http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/11/AR2006021101455.html
Here Came The War Brides
60 Years Ago, a Vast Wave of British Women Followed Their New Loves to a New
Land
By Tamara Jones
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 12, 2006; D01
"Vera is certain even now that it began with the red dress. London in the
waning months of World War II was unbearably dark and dreary. Vera Cracknell
was just 18, and sick of the anti-barrage balloons that blotted out the sun,
sick of carrying the smelly rubber gas mask wherever she went. One day, a
flash of color brought her to a halt outside a downtown shop window. Vera
remembers her older sister shaking her head.
"You can't buy that! It would take all your coupons!"
The dress had tiny brass rivets and a twirly skirt. Vera was a junior
hostess at an American Red Cross club behind Harrod's. Dancing with the
flirtatious GIs let her forget the screaming bombers and deafening ack-ack
guns. She handed over her entire year's worth of clothing rations and took
the red dress home.
When she wore it for the first time, an American sergeant followed her into
the club and asked her to dance. In the sunroom of his Leisure World condo
near Leesburg, Charles Long recalls the moment with tender conviction: "It
was love at first sight, absolutely." With her raven hair, porcelain skin
and eyes the pale green of sea glass, Vera toyed with her share of suitors,
but Charles persevered even after she stood him up on their first date.
They married when the war ended, and Vera soon found herself crossing the
Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary, the famed luxury liner winding down her war
service as part of an amazing armada carrying some 70,000 young British war
brides and their babies.
It was 60 years ago this month that the first ship arrived in New York
Harbor, launching what was officially known as the War Brides Operation.
Over the next five months, 20 converted war ships would be in perpetual
motion across the Atlantic, a floating procession of brides. Some 200
reporters and newsreel cameras greeted the first "petticoat pilgrims," as
the British media had dubbed them. A special act of Congress had waived
immigration quotas for the war brides, and they claimed a unique place in
the country's social fabric -- a mass influx of foreigners drawn here not by
need but by love. Across America the women scattered, becoming Iowa
farmwives who grew "tomahtoes" or overly polite New Yorkers who muttered "oy
vey" with British accents. They rode trolleys through the streets of
Washington and plied swamp boats through the backwaters of Mississippi.
They slipped quietly into their new lives, and were quickly forgotten.
Precious Cargo
Love isn't like that anymore, is what Joan Stubbs will tell you if you ask
her. "Today people stand up in front of the altar and pledge their lives and
don't mean it," she laments from the house her husband built her in
Gloucester, Va. She married her Walter when she was just 17. He was one of
the Army Air Corps boys who played cards each night in the village cafe; she
was the air-raid warden's daughter who would come remind them to draw the
blackout curtains. Sometimes Walter would walk her home in the moonlight.
"He liked to talk," she remembers, "and I liked to listen."
War had already torn a gaping hole in Joan's childhood. She and her older
sister were among thousands of schoolchildren evacuated from the capital
when the London Blitz began, sent to the countryside to live with strangers.
Joan was 11. The besieged capital was 30 miles away, she guesses, and "at
night you could see London burning." When Joan was 14, her father came to
collect her -- their house had been destroyed in a direct hit, and now her
parents were fleeing the city as well. They all moved to a one-lane village
called Bourne End, near the aerodrome where B-17s took off. Walter Stubbs
belonged to the regiment known as Fame's Favored Few.
Joan was aboard that first love boat to America. She remembers the Argentina
setting sail without fanfare. "We weren't allowed to have anyone see us
off," she says. Families had to bid their daughters farewell at the train
station. The girls then reported to processing camps, where there were
mountains of forms to fill out in triplicate, thick stacks of documents to
read and humiliating physicals to endure, standing naked before Army doctors
who scanned their bodies with flashlights.
The U.S. military bore the cost of transportation, but the Red Cross budget
to staff and supply the operation was $100,000. At the processing camps,
cradles were made out of orange crates, while 20 war vessels were stocked
with pureed peas, talcum powder and safety pins. Babies had to be at least 3
months old to travel, and women could not be more than seven months
pregnant. Joan met a woman who slipped on the deck and would have lost her
daughter overboard if a passing steward hadn't caught the infant. Thirteen
babies who sailed from Belgium with their mothers aboard the Zebulon Vance
were reported dead after an outbreak of diarrhea.
Sometimes the stress of waiting for passage from war-torn Europe pushed the
brides to the breaking point. When 87 women expecting to ship out of Germany
discovered there was space for only 10, bedlam erupted at the processing
camp.
"Elephants on a rampage never trumpeted louder," the Red Cross staff
reported back to national headquarters. "Books were swept off shelves,
tables and chairs overturned. Crockery ornaments were hurled to the floor.
Coca cola bottles smashed against the fireplace. In short, an atomic bomb
could not have caused more chaos. The post physician was called to attend to
three hysterical women, and the MPs came in to stop the flying bric-a-brac."
British troops returning from years of combat would heckle and jeer at the
women from the decks of their ships docking in Southampton as the brides set
sail. The well-supplied American soldiers already were scorned in a popular
slogan for being "oversexed, overpaid and over here." Now they were
plundering the population of would-be English wives.
Joan Stubbs was oblivious to any controversy. "I think I was too young to
realize the impact of what I was doing," she reflects.
Covered in ice from an overnight storm, the Argentina entered New York
Harbor at 2:30 that February morning. Joan remembers the brides all rushing
to the deck, shivering in the bitter wind to catch the first glimpse of
their new homeland. "Can you imagine after four years of darkness what it
was like to see the Statue of Liberty all lit up for us?" Joan's voice
cracks at the memory. "It was such a beautiful sight."
Walter was waiting for her in Virginia, where they would be living with his
parents. She called him from the Norfolk train station. He was shocked to
find her in the baggage room, sitting on the "colored" bench. Segregation
was an alien concept to her.
The teen bride is 78 now. She lost Walter two years ago this April. Their
two children, and even the grandchildren, are grown and gone. Now a
great-grandchild is on the way. "I'm kind of alone here," says Joan. She
feels him beside her still, in the pool where he swam 12 laps a day, or when
she discovers an old birthday card tucked inside a book, or when she
misplaces something and hears herself ask, 'Well, Walter, where is it?' and
then it always turns up. He is the only man she ever loved.
"Who would think all this would come out of war?" she wonders.
A British Sisterhood
The stereo is blaring "Yes, We Have No Bananas," and the septuagenarians are
out of control. They dance a conga line through the hostess's living room, a
Carmen Miranda in silver lamé kicking up her heels with the Groucho Marx
surgeon who keeps squirting people in the face with water from his
gag-syringe. Something that sounds like china crashes to the floor. "There's
trifle!" the hostess carols, hoping to herd some of the revelers into the
dining room, where the table offers potluck testimony to English culinary
arts involving unset Jell-O and Matterhorns of whipped cream.
The annual Guy Fawkes Day costume party in November -- commemorating a
foiled plot to burn the British Parliament -- is a rip-roaring success. The
war brides beam. The small clubs they formed out of newlywed loneliness
became cultural touchstones polished smooth over the decades. They hold
garden parties each June to celebrate the queen's birthday. They fly the
Union Jack on British holidays.
The Transatlantic Brides and Parents Association began even before the last
war bride ship had left England back in 1946, formed by families who
despaired that they would never see their daughters again. The young women
came largely from working-class homes, and travel was prohibitively
expensive. Telephones were rare and overseas calls exorbitant.
As the association grew ever larger, a heartsick father had an idea: The
families could charter flights to the States. The parents' networking in
turn connected the lonely brides to one another, and social clubs began
popping up across the United States.
When Doris Amspaugh put a notice in her community paper asking if there were
any other British war brides in Vienna who wanted to get together for a
proper cup of tea, she was surprised when a dozen women responded. Vera Long
was among them. Hearing everyone else's stories over the years piqued Vera's
curiosity so much that she wrote a history project about the brides while
studying at George Mason University, and turned it into a book a few years
ago. Tentative fingers gently brush each young face when the women gaze at
the old pictures Vera collected.
There's Patricia, didn't she look just like Ingrid Bergman? She's dead, and
this couple here, the husband is dead and Eunice moved closer to her
daughter out West. There's Jack and Doris on their honeymoon. That's
Margaret; she's here but has dementia, and here's Annie the Scottish girl;
she died this past year.
They cross winter's seas together still. Baby showers have given way to
funerals, love letters have become eulogies.
No one kept any statistics on how many of the marriages lasted, though
Vera's research led her to hypothesize that the divorce rate was around 8
percent. The number who stayed in unhappy marriages would never be known.
Return passage to England was funded by the government for only one year
after arrival, and for mothers whose children were American citizens, going
home could mean losing custody in a U.S. divorce. Some women got off the
bride ships only to discover that their GI husbands were already married.
Others found themselves isolated in rural areas, London birds recast as
prairie wives in the Dakotas, or married no longer to a dashing soldier but
to a trapper living in a backwoods cabin with no running water or
electricity.
"I think people were tougher then and you accepted what you had," says
Doris. She remembers how the stress of adapting made her hair fall out in
clumps for the first two years here. Only a handful of actual war brides
remain in her club, but the tea party grew to 50 at one point, and has since
expanded to include postwar couples, homesick nannies and British expats in
perpetual search of a decent trifle.
Doris's husband, Jack, converted their Vienna basement into a faux English
pub where they threw parties. "But after Jack died, I didn't much like
coming down here alone," Doris says. She is 86 now. Jack's been gone nearly
20 years. The mahogany four-poster he bought for her arrival still stands
polished in their bedroom.
Those whose wartime romances did endure describe love not as a complicated
mystery but as a simple truth.
Charles never proposed properly, Vera reveals over Yorkshire tea and
digestive biscuits in her dining room. Charles sips guiltily from his china
cup. He thought sending her cheery instructions to fill out the seven-page
application required by the Army made his intentions clear enough.
"What cheek!" Vera declares.
What about that first date? Charles counters. They were supposed to meet at
Marble Arch, and Vera never showed. "As I got ready to go, this other
American who was always bringing things brought this huge case of strawberry
preserves," she explains.
"Remember, I brought you lemon drops," Charles counters plaintively.
"You brought me lemon drops, yes."
Charles was working with military intelligence to break the Germans' famed
Enigma code. Cracking the code of romance proved tougher. Transferred to
Paris to work on Russian encryptions when the war ended, Charles returned to
England for his wedding bearing a box of cigars instead of champagne.
"He said it was easier to carry," Vera says.
"Honey, now you behave," Charles replies mildly. "She never forgave me. At
the time, we were given free champagne or cognac in Germany after the war. I
thought it was pretty noble because I had to pay for the cigars."
Vera remembers there was also a bottle of French perfume, which she saved,
only to drop it on the floor of her cabin in her excitement to get ready to
walk down the Queen Mary gangplank and into Charles's arms. She quickly
shared the leaking perfume with the other giddy brides, and a cloud of
Chanel No. 5 followed them into America.
Settling into a rented room with a shared bath on 18th Street NE, Charles
embarked on a career as a pioneer who would help usher the CIA into the
computer era. Vera worked as a secretary until she became pregnant the
following year with the first of their two children. Washington left her
both dazzled and dejected. "I was annoyed that everything was perfect. It
was such a shock to me to see everything so white, shiny and beautiful."
Save for the scarcity of housing, America bore no mark from the war that had
caused her such hardship. Vera hadn't seen bananas in so long that she made
an entire dinner out of them for Charles's bemused sister.
They threw a big party for their 60th anniversary last fall. A tea dance, of
course. Charles gave Vera a diamond eternity ring.
They still love to play the music from those days, that war, their time.
Vera turns 80 next month, but the four different British organizations she
now belongs to keep her busy, and her exercise classes keep her fit. She
worries, though, about Charles. He is 87, and having some trouble getting
around. She puts Glenn Miller on to coax him away from his computer.
"Come on, come on, come on," Vera will plead. "Dance with me." Charles will
shuffle into her arms, and they hold each other close, the handsome soldier
and his girl in the red dress, knowing each step by heart.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company