The GI Bride
Authors: Iris Jones Simantel
6: American Firsts – Apartments, Job and Pregnancy
7: Our Baby, Motherhood and My First Visit Home
8: Back in the USA – Family, Friends and Independence
9: The Questionable Gift of American Citizenship
10: Divorce, and Home for Christmas
13: The Palmer Saga Begins, and Meeting a Royal Butler
14: The TBPA and Convention Capers
16: Las Vegas, City Without Clocks
17: Chicago and Another New Job
18: Back in the Old Neighbourhood, and Al-Anon
19: New Neighbours and Unusual New Friends
20: Another Divorce and the Aftermath
21: Strange Encounters, and Life after Palmer
PENGUIN BOOKS
Iris Jones Simantel grew up in Dagenham and
South Oxhey, before moving to the US with her GI husband Bob at the tender age of
sixteen. She now resides in Devon where she enjoys writing as a pastime. Her first
memoir about her childhood,
Far from the East End
, beat several thousand other
entries to win the Saga Life Stories Competition.
To the more than 100,000 GI brides who left their
homes and families to follow their hearts, but especially to those brave young women who
fought loneliness, discrimination and disillusionment.
To the parents and families left behind, who
didn’t know if they would ever see their daughters again. Some never did.
To the Transatlantic Brides and Parents
Association (TBPA), founded by the families of GI brides to support each other in their
longing for daughters who lived across a vast ocean. The TBPA also championed affordable
travel between America and Britain by sponsoring charter flights between the two
countries. It subsequently formed American chapters to enable previously isolated GI
brides to form a supportive sisterhood. The organization remains strong and continues to
support many British ex-pats.
Together Again is the title of the TBPA magazine,
and that was what we daughters and our parents hoped and prayed we would be: together
again.
It is 16 February 1955 and I find myself,
at the age of sixteen, one of hundreds of British and German ‘GI brides’,
about to embark on the journey of our lives. We have all said goodbye to our families,
homes and countries, to travel halfway around the world to begin a new life with our
American husbands in a country we have only seen or heard of in movies or on television.
Is everyone as frightened and excited as I am? What can we expect in this strange new
world? Will we be welcomed? Will I ever see my family again? What if I’ve just
made the biggest mistake of my life – or are all of my dreams about to come true?
All of these questions, and more, crowd my
mind as the USS
General R. E. Callan
begins its long voyage across the Atlantic
Ocean. There is no turning back now: in a matter of days, I, with all the other
apprehensive GI brides, will set foot on American soil. Our new lives will begin. How
had I, a mere child, many thought, arrived in this place, at this time? How had this
journey begun? And how will it end?
Life had not been easy for me in England.
It had begun when my mother almost gave birth to me in the toilet and, in some ways, it
didn’t improve a great deal after that.
I was born into poverty on 5 July 1938, in
the East End of London. My parents were living temporarily with my grandparents in
Station House on Blackwall Pier, where my grandfather was the stationmaster. The pier,
Brunswick Wharf and the railway station were part of the East India Docks on the banks
of the River Thames in Poplar, which is situated within the sound of the famous Bow
Bells, at the St Mary-le-Bow Church. According to
The Victorian Dictionary
,
‘Only those born within the sound of Bow Bells are properly called
Cockneys.’ I was not always proud of my Cockney label and heritage: to the upper
classes, the term suggested indolence, dishonesty, illiteracy, lack of manners and
absence of personal hygiene. That label, and the tell-tale accent, defined a
Cockney’s station in life and served to trap them in an often cruel,
discriminating world.
My older brother, Peter, and I were born in
peacetime Britain, but that peace was soon shattered when war was declared against
Germany in 1939. My earliest memories are of air-raid sirens, anti-aircraft guns and
bombs exploding; worst of all was the sound of my mother crying. In my fright and
confusion, I would crouch in a corner, to
hide my own tears. At night,
we hunkered down in our air-raid shelters, feeling the earth shudder beneath us as bombs
landed nearby. Afterwards, we often had to wipe away the dust and dirt that filtered
through the cracks in the corrugated-iron roof. Filled with terror and wishing my mother
would hold me close to her, I often cried myself to sleep, wondering what it would feel
like to be blown to pieces by a bomb.
My mother suffered a series of nervous
breakdowns during those years, and my father was a physical wreck from working at the
Woolwich Arsenal, which was bombed almost nightly, and from continuous nights on
fire-watch duty. I have no doubt that the physical and psychological illnesses people
experienced at that time were greatly exacerbated by sleep deprivation and inadequate
nutrition.
Peter was one of the first children to be
evacuated out of London in what the government called ‘Operation Pied
Piper’, the scheme to keep Britain’s children safe. Because I was younger, I
wasn’t evacuated until much later: Germany had developed unmanned missiles, the V1
and V2, that were about to be deployed in a new nightmare of attacks.
My family spent the war years wondering if
we would survive, or if we would ever see each other again. We could only wait and hang
on to hope. My brother and I had different experiences at our wartime billets:
Peter’s was not happy but I was lucky enough to be taken in by a kind family in
South Wales. The local children ignored me when I first arrived in the coal-mining town
of Maerdy, but although I was lonely, I made happy times for myself,
playing on the beautiful mountainsides of the Rhondda Valley. Luckier than many other
evacuees, I had plenty to eat and was well cared for. It broke my heart when I had to
leave my Welsh family to return to the family I had begun to forget.
My family all survived the war, but I
believe we came out of it with scars, not necessarily physical – although my father had
many from his work at the arsenal – but emotional. They stayed with us throughout our
lives. When Peter and I returned to our parents after the war ended, we found it hard to
readjust to each other. For a while, we were like strangers in our own home, and I know
my mother had a difficult time dealing with us. We were not the same children who had
left years earlier when we were just five or six years old. Our parents were different
too: the war had changed them. There seemed to be an invisible wall between my mother
and we children, which seemed to strengthen when, in late 1946, she gave birth to a
third child, our brother Robert. As soon as he arrived, he demanded almost all of
Mum’s attention, and she slipped once more into depression. Perhaps it was what we
now call post-natal depression, but I learned that it had much to do with my
father’s habitual philandering.
Approximately two years later, as the
memories of war faded, London’s poor were encouraged to move out of the city, to
enable the clearing and rebuilding of the slums and bomb-damaged areas. The government
offered brand new houses on newly built London County Council (LCC) housing estates,
located mostly in rural areas. Many Londoners refused to leave the city, but when we
were
offered the opportunity, Dad seized it. He decided we would have
a better quality of life if we moved away.