The GI Bride (19 page)

‘Well,’ she proceeded,
‘someone we knew years ago had a terrible problem with constipation. He got so
desperate that he dug around down in there with a rusty nail file. He got blood
poisoning and died.’ I had to excuse myself and only just made it to the bathroom
before I threw up. These people are weird, I thought. Did she really think I might be
stupid enough to resort to such bizarre methods to relieve myself?

We had some good times living at 431 North
Central Avenue, even though Palmer was already creating problems with his drinking. I
believe the support system within the apartment building kept us going for as long as we
did.

While we were living there, I made a
concerted effort to gain favour with my in-laws by inviting them and a few
more of Palmer’s relatives for Christmas dinner. Seven came,
including a couple of aunts and cousins. With my own family and friends, we had about
eighteen in all, including small children. With an additional borrowed dining table, we
managed to squeeze in to eat together and, from what I could tell, a good time was had
by all. I had spent days preparing food and presented an impressive feast, but on
Christmas Day, as I cooked the turkey and brought the meal together, I began to feel
very ill. How I got through it I don’t know, but it was a great relief when some
of the guests offered to help with the clearing up. By the time everyone left that
night, I was dizzy and had a splitting headache. I took my temperature and discovered I
had a dangerously high fever. Then I must have fainted. The next thing I knew, I was in
the hospital with pneumonia. No wonder I’d felt so ill. Almost everyone who had
been at our Christmas dinner sent thank-you cards and said what a wonderful day it had
been; we heard nothing from Palmer’s parents.

I couldn’t believe it when they
arrived unannounced at our apartment while we were having our traditional Saturday-night
hot dogs and beans with the Nicholsons. We invited them to join us, cooked more hot dogs
and beans and opened another tin of date bread. Seemingly, the meal went well and we had
pleasant conversation, but we later learned that our uninvited guests had badmouthed me
to anyone who would listen, telling everyone that they had travelled all that way from
Peoria only to be fed ‘lousy hot dogs’. You could have knocked me down with
a feather when I heard that. I was livid. Did Palmer come to my defence? Never.

‘Did they think I could pull a special
meal out of the air for them?’ I asked Palmer (I might have said something other
than ‘out of the air’). He had no answer, just shrugged his shoulders
dismissively.

One of the many interesting things that
happened during our time on Central Avenue began with an evening stroll that took me
past the Central Plaza Hotel. A small knot of people was standing outside, chatting on
the sidewalk. As I passed them, I thought I recognized one of the men in the group. I
couldn’t remember where I had seen him before until several minutes later. When I
was about a block away, it came to me. He was Thomas Cronin, a hot item in the press and
on television in 1960. He had been butler to Princess Margaret and Antony
Armstrong-Jones and had recently left their employ to write a tell-all book about life
with the couple. He was presently on a tour of America’s television talk shows. I
turned around and went back.

When I got to the hotel, he was standing
alone so I decided to speak to him. ‘Excuse me, sir, my name is Iris Palmer.
Aren’t you Thomas Cronin?’

‘Yes, madam, I am indeed,’ he
replied, in a posh British accent.

‘I’m from London,’ I told
him, ‘and I’ve been following your story in the magazines and newspapers.
It’s all very interesting and exciting.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ he said.
‘I’m just enjoying a little break.’

‘I’m sorry. I hope I
haven’t offended. I always like to talk to anyone from home,’ I blabbered.
‘I didn’t mean to intrude on your privacy.’

‘You haven’t intruded in the
least. I’m glad to talk to
someone normal for a change, without
cameras flashing in my face.’ We both laughed.

‘Well, my husband and I live just
along the road, and if you should get fed up with all the fuss and want a quiet cup of
tea, you’d be very welcome,’ I told him, and gave him our phone number and
address.

The following day, quite by chance, Palmer
met the same man in the hotel bar where he often stopped on the way home from work.
After some conversation, Cronin realized that he had already met this new
acquaintance’s wife. Surprised by the coincidence, Palmer invited him to have
dinner with us.

I was a wreck about serving dinner to
someone who had been a royal butler. I was even nervous about serving him tea, which
never happened anyway since he preferred very expensive Scotch. Over the next two weeks,
we ended up spending a lot of time with Thomas Cronin and I came to realize he was
nothing but an opportunist and mooch. I remember thinking, as I waited on him hand and
foot one evening, how ludicrous it was that I should be serving someone who had never
been anything but a servant himself. Palmer and his cronies even took him to a strip
show, which was something the man had never before experienced. In all the time he was
around, he never offered to pay for anything or even bring a bottle of wine to dinner.
The only redeeming feature of his visit was the stories he told about working for
royalty and other prominent figures.

He said he had worked a five-year term for
the American ambassador to the United Kingdom, and, of course, he had worked for
Princess Margaret and
Antony Armstrong-Jones. At the time, there had
been much speculation about the princess and her husband’s relationship.

‘Did Armstrong-Jones have much say in
things? Did he wear the pants in the family?’ I asked.

‘Well, I wouldn’t use such an
expression,’ he huffed, ‘but I will say that, unfortunately, not only did Mr
Armstrong-Jones want to be the master of the household, he also wanted to be the
mistress. You must understand that I was very protective of Princess Margaret and her
royal standing, especially in view of her fondness for drink. I often clashed with Mr
Armstrong-Jones over household decisions to the point that I felt it best to seek
alternative employment.’

Aha, I thought. Perhaps all the rumours
about that particular royal marriage were true.

Of course, when the press got wind of
Cronin’s sudden departure from Kensington Palace, they jumped on him to get the
inside scoop. Apparently they’d made him an offer he could not refuse. Now, having
betrayed the royal family’s trust, he could probably never work as a butler in
Britain again. I believe that after he finished his tour of America Thomas Cronin went
to work as a maître d’ at one of the big Jai Alai hotel casinos in Florida, and
that was the last anyone ever heard of him. While I was checking the accuracy and dates
in this part of my story, I learned two things: first, he had been in the employ of
Princess Margaret for just one month, and second, he was purported to be a spy.

On 20 February 2000, the
Mail on
Sunday
published an article written by Jason Lewis, an investigative editor.
The headline reads:

THE KGB’S SPY AT THE PALACE: Soviet
intelligence files reveal the extraordinary story of how Princess Margaret’s
butler and top author Derek Tangye sold secrets to Moscow.

The article in part reads:

The Soviet Union spied on the British
Royal Family during the height of the Cold War and even succeeded in getting an
agent employed as Princess Margaret’s butler, the
Mail on Sunday
can
reveal.

Today we unmask Thomas Cronin – code
name Rab – as the key agent in an audacious plan that led to the Royals’ most
intimate secrets being sent to spymasters in Russia.

Highly classified files in Moscow
reveal how Cronin, who also served a five-year stint as butler to the American
Ambassador, was just one of a number of Soviet spies given the mission of
infiltrating London high society.

Wow, what a surprise. There we were,
unsuspecting and naive, thinking it was a bit of a privilege meeting a royal butler when
all the time we’d been entertaining a spy!

Meeting Cronin had been the hot topic of
conversation at my next meeting with all my GI bride friends; I wonder what they would
have thought if we’d known about this side of the infamous butler, and the threat
to our royal family!

By this time, as well as belonging to the
Daughters of the British Empire (DBE), I had discovered another organization for British
women. I’m not sure if my parents heard about it first or if I learned of it from
my friend Bobby McCarthy. The Transatlantic Brides and Parents Association (TBPA) was
founded to provide GI brides in America and their parents in Britain with a meeting
ground for mutual fellowship and support. I knew how much it meant to me to have other
girls like myself to talk to but it had never occurred to me that perhaps the parents we
had left behind might need the same kind of support. I thought it was wonderful that
someone had thought to include them. I later learned that the parents had started the
club. The added bonus of belonging to the TBPA was that, because of the large number of
members, they could organize and offer charter flights between the two countries. With
commercial airfares being out of reach for most of us, the cut-rate charters were a
boon.

The girls I met in this new club were, for
the most part, younger than those in the DBE. Members of the DBE were almost all war
brides, but those of us in the TBPA had married servicemen after the war had ended. We
seemed to have more in common, especially since most of us had younger children. Our
meetings were always great fun: we’d chatter and laugh over tea, cucumber
sandwiches and homemade cakes and biscuits, all the things our
American counterparts didn’t understand.

‘Cucumber sandwiches?’ one
American woman said. ‘With no meat? It sounds dreadful.’ And I’ll
never forget the reactions when I mentioned such delicacies as fish paste, bread and
dripping, and toad-in-the-hole.

‘I always thought you English were
weird, but that is just plain disgusting,’ our friend Cindy said, when my
sister-in-law, Brenda, and I were talking about the food we missed.

‘Well, do you want a list of all the
things we think are weird over here?’ said Brenda. We were always laughing about
such things, and we could never have had such laughs without other English girls to
share those things with. So many conversations began, ‘Do you remember this or
that?’ We bonded through our mutual reminiscences. Without those shared joys and
sorrows, I’m sure many of us would have found life in America far more difficult,
especially if they’d had the misfortune to acquire in-laws like the two sets
I’d had. Most of us missed our families, and many British girls I met had never
been home for a visit; a very few didn’t want to go, but others yearned for the
opportunity. I used to watch a TV programme called
Queen for a Day
in which if
your hard-luck story was that week’s winner, you wore a crown, received a bounty
of gifts and had your wish come true. My wish would always have been the same: an
all-expenses-paid trip home to visit my family or to bring them to me. The longest I
ever went without going home was seven years. I was frightened I might never see my
family again.

One thing I believe we all agreed on was how
lonely
and isolated we felt when we had given birth to our children
and didn’t have family, especially our mums, with us to offer support and share
the joy. Until I met all those other GI brides, most of whom were in the same or similar
situations to my own, I had often felt sorry for myself about the conditions I had
married into. All of us had had dreams that were shattered by reality. I felt foolish
when I heard some of their stories, and wondered at their ability to laugh about
them.

‘You think you married into a bad
situation, Iris,’ said my dear friend Shirley Ashburn, who had arrived in America
just a few months after I had in 1955. She continued, ‘After Wayne [her husband]
was processed out of the army in New York, we bought a used car and drove it to
Tennessee, which was where we’d be living. On the way, he said he’d
forgotten to tell me that the house had no indoor plumbing. Well, that was a bit of a
shock. His parents did get plumbing fairly soon after that, but while I was there, I had
to go to a neighbour’s well to fetch water. It was down by the river, and because
I was scared of all the creepy-crawlies I’d heard about, I’d run all the way
back. By the time I’d get there, most of the water’d be gone out of the
bucket. They must’ve thought I was crazy, but Wayne had told me all about the
poisonous snakes. They had rattlers, water moccasins, copperheads, the lot. I
wasn’t taking any chances,’ she said. She deserves a medal, I thought. I bet
she was glad when they moved to Illinois!