© 2004 Velma Weiss
All Rights Reserved
Note to Reader:
This book was written about events occurring from the 1930’s to the mid-1980’s.
I wrote it for several reasons: many friends had told me I should write a
book; I had just gone through a rather scary illness and was feeling
certain that I was not long for this world; and I wanted to leave
something for my grandchildren to read about me when they grew up. I
finished writing the book in 1986, and lo and behold! I didn’t die. My
grandchildren grew up hearing my stories, and there was nothing to do with the
book, so I put the draft away for about 14 years.
During those years I lost my beloved husband, and by moving into a large
residence for seniors, I made a lot of new acquaintances. After about two
years of listening to my stories, several of them said that I ought to write a
book. “I have,“ said I and was persuaded to dig out the moldering
pages. All of those who read the draft insisted that I edit it and
preserve it in some form. I agreed to put it on a floppy disk because I
had bought my first computer (for my 84th birthday) and really needed something
to do on it besides trading jokes and e-mail with my few computer-owning friends
and relatives.
It soon became obvious during the editing of the manuscript, that there might be
some chronological confusion for the reader. I have therefore added some
notes designed to bring some things up to date. If I have thereby only
added to the confusion, please forgive me. I also would like to point out
that many things I described have changed. Culture and mores have
changed in the countries where I lived. I might write quite differently
were I able to revisit them. How I wish I could!
I would like to acknowledge here the enormous amount of support and assistance
provided by my good friend, Jane Dunn. Not only was she a talented and
tireless editor, but the book would never have made it into the computer without
her. Thanks also to my daughter-in-law, Marney Swan, for her cover
drawing.
My book is available for reading on my web site and also on audio tapes for the
visually or otherwise handicapped, published by the Library of Congress. For
those who already have qualified and have the equipment and arrangements for
acquiring these tapes, the number is AZ2534. Simply give this number to your
local branch. For those interested in initiating this wonderful free service,
contact the National Library Service For The Blind and Physically Handicapped at
1291 Taylor St. NW, Washington D.C. 20542 or call 1-800-424-8567.
I dedicate these memories to my beloved Werner who helped make most of them.
VELMA
January, 2001
Foreword
My father was a voracious reader of paperback mysteries and westerns. He
could choose four or five of them in as many minutes, while I am a browser who
takes forever to pick out a couple of novels. I finally asked him how he
was able to select his reading matter so rapidly. “Well,” he replied
in his slow Texas drawl, “if no blood is spilt on the first page, I just move
on to something else.”
In loving memory of him, I shall try to let you know right up front what this
book is, or perhaps more accurately, what it is not. It is not an
autobiography—I am neither famous nor infamous enough, nor am I related to a
famous person. It is not fiction; everything is as factual as my memory
will allow, but it is not a learned work backed up by hours of research.
It is just a collection of anecdotes and memories culled from fifty years of
personal experience and some observations based on that experience. It
encompasses more than a year of pre-war England and all the years of wartime
England as seen through the eyes of a young American bride of an Englishman—a
sort of war-bride in reverse. My new husband didn’t bring me home from a
war; he brought me home to one.
After spending the post-war years in England, Switzerland, France, and Franco’s
Spain, I started a new life, working for and later marrying into the Central
Intelligence Agency. This led to my living in Germany, Japan, and of all
places, Las Vegas, Nevada (while my husband worked in the Nevada Test
Site). It also led to some very interesting experiences while living in
Paris.
Finally, there were the years of going back to England, with the inevitable
comparisons of then and now, here and there. I hope to strike some
nostalgic chords among my contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic and to
answer some of the questions asked by young people like my grandchildren about
what it was like all those years ago.
If this does not appeal to you, just follow Daddy’s example.
Chapter One
If this were an autobiography, I suppose it would begin with my birth or perhaps
even earlier with an account of my parents, their parents, and so on, until we
had climbed my whole family tree. Fortunately, we don’t have to do that
because what little I know of my antecedents is sketchy and probably very dull
or worse. My father always said that if a Texan insisted on digging into
his family’s history, he was sure to find a horse thief somewhere, a theory
that may account for the paucity of my knowledge of my forebears.
Although I loved my parents dearly, I am sure that, in the eyes of others, they
were very ordinary people. . They enjoyed, thanks to the entrepreneurial
talents and hard work of my father, more than a modicum of financial blessings,
which made my childhood years comfortable but not very exciting. Their
traveling to (to me) exotic places like Florida, Cuba, and California was mostly
done in the winter, leaving me at home going to school and under the supervision
of my grandmother. Summers were almost always spent in Galveston at the
beach, although I was once taken to New York, and we spent a summer in Chicago
when my father had business there.
I can say, with all due modesty, that I was an above-average student,
blessed with better-than-average good looks, but that is about as far as I can
go. I had no special gifts or talents. In short, there was nothing that
might foretell that my life was destined to take the unexpected and unusual
turns that it did.
If I must choose the one event which was to lead eventually to all the others,
it would be my father’s announcement that we were to move to New York City in
April, 1933. I was seventeen. We had until then lived in Dallas,
Texas, and I had planned to go to college in California in September. The
distance from there to New York was unacceptable to my parents and I had, in all
fairness to them, to agree to look for a college in the East. We
eventually chose Wellesley College for Women, near Boston, not only for its fine
reputation, but because I had a friend who was going there. I became a
member of the Class of 1937.
Sadly, since this is not an autobiography, I shall have to forgo reliving the
whole four years of my attendance at this beautiful and nurturing
institution. For the purposes of this account, suffice it to say that, in
my third or Junior year, I met a young Englishman who, having taken his degree
at Oxford, was spending a year at Harvard Business School before entering his
father’s business in England. He was totally different from anyone
I had ever met. Before long we were “going steady,” and in the spring
of that year, 1936, we became officially engaged, diamond ring and all.
My parents accepted all of this in the same manner in which they had always
allowed me, within reason, to make my own decisions, but of course, with a
private “wait-and-see” reservation. We were both young and I had
promised to finish college, which meant another full year at Wellesley while
Douglas would be back in England. That, if nothing else, should test the
strength of our commitment to each other.
Doug’s parents, Mr. Thomas Swan and his wife Mary, arrived in June on a
previously arranged visit. I found them to be astonishingly unlike their
son. They even spoke with a different accent, and they seemed very cool
toward me, but I was so engrossed in myself and my newfound happiness that it
didn’t occur to me to worry about such things. When Doug got his parents
to second, (reluctantly, I suspect) his invitation to England at Christmas, I
accepted wholeheartedly. My parents gave their consent, still with some
unspoken reservations, and we saw the Swan family, including Douglas, off home
to England.
I spent the summer, as I had spent the previous ones, being a part-time
photographic model. I had applied for such work with the famous John
Powers Agency the first summer I spent in New York, and while I had not reached
the cover of Vogue, I got enough work to keep me occupied and in
pocket-money. One of my colleagues was a girl named Jane Wyman. I
never met her but learned that photographers or magazine fashion editors would
often ask for one of us if the other was not available. Miss Wyman, as we
all know, went on to an illustrious career as an actress. She also, I hate
to confess, has kept her figure to this day much better than I have done.
It being summer and I being very slender, I did a lot of fur coat modeling for
the autumn editions of the fashion magazines. I will never forget one
memorable day in the Central Park Zoo. The photographer was
determined to match the coat with the animal; i.e., to take the picture of the
model in the coat with the appropriate animal in the background. Not
surprisingly, the animals were of no mind to cooperate and retired to the cool
comfort of their shady dens just as we got set to snap each picture.
It was a long and exhausting process, and it could not possibly happen today
when the exploitation and killing of animals for their skins is anathema to so
many. It would also cost a great deal more today. I received $25.00
for a whole day’s work in fur coats in August!
I returned to college in September, counting the days until I was to sail on my
first trip abroad. I was lucky that a passage on the recently launched
Queen Mary was available.
Chapter Two
I realize that relatively few people cross the oceans by ship nowadays.
But the drawing power of the permanently docked Queen Mary as a tourist
attraction in Long Beach, California, suggests that there still is a great deal
of nostalgia and curiosity about those magnificent floating palaces which
provided intercontinental travel prior to World War II. With
intercontinental air travel, speed has supplanted grace. Today’s travelers are
herded like cattle into ever-larger airplanes where they spend hours on runways
waiting for clearance to take off. Then they must circle interminably in
the crowded skies waiting their turn to land. There is very little
comfort, much less elegance, left in today’s travel.
Those majestic ships, like small cities or resorts, provided every degree of
comfort and every imaginable amenity: shops, gyms, beauty salons, swimming
pools, ballrooms, orchestras, movies, and even kennels for one’s dog.
Every conceivable game or sport which was possible to provide at sea kept
passengers entertained, and there were libraries and card rooms for the less
active. One could, if so inclined, retire to one’s bed for the entire
crossing and be fed and coddled by a motherly stewardess. Many people
managed to “drop out” for a few days without feeling disapproval or guilt.
There is still the Queen Elizabeth II, but few can afford her with air travel so
much cheaper. There are, of course, cruise ships, including the QE II, but there
is a subtle difference in atmosphere—cruises are for fun, relaxation, or just
getting away. Before intercontinental air travel, the ocean liners were
the only game in town, as far as getting to Europe was concerned. As a
result, not just vacationers but all kinds of people were aboard, people from
all walks of life. I never made a crossing without meeting interesting persons,
and five or more days at sea gave one a chance to know them, at least a little
bit better than one knows one’s seat companion on a plane.
The competition between shipping lines and individual ships resulted in a
standard of service and comfort which has not been duplicated. I have been lucky
enough to stay in some of the world’s great hotels, but give me a pre-war
transatlantic liner every time. Even in Tourist Class, where I spent most
of my earlier voyages, the food was delicious, the quarters comfortable, and the
service impeccable. As you will learn, not all the ships I traveled in
were of the luxury class; over the years I made at least a dozen crossings in an
almost unbelievable variety of ships, and I can truthfully say that every one of
them was memorable in one way or another. My initiation on the Queen Mary
seems, in retrospect, to have inaugurated a sort of pattern which I came to
expect of sea travel—none of it would ever be dull. The Queen Mary, of
course, set the standard against which I measured all later voyages. I can
promise you, however, that there was an enormous diversity among my later
voyages which I will describe in due course.
On this first voyage, I was assigned by the chief dining steward to a table for
eight. I did not expect to meet very many people of my own age group at that
time of the year. The Christmas break at American schools is much shorter than
in England or Europe, and summer is a better time for extended travel for
students. My tablemates were all middle-aged and pleasant enough, but no one
really grabbed my interest until the man on my left revealed that he, although
British, lived and worked in Paris. I did not ask him at what he worked, but was
very interested to learn what life was like in the City of Light, so we had an
absorbing conversation throughout dinner and went to the movies
afterwards.
The next morning when the stewardess brought my breakfast (you didn’t think I
would pass up breakfast in bed, did you?) there was an envelope on my
tray. It contained an engraved invitation, which stated that the
Honourable Mr. Seymour-Bell, Chairman of the Cunard Line, requested the presence
of (my name in ink) for cocktails that evening in Suite such-and-such, First
Class. Out of my vast experience I jumped to the conclusion that he was inviting
all of the passengers, perhaps alphabetically. My cabin-mate agreed. I
skipped lunch to unpack my prettiest cocktail dress and otherwise prepare myself
to mingle in a large gathering of passengers A through J. (I was a
J.) When I showed my invitation at the First Class barrier, I was
ushered through as if I were a person of importance, but I had already become
accustomed to the flattering deference which seemed to be a hallmark of the
courtesy on British ships, no matter what class one could afford.
I eventually arrived at the designated door, knocked, and was admitted by a man
I took to be a steward, but who, as I later learned, was Mr. Seymour-Bell’s
valet (the first gentleman’s gentleman I had ever encountered.) As he
announced my name, I had time to notice that I was in the living room of a
luxurious suite, very elegant, but not really large enough to accommodate
passengers A through J. While I was digesting this, Mr. Seymour-Bell advanced
upon me cordially with outstretched hand, saying “Good evening, I’m
Seymour-Bell; do come in and meet the others." The others turned out
to be a Duke and Duchess, a Lord and Lady, and two others, also titled. I
was horrified. Obviously, a mistake had been made, and my invitation had
been intended for someone else. I was about to impart this information to
my host and beat a hasty retreat when my table companion from Tourist Class was
admitted. He rushed to my side, apologizing for not having been there when
I arrived. He had asked the Chairman to invite me and would have explained
at lunch but I was not there. It turned out that he was an upper-echelon
employee of the Cunard Line who was traveling in Tourist Class to check out the
food and service there. He was naturally entitled to free run of the ship,
knew the Chairman well, and thought I might enjoy attending the party. I
not only enjoyed the party, which was extended to include dinner, but I returned
to my cabin with a card which gave me entrance to First Class and its amenities
for the duration of the voyage. No wonder I fell in love with
transatlantic travel.
Even Paradise must have some pitfalls; about mid-voyage we ran into some very
bad weather, and it soon became apparent that the Queen Mary was not handling it
very well. The ship rolled from side to side until she reached an alarming
list. Velvet-covered ropes were hastily placed for passengers to hold
onto, although most of them stayed in their cabins. Since I am fortunately
not subject to seasickness, I was able to roam around the ship with my friend
and to observe some of the results of our predicament. A grand piano had
been wrenched from its moorings; armchairs rolled around like huge
upholstered dice, and carpets not held down by furniture slid back and
forth on the parquet floors, folding up like accordions. Several
passengers had been hurled into glass doors, sustaining cuts. A number of
ambulances were lined up at Southampton, and the Queen Mary went into dry-dock
for several weeks to have her ballast adjusted.
Chapter Three
Upon the Queen Mary’s arrival at Southampton, I was met by Douglas and two of
his friends and, after clearing customs, we set off by car for the Swan family
home in Chorleywood, a suburb northwest of London. We bypassed the great
city, so I really saw nothing much but countryside, small towns, and suburbs for
my first glimpse of England. As it was December, the countryside was not
at its best, so I paid more attention to the occupants of the car, especially
Douglas. That, I am somewhat ashamed to say, remained true for the rest of
my brief visit. It being Christmas week, we spent most of our time going
from one party or gathering to another so that I met lots of Doug’s friends,
but we spent practically no time with his family. The day after Christmas,
the Swan family departed for another house they owned in Essex. Several
acres of shooting (birds) belonged to the property, and it was here that Mr.
Swan did most of his business entertaining. Doug and I drove down
for one day but were not able to follow the sport, because I was not equipped
with the boots required for slogging across the muddy fields. The cold was
bone-chilling, and I was glad to head back to the suburban comfort of
Chorleywood. Doug’s sisters (Nancy, the elder, and Mary, still a
teen-ager) were so busy with their own friends that I never really had much
contact with them, and we ran about so much that I can’t recall learning much
about them during that visit.
That visit to England occurred just a few days after King Edward VIII had
abdicated so that he could marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. The
English were so preoccupied with this subject and with their new Royal Family
that little else was discussed. Once or twice I overheard, or gathered
that my presence stifled, some uncomplimentary comments about Mrs. Simpson, but
none of them seemed intentionally meant to offend me. So much interest was
shown in the two little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, that I carried away
a lasting impression of the continuity of the monarchy and what that institution
meant to the British people. Unfortunately, and to my shame, I carried
away very few other meaningful impressions. So frenetic was my brief visit
and so confined to Christmas and general levity, that I could have learned as
much about the real issues with which the nation was confronted by staying at
home and reading the newspapers.
I returned to New York on the United States Liner Washington. I remember
two things about that crossing. One was a father and son, recently
bereaved of wife and mother, who remained my good friends for many years.
The other was the peculiar influence of Union Rules. I could not get a
stewardess to bring my breakfast or to help me fasten an evening gown.
When I rang for the stewardess I got a sort of bellboy. When I asked him
why no stewardess, he muttered, “Union Rules.” A bit of maritime
trivia I learned is that ships pitch when sailing westwards; the Queen Mary,
sailing eastwards had rolled. In fact, she had almost rolled over!
I returned to Wellesley and settled down to my studies, preparing for that
terrifying trademark of our college, the General Exam. without passing which one
could not graduate. So that my friends from all over the country could be
present at our wedding, Doug and I were to be married the day after graduation
in the college Chapel. To avoid distraction while studying for the exam, I
had asked Doug to sail on a ship that would get him there just in time for the
wedding, but Doug, as the saying goes, “missed the boat.” Mrs. Swan
had a timely heart attack and had him paged off the ship just before it sailed.
There was no way he could make it to the wedding on the proposed date. My
friends dispersed to their homes. Mrs. Swan made a swift recovery. I
was left at the altar.
I spent the summer in New York, licking my wounds and having long, wrangling
discussions with Doug on the telephone and by letter. Our engagement was on-
again, off-again more times than I could count. In the end, Doug arrived
in October and installed himself at a small hotel near my parents’
apartment. We resumed the wrangling, breaking up and making up, until my
poor parents were about at their wits’ end. Finally one night, during an
interval of peace, we decided to drive the next day to Baltimore in Maryland, a
state whose laws made it popular with elopers, and get married before we had
time to have another fight. My parents received the news with relief
tempered by doubts but gave us their blessing. After a short honeymoon in
Canada, where my loving bridegroom turned me (on skis for the first time in my
life) over to an instructor while he demonstrated his prowess on skis, we
returned to New York and found a furnished apartment in suburban Pelham.
Doug went to work for my father, and I started learning how to cook.
All went smoothly for nearly six months until Doug had a terrible accident at
work, crushing the knuckles in his hand, which then got infected. He was
saved from losing his arm by the new sulfa drugs, but he was very ill, and I had
to inform his family. As a result, he was bidden to come home in time for
his sister’s June wedding, and we booked passage on the German liner Europa.
The notable thing about that crossing was that the much-anticipated Louis-Schmeling
return bout took place on our second night at sea. Before we could make
our way to the lounge after dinner to listen to the fight on the radio, it was
over. Louis had already avenged his previous defeat at the German’s
hands by knocking him out cold. For the rest of the crossing we were
surrounded by a very surly Nazi crew and were delighted to disembark at
Southampton. We were met by the Swans’ car and chauffeur who drove us to
the family home.
Chapter Four
Nowadays we have a new name for homesickness. We call it culture
shock. However, I believe that they are not really synonymous because
culture shock adds something to homesickness. Not only does one miss the
people and the place that one has left behind, one is also faced with new
customs and ideas which are so difficult to assimilate that a period of very
real and traumatic disorientation ensues. I had not married an Arab and found
myself in a harem, but life in the bosom of the Swan family brought me face to
face with fundamental differences in social and cultural attitudes to which I
had not previously given any serious consideration.
Before I could take time to examine these differences, I had to cope with simply
trying to integrate myself in the day-to-day operation of the household.
Corone House was situated in Chorleywood, a residential suburb northwest of
London. It was a modern house of about five bedrooms and a couple of
servants’ rooms. It sat in about three acres of garden and orchard and
faced a common, an area forever closed to construction of any sort. At
that time Chorleywood consisted of a railroad station, a small hotel/pub, a
church, and one or two small grocery stores. All major shopping was done
in Rickmansworth, the nearest small town; otherwise, one went to London. (or up
to town, as the British put it.) Most residents of Chorleywood were
families of successful business or professional homeowners or other persons of
considerable means—people to whom the British referred as gentry. In
other words, poor people did not abound in Chorleywood, nor did young marrieds
such as Doug and me. I was totally dependent on the occupants of Corone
House for any kind of companionship.
There was no movie theater, no public library, nor drugstore. Drugstores
in England were called chemists and sold prescriptions, medical supplies,
toiletries, and sundries. They did not have soda fountains or magazine
stands. Some of the larger chain chemists, such as one called Boots, did
have lending libraries, but there was no Boots in Chorleywood. In other
words, there was nowhere for a displaced person, such as I felt myself to
be. It is said that “everybody’s gotta be somewhere,” but I
could not find a place to be.
The day started with the arrival of Nellie, the upstairs maid, who opened the
heavy draperies and left a tray with morning tea. Breakfast was served an
hour later in the dining room, and Doug and his father left immediately
afterwards, taking the morning newspapers with them. Mrs. Swan and her
daughters simply disappeared; Nancy, the elder sister, was being married in a
week, so it was natural that they had a lot to do and left me to my own
devices. The real “living room” of the house was called the music
room, having a grand piano on a raised platform at one end. It was very
large and comfortably furnished with a huge sofa and armchairs facing a
now-empty fireplace. I decided to go there, find a book, curl up,
and read. Unfortunately, it was being “turned out” by a maid. I had
already gone upstairs to our bedroom, intending to make our beds, only to find a
maid there making them; it was clear that this was the established
routine. Adding to my discomfort was the cold. Every window in the
house was thrown wide open to what the natives called a beautiful June
day. To me, straight from a New York summer, it was a decidedly chilly
day, insufficiently warmed by those bright intervals beloved of British weather
commentators on the radio news. Doug had not warned me about the English
summer nor advised me to bring some warm clothes. My entire cool-weather
wardrobe was in New York, being packed and shipped by my mother. I had
with me a white cardigan which I came to wear with everything and even in
bed. There was no place to shop in Chorleywood, and I was not up to
bothering Mrs. Swan for help in adding some warm clothes to my wardrobe.
Of course, the others in the household did not find it cold, but if they had, no
kind of heat would be turned on between March and October. This would
amount almost to Original Sin in the British Isles. So I was not only
displaced without a place to be or a thing to do, but shivering as well.
Occasionally, as I wandered about, I would encounter Mrs. Swan or Nancy and ask
piteously for something I could do, but the answer was always negative. In
desperation, I returned to our bedroom where, at least, the maid had finished
and departed. If I expected to find comfort there, I was to be
disappointed. There was no chair, just a stool for the dressing table..
One would not have dared to disturb the grandeur of gold, lace-trimmed taffeta
surmounted by white mousseline de soie, which comprised the bedspreads.
There was a sort of bench, done in needlepoint, footstool-height, in front of
the empty fireplace. Muttering “any port in a storm,” I arranged
myself on it in the fetal position, hugging myself for warmth. One of the
already low points of my life, got even lower when the door opened and Mrs. Swan
entered. I didn’t know eyebrows could rise so high. She had come
to tell me that morning coffee (to become known as elevenses) was being served
in the drawing room (instead of the music room which was still being cleaned.)
The drawing room was furnished in French period furniture. There was an
enormous breakfront containing china and figurines. With one exception,
the entire room looked totally unused. The exception was a massive black
and gold Chinese lacquer desk in the bay window facing on the front garden. This
was Thomas Swan and Company’s Chorleywood office. The firm’s head
office was located in Consett, County Durham, in the north of England. The
drawing room was seldom used except for display of wedding gifts or rare tea
parties.
Morning coffee, or elevenses, consisted of last night’s after-dinner coffee,
boiled with milk which had formed a skin. It was the color of water in
which grey socks had been washed and tasted about the same. By contrast
the cookies, or biscuits as they called them, which accompanied the coffee were
delicious. While we were having elevenses, I asked again whether there was
something useful I could do. Once again, this was denied me; the wedding
plans were well in hand. I was to be a bridal attendant and to fit my gown
later that afternoon when the dressmaker arrived. They suggested that I
take a walk in the garden before lunch. Figuring that I couldn’t be any
colder outside than in, (actually, it was warmer outside during the bright
intervals) I wandered around the garden and tried to find the reason for my
malaise, other than the obvious ones of having nothing to do, nowhere to be, and
freezing.
I was baffled by the number of servants. I had not learned about the
English and servants. Corone House was a family-sized house, but it was by
no means a mansion. It was not a great deal larger than the house in which
I had grown up in Dallas, and while there were two more in the Swan family than
in ours, that didn’t seem to justify the large difference in the number of
staff. We had done quite well with our Jessie (who had been with us since before
my birth) and a “yard man” (yard being a term never associated with a
private home in England.) The Swan household employed a cook, a kitchen-maid, a
parlor-maid, an upstairs maid, a visiting charwoman, and a weekly
laundress. Outside, there was a chauffeur-gardener and a garden-boy.
At that time I was unaware of how little they were paid, so it seemed to me that
the cost for such a large staff must be enormous and I simply couldn’t see the
justification for it. I came to learn that servants were an important
status symbol in England and that, because they came so cheaply, it was common
to employ a larger number of them than was necessary in order to maintain one’s
standing in society. This, in turn, brought about the existence of rigidly
defined boundaries circumscribing what chores a servant would and would not
do. I have since read that, especially in the Victorian era, the genteel
poor would indeed scrimp on food and heat in order to have at least a single
servant to open the door to visitors. This was hard for me to
assimilate. Although my own family had always had a maid, I knew many
families equally or more affluent who chose not to have any live-in servants at
all, preferring their privacy and their “own way of doing things.”
Coming from such a background, it was to be expected, I suppose, that the
presence of so many servants would somewhat intimidate me and contribute to my
culture shock. However, being waited on hand and foot is very easy to get
used to, and it was not to make me uncomfortable for long.
As the days passed and I still felt uncomfortable and uneasy, I realized that it
was not just this change in lifestyle which was affecting me. For a while,
I concentrated on blaming my in-laws. The problem, I decided, lay with
them and their attitude toward me, which made me feel something hostile in the
air around me. I had not, of course, expected Mr. and Mrs Swan to receive
me with open arms; they had been decidedly cool towards me on previous
occasions. I assumed that they, like my own parents, had hoped that the
romance between Doug and me would fade with separation. They had not even
pretended to be pleased when Doug left for America and subsequently married
me. However, when, after six months and upon learning of Doug’s
accident, they had summoned us to England, I assumed that all was forgiven and
that I would be accepted as a member of the family. I realized that it
wasn’t going to be easy; There were preconceived ideas on both sides, largely
gleaned from the movies, about what each other’s characteristics would
be. I think that they really thought that American girls did little but
drink cocktails and do the Charleston; if indeed they ever prepared a meal for
their husbands, it would come out of cans (or tins as they called them.) I
wasn’t much more realistic, basing my ideas of Englishmen on Herbert Marshall
or Leslie Howard. I couldn’t remember ever having seen a film featuring
a blunt, hard-nosed, north-country businessman like Mr. Swan. Nothing had
prepared me for my mother-in-law. She was, as far as I could determine, a
one-of-a kind individual. When I first met her, I had thought that she was
painfully shy. Now, in her own home, I realized that she had a will of
iron. She was implacable in her determination to keep me at a distance,
and she succeeded in making my sense of isolation complete during the hours when
the men were away from the house. When they returned, Mr. Swan was so good
at making me feel foolish that I yearned for the daytime luxury of being
ignored. Perhaps from nervousness, I had an enormous appetite. When
I accepted a second helping, Mr. Swan would announce that he’d rather keep me
a week than a fortnight.
Another cause of painful embarrassment for me was the plumbing. All the
toilets (called WC’s—water closets) were in small separate rooms next to the
bathrooms. There was also a WC in the downstairs cloakroom. The
windows were kept open at all times and in all seasons. There were times,
later, in winter, when I was sure I would freeze to the seat. All the
toilets were flushed by pulling a chain which issued from an overhead
tank. There was a knack to getting the thing to flush on the first pull, a
knack reserved to persons of British birth and upbringing. When I pulled
it, it made a horrible screeching noise and refused to flush. Every call
of nature, requiring numerous loud yanks on the chain, was followed by an
ignominious return to the others. In a warm and welcoming atmosphere, this
sort of thing could have been laughed off, teased about, and eventually become a
family joke. Such was not the case; when I returned from a trip to the
cloakroom WC, or even one upstairs, there was a smirk on every face except Doug’s.
A good part of my time was spent figuring out how to time my visits to the WC’s,
so that the family members were either out or scattered about the house.
Fortunately, I never had to use the facility during the night. I would
surely have awakened the entire household.
I decided that only the passage of time might improve the relationship between
me and the Swan family. After all, I was certainly not the first young
woman to receive a cool reception from her in-laws. I determined to relax
and felt confident that, when we all got better acquainted, we would be a happy
family. Having made that resolution, I became increasingly aware
that this would not be a happy family even if I had not intruded upon it.
There was something basically wrong with the relationships within the family
itself. It took me a while to define and understand the problem.
Chapter Five
Looking back with the advantage of hindsight, it’s hard for me to believe that
a young woman of some intelligence and quite a lot of education could have been
so politically, economically, and sociologically illiterate as I was when I
arrived to live in England. In my own defense, I can only plead that, up
to now; I had had little time to concentrate on anything of consequence except
my studies. Due to my own preferences, these had consisted chiefly of
languages and certain sciences to the exclusion of any formal study of politics
and/or history. My knowledge of English history was almost entirely
restricted to the American Revolution. I really hadn’t thought much
about why our founding fathers had made it so clear that “All men are created
equal.” I knew little or nothing about the system of class distinction
which prevailed in England. I was not able to recognize that the Swan
family was, in fact, divided within itself by that very system
.
I knew, of course, that England had a monarch and an aristocracy, but it had a
parliament and a voting population; as far as I could discern, it was a
democracy such as we enjoyed in my own country. What was new and
relatively unknown to me was the concept of class distinction and the role that
speech accent played in delineating and identifying classes. I, like most
Americans, am uncomfortable about using the word “class.” To us,
unless it refers to a group of students or inadequate objects, “class” is a
word we avoid. Although we don’t mind referring to the middle class, we
avoid saying lower, working, or even upper class; we grope for such substitutes
as privileged/underprivileged, haves/havenots, VIP’s and John Does, to name a
few. Of course, we have a kind of class distinction, as implied in the
designation WASP, but we do not like to call it such. We might joke about
the Cabots and the Lowells and ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower, but we
really reserve our homage for the self-made business man or the doctor or lawyer
who worked his way through college waiting on tables. This seemed to me to be in
direct contrast to the British attitude, which until quite recently, was one of
disdain for persons “in trade.” I say “quite recently” as
acknowledgement that there have been significant changes since the end of World
War II. It is not my purpose to discuss these changes here; I am
interested in describing how I found such attitudes in pre-war England and their
impact on me.
In America. it seemed to me, once a man had worked hard and achieved success, as
had my own father, he could take his place in the community without fear that
the stigma of humble birth would become apparent every time that he opened his
mouth. His grammar might be flawed and his conversation more colorful than
educated, but this would not likely be a matter of shame to him or his
children. In England, I learned, no matter what a man had achieved, he
could rarely overcome the disadvantages caused by his regional accent with its
implications of humble origins.
I was of course aware that the speech of Mr. and Mrs. Swan was different from
that of their children. Somehow, I had failed to see the
significance. I simply assumed that the difference in accent was the
result of the family’s having moved to the south of England when the children
were quite young. In fact, the difference was due to the children’s
having gone to private schools. I was blissfully unaware of the social
implication of accent. Some English people spoke like Herbert Marshall or
David Niven, while others retained their regional accent. I had not yet
been exposed to “My Fair Lady’ or “Upstairs-Downstairs,” and actors who
spoke cockney were rare in Hollywood. I was accustomed to regional accents
in the States; indeed, I had had a marked southern one when I arrived at
Wellesley. There, in our first semester, we had a required course in
phonetic speech. As far as I was aware, though, there were no social
implications of accent in my country. It was quite different in
Britain. A child learned to speak “the King’s English” either
at his mother’s knee or by attending the right type of school where it was
spoken.
What had happened to the Swan family was what I came to think of as the
self-made-father syndrome. I think it must have started to manifest itself
with the industrial revolution which produced many self-made, wealthy men of
humble origins. They sent their children to expensive schools,
inexplicably called public schools, and then resented them for having the more
socially desirable accent. I am certain that the Swan children loved and
respected their parents and were never ashamed of them. I am equally
convinced that the parents were never sure of this. In the case of Mr.
Swan, this situation brought about a measure of resentment of his son, who not
only would inherit a thriving business but who would also be more socially
acceptable than his father.
Not surprisingly, this state of affairs affected the atmosphere of the entire
house. Mr. Swan spoiled his daughters in order to humiliate and punish the son
whom he resented so bitterly. This produced a contempt in the girls toward
their brother (and incidentally explained some of the lack of friendship I had
sensed in the daughters toward myself.) The father played his children off
against one another unmercifully, almost always to the disadvantage of the
son. Mrs. Swan didn’t help matters. The normal jealousy of the
mother whose son is newly married was intensified by her own feelings of
inferiority, and she was therefore more than willing to follow her husband’s
lead. She was diffident, almost to the point of subservience, to her
daughters who, as a result of this double-barreled indulgence on the part of
both parents, inevitably became temperamental and arrogant. It is little
wonder that this kind of sibling rivalry and parental favoritism eventually
resulted in emotional problems and broken marriages for all three of the Swan
offspring.
The only person who seemed to like me was dear old Grannie, Mrs. Swan’s
mother. She had been widowed for many years and was now in her
eighties. When Mr. Swan made a business trip by car up north, he would
bring her back for a visit. This time she came for Nancy’s
wedding. What a joy she was! She still lived in the cottage which
Lord Redesdale had provided for her husband, his gamekeeper. Mr.
Swan had bought it for her. It was in a tiny village named Rochester, near
the Scottish border. When she met me and saw how I suffered from the cold,
she produced some green wool from somewhere and proceeded to knit me a sweater
in three days. It was most welcome, although the body was at least three
inches too short and the sleeves six inches too long. I adored her, and so
did the rest of the family. When she came for a visit, which she continued
to do until her death, she brought something healing to the family table.
Everyone exchanged indulgent smiles as she busily (and audibly) scraped
her plate for the last bit of pudding and insisted that one helping was enough
while willingly accepting another. In later years, when I had gained some
maturity, I often speculated on how much her daughter might have resembled her
in character had her husband not acquired the wealth that sat so uneasily on her
shoulders.
Meanwhile, the wedding was upon us. It was also the occasion for me to
distinguish myself by shivering so violently with the cold in the church that
the rattling of my bouquet almost drowned out the ceremony. I looked
enchanting, too, with my blue and mauve dress that matched my skin and lips.
I did get the chance, however, to observe a large number of English men and
women at one of their rituals and at play. There was a seated luncheon in
a vast marquee on the lawn and an orchestra to play dance music
afterwards. It was quite a large affair, what with all the children’s
friends and many of Mr. Swan’s business acquaintances as well as quite a large
contingent of old friends from the North. A great deal of wine and liquor
was consumed, and by the end of the day, I had learned a few things more about
the British. They could put away an incredible amount of alcohol,
and they became quite uninhibited on a dance floor. The Lambeth Walk had
been a very popular result of a recent stage musical, and all that I had ever
heard about British reserve went out the window at the spectacle of some 200 men
and women performing and singing it with abandon. In spite of their
exuberance, they still liked some organization in the procedures; a large white
card, placed in front of the orchestra, announced what type of dance was in
progress—waltz, foxtrot, one-step, two-step, and something called the Valeta
(my spelling is phonetic.)
The lavish luncheon which preceded the dancing was punctuated by the services of
a professional toastmaster, the first such person I had ever encountered.
Resplendent in brilliantly colored ceremonial attire, he proposed all of the
toasts, chanting “Ladies and Gentlemen, charge your glasses” before
each, introduced the speakers and generally orchestrated the event until the
final toast to the sovereign. It was only after that toast that smoking
was permitted and the dancing and mingling began. Altogether it was a very
enjoyable affair, but I had a curious feeling all through it that I had somehow
been transported backward in time. This was a sensation which stayed with
me until some time after the beginning of the war.
Chapter Six
Shortly after the wedding, Doug and I were invited to a dinner party given by a
titled couple whose son had been at Oxford with Doug. It was a small, but
very formally served and somewhat stilted dinner; it was probably restrained by
the presence of our elders (the hosts) and a number of servants, uniformed and
wearing white gloves.
The hearty meals and my nervous appetite had begun to have an effect on my
waistline. As I was being seated for dinner, the large snaps at the back
of my wide, gold leather belt came apart with a sound like a pistol shot, and
the belt landed on the table’s centerpiece. At home in the States,
I am sure that the resultant burst of laughter, including mine, would have
helped to assuage my embarrassment. Such was not the case here. Doug’s
spontaneous (Americanized) laughter died as the entire company froze in
silence. A maid retrieved my belt and handed it to me. I hastily
shoved it into my lap as someone finally broke the silence with a remark about
the weather, and conversation resumed. I wanted to die, but I came to
realize that, according to their code of mannners, the kindest thing to do was
to ignore my mishap. Doug insisted later that they would probably have
behaved quite differently if such a thing had happened to one of themselves,
without the presence of a stranger.
With the wedding over, life eased up a bit at Corone House. Rooms weren’t
turned out so often, and the family members made a few forays into London for
the theater, followed by supper in a good restaurant. Mrs. Swan relented
enough to take me shopping in London, and I began to learn some of the odd
quirks and habits of the British. I shall never forget my first visit to
the beauty parlor or, as the English say, the hairdresser. This took
place in the town of Ricksmansworth. Many of the salons in small towns
were in the process of installing the reclining type of shampoo chair to which
Americans were accustomed. British ladies had previously bent forward and
rested their foreheads on a folded cloth on the edge of the wash basin.
“Back or front, Madam?” asked the young assistant as she conducted me to the
shampoo area. “Oh,” I blurted, “I want my whole head washed.”
The months at Corone House came to an end (don’t all good things?) The
firm was to open new offices in Cheltenham, a hundred miles northwest of
London. Doug was to be in charge there. Before the offices were
ready, we had some free time, so we flew to Paris. It was the August Bank
Holiday weekend and Paris was nearly empty, it being the time when the French
take their national vacation. We managed to have a very good time until I left
my handbag in a taxi. It contained Doug’s wallet (safer there than in his hip
pocket.) This was in the days before credit cards, and we needed money to pay
our hotel bill. We were about to throw ourselves on the mercy of the
British Consulate, when I remembered my friend from the Queen Mary.
We found his listing in the phone book and were happily astonished to find him
at home at that time of the year. This kind man lent us enough money to
pay our hotel bill and get home, proving that friendships made at sea are not
always as ephemeral as shipboard romances are said to be. We gratefully
repaid him by wire when we got home and, sadly, I never had the pleasure of
renewing our friendship.
Later in the month of August, the Swan family lent us a car for a trip to
Scotland. It was The Season there, and I was enchanted with the Highlands
in all their purple heathery glory. Most enlightening was my first foray
into the North of England, always spoken of with much respect by the Swans who
had their origins there. As we drove north and northeast, I was astonished
to learn that there were 56 counties on this small island, and that every one of
them had its own physical characteristics as well as its own speech
accent. The northern areas of England share a common border with the
Scottish lowlands, but they could be an ocean apart, judging by the difference
in their speech. Northumbrians speak an argot called Geordie (my
spelling,) which was as unintelligible to me as Chinese would have been.
Later I learned that these variations of English occur in all of England; I
often wondered how a soldier from Somerset could converse with one from
Northumberland. I am sure that they manage to communicate as they must
always have done in the armed services, but I don’t know how. We found
in Scotland that some persons still spoke in their native Gaelic, and I was told
that Welsh was still alive in Wales.
Another thing that impressed me was the infinite variety of scenery to be found
within a very few square miles. The Lake Country stunned me with its
awesome beauty which seemed to be a stone’s throw from the patterned fields of
nearby farmlands. I began to think of England and Scotland as a
miniature continent rather than a small island.
On the lighter side, I was daily encountering what, to me, were amusing
oddities. One of these was the chamberpot. I first discovered one of
these relics from what I thought was the distant past in the bedside nightstand
of a Midlands hotel room. I had seen the little pair of closed doors in
the lower half of many bedside tables, but I had never opened
them. Now, looking for a place to put my book, I discovered a
large chamberpot. When I pointed out my find to Doug, he was neither
surprised nor amused. He said that nearly all bedrooms had them because
bathrooms were often far from the bedrooms, having, in most cases, been added
years after the house was built. This accounts for the often
enormous size of bathrooms which were converted bedrooms themselves.
Private bathrooms were a rarity in small provincial hotels, many of which were
centuries old. Doug pointed out that there had been a chamberpot in
the nightstand at Corone House. “Why?” I asked, noting that the WC was
just across the hall. “Tradition,” said he. That was an answer I
was learning to expect to a good many questions.
Another learning experience concerned the drinking of water. I had noticed
that water never seemed to be on the table at Corone House and, at any dinners I
had eaten at other places, wine had been served. I hadn’t really thought
much about it so it was quite casually that I asked a little country hotel
waitress for “some water, please.” She departed for a minute or two and
returned to ask whether I wanted the water hot or cold. I said cold and
she departed again only to return and ask whether I wanted it to drink or to
wash in. Bemused by now, I kept a straight face and said I wanted it to
drink. Off she went but back she came a third time. Did I want it in
a cup or a glass? I finally got a glass of water and Doug managed to
keep me from laughing until we left the dining room. He explained to me
later that drinking plain water at the table was not generally done in England,
especially in those areas still unreached by American tourists. In
restaurants, one ordered either wine or beer or soft drinks such as ginger beer
or fruit drinks they called squashes. I now recalled that a selection of
these beverages was always available on a side table in the dining room at
Corone House. At breakfast, one drank tea or coffee. If one wanted
water when dining out, one ordered and paid a small price for bottled water, as
we had done in Paris. As far as I know, this custom is unchanged in
England except in establishments that cater to a large number of Americans.
On our way to Scotland, we passed through the tiny village of Rochester which
was the girlhood home of Mrs. Swan and where Grannie still lived. We didn’t
stop as she was in Chorleywood visiting the family, but I was to come to know
this small row of cottages, with a pub at one end, which made up the entire
village. By the way, I learned that the term “cottage” in
England usually meant a small but two-storied dwelling, often one of a row,
attached to one another. A one-storied small dwelling was called a
bungalow. Nancy moved to the Rochester cottage with her small son when the
war broke out. As a result, we spent at least one Christmas there and the
first stands out as one of my treasured memories. Nancy said that we
should go out and call on the villagers on Christmas afternoon, which she, Mary
and I proceeded to do. One cottage contained two elderly ladies who
insisted on giving us a cup of tea. When we left, I commented on how bossy
the elder sister was to the younger. “They’re not sisters,” said
Nancy, “they are mother and daughter.” The daughter was at least
seventy-five! People in that part of the country tend to live to a ripe
old age. One last memory lingers from my first visit to the north of
England—the name of a small mining town, “Pity Me.” To my
everlasting shame I must confess that I laughed. It pains me now to
realize how ignorant I was of the unemployment and suffering with which parts of
England, particularly the coal-mining areas, were afflicted in those days.
I had of course been aware of the American depression, but, cocooned in luxury
as I had been at Corone House, I had apparently assumed that the depression was
a purely American tragedy.
Shortly after our return from our brief tour of the North and Scotland, we set
off for our new home and Doug’s job in Cheltenham. We had been provided
with a company car. It was small, but at least it was ours to use at will.
Chapter Seven
Cheltenham turned out to be a pretty town in the picturesque Cotswold
Hills. It was originally named Cheltenham Spa, and one could
drink the rather sulfuric water drawn from a local spring. The town had
been a popular resort, a smaller Bath, during the Regency. It had now
become a favorite place for retirement, especially for former military officers
and civil servants, most of whom had served in India or other far-flung outposts
of the British Empire. There were many fine Regency residences, some of
which had remained intact, others having been converted into apartments (flats
in British) or hotels. There was a well-known girls’ school, a
racetrack of some standing, and The Promenade. This beautiful avenue was
adorned with flowerbeds and boasted branches of some of London”s more
exclusive shops. We couldn’t have chosen a nicer town. We checked
into a residential hotel and started looking for a flat.
It was in the course of our move to Cheltenham that I became more knowledgeable
about two important British institutions, the residential hotel and the
pub. Other countries, I have since learned have residential hotels and
call them pensions or some variation thereof. I don’t believe the
British pub is wholly duplicated anywhere else in the world. Of course I
had been in pubs, and we had stopped in several small provincial hotels on our
trip north, but I hadn’t realized the importance of the pub in the social life
of a community. And I had lacked any idea of the value of the truly residential
hotel such as the one we chose for our first few weeks in Cheltenham.
There has been in the last several years an enormous increase in the number and
type of living facilities for the elderly. Living, as I do, in an area
which is extremely popular with retired persons, I am aware of the range in
price, comfort and amenities offered to our elderly today. I refer to
those who are able to afford even the most austere of these
establishments. There is, however, one drawback common to all of them, no
matter how elegant and luxurious they may be: they are still provided for
the elderly. They have a minimum age requirement. In contrast, the English
residential hotels, as I came to know them, were able to fill many of the needs
of the elderly without that atmosphere of existing solely for those above a
certain age. Although they were indeed used predominately by older
persons, they were open to anyone. Doug and I were in our twenties when we
found a temporary home in one of them.
The residential hotel served a very definite purpose in a country where there
seemed to be a multitude of what I thought of as displaced homemakers, mature or
elderly women of genteel background who, for one reason or another, had been
displaced or had moved voluntarily from the family home. For the most
part, they were ladies who had run their former homes with an appropriate staff
of servants. Now, although they were still active and able-bodied as well
as skilled in the domestic arts, they preferred this type of hotel to the
loneliness of a small cottage, flat, or “bed-sitter,” with or without
cooking facilities and/or meals prepared by a landlady. The amount of
luxury and comfort in the hotel depended on the resident’s means, which could
be a pension from her deceased husband or an allowance from a son or daughter
who now inhabited the family home. Large estates often had what were called “dower
houses” for the heir’s mother. Of course, the residents were not
poor. Really poor families usually kept the elderly mother living
with them. Doug and I were content to live in the hotel we found, which
was comfortable but not luxurious. Mr. Swan was not exactly throwing money
at us.
The hotel provided a comfortable bedroom and a lounge; the latter offered a warm
fireside and companionship. One had one’s own table in the dining room
and afternoon tea was served in the lounge by a waitress in a black uniform and
frilly white cap and apron. Not all of the residents were elderly ladies;
there were one or two widowers and an occasional traveling salesman (commercial
traveler) who had made the hotel a regular stopping place when in
Cheltenham. There was also a family, a retired clergyman of ninety-two,
his fiftyish wife, and their twelve-year-old son, who was the spitting image of
his father.
I later visited pensions, pensiones, paradors, and such places with various
names in other countries. The only American equivalent of such a place in
a small town would be, as far as I knew, the boarding house. Without meaning in
the least to disparage these establishments (my maternal grandmother ran one
after she was widowed with four children in Fort Worth, Texas,) I am sure they
were not exactly the same as the English hotels to which I am referring.
My father had lived in many boarding houses in his bachelor days; his
description of the need to develop a “boarding house reach” at the communal
dinner table shows nothing in common with the graceful way of life we found in
our temporary home in Cheltenham.
For the first time since my arrival in England I felt at home. At the
lounge fireside, I had a “place to be” after Doug left for work. An
elderly widower launched me onto my life-long love affair with bridge, and my
knitting prowess grew rapidly with the expert help of several ladies who happily
picked up my dropped stitches. I shall always remember that hotel with
gratitude. It put an end to my culture shock. I do not know how the
residential hotels have fared in modern Britain, but if one should find oneself
to be a stranger in an English town or city, there is no better place to find a
home away from home.
The other institution was the pub. I already knew that there was a pub on
almost every corner in urban England and that they were equally abundant in
villages and in the deep countryside, but until now, I really had no idea of
their place in British life, nor of the scope, in social terms, to be found in
them. Most pubs have at least two bars. One is the public bar where the
beer is cheaper and the clientele is therefore at the lower end of the
socio-economic scale; the other is the saloon bar with higher prices, upgraded
décor, and more affluent patrons. One of the charms of very small one-bar
isolated pubs is that people from all walks of life rub elbows and get to know
one another in a relaxed atmosphere. Some pubs are in hotels and may have
attractive cocktail lounges which cater not only to transients but to local
citizens as well. Each pub seems to have its own type of clientele and
there is almost as much variety in the character of pubs as in people.
Every neighborhood has its share and choice of pubs and they serve as meeting
places and social centers for their habitues. When a Britisher refers to
the “local,” he means his neighborhood pub, not his union hall.
The British male is born with an unerring ability to locate, within minutes of
finding himself in a new community, exactly the type of pub which suits his
needs and befits his station. Pubs, therefore, make a real contribution in
enabling a newcomer to meet and make new friends. Our hotel, being
strictly residential, had no bar, so we were forced to seek refreshment abroad
in the town. No problem. Doug, with the instincts of a homing
pigeon, located the favorite watering holes of several groups of people who
became fast friends in no time. Through them we joined a small,
fashionable club, about six miles out of Cheltenham. They served excellent
food and held a dinner-dance every Saturday night. This club’s members
formed the basis of our social life in Cheltenham. Through them we met a growing
number of people and soon felt ourselves to be well launched in the
community. It all started with finding the right pubs.
Our first priority was to find a home, and we were fortunate. One of our
new friends mentioned that a block of flats was nearing completion. This
was quite a departure in conservative, period-style Cheltenham. Modern
flats, with up-to-date kitchens and bathrooms, were almost non-existent.
We signed a year’s lease without hesitation.
We had been given permission to purchase what we needed (within reason) by using
the family’s charge account at a large London furniture store. We bought
conservatively, choosing reproductions of period furniture for the pieces made
of wood, and a contemporary sofa and armchairs. We installed wall-to-wall
monochrome carpeting, another departure in England, but it made the rooms seem
larger and was quieter than the parquet floors. We were quite pleased with
what we had done and proud when we received many compliments on our first
décor.
So absorbed had we been in the finding and feathering of our nest that we had
not taken the time to realize that we were living in what we later described as
the “lull before the storm.” Of course I had come to England aware of
what was happening in Nazi Germany, but I was still under the influence of the
American sense of distance and isolation from what was occurring across the
Atlantic. I had not absorbed the fact that I now was in the front row of
the theater of international affairs. At Corone House I had never had
access to the daily newspaper, and I had no radio of my own. Perhaps Doug
and his father, along with Nancy’s husband, discussed the mounting Sudetenland
crisis, but they had never done so in my presence. I was so intimidated by
my father-in-law that I wouldn’t have dreamt of being the only female to join
the pre-dinner sherry session early in order to hear the evening news on the
radio. By the time the ladies arrived, the broadcast was over. I was
therefore quite isolated from any discussion of world affairs. When Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain and his umbrella went to Munich to meet with Hitler
and returned with “Peace in our Time,” Doug and I were in the
Highlands in Scotland. We were so happy to be away from Corone House that
we were not about to spoil our idyll by seeking out the unpleasant news to be
found in the media. It is hard nowadays to recall the days before the
portable transistor radio, later to be found in every car and hotel room.
Most houses and hotels had but one radio, in a public room, where family or
guests gathered at the appropriate times in order to be informed about current
events. Of course we could have bought a daily newspaper, had we been
really concerned about the war clouds gathering over Europe.
Now, as a British housewife, I had scarcely a care in the world beyond learning
how to make a steak and kidney pie. At social gatherings I tended to do
the normal thing by joining the other wives at one end of the room, discussing
recipes, children, and for my part, where to find what in Cheltenham. No
doubt, the men were discussing current events at the other end of the
room. As for the growing threat of war, when I did hear it
mentioned, I dismissed it as unthinkable; it simply couldn’t happen.
In August 1939, I went to France with two women friends and their three
children. My only previous visit to France having been a year earlier, when Doug
and I had flown to Paris for the weekend, I had not had much chance to practice
my classroom French. On this trip, therefore, I remained for the most part
silent (unusual for me!) and let my more experienced companions do the
talking. A couple of days convinced me that my French was much better than
theirs, but none of this seemed very important as we enjoyed a spell of very
good weather and the pleasures of the beach at the small seaside resort of Sable
d’Or Les Pins in Brittany. This quiet holiday contentment was suddenly
shattered when Germany and Russia signed their infamous “accord,” announced
on 23 August. France began mobilization immediately, and Britons on
holiday all over the Continent converged on the Channel ports in a frenzy to get
home. As our scheduled passage was not booked until a week later, we
joined the hordes besieging the Channel boats departing from St. Malo. We
had to abandon the car which we had brought over, leaving it in a local
garage. It was retrieved some weeks later during the lull which came to be
called the “Phony War.”
Leaving our luggage with two porters on the quayside, we managed to get on board
and find deck chairs for the children for the over night voyage. One of
the mothers stayed with them while I and the other went ashore to get the
luggage. We finally located our two porters at a dockside café, where
they had obviously “drink taken” and were in a playful mood. Our
luggage was nowhere in sight, and the porters professed to have forgotten where
they had left it. It was pretty obvious that a tip much larger than usual
would restore their memories. It was at this point that I, hot, tired, and
worried, made a discovery that led to what I have since named the reiterative
method of dealing with recalcitrant foreigners. I hereby offer it to
frustrated travelers everywhere.
It being obvious that you cannot win an argument with any foreigner in his
native language, you must develop other tactics. The first is to go on the
offensive. To do this, you must dominate the proceedings by making it
impossible for your adversary to get a word in. (You probably won’t
understand it anyway.) Equip yourself with a few simple phrases in the
appropriate language which will cover most of the circumstances likely to
arise. Some examples are “Not a centime (peseta, mark, etc.) more;”
“You are going the wrong way!” for taxi drivers; and “I made a firm
reservation” for headwaiters and hotels. You can add to these as your
knowledge of a language grows, but do try to get the pronunciation right.
Remember that George Bernard Shaw said about the French, “They don’t care
what you say as long as you pronounce it properly.” When confronted with
a desperate situation, take a deep breath and repeat your phrase over and over
again at top volume. Never allow your adversary to get a word in or
to outshout you.
I used this method successfully for over 40 years. I realize that it is
more difficult for shy retiring types, but it is even more effective when such
individuals resort to it. The two tipsy porters at St. Malo were
completely taken aback when the “quiet one” suddenly started screaming, “Ou
sont nos baggages?” (Where is our luggage?) over and over again. Heads
were turning our way, and their discomfort was being observed by their peers in
the café. They turned tail and ran around the corner, to reappear almost
immediately with all our luggage. My astonished companion and I followed
in their wake as they mounted the gangplank and deposited our bags in the heap
indicated by a crew member. The porters accepted their tip without
argument and scuttled away. I headed for the bar.
We were lucky enough to get three seats there, and as seats were at a premium
anywhere on the boat, we stayed there all night. This required that we
justify keeping our seats by drinking all night. Every cloud has a silver
lining. Ours was that no customs inspector wanted to deal with three
inebriated women at 7:00 a.m., so we were spared declaring and paying duty on
the considerable quantity of French perfume with which we had stocked up in the
face of the oncoming war. A few hours later we were in Cheltenham,
hung-over but safely at home. A week later, Hitler invaded Poland and we
were at war.
Chapter Eight
My memories of the first days of the war are a blur of blackout materials,
ration books and gas masks. The latter were issued in unwieldy cube-shaped
cardboard boxes which were worn suspended over the shoulder by attached
strings. They were pesky appendages, always getting in the way. Most of us
were relieved when it was considered safe to abandon wearing them. As for
blacking out our homes and businesses, we grabbed at anything handy, such as
blankets, cardboard, etc., until suitable materials, curtain lining, and other
more durable devices could be installed. As blackout went into effect
immediately, there was a certain amount of frantic activity, but British calm
and muddle-through ability rose to the occasion. Some people, expecting an
immediate rain of bombs, taped the glass in their windows. Fortunately for
the rest of us, the bombs did not materialize at that time.
One of my first problems was a short-lived but frequently embarrassing ignorance
about British military uniforms and insignia. I mistook an Admiral for the
doorman at a London hotel and asked him to get me a taxi. He didn’t.
At another hotel I thought a young officer in the short-jacketed formal mess kit
was a bellboy. I asked him to show me the way to the ladies’ room.
He did. I realized how little the American public knew about such
things. In the States, I had never seen a serviceman in uniform. The
English were much better informed, service in their armed forces, even in
peacetime, being a popular career choice. Second and third sons in
aristocratic families, even in the Royal Family, traditionally entered either
the military or the clergy. Older people still remembered uniforms and
insignia from the first World War.
As I kept no journal or written account, a fact I deplore frequently, I cannot
recall the precise order in which commodities were rationed. Petrol
coupons came very early and were issued to the car, according to the size of the
engine and the legitimate needs of the owner. This did not affect me very
much at the time. We lived in the center of the town, and I could walk to
the shops. Doug was never allowed to serve in the military because of his
injured hand. His work, however, was considered essential to the war
effort, and he received a generous ration, enough for his business needs and for
our modest personal ones as well. The family firm was heavily engaged in
the building and maintenance of airfield runways, which required him to travel a
great deal throughout the country. I was very fortunate that he drove to
the London area often enough for me to go to Town for shopping beyond that which
Cheltenham afforded.
Food ration books were issued and each had to be registered with a particular
merchant for the purchase of the rationed foods. The first to be rationed
were sugar, butter, lard, bacon, and meat. There was rigid price control
for such items. The size of the weekly ration varied from time to time,
becoming increasingly smaller as the war went on. There were seasonal
increases in sugar so that jams and jellies could be made, thus avoiding wastage
of seasonal fruit.
Supermarkets did not exist in pre-war England. Routine shopping entailed
visits to the butcher, the grocer, the greengrocer, the fishmonger, the
ironmonger (hardware store) and the sweets (candy) store. The latter was
often combined with the tobacconist. Bread and milk were still delivered,
but most other deliveries became a thing of the past. English housewives
carried large shopping baskets and cloth or string bags to accommodate their
purchases. As the war went on, paper came into short supply, and merchants
could no longer wrap what they sold. One took along one’s increasingly
smaller newspaper for fish and meat and tried not to find oneself buying soap
flakes, scooped out from a large bin, with nothing but a string bag in which to
carry them home.
It was important to stay in the good graces of the merchants, not to get any
increase in one’s ration, which was unthinkable, but to be on the receiving
end when he was doling out rare unrationed goodies. Cookies (biscuits),
especially chocolate ones, soap flakes, canned meats (later to be rationed),
cigarettes, and candies (also rationed later) were among the items for which we
were constantly on the prowl. We were like the females in a pride of
lions. Here was where the custom of elevenses became invaluable.
Around that time, during a morning’s foraging, housewives gathered at their
favorite cafes or tearooms to drink coffee, and to impart to one another which
grocer had had a delivery of chocolate biscuits and which butcher had just
slaughtered a pig and had some unrationed liver or other parts of the pig’s
anatomy. I called it “awful offal.” Partnerships were
forged. I found a non-smoking lady who had, nevertheless, a good
relationship with her news stand owner who also sold cigarettes. She had
an insatiable sweet tooth, while my nicotine addiction outweighed my craving for
sweets. We traded cigarettes for chocolates over our elevenses. It
would have been a good time to give up both candy and cigarettes, but the
medical profession had not yet warned us of the perils of these pleasures.
Elevenses were thus an important factor in a housewife’s life. Newcomers
joined the group from time to time, and one could belong to several groups. Some
of the women invited me to their homes, and our husbands became friends as
well. There were other women whose husbands I never met. Whether or
not we extended the scope of our relationships did not in any way interfere with
our common preoccupation and purpose. This was the feeding (and later,
clothing) of our families. For clothes rationing was on the way, and it
was to come as quite a shock. It never failed to impress me how well the
British Government managed to keep such things under wraps until they were ready
to announce them to the public. We had all been prepared for food and
petrol rationing, but I never met anyone who expected clothes, shoes, fabrics,
and even babies’ diapers to be added to the list. The immediate impact
was, of course, more psychological than actual. We had to find food every
day; the need to buy clothing was more sporadic. Gradually, however, the
realization grew that civilian life in wartime was really getting down to the
nitty-gritty. If memory serves me, we were given some forty-odd clothing
coupons per person per annum.
A man’s suit took 26; a woman’s dress 18; and diapers cost one coupon
each. Shoes were also high in coupons, but that didn’t bother me since I
was unable to buy any for myself. If I had had any advance knowledge that
they were to be rationed, I would have dashed to London and bought every pair of
American shoes I could find, because British or European shoes would not fit
me. The British government, quite understandably, stopped the importation
of American shoes, and I did without new shoes for five years. For the
most part, I made do with fleece-lined ankle boots whose width didn’t matter
much; my dressier shoes and summer sandals were resoled and reheeled until they
became a cobbler’s nightmare. You might wonder why I didn’t write to
my parents to send me shoes and any other little thing I might be missing.
Good question!
All overseas mail was censored. As Britain had to import many food and
military items, they weren’t about to allow precious shipping space to be
taken up with treats for people with American connections. My parents
could send me small packages, but I couldn’t write and ask for them.
Even a letter thanking someone for the lovely shoes and lingerie or the lovely
parcel of assorted goodies was returned from the censor with a printed notice
explaining that the thanks could be interpreted as a request for the items
mentioned. As far as I know, there was no transatlantic telephone service
for personal use. The only request I ever got away with was made quite
unintentionally. I had been asked by the BBC, who had moved some of their
operations and personnel to Cheltenham, to write the scripts and to record some
broadcasts for their Overseas Program to America. I mentioned that I would
have to use clothing coupons for shower curtains and received three curtains
from American listeners. Because of the “no hinting” restrictions, I
couldn’t even write to thank the senders!
Chapter Nine
The reason I needed the shower curtains was that, at long last, after many
months of searching, we had found a house in the country. Some months
previously, Mr. and Mrs. Swan had visited us for the first time at our flat in
Cheltenham. They were obviously surprised at the unostentatious but good
quality of the furniture, the tidiness of the flat, and the simple but delicious
lunch I had prepared for them. Mrs. Swan asked me who had cooked the roast
chicken, and I told her that I had. I told her that my only help was a
cleaning woman one morning a week. She obviously approved, and I sensed
that her opinion of me had improved. This was confirmed later when I was
told of the contents of a letter she had written to her younger daughter at
boarding school. I never had a chance to enjoy her approval. She was
killed in a minor motor accident shortly after their visit to us. I
believe that all of this influenced Mr. Swan to offer to have the firm buy a
comfortable country house where Doug and I could live and he could stay on his
visits to Cheltenham.
The house, named The Gorse, was only about three miles out of Cheltenham,
enabling us to continue to enjoy the friendships we had made there. I was
provided with a tiny Austin car which had belonged to the firm for several
years. It was good enough for me to get to the shops and my elevenses.
I now began to learn wartime housewifery in earnest. The house came with
100 acres and a cottage, as well as stables, a tackroom, and a greenhouse in a
large garden. It being obviously more land than we could handle, we leased
out 90 acres and the cottage to a Mr. Chatham. He had turned his large
farm over to his son but wanted to continue to work a few acres for
himself. A nearby cottage belonged to a wonderful gardener/handy man who
had worked for every owner of the house. I doubt we would have survived
without him. His wife, although she didn’t “go out” to work, always
came over to help with the larger projects upon which I was to find myself
embarked during the coming years. We had an enormous fruit and vegetable
garden, and it was essential that we preserve its summer abundance for use in
winter. I learned to preserve (mostly without sugar) plums, gooseberries,
raspberries, red and black currants, strawberries, and tomatoes. I learned
to layer green beans with coarse salt in large containers and to put fresh eggs,
when the hens were laying, into large crocks containing isinglass.
Isinglass was a repulsive slimy substance which somehow made the eggs edible
months later--and preferable to the powdered ones that were the lot of those
unfortunates without chickens.
All of this was mere child’s play compared to what I had to do when we killed
a pig. First, of course, we had to get enough food to feed the pig.
Wartime table scraps were not enough. We acquired pig feed by giving up
the family’s lard and bacon rations for the time it took to raise the pig to a
suitable size for slaughter—about a year, if memory serves me. When the
poor animal’s day of destiny approached, the proper permit was acquired, and
an appointment made with a butcher who would come and do the grisly job.
Mrs. Hayward and I were left with rendering the lard and dividing up such edible
by-products as the liver, feet, etc., most of which I considered to be the
aforementioned “awful offal,” but which the Haywards enjoyed. Hayward
smoked and cured the bacon and hams, which were then stored by hanging them from
large hooks in the ceiling of the larder. Hayward also kept us
supplied with freshly killed and beautifully dressed poultry from the chickens
which he had purchased and raised for us.
The larder was an essential component of most English dwellings. Larders
ranged in size from tiny cubicles in small houses and flats to large storage
rooms with stone floors and shelves in country houses. They all had one
thing in common: permanently open, screened windows. I learned that
relatively few people had refrigerators in those days. We were without one
for years at The Gorse because we were not on the electric mains. We made
our own electricity with a Diesel generator, and the DC current was wrong for
the available refrigerators.
In winter, our larder was unbelievably cold, and the kitchen felt blissfully
warm after a trip to the nearby larder. Actually, the kitchen was the only
room in the house which could always be relied on to be warm. This was
because of the AGA. How to explain the importance of owning an AGA if you
lived in rural England? AGA cookers, which originated in one of the
Scandinavian countries, were fueled only twice daily by very economical
quantities of hard coal such as anthracite. Therefore they required no
electricity or gas. (Today, many AGA’s are fueled by oil, but I never
saw an oil-fueled AGA until after the war.) As many country houses were,
like The Gorse, without power and gas from the mains, appliances that did not
require such fuels were a necessity.
Another virtue of the AGA was that it was never allowed to go out; i.e., it
maintained a constant heat throughout the 24 hours. The kitchen with an
AGA was always warm—a disadvantage only in hot weather, a condition rare in
England. Even if a house was supplied with electricity or gas, an AGA was
preferred since they cooked splendidly and with much less attention than other
types of ranges. They were clean-burning and self-cleaning. They had
hot ovens and simmering ovens which, when used in combination, produced
perfectly cooked roasts. There were baking ovens which turned out splendid
cakes (if you could acquire the ingredients.) The top-of-the-stove
functions were performed by hot and simmering rings which were insulated with
hinged steel lids when not in use. The AGA also provided a constant supply
of almost boiling water. The only thing an AGA owner misses is an electric
toaster. You can make toast on an AGA, but absentminded cooks burn a lot
of bread.
The AGA was never referred to except by name; it was never called just the range
or stove or oven. I don’t know of any American appliance which is
regarded with such reverence or given such name recognition. The nearest
equivalent would perhaps relate not to appliances but to automobiles whose
owners would never refer to them except as “The Rolls” or “The Caddy.”
The AGA is the only item I can think of which totally escapes that curious
reverse snobbery so prevalent in certain English circles. Persons who
would bite their tongues before mentioning that they owned a very expensive car—or
indeed would even refuse to own one—have no problem at all about owning and
referring to their AGA.
Lacking central electric or gas heating at The Gorse, we had a fireplace in
every room. The trouble was that coal was strictly rationed, and wood
sufficiently dried for burning was very scarce. The dining and drawing
rooms were closed except for special occasions. We scraped the ice off the
inside of our bedroom windows each winter morning. I acquired a kerosene-
or paraffin-burning space heater for the worst winter days, but it smelled so
awful that freezing was almost preferable. There was just enough hot water
for one bath per morning, so while Doug warmed up in that, I thankfully headed
for the kitchen and the AGA, postponing my personal ablutions until the water
had heated up again.
We ate in the study, a smaller room than the drawing room and the one room where
we kept a fire going, except for early mornings. Last night’s ashes had
to be removed and a new fire laid and started. This was done by a servant
if there was one, but it was one of the first and most important things I
learned to do. Laying a coal fire properly and getting it to draw and stay
lit is a matter of survival in English country houses. There was a
servants’ sitting-dining room next to the kitchen which shared some of the AGA’s
warmth, and we used that room for breakfast. I took to wearing woolen
underwear and could even be found making beds and dusting with woolen gloves on
my hands.
I really believe I survived World War II because of a garment for which I still
have no name. It was of a woolen knit material, similar to that used for
“long-johns,” but it reached only to my knees. The upper half of the
one-piece beauty had wide shoulder straps and a neckline scooped low enough to
accommodate the décolletage of most blouses and dresses. Instead of the
better known “drop-seat” to enable the wearer to answer the calls of nature,
there was a long, overlapping opening which extended from the waist in front to
the waist in back. As a result of this construction, one was able, with
careful arrangement, to avoid contact between one’s flesh and the freezing
toilet seats. Cold lavatory seats, as the British called them, were de
rigeur (pun intended) in the British Isles. The windows of the
little rooms that housed them were kept permanently open, even in dead of winter
and even in the rare house that was centrally heated. Going to the John
(or to the loo as the British call it) was therefore an excrutiatingly
uncomfortable experience in winter (and even in some summers I can recall,)
We had no such thing as a clothes dryer, but we did have a small room that
housed our hot water boiler. A wooden rack could be raised and lowered by
a pulley system to provide limited indoor drying in a fairly short time.
My undergarment spent all its nights on that rack. Clothes rationing
precluded my buying another. In fact, I never saw another one to buy.
Another garment which I found to be absolutely indispensable was called a “Spencer”
(perhaps spelled “Spenser,” but not to be found in my American
dictionary.) This was a knitted wool garment to be worn as an underblouse.
It was gossamer-light and had sleeves that stopped just short of the wrists as
well as a deeply scooped or Vee neckline so that one could wear it under a silk
blouse or a long-sleeved silk dress or dinner gown for extra warmth. I
still have a spencer which I take with me to any place where it is likely to be
cold.
Even with these two treasures, I never got used to the cold and still find it
hard to understand why English cold seems to be so much more bone-chilling than
any I ever suffered in New England, although the temperatures dropped much lower
in the latter. I guess it is a combination of humidity and lack of
heating, but I’ve been colder just walking down the street in
London that I ever was in a blizzard in Boston. So I don’t think it is
just the lack of heating indoors but also a different kind of cold
outdoors.
Chapter Ten
Besides the Haywards, two other helpers were found in the neighborhood. Our
house was situated in a small community which probably would be called a hamlet.
It didn’t qualify as a village, having no shops or any other public buildings
except a small Norman church. There were two or three farms, and at the
corner where one turned off the main road, a row of council houses. These
were cottages built and subsidized by the government for qualifying persons of
low income.
It was because of these houses that I acquired the services of Mrs.
Turner. She appeared at the kitchen door a day or two after our arrival,
announcing that she had always done the laundry for The Gorse because she (I
quote) “had the gas.” Correctly interpreting this to mean that her
house was on the gas mains, I learned further that she had a gas-fueled iron, an
item I didn’t even know existed. As our homemade electricity would not
run to an electric iron, or anything else with a heating element, Mrs. Turner
was a Godsend. Remember, this was long before the days of drip-dry and
permanent press. Every Monday, Mrs. Turner would arrive with an empty
wheelbarrow. She would go through the house like a cloud of cloth-eating
locusts, stripping it of any and all soiled linens and washable clothing.
At her house, she boiled and scrubbed on a scrubbing board and ironed even Doug’s
underwear. We never made a list, but she never lost or ruined a single
piece of laundry in the years she worked for us. She must have been well
over 70 the first time I ever saw her, and she was still going strong the
last. It is hard to think of her succumbing to the Grim Reaper, but of
course, she has had to at some time. RIP, Mrs. T.
Our other helper was Dorothy, who became our live-in maid-of-all-work at the age
of 15. She was the eldest of seven children of a farm laborer and his
wife who lived in a tiny cottage on the farm where he worked.
Dorothy had finished the required number of years at school at 14 and was now
considered ready to enter the work force. She had had no training except
for the simple cooking and childcare with which she helped her mother, so it was
up to me to train her. A case of the blind leading the blind. My
experience in running a household consisted entirely of living in a flat and
having a cleaning woman once a week. Dorothy’s training had to be
accelerated when I learned of the impending visit of my married sister-in-law
Nancy. So assiduously did I drill Dorothy in how to serve Nancy at the
dinner party I gave in her honor, that, in a classic demonstration of Freudism,
she simply omitted to serve her at all.
In a way, Dorothy was responsible for a lot of my own growing up. Here I
was, little more than a girl myself, responsible for this young person without
having any clear idea of her needs and her problems. She had never been
taught that, given any money, she could buy the items to provide for her
personal, feminine needs. She probably wouldn’t have bought them anyway;
she gave the money she earned to her father. I simply started to hand her
certain items without comment, thus becoming an away-from-home mother figure for
an adolescent, an experience I had not thought to confront for several years to
come.
Chapter Eleven
Dorothy’s wages were, by American standards, a pittance, but they were the
going rate for one of her age and experience. I knew better than to fool
around in that area. As I have noted, my days of culture shock were coming
to an end. While I still had a lot to learn, I had already absorbed enough
of the English attitude about servants and other characteristics that I had come
a long way toward being completely assimilated. By the time the Americans
arrived to join the war effort (known as the Yank invasion,) I must have seemed
as foreign to them as all those other “Limeys” who actually chose to live on
this wet little island where the pubs closed at ten o’clock.
Of course, I had wanted to be assimilated. What young bride in a new
country would not want to learn the customs and the cuisine and to understand
the inside jokes of her adopted homeland? I was anxious to be accepted, to
be one of them. I embarked, with the help of a friendly librarian, upon
improving my knowledge of British history. She sugared the pill by lining
up a number of historical novels which, if read in the right order, would give
me a very good grasp of the subject. I ended up besting many of my English
friends (and Doug) at rattling off the names of monarchs in their proper order
of succession.
Other aspects of my Anglicization were acquired without conscious effort on my
part. I had always had the facility of taking on accents or changing
accents in a matter of moments. When my family visited Chicago for several
months when I was about nine, my father had chided me for “mimicking” the
playmates I had found in our apartment building. At Wellesley, we had a
phonetic speech class, and I was very quick to lose my Texas accent. I
wasn’t long in England before I had acquired such a British accent that I was
seldom recognized as being American. To this day, the moment I hear an
English voice on the telephone, I echo it right back to the amusement of anyone
present. I didn’t try to develop an English
accent; it just happened. I was, as a result, very annoyed when some
Americans jumped to the conclusion that I was consciously trying to change my
speech. Exposure to the “Yanks” during their invasion of England threw
me into a veritable linguistic mish-mash. Spending an evening with both
American and English friends, I would often use both accents in one sentence. In
any case, I was now an English housewife, with an English accent, in an English
country house, with English friends and domestic helpers. The only thing
missing was an English baby. We attended to that matter on 7 May 1942, by
producing a son who looked exactly like Winston Churchill. He outgrew it.
Chapter Twelve
The prospect of motherhood brought its joys, but in wartime, also its
problems. They started with the need for baby and maternity clothes.
These were all subject to clothes rationing. As even diapers were
rationed, a certain amount of ingenuity was required. English babies wore
two diapers, or nappies, as they called them. The outer one was of terry
cloth, and here I was in luck. Somehow I acquired a number of pre-war
white bath towels. Those were made into the outer nappies. The inner
ones were of a soft gauze material, and I had to give a coupon each for
them. There were no disposable diapers and no diaper services. Mrs.
Turner came to the rescue, arriving every day to collect a pail of diapers and
take them away in her wheelbarrow, returning with them clean the next day.
As for other baby clothes, I knitted like crazy, even though I had to give
coupons for the yarn. Here was where I really chafed under the censor’s
rules. American relatives who asked what I needed went unanswered.
My mother, without being asked, sent a few useful things, but my aunts, bless
their hearts, tended to avoid the practical, like diapers, and send cute and
pretty things. I really didn’t need silver spoons and bowls in an
England almost weighed down with antique and unrationed silver. I needed
maternity clothes and baby blankets, all requiring coupons. I clumped
through my pregnancy in my fleece-lined boots, wearing a red smock over a black
maternity skirt. I also had two dresses that wrapped around to accommodate
my growing girth.
When I could no longer get behind the wheel of my car, I turned it over to a
friend who lived in Cheltenham. She came and fetched me when I needed to
go out, but I had no on-the–spot transportation. Doug could be reached
by phone at his office, so we didn’t worry too much about my isolation.
Two weeks before the baby was born, I was upstairs one morning in my bedroom,
getting dressed. I heard Dorothy’s voice from the bottom of the stairs,
calling, “Madam.” I went to the landing and looked down to where
Dorothy was standing with her hand wrapped in her apron. “I’ve cut me
thumb off, Madam,” she said in a small, scared voice. “Nonsense,”
said I, in my most British matron’s voice, “let me see it.” I
descended as fast as my condition permitted, and Dorothy unwrapped her
hand. Slight gasp from Madam before she remembered her stiff British upper
lip and the first aid course she had taken. ”So you have,” said I. “Wrap
it up and come out to the kitchen.” I tore a towel into strips and made
a tourniquet. Then I tried in vain to reach Doug, but the line was
busy. My friend with my car was not at home. I threw a coat on over
my underwear and went over to Mr. Chatham’s cottage. He immediately
brought his car over and took Dorothy to the hospital. Later, Doug and I
picked her up and drove her home to her mother, where she wanted to go.
Doug found her thumb in the woodshed. She had wanted something to stick
down a clogged sink and had tried to chop off a piece of packing wire with a
14-pound axe.
Our son was born two days later and two weeks early, but none the worse at a bit
over eight pounds. As I had never had a baby, I had no means of comparing
the process in the US and the UK. I had an excellent doctor, known as a
GP, who was also one of our new friends. By the way, he and my girl
friend, who drove me to his office from time to time, fell in love, and two
divorces resulted. Tommy broke up two marriages before he was born.
Small nursing homes were more popular for childbirth than hospitals.
Unless there were complications, it was quite customary to have one’s GP serve
both as obstetrician and later as pediatrician. Other small differences
from American child production were that the baby was born in my room instead of
in a labor room and that the baby remained in my room with me instead of in a
nursery, behind glass. The staff of this nursing home
consisted of four sisters who were also Sisters, as nurses are called in
England. The Maternity Sister was very short and obese, truly five by
five. She had an enormous bosom which was so commodious that she could
walk around with a baby lying on its tummy as it peered blissfully over her
shoulder, while her hands swung free. At that time one stayed much longer
in the nursing home or hospital than in these days of astronomical costs.
I stayed for ten days, during which time Maternity Sister taught me how to care
for my baby, including breastfeeding. By the last few days, I was free to
come and go, out to lunch or dinner or shopping, but I slept at the nursing home
and was there at feeding times. This use of the nursing home as a sort of
halfway house was of infinite value to a first time mother before she took her
baby home. In my case, having no mother, sister, or other female
relatives, it was a Godsend.
Since Dorothy was at her home nursing her hand, and Doug was away from home a
great deal, a friend brought her little boy and moved out to The Gorse to give
me moral support and the benefit of her experience. We managed quite well
between us until Dorothy returned after a few days. She pronounced herself
able and willing to work again, and we happily surrendered the chores of
cooking, bedmaking, and the handwashing of tiny baby things which were not Mrs.
Turner’s responsibilities. Our delight in having Dorothy back was
short-lived. She broke out in a rash which the doctor diagnosed as
impetigo, a very contagious skin disease which children sometimes caught and
brought home from school. Apparently one of Dorothy’s little
siblings had brought it home to Dorothy. She was again sent home, and we
set about sterilizing everything she had touched. We did a good job as
none of us caught the disease, and Dorothy returned as soon as she was
cured. My friend thankfully returned to her neglected husband.
Dorothy more than made up for her mishaps by saving Tommy’s life a few months
later. It was the custom to put babies in large prams and keep them out of
doors for a large part of every day, regardless of the weather. The prams
came with leather raincovers so the baby would stay warm and snug, even in a
downpour. I am convinced that this practice immunizes English children to
the miserable climate they are called upon to face for the rest of their
lives. I am equally convinced that the British climate was the force
behind the creation of the far-flung British Empire. You will agree that
most, if not all, of the Empire was located in warm climates. When a child
got too active to leave alone .in the pram, he was provided with an upper-body
harness. Hooks were provided for attaching the harness to the pram.
Tommy must have been unusually active because Dorothy looked out of the window
one day when I was out. She saw Tommy hanging upside down over the edge of
the pram. When she reached him he was turning blue. She carried him
into the house and immersed him in tepid water. He resumed breathing and
was playing happily in his playpen when I got home. When I asked Dorothy
how she knew what to do, she said that her mother always did that when anything
happened with one of the children. Everyone has heard about the English
nanny, but having the eldest of seven children around can be almost as useful to
a new mother. Dorothy taught me many of the country or old wives’ ways
to deal with an infant. A bit of treacle (like corn syrup) on the
fingertips and a small feather will keep a baby bemused for long blessed periods
of peace. Tommy kept falling asleep while breastfeeding, causing the
process to take an hour. Placing him on a pillow and not holding him in my
arms reduced it to 20 minutes.
Chapter Thirteen
While I was adjusting to motherhood, we were all constantly adjusting to new
developments of the war on the home front. One of these was the arrival of
large numbers of children, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes not.
The children were being evacuated to Cheltenham from the more vulnerable cities
and coastal areas. Coming largely from slum neighborhoods, they brought
some rather unwelcome things with them, one of which was head lice. The
eggs were deposited on the headrests of the Cheltenham bus system. One of
my friends, a doctor’s wife, often rode the bus to save her precious petrol
ration. She had glorious hip-length hair which she wore in a magnificent
coronet. One day she told her hairdresser that her head itched as if it
had a million live things in it. On being informed that it indeed had, she
had to have her hair cut very short so that the prescribed medication could
reach her scalp. Another casualty of the war.
The so-called phony war, that first autumn and winter, with a surprising lack of
violence, had given us time to learn about rationing, shortages and all the
other, in truth, minor problems of war. There was a great deal of movement
and relocation of families. Two of these resulted in our inheriting two
dogs from displaced families. The first dog was an adorable miniature
Pekinese named Peanut. We acquired her before moving into The Gorse and
fell in love with her, although neither of us would have chosen a Peke if left
to our own devices. She had several endearing personality traits and
adored playfully teasing our other orphan, acquired after the move to the
country. This was George, an enormous Great Dane. He was a gentle
beast, and when Peanut had pestered him long enough, he would lift one paw and
effortlessly roll her head-over-heels to some distance away from his immediate
vicinity. His vicinity, alas, was confined to the distance between the
garage and the tackroom, an area wide enough to include six loose-boxes which
were supposed to contain horses. One of them was George’s kennel.
A wire was strung across this area, and to that was attached a 15-foot chain,
which in turn was linked to George’s collar. The reason for this
restraint on this normally gentle animal was that George had killed one of Mr.
Chatham’s sheep. As this was a distinct no-no in meat-starved England,
it was either restrain George or have him put to sleep.
To my almost inconsolable sorrow, Peanut was run over and killed in our long
driveway by the baker’s delivery van. As the war went on, George
suffered more and more from hunger. What table scraps could be gleaned
from our meager meals were totally insufficient to appease his appetite.
The horsemeat (treated with blue dye to preclude human consumption) which was
sold for pets was informally rationed and in short supply. The
amount obtainable per week was barely sufficient for about two days for
George. No wonder he had attacked Mr. Chatham’s sheep. The poor
dog got thinner and thinner; he howled for food day and night; and we finally
had no choice but to put him to sleep. We replaced him with a bull terrier
who got eczema on his back as soon as he was full-grown. He would rub his
back raw under a fence and constantly had to wear an application of a greasy,
smelly ointment which made him unwelcome in the house.
Our final canine effort was with an adorable small Dachshund which Doug got for
me. His name was Schnapps. He killed chickens—always Mr. Chatham’s
chickens which, unlike ours, were allowed to run free. Schnapps didn’t
kill them out of hunger; he killed them from the same instinct that had made his
breed valuable as hunting dogs in Germany long before they became popular as
house pets. (Years later, in Bavaria, I saw some old hunting prints, and
there they were, a pair of Dachshunds, clinging tenaciously by their teeth to
the ears of a wild boar.) We sent Schnapps to obedience school. He
came home and promptly laid a dead chicken at my feet. Mr. Chatham,
strictly within his wartime rights, threatened to shoot him. I regretfully
gave him to some London friends who didn’t live within miles of a
chicken. At this point I ruefully concluded that, living in the most
dog-loving country in the world, I was never going to be the successful owner of
one. For some reason, I had the equivalent of a gardener’s black thumb
where dogs were concerned.
Chapter Fourteen
We carried on, making adjustments in our small world as events in the larger
theater of war required. After the fall of France, when it seemed
inevitable that Hitler would forthwith attempt the invasion of England, we set
about learning how to disable our cars, before leaving them parked, by removing
some necessary part under the hood. We were also fined (as I was) for
forgetting to lock all doors of the vehicle. Signposts were taken down so
that, if a German landed by parachute, he would not be helped to orient himself
by our own directional aids.
The public accepted these minor inconveniences with scarcely a mention.
They were supposed to be shaking in their boots under the threat of imminent
invasion by an implacable foe. What did they do? History has
recorded what their armed forces did, and what thousands of small craft owners
did at Dunkirk. We all knew about and admired the bravery of citizens in
the areas targeted by the German bombers. I can tell you what the women of
Cheltenham did. They did what had to be done, accepted what had to be
accepted, and went right on with their ceaseless search for their families’
needs, alleviated and assisted by their elevenses. I can not recall a
single word said in fear or discontent. The women of Cheltenham didn’t
get much chance to show the magnificent courage of their sisters in London who
faced bombs and fire, but as Milton wrote, “They also serve who only stand and
wait.” Staying at home and trying to develop a taste for whale meat and
what one columnist described as “strange and malignant sausages” took more
intestinal fortitude than you might imagine.
Out at The Gorse, changes were about to take place. We went out one night,
leaving 14-month-old Tommy in the care of Dorothy. For some reason, we
returned much earlier than expected and found that Dorothy had slipped out to
meet a boy and left Tommy alone. Doug fired her on the spot. I
probably would have given her a second chance, but my confidence in her was so
severely shaken that I let her go, sadly, but without protest. She had, by
the way, been generously rewarded for her lost thumb by our insurance
company. She had, therefore, a handsome nest egg for a girl of her age and
background. She was quite content with this outcome, saying that she only
missed her thumb when she was cracking eggs. As a matter of fact, we would
have lost her soon anyway, because the government was starting conscription of
childless females between 18 and 60-odd years of age.
As Tommy had started walking, it was imperative that we find someone who could
keep an eye on him at all times. The property surrounding the house was a
minefield of potential hazards for a youngster. There were ponds, the odd
bull or boar, and a host of other pitfalls which magnetically attract a
child. Before I could find him a full-time guardian, he turned on the tap
of a 50-gallon container of kerosene (liquid paraffin in England) and took a
shower in it, fully clothed. Hayward led him into the kitchen warning me
not to light a match. Tommy found a large pile of chaff, which Mr. Chatham
had separated from the wheat, and rolled over and over in it, embedding
thousands of little barbs in his knitted coat and leggings. He threw his
first pair of rationed, hard-soled shoes, for which I had stood in line for two
hours, over the firescreen into the fire, five minutes after I had put them on
him and injudiciously turned my back. He managed, through the bars of his
playpen, to steal and eat all of the small cakes off a cakestand, while I was
giving the vicar afternoon tea. I needed help.
Chapter Fifteen
The Russians had been crying out for a second front for some time, when I opened
one by engaging Miss Braun. She was a woman of some 60 years, thereby
being exempt from conscription. Her age did not lessen one whit her quite
extraordinary vitality and stamina. She was obviously from a genteel
background, and she had impeccable references from all sorts of persons, either
titled or of undoubtedly elevated station. This should have warned me, but
I was desperate. She insisted that she be called Miss Braun and that she
be described, not as a nanny, but as a nursery governess. I agreed, not
really knowing what that implied. I soon found out.
Miss Braun was to eat with the family, but, under no circumstances, was she to
help with the preparation of the meals, except for the child’s.
Normally, she wouldn’t even had done that, but as cooks and kitchen maids were
rare in wartime, she made an exception, considering this her contribution and
sacrifice to the war effort. It was also obvious that she found that
preferable to trusting me with a helpless child’s food. I was happy
enough to have her do it, except for the problem of the burning milk. All
of our milk came from a neighboring farm, unpasteurized, indeed warm from the
cow and with an occasional wasp floating in it. It had to be boiled for
Tommy’s use. A day never passed that Miss B (now I can call her that)
didn’t let the milk boil over on the hot ring of the AGA. After all
these years, I associate those days more with the smell of burning milk than
with almost any other of the war’s minor vicissitudes.
We clashed from the outset, and there were only two reasons why she remained
with us for as long as she did: The first was that she was an excellent child’s
companion and mentor. Her patience with and devotion to Tommy were total
and without reservation. When it was noticed that the child was developing
knock-knees, the doctor said that he would have to sleep in leg braces or have a
great deal of massage on his legs. Miss B. provided the massage tirelessly
and with complete success.
To the rest of us she was dedicatedly difficult. When I came down with
chicken pox at a time when we had no other help in the house, she refused even
to prepare a tray for me, isolated in my room. She was willing to cook for
herself and Tommy but considered it demeaning to do anything for me.
Fortunately for Doug, he was away on business most of the time that I was
ill. I ended up in the isolation ward in the hospital. Miss B. allowed
Hayward to spend hours constructing a large wire-enclosed play area, complete
with swing and sandbox, a safe, private playground which would have afforded
Miss B. much more free time. When he had finished it, she refused “to
put Thomas in a concentration camp” and never allowed him to use it. I
took great pleasure in using it on her days off. Tommy loved it. We
had an orphaned baby lamb for a while and he could bottle-feed it and cuddle it
to his heart’s content in the enclosure where it couldn’t scamper
away. Miss. B. would never have allowed him to do anything like that.
She was punctilious about asserting her place in the household as upstairs, not
downstairs. If we had dinner guests, she would not intrude on the cocktail
hour or the after-dinner part of the evening but would appear, just at the right
moment, to take her place at the table. I must admit that her behavior was
impeccable. She never overstepped her self-imposed boundaries, but she
never failed to claim her privileges, according to our original agreement.
If I had the King and Queen for dinner, I would not have dared to ask Miss B. to
forgo joining us at the dinner table.
She had many other endearing qualities. One that has stuck in my memory
was her habit of pointedly wiping the passenger seat of my car whenever I gave
her a lift to town on her day off. As I have said, the primary reason she
stayed with us so long was her devotion to and her excellent care of
Tommy. The second reason was simply that I never was able to fire
her. I presented her with her notice and a final check at
least twice a month. She simply tossed her head, said “Nonsense,” and
tore up the check. Short of calling in the police, I just could not get
rid of her. Doug was of no help at all. She treated him with the
deference English women have traditionally accorded the male head of the house,
and she never goaded me to distraction in his presence. Stupid, she was
not. So in spite of our personality clash (a euphemism if I ever heard
one,) we resigned ourselves to an armed truce punctuated with frequent
skirmishes. I needed her, and she adored my son, so we stayed together for
the duration.
Other household help came and went. As conscription had taken all of the
young childless women, one was left with mothers with small children or elderly
married couples. We tried them all with various results. There was
one child who systematically uprooted every flower he could get his hands
on. I really began to fear that Hayward would do him or his mother serious
harm. I did have one delightful young woman and her charming little boy,
but her husband was invalided out of the Air Force, and she gave up working
outside her home. As for the married couples, we could never find one in
which both husband and wife were tolerable. One husband had such a
voracious appetite that his loving wife gave him the entire family’s meat
ration for a week at one sitting.
The husband of another couple appointed himself Air Raid Warden of the household
when Doug was away. We had a few air raids, mostly caused by mistake when
Gloucester Aircraft, about nine miles from us, was the target. Harcourt,
on the occasion of the first air raid, insisted that we take cover in the small
copse on the property, as if trees would protect us from bombs. The copse
was the bailiwick of a large and ferocious boar who sired all of Mr. Chatham’s
pigs. When I declined to take shelter in the copse, Harcourt marshalled us
into Mr. Chatham’s cowshed because it had a corrugated iron roof. (Mr. Chatham
remained in his cottage.) As each bomb whistled down, Harcourt would order
us to hit the deck, the deck being the cowshed’s floor. When I refused
to continue this kind of behavior and put Tommy under a sturdy oak refectory
table, Harcourt’s machismo got hurt, and he restored his pride by beating up
his wife, following which they departed. As they quarreled fiercely and
audibly almost every waking moment, it was a relief to see them go.
Chapter Sixteen
From time to time, when Doug drove to Corone House to see his father on
business, I would accompany him, grateful for the chance to do a little foraging
in the London shops like Fortnum and Mason. In this sh