They were certainly far more casual and confident in their manner than our lads, and they had much smarter uniforms. They even wore shoes rather than the great clodhopping boots the Ministry saw fit to issue to our poor armed forces. Of course, our view of Americans was still almost entirely formed by the glamour of Hollywood films, magazines and popular songs. To some, they were all cowboys and gangsters; to others, the men were handsome heroes and the women beautiful and rather vulgar molls.
That evening as we trudged through the forest, we had little real idea of what to expect. We had all fussed about what to wear for days, and we had taken special care with our appearance – even me, who was generally not overly concerned about such superficial matters. Under the overcoats we wore to keep out the chill, we all had on our best dresses. Gloria, of course, looked gorgeous in her black velvet V-neck dress with the puff sleeves and wide, padded shoulders. She had added a red felt rose at the neckline on the left side. I was a little more serviceable in the Utility dress I had bought in London.
One big problem was that we had all run out of fashion stockings and either we didn’t have enough coupons to get new ones or we couldn’t find any in the shops. When Gloria dropped by to meet me after I closed up shop, the first thing she told me to do was stand on a chair.
“Why?” I asked.
“Go on. You’ll see.”
I could have said no, but I was curious, so I stood. The next thing I knew, Gloria was lifting up my skirt and applying some sort of cold greasy stuff to my legs.
I squirmed. “What is that?”
“Shut up and keep still. It’s Miner’s Liquid Make-Up Foundation. Cost me two and sevenpence halfpenny, it did.”
I kept still. When the stuff she had slathered on my legs finally dried, Gloria had me stand on the chair again and she carefully drew a seam all the way down the backs of my legs with a special sort of pencil. It tickled and again she had to tell me to keep still.
“There.” She bit down on the corner of her lip and stepped back to admire her handiwork. I stood on the stool feeling like an idiot, holding my skirt up around my thighs. “That’ll do,” she pronounced at last. “Me next.”
As I “did” her, rubbing the foundation on her soft, pale skin, she started to laugh. “Marvelous stuff, this,” she said. “I was at my wit’s end the summer before last, before Matthew… well, anyway, I was so desperate I tried a mixture of gravy powder and water.”
“What happened?”
“Bloody flies! Chased me all the way from here to Harkside, and the damn things even buzzed around my legs inside the hall. I felt like a piece of meat in a butcher’s window.” She paused. “Ooh, Gwen, do you remember what that looked like? All those lovely cuts of meat in the butcher’s window?”
“Don’t, I said. “You’ll only make us miserable.”
We met the others by the fairy bridge. Cynthia Garmen was going for the Dorothy Lamour look. She had a black pageboy hairdo and wore a lot of makeup. She even had mascara on her eyes, which looked really strange, as women tended not to use a lot of eye makeup back then. It wasn’t good-quality mascara. When she got hot from dancing later in the evening, it started to melt, and she looked as if she had been crying. She said she had bought it on the black market in Leeds, so she could hardly go back and complain.
Alice was in her Marlene Dietrich period: plucked eyebrows penciled in a high arch, wavy blond hair parted in the center, hanging down to her shoulders. She was wearing a Princess-style burgundy dress with long, tight sleeves and buttons all down the front. It came in at the waist to show how thin she was: almost as thin as Marlene Dietrich.
The dance was held in the mess. We could hear the music before we even got there. It was the song I remembered hearing in Piccadilly Circus a few months ago: “Take the ‘A’ Train.” We stood outside the door touching up our hair, checking our appearance one last time in our compact mirrors. Then we took off our coats – not wanting to walk in wearing bulky winter overcoats – stuffed our court shoes in the pockets and put on our dance shoes. Ready at last, we made our grand entrance.
The music didn’t stop, though I swear it faltered for a moment the way records do sometimes when they become warped. It was a sextet, playing on a makeshift stage at the far end from the bar, and they all wore American air force uniforms. I suppose the odds are that when you gather so many disparate people together, you’re bound to end up with enough musicians for a band.
Already the place was crowded with airmen and local girls, mostly from Harkside. The dance floor was busy and a knot of people stood laughing and drinking by the bar. Others sat at the rickety tables smoking and chatting. I had expected the large Nissen hut to be cold, but there was a peculiar-looking squat thing giving out heat in one corner, which I later discovered was called a “potbellied stove” (a very apt description, I thought). Apparently, the air force had brought it all the way from America, having heard English winters were cold and wet, and so were the summers.
They hardly needed it tonight, though, as the press of bodies and the motion of dancing exuded all the heat we needed. The men had already covered the walls with photographs taken from magazines: landscapes of vast, snowcapped mountain ranges; long flat plains and prairie wheatfields; deserts dotted with huge, twisted cacti; and city streets that looked like scenes from Hollywood films. Little bits of America brought over to make them feel less far away from home. A Christmas tree stood in one corner, covered with tinsel and fairy lights, and paper trimmings hung around the ceiling.
“Take your coats, ladies?”
“Why, thank you,” said Gloria.
It was Gloria who had turned the heads, of course. Even with Dorothy Lamour and Marlene Dietrich for competition, she still stood way ahead of the field.
We handed our coats to the young airman, who was tall, slim and dark in complexion. He spoke with a lazy drawl and moved with agile, unhurried grace. He had brown eyes, short black hair and the whitest teeth I had even seen.
“Over here.” He led us to the far wall, beside the bar, where everyone’s coats hung. “They’ll be safe here, now don’t you ladies worry.” When he turned his back, Gloria looked at me and raised an eyebrow in approval.
We followed him and held on to our handbags. It was always awkward not knowing what to do with your handbag when you danced. Usually, you left it under the table, but Cynthia once had hers stolen at a dance in Harkside.
“And now, ma’am,” he said, turning straightaway to Gloria, “if I may have the pleasure of the first dance?”
Gloria inclined her head slightly, passed her handbag to me, took his hand and went off. It didn’t take long before someone snapped up Cynthia, too, and I was holding three handbags. But, if I say so myself, a rather handsome young navigator from Hackensack, New Jersey, called Bernard – which he pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable – asked me to dance even before his friend asked Alice. I passed the three handbags to her and left her standing there gawping in a way that Marlene Dietrich never gawped.
“First, you have to answer a question for me,” I said, before I let him lead, just to show I could be quite brave when I wanted to, though I was secretly scared to death of all these brash and handsome young men all around me.
Bernard scratched his head. “What’s that, ma’am?”
“What’s an ‘A’ train?”
“Huh?”
“The music that was playing when we came in. ‘Take the “A” Train.’ What’s an ‘A’ train? I’ve always wondered. Is it better than a ‘B’ train, for example?”
He grinned. “Well, no, ma’am. I mean, it’s just a subway train.”
“Subway? You mean the underground?”
“Yes, ma’am. In New York City. The ‘A’ train’s the subway that’s the fastest way to Harlem.”