After a rubber of whist, Miss Elizabeth and I continued our conversation. I found her to be well informed as to national political debates and the events taking place on the continent with particular attention being paid to the anti-monarchial actions of the French National Assembly. Jane Garrison talked with Bingham for most of the evening, choosing not to play cards. There are three other Garrison sisters. The two youngest laughed and talked loudly the whole of the night without correction.
Bingham will remain in Hertfordshire and, no doubt, will continue his attentions to Miss Garrison. He has shown a greater interest in this woman than any other I have witnessed. I look forward to visiting with you in London.
As always,
Will
I loved this letter! Will was falling in love with Elizabeth, but he didn’t know it yet. On the other hand, Lucy and Celia’s behavior was obviously an irritant for him.
After finishing Will’s letter, I reread Beth’s letter where she had mentioned that her family had “contributed more than their share for King and Country,” and I wondered what she meant.
I had planned to spend Christmas Eve listening to the BBC radio broadcast of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with the Dawkins’s family but was rescued by Leo, my Polish friend, who had been invited to a party by Americans who lived in his building. Because of rationing, Americans were the only ones who could get their hands on scarce food items, and they had always had access to what seemed to be a bottomless supply of booze.
As a rule, I tried to dress simply because many Britons were wearing the same clothes they had worn since the war began in 1939. But this was Christmas, and I wanted to wear the red silk blouse, which complemented my dark hair and blue eyes, that my mother and sisters had sent to me for Christmas. I compromised and wore the blouse with a practical navy blue skirt I had brought from home. I was hoping to meet a nice guy at the party. A handsome man would be just the thing to take the sting out of being alone during the holidays.
Leo was having no trouble attracting a bevy of attractive young women who found his Polish good looks and accent to be irresistible. Up to that point, I hadn’t been so lucky until I saw a handsome man across the room. Even though he had a scar on his right cheek, he was very attractive. I was embarrassed when he caught me looking at him, but when he raised his glass to me, I went over and introduced myself after apologizing for staring.
“The scar is actually helpful when you are trying to meet pretty girls.” He introduced himself as Rob McAllister from Flagstaff, Arizona. “I was a navigator on a B-17 bomber. When the plane was hit by flak, the Plexiglas on the nose of the plane shattered, and shards went flying. I’m lucky it wasn’t worse.” He gave that short laugh people use when they are uncomfortable, and after that — nothing.
I’m one of those people who can’t stand lulls in a conversation, so I started talking and told him about my job with AES in Germany. I had been able to do some sightseeing since train travel in Europe was so easy once the bombed tracks had been repaired. One of the most accessible destinations was the Black Forest. It was a breathtakingly beautiful ride through mountain passes with postcard villages and thatched, three-story farmhouses paralleling the tracks. On the surface, the villages of the Black Forest appeared to be untouched by the war, but even here, you could not avoid stories about the horrors of war. Troops from North Africa, who had fought with the French army, had gone on a rampage of rape, looting, and murder in those picturesque mountain towns.
After I realized how inappropriate it was to discuss rape and murder with someone I had just met, I tried to cover up my gaffe by asking Rob if he had ever been to Germany, and he said that he had been “over” it many times, but he had never been “to” it.
“Oh, of course, you flew on a bomber,” I said. “Well, I lived in Frankfurt for a year, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that you guys did a thorough job.”
This was not going well. I had just complimented Rob on bombing a city into rubble.
“Sorry. That came out all wrong.” I started to walk away before I could do any more damage, but Rob pulled me back and said, “Don’t apologize. We did what had to be done to end the war, but I’m obviously making you nervous. Why?”
He was making me nervous. I hadn’t felt like this since high school, when I had to sneak around to see my boyfriend, who was Italian and, therefore, unacceptable to my Irish-centric family.
Looking across the room, Rob asked if Leo was my date, and I assured him he was just a friend. “I’m glad to hear it because I think he’s about to leave with the leggy blonde.”
As if on cue, Leo looked at me and gestured that he was leaving and was it all right. I gave him the okay sign. I was confident in that large of a group I could find someone to see me to the Underground station, and Rob said he could guarantee it.
Rob and I had our first date at an Italian restaurant near the National Gallery and Trafalgar Square. It was your typical Italian restaurant: red and white checkered tablecloths, candle wax dripping down the sides of Chianti bottles, and a waiter in a starched white apron. It could just as easily have been South Scranton as London.
Rob had left England in March 1945 as a captain in the Air Corps and had returned in the spring of ’47 as a civilian working for an American corporation based in Atlanta. Smiling, he said, “My second tour of England has been much more pleasant than my first.
“After I returned to the States, I was retrained to teach radar navigation on B-29s at Victorville, California, which was quite a change from England because Victorville is in the Mojave Desert. After I got out of the Air Corps, I applied for a job with TRC, Inc., a company that makes hardware for just about everything. The personnel manager was a veteran of the 8th Air Force and was known to hire Air Corps vets. After six months at the Atlanta headquarters, my roommate and I were transferred to London so we could gain international management experience. Ken and I have been here about nine months, but we don’t know how long we’ll have the jobs, because they really do want to hire as many British nationals as possible. I’ll run with it until they tell me I have to go home.”
Rob asked about my two years in Washington. It had been an exciting place to work. I met people from every region of the country, whose customs were so different from mine. My sisters, who had moved to Washington even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, had told me that early in the war, when there was such a demand for clerk typists, they knew of young women who were hired at the train station and taken directly to their jobs. With every desk in every office occupied, temporary buildings had been built all over the city, even on the mall between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. They were ugly but necessary.
The apartment I shared with my sisters had only one bedroom with twin beds and a mattress under each bed. Once word got out from our brother, who was in the Navy, that the Joyce sisters would let anyone from Minooka sleep on their living room floor, it was a rare morning when we didn’t have to step over a comatose soldier, sailor, marine, or airman sacked out in our tiny living room. As much as I enjoyed seeing familiar faces, I did not want to date anyone from home. I wasn’t willing to risk getting involved with someone who might want to return to Minooka once the war was over. Instead, I went dancing or out to dinner with guys from all over the United States. They were just passing through on their way to Europe or the Pacific, and we had some fun together before they boarded a train that would take them to their next post.