinger had departed.  No one ever discovered his presence in Paris or his hiding place.  One of my most treasured memories is of a bridge luncheon I attended one day.  George’s wife was there, and the conversation turned to Mr. Kissinger and his secret trips to Paris.  Everyone was trying to guess his hiding place.  To this day, I do not know whether George had told his wife that I was the “hostess with the mostest.”  If she knew, she gave no sign, and I certainly gave none to her, although it was hard to keep a straight face at some of the wild guesses that were made.  One lady had it on the best authority that Mr. Kissinger stayed on a houseboat on the Seine! 

The last visit was rather hectic.  It had been a bit less than the usual two weeks since the previous one, and we were caught unprepared in that we had my son and his wife and baby staying with us.  We made an excuse about unexpected visitors and were fortunate that my daughter-in-law’s aunt lived just outside Paris.  Our family visitors were packed off for the night on some spurious excuse. When this visit and the visit of the Kissinger party were closely followed by one from Werner’s brother and wife, we felt that we were really running a hotel.  For awhile, I counted sheets instead of sheep at night. 

The last visit presented us with another problem.  A new member had been added to the party, no less a personage than General Alexander Haig, whose appointment as Vice Chief of Staff of the Army and promotion to four-star general had been announced in the press that very day.  He was, however, for all his exalted rank, Mr. Kissinger’s aide.  I had no private room for him.  While Winston Lord and I were discussing the problem, we were joined by Mr. Kissinger and the General.  After learning of our problem, Mr. Kissinger said, “He gets the next best to me.”  I glanced quickly at the faces of the three men.  Winston suppressed a smile; General Haig’s face was expressionless.  So was Mr. Kissinger’s, but I think I detected a glint of mischief in his eyes.  Few people other than the President can tell a four-star general to take second best.  Recently, in the magazine section of the Sunday newspaper, I saw that some wag had posed the hypothetical question, “Should General Haig run for President and be elected in 1988, to what post would he probably appoint his former boss, Henry Kissinger?”  “Ambassador to Chad” was the answer.

It was finally decided that John would move down and share the maid’s room with David (on yet another rollaway bed) and General Haig would share the large bedroom with Winston Lord.  All in all, our little house party had grown to nine, including Werner and me.  Incidentally, it had been ruled out that Werner and I could sleep elsewhere.  In case anyone should come to the door in the middle of the night (to borrow a cup of sugar?) the real tenants should be there.

Werner and I were very sorry that we had not been able to find an apartment with more bedrooms, but I believe that we did the best possible in Paris.  As elsewhere, rising property values and smaller families were doing away with the older type of apartment with five or six bedrooms.  Modern apartments, with basement garages, are rarely so large, and the garage was our primary requirement.  We apologized to General Haig, who was a good sport about it.  If he complained, at least it was not in my presence.

The world held its breath during the succeeding weeks of the off-again, on-again Peace.  Charges and counter-charges filled the media.  The bombing of North Vietnam was resumed.  When at last the talks between Mr. Kissinger and M. Le Duc Tho were resumed, the meetings were announced in advance.  Mr. Kissinger stayed at the American Embassy where, among other things, he had facilities for immediate communication with the President.  Except for putting Peter and David up for one night, we saw no more of our distinguished guests.

Those final talks involved more people than the secret ones had, and each lasted for several days.  There was a sudden requirement for one or two large suburban villas for the days when the U.S. was host.  Two suitable ones were found which belonged to friends of CIA personnel.  The villas were “borrowed” for a day or two at a time, the owners put up in hotels.  On one occasion, the owners of one house had invited a large number of guests to a dinner party.  The party was transferred to Maxim’s—at government expense of course.  Learning of this made us feel a bit better about the high cost of our apartment.  That party must have equaled our rent for two months. 

For one of these U.S.-hosted meetings, Mr. Kissinger suddenly decided to serve a Chinese meal.  As usual, George delegated this kind of thing to CIA, in this case, to Charlie.  Somehow Charlie found a Chinese restaurant which was able to cater the enormous five-course meal on short notice. 

At long last the meetings ended, sadly unsuccessful as far as Peace was concerned.  All that was left for us to do was to finish our Paris tour.  We had been promised at the outset that we would not have to move again, so we stayed on in the apartment, contributing, as always, our housing allowance toward the rent.  We were asked only once more for the use of the apartment—the week of 18 May.  This time we were to absent ourselves, so Werner and I spent the weekend in Deauville.  When we returned, we found that no one had been to the apartment at all.  No one ever explained.

Recalling these events all these years later, I am of course aware that the Paris talks were not so successful in ending the Vietnamese war as we had all hoped they would be.  Nonetheless, Werner and I are proud of our part in what, no matter the political outcome, was an unquestionably successful CIA operation.  As I write this, we are in the throes of Irangate, and I would like to quote from a column written by Mr. William Buckley and published on 25 November 1986.  Mr. Buckley wrote as follows: 
   
    “. . . Having reached these conclusions, we are entitled to ask, ‘Is there a role for covert operations?’  In answer to that question a few years ago, George Kennan gave a lucid, if fatalistic answer. 

    “He said, ‘If a covert operation stands any chance of being blown, then it should not be undertaken, and all covert operations nowadays run that risk.’ Therefore?  Well, therefore, if Kennan’s rule is to be observed, we should put an end to all covert operations.

    “But this is the counsel of despair.  We live in a world in which secrecy is quite simply essential to the execution of important missions.  Moreover, secrecy is not impossible.

    “While national security advisor, Henry Kissinger managed about twenty secret meetings in Paris to haggle with the North Vietnamese negotiator.  Not one of these meetings, though the logistics were infinitely complicated, was penetrated.”
 

 

Chapter Fifty-one


Throughout the entire operation, it had been considered important for us to continue our normal day-to-day lifestyle, so I had kept on with the bridge lessons I had been giving at the behest of the American Women’s Club.  These had started with one small class while we were living in the house and had grown to over 60 students meeting at my home three afternoons a week.  I refused to keep the money the Club insisted be charged for the lessons, for I didn’t consider myself a bridge teacher.  Indeed, I was chosen as much for the fact that I spoke French as for my prowess at bridge.  French-speaking members who wanted to learn the game had been promised a professional, bilingual teacher.  He had withdrawn at the last minute.   I was not a member of the club, but someone had given them my name. I donated the money to the Club’s scholarship fund, and they showed their appreciation by honoring me at the head table at a farewell luncheon meeting, where they presented me with an antique Baccarat pitcher.  It is one of my most treasured possessions.


I had almost given up trying to buy ready-to-wear dresses for myself in Paris.  Saleswomen would look me up and down and bewail the fact that I was so tall for French clothes.  But I solved the clothes problem.  I found that I could take a sleeping compartment on a train departing Paris at 9:00 p.m. and arriving in London the next morning in time for breakfast.  I could shop the entire day and return on the night train, having found the right sizes and saved enough money on London prices to pay the cost of the journey.  As far as I know, I am the only female I have ever known who would travel hundreds of miles to avoid shopping in Paris.  Similarly, practical Frenchwomen who found themselves in England did not fail to find bargains at the famous Marks and Spencer’s (affectionately known as Marks and Sparks.)  On one of my forays, I picked up a very passable Pucci-inspired housecoat for the proverbial song.  Back in Paris, I was wearing it when some Americans dropped in with a friend, a very chic French countess.  “J’adore votre Pucci,” she murmured admiringly.  “Oh,” I blurted honestly but tactlessly, “I got it at Marks and Sparks!”

Werner had planned to retire in October.  CIA’s policy of giving additional credit for years overseas made him eligible that year.  We intended to put the apartment on the rental market in April, just one year after we had moved in.  This would give us six months to find a new tenant before giving the 45 days’ notice.  Unfortunately, we got caught in one of those situations which often occur in intelligence work; i.e., one hand knew nothing of what the other was doing.  The Director of CIA, as part of an economy drive, was requested by the President to order an immediate reduction in force.  Werner was at the top of the list of imminent retirees, and as a result, when the computer’s button was pushed, his name must have topped the list.  In April, he was asked to advance his retirement from October to 30 June.

It really didn’t make much difference to us personally.  We had planned to stay only until October, because it would bring Werner to exactly 35 years of government service and because I was expecting another grandchild in England early in July.  What the computer couldn’t be expected to know was how the change in plans would affect our disposal of the apartment.  On the one hand, we were tempted to contact our Headquarters man and explain that what they saved by letting Werner go would most likely be lost on the apartment.  On the other hand, we realized that some other man, perhaps one not ready to retire anyway, would have to retire in Werner’s place.  So we decided to go ahead and leave 30 June.  We had just two months, which meant that we could not give the 45 days’ notice any later than 15 May.   Before that 45 days were up, we had to find a new tenant. 

It couldn’t have been a worse time of year.  Parisians leave Paris in droves for the summer, and they are not about to start paying rent on a new apartment in June, July, or August.  Besides, all work practically stops in July and August when the working people take their holidays, and absolutely nothing gets done.  People either move before the summer starts or wait until autumn.  For us to find someone to get us off the hook by 30 June would require a miracle, and failure to do so would involve paying the penalty set down in our lease and losing any return on the reprise. 

The few possible tenants produced by the agents we called were quick to realize our predicament, and they decided to wait until our time had run out.  Then they could make us a token offer on the reprise or wait until we had left, when they could make their own deal with the owners.  As one particularly offensive banker pointed out, “After all, Mr. Weiss, it would be very difficult and expensive for you to remove these things and take them with you.”  That did it for Werner.  He was tired of being a patsy and the dumb American.  He determined to salvage everything possible and to leave those “damned vultures” nothing that could be removed without damaging the actual structure of the apartment.  We already had permission to dispose of the furniture at half the price we had paid for it; now we decided to include the reprise items as well.  A sale was announced in the Paris Herald Tribune.

The results were astonishing.  Hordes of bargain-hungry people of all nationalities, attracted by the words “American family,” responded.  We had given the telephone number in the advertisement, and I received more than 400 calls in the week preceding the sale.  People were desperate for American things and for any kind of electric appliances.  The day of the sale, they lined up outside our door hoping to get the (French) washing machine, which had been part of the reprise.  A well known princess was desolated when she arrived 15 minutes too late and missed a chest she had heard about.  By noon, we had sold not only the furniture, but also everything that could possibly be removed:  wall-to-wall carpet, draperies, chandeliers, light fixtures, the kitchen wall cabinets, the stove, the refrigerator—literally everything but the kitchen sink (which was too difficult to rip out.)  All that remained were the wallpaper and the additional electric wiring which the Count had installed.  One man even offered to buy the slacks Werner was wearing!  If our greedy banker friend or any of his ilk got that apartment, it probably cost him three times what we had asked on the reprise to replace what he had thought to get for nothing.  New carpeting alone would cost a small fortune.

The turmoil of the last few days was horrendous.  Between the packers for our own things and the men ripping up the carpet and taking down kitchen cabinets, the place was a madhouse.  We had arranged to go to a hotel on Wednesday, 27 June, and to stay there until our departure on the 30th.  I had finished my packing and was sitting on my suitcases in the stripped living room waiting for Werner to come and take me to the hotel.  The phone rang.  I picked it up from the floor and heard Tom’s voice telling me that I had a baby granddaughter.  I was so tired and numb that I scarcely managed to mumble something appropriate.  I hung up and burst into tears.  Werner found me blubbering, got the news, and took charge.  He announced that, as long as the baby had arrived in time for me to see her, see her I would.  I was to go straight to the hotel, make reservations to fly to England and back the next day, and call Tom to tell him that I was coming.  Werner couldn’t leave the apartment at that moment, so one of the workmen took me to the hotel in his truck.  Thus it was that I left my elegant Paris apartment, perched on the front seat of a pick-up truck.  I didn’t look back.
 

 
Chapter Fifty-two


The temptation was strong to write “The End” at the bottom of the preceding page.  Up to that point it had been easy, for all I had to do was to remember and to record actual events.  With Werner’s retirement, there began a period in which I would spend more time in introspection than in action.  It is much harder for me to write about what I thought than about what I did, and more importantly, to envision that anyone would be interested in the result of my ruminations.

I had, however, set out to recall a period of 50 years, and in 1973, I still had 14 years to go.  If I am to fulfill my commitment, I must bring this retrospective up to date and end it.  I find myself reluctant to do so, because as far as I know, there is life in the old girl yet.  It is not easy to write finis to your adventures when you are not at all convinced that something wonderful might not happen tomorrow.  Who knows?  We might win the lottery.  I find myself envying those still young but famous actresses who write autobiographies of their first 30 years with the reasonable assumption that they can update the saga every ten years or so.  Lacking such luxury and having decided to take the plunge into those 14 years, I must go back to the day we left Paris, “Free at Last!”
 

 
Chapter Fifty-three


“Marry in haste and repent at leisure” is an adage with which we are all familiar.  I soon began to paraphrase it by substituting “retire” for marry.  Much has been written about retirement in recent years, as the process called “the graying of America” has steadily advanced.  At the time that Werner was approaching that phase of his life, either little had been written, or we had not bothered to read about it, much less to prepare ourselves for it.  I believe, in retrospect, that he had refused to admit that it would really happen.  When it did, he was like a fish out of water.  Perhaps those three extra months would have made it less traumatic, but I doubt it.  As it was, he worked a full day in Paris one day, and after a few hours on a plane, he was unemployed in the U.S. 

Even though we hadn’t liked the way it was changing, we returned to Las Vegas.  We had no idea where else to go.  Unlike our military friends who had always known that they would be retired after 20 years, while they were still young men, Werner had never considered creating a second career, much less a retirement home.  Neither of us had a family place to which we could return and resume old relationships and friendships.  Werner’s relatives lived in the New York area, and while we enjoyed visiting, we preferred the West.  Except for a cousin in Dallas, I had no family with whom I had remained close; both my parents were dead, and I had no siblings.  The nearest things we had to roots were apparently out there in the desert.

One of Werner’s colleagues from the Test Site days was among several who had retired to Las Vegas.  He had become a realtor, and he persuaded Werner to take the course required to become a licensed real estate broker.  He took the course, passed the exam on the first try (no mean feat) and joined the firm his friend worked for.  He hated both the work and the firm.  He resigned after two months and never went back.  The experience, however, did have some positive results.  Retirement didn’t seem so bad, and having the broker’s license was like a wife having her own car in the garage:  there might be days when she doesn’t use it, but she knows it is there.  The knowledge that he had a marketable skill made Werner more willing to settle down and give retirement a chance.  He began to play golf regularly and took over some of the household chores, in particular the marketing. 

I tried to help by giving up bridge so that Werner would not be alone at home in the afternoons.  This was probably a mistake, because it left me with too little to do outside the house and therefore with too much time on my hands.  I took a course in sewing for which I displayed a remarkable lack of talent.  I was bored to the point of apathy.  Thumbing through one of the many catalogs that arrived in the mail each day, I saw a daintily embroidered pillow which stated “Screw the Golden Years.”  I agreed.

We limped along like walking wounded through the first 18 months, getting the condominium we had bought furnished and finished, but taking more interest in preparing for our first trip to England.   This, unfortunately, set the pattern for the next 12 years.  We lived in a sort of non-productive limbo for ten months, waiting for the next spring’s visit to see the family over there.
 

 
Chapter Fifty-four


Believing, as my father had often said, that fish and houseguests both begin to stink after three days, I asked Tom to find us a place to stay near his small house in Ebchester.  He found us a very nice two-bedroom apartment, which a gentleman farmer and his wife had added to their house.  It had been a temporary home for their son and his wife who, by now, had a house of their own.  It was very comfortable but quite isolated, and it lacked the contact with people that I wanted.  This really didn’t matter a great deal on this visit, however, as I was too busy getting to know my two grandchildren and their mother to notice much of anything else.

By the time of our second visit, in the summer of 1976, Tom and Marney had had a second boy, our third grandchild, and had acquired their long-sought dream house at Bedburn in the depths of the country in County Durham.  We flew into Prestwick Airport in Scotland, where Tom met us with a car to drive us to his “new” house.  We were to stay there for two or three days before moving into a cottage Tom had found for us in a village about ten miles from his home.  As always, he lent us a small company car for the duration of our visit. 

As we drove southward, Tom took care to warn me that “the house is not fixed up yet.  It will not be fixed up this year or next year or the year after that.   Part of our pleasure in the house is that we never really intend to finish fixing it up, so don’t be too disappointed when you see it.”  My son was obviously thinking of my pesky perfectionism and my impatience, which combine to make me impossibly demanding to hurry up any improvement of new surroundings.  Tom had managed to inherit British genes when it came to patience and the tendency to make changes slowly.  At any rate, I was forewarned, and it was a good thing that I was.

The house was well over 200 years old, and the last person who had done any fixing up must have long moldered in his grave.  They had moved in the previous October, and Harry had been born in January, so that a very pregnant Marney had had to feed the family from a small two-burner electric stove, while Tom created what was really a wonderful large modern kitchen from two or three smaller rooms.  In that kitchen, he had installed—you guessed it—an AGA. 

By the time of our visit, Harry was six months old, and although there was still a lot of work to do, Marney was able to give a beautiful Bicentennial party for her American visitors on the Fourth of July.  It was an afternoon and early-evening affair, so that the guests could bring their children, and everyone was asked to wear red, white, and blue in honor of our national anniversary.  The weather was uncharacteristically wonderful, and we had hot dogs and a great time.  It was a splendid way to begin our acquaintance with this very special part of England.

My feelings about the lack of tourist interest in the area where our cottage was located are ambivalent.  On the one hand, I feel frustrated at how few Americans ever include it in their itineraries; on the other hand, I am glad they don’t.  So far, it has remained unspoiled by the effects of unbridled tourism, even though the TV series based on James Heriot’s “All Creatures Great and Small” appealed enormously to aficionados of American Public Television and resulted in some of them making pilgrimages to the area. Our rented cottage in Romaldkirk was discernible in the background of the TV series’ bus stop.  Romaldkirk is nestled in a fold of the Yorkshire hills and dales in an area known as Teesdale, named for the beautiful little River Tees which meanders through it.  Its inhabitants call it “God’s Country,” and I would not for one moment disagree with them.  Not only is the countryside of an enchanting peace and beauty, but the personality and distinctive character of the people born and bred there are of a very special quality.

From Tom’s house, we drove about ten miles over moors covered with heather and bracken and criss-crossed by narrow little roads which lead to small hamlets and prosperous farms The fields make a patchwork on the surrounding gentle hills.   Watching the play of sun and shadow on those hills taught me the meaning of the art term chiaroscuro.  After stopping frequently to let sheep cross the road, we descended from the moor, crossed a tiny one-car-wide humpbacked bridge over the Tees, and there was “our” village, Romaldkirk.

Romaldkirk is one of those perfect little English villages that seem to have frozen in time.  Nowadays, it is really frozen because the powers that be, who are in charge, have decreed that there may be no new building, that nothing shall disturb the pristine perfection of this little jewel of an English village.  There is the old Norman church, the village green (complete with the village water pump which was shut off during the Great Plague of the 17th Century) and, of course, two pubs.   The prevailing architecture is Georgian, although there are a few examples of Victoriana.  All the buildings are constructed of the same gray stone, quarried in the area, lending that homogeneous quality typical of many English villages, such as those near Cheltenham in the Cotswolds.  Because it was forbidden by the historical preservation mavens to alter the outside appearance of the buildings, even the only small store (tinned foods and sundries) is concealed in the front rooms of a house which conforms to the prevailing architectural style.  The villagers do most of their shopping in Barnard Castle (Barney) a market town a few miles away, which they reach by car, bus, or bicycle. 

We could not have found a more picturesque setting in which to spend our visits to England.  However, there was (isn’t there always) a fly in the ointment.  I am passionately devoted to the mystery novels of Agatha Christie et. al., and I have always dreamed of living in a typical English village like those depicted in books of that genre.  Those villages were veritable microcosms of English society, inhabited by persons from every stratum of the social scale.  They seethed with the loves and hates, the friendships and feuds, the quirks and traits of past and present generations who rarely strayed away from their native enclave.  There one could find the true meaning of who was county and who was country, who was gentry and who was not, what was rural and what was provincial, those subtle differentiations of what P. D. James calls a sense of hierarchy, essential to British village life. 

That situation had almost disappeared in Romaldkirk. A local cleaning woman spoke to me plaintively of how children must move away when they grow up and marry, because they cannot buy or build a dwelling in the village.  In many cases, their parents have pulled up roots and followed their children, and their cottages have been bought by outsiders such as well-to-do retired persons or prosperous businessmen.  The buyers converted the cottages into modern houses by knocking out walls and putting two cottages together, as well as updating the plumbing and décor.  Of course, the outside remains “authentic” as the law requires.  It seemed to me that Romaldkirk had been so studiously preserved as a typical English village that it had, in many ways, ceased to be one.

Our cottage, built in 1725, had originally been a small farmhouse. It had been modernized by installing a bathroom downstairs adjacent to the kitchen, putting running-water basins in the three bedrooms, and creating a lavatory at the end of the upstairs hall.  It was the property of a schoolmaster who taught at a boys’ boarding school some distance away.  He and his wife lived at the school, returning to Romaldkirk between terms.  We were therefor able to rent the cottage during the summer term, from the end of April to the middle of July, which we did for four years.

Thus I was able for a while to become once again a resident, albeit part-time, of England.  At the end of four years, the children were old enough to travel, and the British contingent visited us during three summers in the States.  Thereafter, until 1984, we exchanged visits alternately.  Our pleasure in the visits to England were only marred by my almost predictable illnesses.  Finally, in 1984, I was diagnosed with asthma, which was triggered by an allergy to the molds found in very old walls.  [Note: As one could rarely find any other kind of wall, especially in Tom’s area, we discontinued our visits.  Tom and Marney have since come to  Arizona at least once a year.  Each of the children was sent for a visit until they got too old and had their own adult lives.  We all keep in close touch by telephone, fax and, now, e-mail.]   Back to Romaldkirk.
 
Chapter Fifty-five


We moved in and became at once the objects of the kind of curiosity always aroused by the arrival of newcomers in such a small community—there were only about 300 residents of Romaldkirk.  One or two couples, friends of our landlord, extended invitations for a drink in their homes, but such invitations were the exception to the general custom of getting together at the pub where we were looked over by the villagers and looked them over in turn.  We invited our hosts back for a drink at our place and they came, but that was the end of that sort of social exchange.  One was expected to socialize at the pub, and very little at-home entertaining appeared to take place.  Obviously, one thing that had not changed in Britain was the stature of the pub.

Of the two pubs, one was, in true British fashion, the meeting place of the gentry.  It was attractively decorated and possessed a dining room popular in the area.  In summer it was necessary to book a table well in advance in order to have dinner or Sunday lunch there.  The other pub was presumably frequented by the lower end of the social and economic scale.  It was my impression that the habitues of one pub would not be caught dead in the other, although I am sure that there were some eccentrics who used both.  Every English community has its eccentrics—sometimes they seem to be in the majority. This poses a curious anomaly; while eccentrics abound and are indeed cherished, nowhere is conformity more essential.  Werner and I made many mistakes.

Probably our worst lapse in conformity was in not frequenting the pub sufficiently.  Of course we dropped in from time to time, but when evening fell and we were not over at Bedburn, we were likely to have our pre-dinner drinks, as we did in the States, in our own living room.  Werner and I have never been post-dinner imbibers unless at a party.  We therefore did not drop in at the pub for that last hour or so before “Time, Gentlemen” was called and after that final walk of the day with the dog.  As for the pre-lunch pub visit, beloved of the natives, we were, if not at Bedburn, either in Barney for shopping and a pub lunch or glued to the TV in our house, munching sandwiches while watching the horse racing.  Having established credit with a bookie, we could (perfectly legally) phone in our bets and then watch our money disappear on the screen in our own living room.

I am sure that this behavior seemed anti-social to our village acquaintances, who made it a point to touch base with one another at least once, but more probably twice, daily at the pub.  One of my worst gaffes was to ask a housewife we knew fairly well if we could bring my visiting cousin by after church on Sunday morning to see their very attractive conversion of a defunct Methodist chapel into a charming domicile.  I thought I was paying her a compliment, but she seemed so underwhelmed with pleasure at our visit, offering no refreshment, that we departed rather hurriedly.  We lived just down the road, and five minutes later, I glanced out the window and saw her hurrying to the pub.  I had committed the cardinal sin of forgetting the Sunday morning drill for many housewives, which is to hurry home from church to  pop the joint (roast) into the oven.  She then hurries to the pub to join husband and friends for the odd drink or two before dashing home to serve Sunday dinner. 
 

 
Chapter Fifty-six


This incident launched me anew into a preoccupation, which has persisted over the years, with the differences between the American and other countries’ concepts of hospitality.  My southern upbringing probably—no, certainly—predisposed me to place a lot of emphasis on the subject, and as a result, I spent much time over the next few years trying to pinpoint the differences as manifested in the two countries.  My time in Romaldkirk provided my first opportunity to do much comparing, because during the war years, we had neither the petrol nor the food to offer or to accept much in the way of hospitality.  Now I could experience the differences, both directly as a guest myself and also vicariously through Werner’s eyes. 

To my southern mother, hospitality was like a second religion.  From the time of my earliest birthday parties, I had been unremittingly coached in the duties of the hostess.  I was not allowed to neglect my guests to play with my new toys until after the guests had been able to enjoy them.  In England, over the years, I had observed that the birthday child not only opened his toys, but tried them out in solitary splendor while his guests watched enviously.  To sum up, “Mi casa es su casa” (including birthday gifts) in the southern states of America, while “an Englishman’s home is his castle,” especially on his birthday.

As I grew older, other responsibilities were ingrained into me as deemed appropriate by my mother.  She taught me, for example, that if one of my guests should start eating his salad from the plate on his right instead of on his left, I should do the same, thus forcing everyone at the table to follow suit so as to avoid embarrassing the errant guest.  Now this may be carrying things a bit too far, but compare it with an incident which happened in an English dining room.

We had reached the end of a delightful dinner, and the after-dinner port was passed around the table.  Conversation was lively, and some time had gone by when Werner noticed that the lady on his right had finished her wine.  Seeking to replenish her glass, he picked up the decanter, which was to his left, and was moving it to the lady’s glass on his right.  All the British leapt to their feet, screaming like banshees.  Werner nearly dropped the decanter and, worse, almost had cardiac arrest.  Through the noise and confusion, to say nothing of his embarrassment, it was finally explained that the decanter must always travel clockwise around the table.  This is tradition, and ill advised is the guest who flies, no matter how inadvertently, in the face of British tradition.  The telling point here is, I believe, that the British would not consider this a matter of hospitality.  My mother would have.
 
In all fairness, my mother did not have so much tradition to uphold. Again in all fairness, I should point out that so compelling is this obedience to tradition that the British enforce it not only on ignorant foreigners, but also on themselves. When I was in Japan, I was yanked from the first tee by the PA system’s announcement that I had an emergency phone call.  Terrified, I made it back to my home telephone to learn that Tommy was being evicted from his father’s house for flouting the port tradition at Doug’ dinner table.  I agreed to meet his plane, but a couple of hours later, another phone call informed me that cooler heads had prevailed.

So often, hospitality gets confused with just plain kindness, and indeed the two overlap to the point where it is almost impossible to differentiate between them.  An incident in Romaldkirk seemed to be a blend of both.  At the time of the Queen’s Jubilee, we had scarcely got installed at the cottage when the holiday drew near.  We spent the whole of one day with the family at Bedburn.  The next morning Werner was surprised to find that our garbage can had been emptied and the plastic liner replaced although we had not put the can outside, it not being our regular collection day. Due to the arrangement of the house and garden, it was necessary to retrieve the garbage can from just outside the kitchen and to carry it through the house and out the front door.  It turned out that the inhabitants of the village had been notified, some days before our arrival,  that collection would be on a different day because of the upcoming holiday.  To reach our container, the dustmen, as they are called there, had to go up a side road, climb a wall, cross a field, climb another wall, cross our back garden, and drop down into the areaway where the can resided near the kitchen door.  This they had done.  We had once left our garbage container 12 inches too far back from the curb in Las Vegas, and it had remained unemptied.  The dustmen, grinning hugely, also accommodated Werner by emptying our mousetraps; they no doubt enjoyed describing the Yank’s squeamishness to the customers of the Public Bar that evening.  Such helplessness appealed to the innate kindness of the working class, North Country English.  The butcher and the baker and the policeman directing traffic would all call you “Luv” and drop everything to help you.

On the other side of the coin, a young woman of impeccable lineage twice failed to be at home when I arrived, invited for a specific time.  I was left to cool my heels for half an hour, while she was simply out for a walk.  To one of my upbringing, only death or an accident requiring hospitalization could be considered an excuse for such behavior.  Which only goes to prove that old saying of my grandmother’s that “handsome is, is as handsome does.”  Privilege and position do not guarantee good manners.  In any case, the dustmen made us feel welcome, and that is what hospitality means after all.

That is not to say that the British uppercrust are inhospitable. They seem to have invented the country house weekend, and they offer more spur-of-the-moment, meal-and-the-night accommodation to each other than any group of people I have encountered   I have never known people so dedicated to the avoidance of hotels in their own country as the upper- or upper-middle-class Englishmen.  The working classes tend to stay at home except for the annual summer holiday in small seaside hotels or lodgings.  The more privileged, upon finding themselves in a part of the country where they do not live (including London) will call upon the most casual acquaintances and invite themselves for the evening meal and/or for bed and breakfast.  The businessman (no matter how affluent) who finds himself in or about to visit an area where he has no close friends or relatives, will somehow recall an old schoolmate or friend of his mother, or the son of a schoolmate of his father, or someone he met recently at a wedding, who lives in the neighborhood.  One of the reasons that the British always carry a small pocket “diary” is to jot down the address and phone number of anyone who might be able to provide food and shelter on some future occasion.  This ever-widening network of potential hosts springs to a large extent from the private schools and the Oxbridge complex of universities, whose international roster leads to the spread of the phenomenon to other countries.

Two Oxford friends of Tom appeared on our doorstep one summer in Las Vegas and stayed for three days.  We were delighted to have them and sent them on their way to California in their ancient and dilapidated used car, with the names and addresses of friends across the country.  In the meantime, my son was traveling all over Europe by the cheapest possible method of transportation, his thumb.  However, since several of the university friends he visited were the scions of aristocratic houses, he carried a dinner jacket in his backpack!

What Americans miss most in rural England is something akin to our motels, but they are not likely to proliferate, as they would probably not appeal to the English.  Bed and breakfasts have become more abundant and are enjoyed by many Americans, but in some areas, particularly in those considered off the beaten tourist track, comfortable lodging is hard to find.  Indeed, it is almost non-existent in Tom’s neighborhood.  In London, where there are a great many hotels, the problem is the enormous drop in décor and amenities between first and second class hotels.  It is difficult to discuss these differences with English persons, because most of them have never stayed in an English hotel.

I am sure that the English are as hospitable as the Americans, but their attitude about it is different.  The Englishman’s home is indeed his castle.  He is prepared to share it with a visitor, even one he scarcely knows, but he is not about to make a fuss over him and expects him to observe the house rules.  The American, suddenly confronted with a comparative stranger who appears uninvited on his doorstep would probably direct him to a nearby motel, but if he did take the newcomer in, he would bite his tongue before mentioning house rules.  An American will insist that the guest take the best chair.  Indeed, I have had American hosts vacate their own bedroom for the guest(s) if it is more comfortable than their spare room (or the sleep-sofa in the living room!)  In an English house, the guest who takes his host’s favorite seat will feel a distinct chill!

The two attitudes are amusingly illustrated by an incident which took place at Corone House.  My father was enroute to Cheltenham to visit me and had spent the night at Corone House before being driven by Douglas to Cheltenham the next day.  Daddy finished his breakfast of bacon and eggs and, it being generally acceptable in those days, took out his cigarettes.  Before he could light up, Mr. Swan said, “Jim, if you don’t mind, I don’t allow cigarettes in my dining room.  They make the curtains smell bad.”  This blatant untruth startled Douglas.  He and I had always smoked cigarettes in the room, and Mr. Swan had smoked many a cigar there, particularly when we had played roulette on Christmas nights according to the family custom.  I suppose he was just trying to “define his territory” or perhaps to play some one-upmanship.  Daddy put away his cigarettes and regarded the kipper on his host’s plate.  “Why, of course I don’t mind, Tom,” he replied in his soft Texas drawl, “if anyone tried to eat that awful-smelling fish in my dining room, I might forget my manners.”  With which he thanked his host for his hospitality, excused himself, and strolled from the room.
 

 
Chapter Fifty-seven


In my foreword, I intimated that these years of going back would produce comparisons of here and there and then and now.  I hope that I did not mislead the reader into expecting any learned or pithy comments on all of the very considerable social and economic changes which had occurred during the nearly 30 years since the end of the war.  Although it is to be hoped that I had acquired a good deal more interest in and understanding of such matters, they did not fall within the parameters of my main preoccupations.  My subjectivity is illustrated by the fact that England’s outstanding contributions to the world of popular music (the Beatles) and trendy fashions made little impression on me.  I am therefore no more qualified to write about them now than when I first arrived in England all those years ago.

My visits over the intervening years had always been brief and almost totally devoted to some absorbing personal event such as Tom’s wedding or the birth of a grandchild.  I, of course, had read about the strikes, the short workweeks, the candlelit shopping, the loss of empire, high taxation, and other social and economic troubles which beset England at that time.  But I actually observed very little of such things firsthand, and I purposely refrained from discussing them with Tom and Marney, wishing at all costs not to appear critical.  The sojourns in Romaldkirk did little to change the situation.  I had more time to observe and to draw some conclusions, but I still confined such observations for the most part to those subjects in which I had always been interested, in areas where I could draw on personal experience.
 
Chapter Fifty-eight


It was from personal experience that I became very interested in health care, particularly in socialized medicine as practiced in Britain.  Whatever political orientation I could be said to possess should tilt me away from the concept of a national health service such as had been adopted in Britain under a Labor government.  Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I encountered nothing short of the absolute best of medical care with the least possible amount of bureaucratic inconvenience, negativism, and lack of compassion on the part of those who not only cared for me but refused to accept any pay for doing so.  There was the doctor from the Romaldkirk area who made house calls every day during my illness and dispensed some of my medication himself, without charge; the hospital where I went for (free) X-rays; and the chemist who filled our prescriptions (free for senior citizens.)  All treated us with the utmost courtesy, although we were in effect freeloading tourists.  When I asked a nurse why Britain should treat foreign patients without charge, she replied that we were, after all, human beings.  We learned that, during a very severe winter, when many country roads were impassable, our doctor had donned snowshoes and had walked eight miles to and from Romaldkirk to visit his snowbound patients there.  I do not know of any American doctor who will even make a house call, although I am not prepared to swear that there are none.

I have read the horror stories of long waits to see the doctor, the lack of choice of doctor, the delay in elective surgery, and all the other terrible things that are said to result from any form of socialized medicine.  I will admit that some of those problems are evident in large cities, particularly in overcrowded and economically depressed areas.  I have, however, never met an English person from any walk of life who would give up the National Health Service.  Of course it has its problems, but compared with the state of affairs in American medicine, they are, in my opinion, small. [Note: I don’t pretend to be an expert, but it is now the year 2000, and this country has still to provide universal health care.  Surely, what the British have is better than that.] 

Perhaps the reason they seem able to stay healthy in spite of their rash behavior at table is that the idea of exercise has not just been discovered by them as it seems to have been in recent years in the States.  To the British, exercise has always been a way of life.  They walk a great deal (with or without dogs) and they have always used the bicycle as a means of transportation.  These practices, in addition to the normal participation in sports, are probably the reason they do not have a health club on every corner and a multimillion-dollar athletic-shoe industry.  They just keep walking in the shoes in which they have always walked, biking in their ordinary clothes, and somehow managing to stay healthy without “making a production of it.”
 
Chapter Sixty


I thought it might be interesting to compare the status of yet another preoccupation of modern times—the women’s liberation movement.  Unfortunately, tucked away in a small isolated rural community, it was difficult for me to make many firsthand observations.  Marney and her friends, to whom my acquaintance with young Englishwomen was limited, simply would not have been found in this area if a career had been of primary importance to them.  None of them were employed outside the home except for the considerable amount of voluntary work they gave to various political and charitable facets of the community.  It was my impression, however, that most of them had worked before marriage, probably in London or in some other area where their talents would be more marketable than in the rural depths of County Durham. 

In this, they differed from most of the young women I had met when I had moved to Cheltenham before the war.  I had christened them “Renaissance Girls” because I stood in awed admiration at the broad spectrum of their talents.  In sharp contrast to me, they were all excellent cooks and seamstresses; they painted in oils or watercolors; they played the piano or sang.  They could cultivate houseplants, knit and crochet, and if country bred, they could groom horses, midwife dogs, and prune rose bushes. Most of them had grown up around servants, but their mothers had insisted that they be able to do anything they instructed the servants to do. 

Unlike me and my college friends, the Renaissance Girls had not continued their formal education after the age of about 17.  They had perhaps taken cooking or sewing courses, but whether they had or not, they had remained for the most part at home, helping their mothers run the household and learning a great deal in the process.  When the war came, many of them were invaluable as Land Girls helping out on the farms or as members of the women’s branches of the services.  I admired them unstintingly and was delighted to recognize my Renaissance Girls in my daughter-in-law and her contemporaries.

There were differences, of course.  They were, as I have pointed out, much more likely than their mothers to have had jobs before marriage.   Now, as housewives and mothers, they had for the most part far fewer servants than had their predecessors.  They were lucky to have a mother’s help or an au pair, as they call a young woman from a foreign country who helps in the house and with the children in exchange for room, board, and a chance to learn English. 

I was curious to see how women’s lib had affected these modern versions of my Renaissance Girl.  The most noticeable difference from her American cousin seemed to be in her very lack of preoccupation with the subject.  This was evidenced more in the prevailing attitude than in any statistics at my disposal. I found that I could actually scan the TV channels or leaf through a magazine without being bombarded with interviews and discussions about the problems of the modern woman.  Such interviews at home invariably had the housewife defiantly rejecting the very term, while the career woman with children spoke of her guilt at neglecting them or, if she had postponed children, listened anxiously to the ticking of her biological clock.

It seemed to me that, if women’s liberation was alive and well in Britain (and I suspected that it was) British women were keeping relatively quiet about it.  This is probably why one hears or reads little or nothing about British men feeling threatened and suffering from insecurity, a common complaint heard in the States.  English women have wisely chosen to let their menfolk think that, if they don’t hear too much about women’s lib, it will go away.
 

 
Chapter Sixty-one


Finally, I turned my attention to my old fascination with the diversity of accents and speech in the British Isles, in particular to their part in defining and identifying class origins.  I had greeted with pleasure the progress made in the movies and on television.  “Upstairs, Downstairs” had attuned millions of American ears to a better understanding of plebian speech, while the portrayal of the romantic lead by such actors as Michael Caine, speaking his native Cockney, encouraged me to hope that the old disdain for regional accents was abating. 

On a personal level, I was enchanted by the publication in 1956 of “Noblesse Oblige.”  Author Nancy Mitford’s presentation of Professor Alan Ross’s “Linguistic Class Indicators in Present Day English” (U for Upperclass and non-U) was intended to bolster her theory that the aristocracy has not only survived but can always be identified by speech patterns.  Miss Mitford, however, wrote so amusingly that looking for examples of U and non-U became a national pastime.  I was therefore able, at last, to put the whole subject in perspective and, as it were, on the back burner. It no longer bothered me as it had while I was a member of the Swan household.  I could instead cherish the rich tones of regional accents and the subtle differences in terminology which provide much of the color in the British tapestry.  My enjoyment of “My Fair Lady” was surely enhanced by my previous problems with those differences.

I don’t know whether British speech will ever become homogeneous, thereby doing away with its reinforcement of class consciousness, but I hope that such national treasures as Cockney rhyming slang will endure forever.

The MacNeil-Lehrer-BBC television series “The Story of English” contributed to my understanding of, but did not lessen my fascination with, the origins of regional accents.  I was comforted to learn that the King’s English (or BBC English as it is more often called today) was a fairly recent development.  It apparently got its start in the private schools (public schools) which largely proliferated in Victorian times.  It delighted me to realize that Shakespeare’s words had originally been spoken, whether by uppercrust or hoi polloi, in regional accents, shaped and formed with contributions from Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans.

When I was a young motion picture fan, the movies ran continuously, without announced starting times, and were interspersed with cartoons and newsreels.  One simply arrived, perhaps in the middle of the feature film, and when the same scene at last reappeared on the screen, one said, “Isn’t this where we came in?”  Borrowing from those days, I shall note that this is about where I came in and I  shall quote that beloved cartoon character, Porky Pig.  Porky concluded each episode of “Bugs Bunny” with a stammered but succinct “Tha-tha-tha-that’s all, folks!”