Rob and I had a table at the back of the restaurant, and the owner continued to refill our glasses long after the dishes had been cleared. We sat there for two hours talking about anything and everything. It was the most enjoyable evening I had experienced since I had left the United States, and I did not want it to end. We finally left Lucca’s after agreeing that we would see each other again.
Chapter 8
Although Rob and I lived in different parts of London, he always took me home to Mrs. Dawkins’s house. After I started dating Rob, my landlady told me straight out that if I ever had a man above stairs, I would be out on the street on my bum. “I only rent to good girls.”
The only place where Rob and I could talk was in the kitchen because the children listened to the radio in the living room, and the front parlor was off-limits. Mrs. Dawkins and her husband, who was rarely seen because he worked the night shift, had two very well-behaved boys, Teddy and Tommy, but they were often in the kitchen looking for a snack or asking Rob a lot of questions about flying in a B-17. As a result, our conversations were constantly interrupted.
Neither Rob nor I had much spare change, so London was the perfect city for two people on a budget because a lot of the major attractions were free. A cheap date might be going to the movies to see Great Expectations or The Big Sleep followed by dinner at a Lyon’s Corner Restaurant. Theater tickets were reasonable, and although the crowds were thinning since the end of the war, dance halls were still popular with young couples swinging to big band music.
After a few weeks of dating, Rob splurged and gave me his own tour of the city as seen through the eyes of a Yank airman, and he hired a cabbie to take us all over London. Rob and three other airmen from his squadron had done the same thing when they first hit town in early 1944. For six shillings apiece, they got the cook’s tour.
Rob had the cabbie start near Piccadilly Circus under the enormous Wrigley’s gum sign and across from the “Guinness is Good for You” sign. The Rainbow Corner Red Cross Club was often the first stop for GIs on leave and had once welcomed thousands of American servicemen each day.
“In the lobby,” Rob began, “was a sign with an arrow pointing toward New York, 3,271 miles to the west, and another to Berlin, 600 miles to the east. It was open twenty-four hours a day with pool tables and pinball machines. It had hot showers, which was a real luxury for some of those guys, because all they ever got were ‘cold-water ablutions,’ as the Brits called them. A lot of the actresses from the theater district came over and danced with all of the lead foots, and the actors and stagehands served the food. Fred Astaire’s sister ‘Delly’ was married to an English lord and volunteered at the Corner all the time.
“In the basement, there was a place called the Dunker’s Den where you could get doughnuts and a decent cup of coffee. They had Coke with ice in it and a hamburger made with Grade-A American beef and someone who knew how to cook it. It had great bands like the Flying Forts and the Hepcats, and some of those couples jitterbugging rocked the joint. There was a huge ballroom on the top floor, and the Red Cross hired hostesses to dance with the men. But there was this unwritten rule that the Rainbow Corner was for enlisted men only. If an officer hung around too long, he’d have a hundred eyes staring him out of the place, so I’d head over to the Red Cross Officer’s Club in Knightsbridge.
“All around Piccadilly Circus were the Piccadilly Commandos. One look at those girls, and you understood why the Army made you watch movies about venereal disease. Because everything was blacked out, the girls held flashlights, what they called torches, up to their faces, so you could see what you were getting into. You’d walk by doorways and see the most interesting silhouettes. It was the same thing in Hyde Park. With the blackout, you had to watch out, or you’d plow right into someone guarding an anti-aircraft battery, or step on a couple lying in the grass getting acquainted with each other. I tried to navigate around London with nothing more than a Zippo lighter. The closest I came to getting killed while I was in England was the night I fell down the stairs leading to an Underground station.
“My favorite dance hall was in Covent Garden. This joint wasn’t just a hangout for Americans. Every branch of service from every country danced there. The prettiest girl I ever danced with, excluding present company, was a WREN from Wales in navy blue.”
At home, women in the military were often the butt of sexual jokes, and the British were no different. “Up with the lark, to bed with a WREN” was the one I had heard about women who had joined the Woman’s Royal Naval Service. It was the old story of one bad apple spoiling the reputations of the many women who had served honorably, but there was that occasional girl who went above and beyond the call of duty.
“Another time,” Rob said, continuing his story, “a bunch of us took the train into the city, and we met eight girls from the East End, who were in the British Land Army and had been working on farms near Cambridge. The homes of all but one of the girls had been bombed out, and their families were scattered all over London. We went with them to Covent Garden. There wasn’t much conversation because I couldn’t understand their Cockney accent. But I’m pretty sure a lot of it had to do with sex, and I’m positive I figured out what ‘cobblers’ meant.
“Everyone on leave in London went to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum at least once. They had a chamber of horrors and death masks from guillotine victims made during the French Revolution, and because so many Americans went there, they added a bunch of U.S. military brass, including one of Eisenhower saluting. It was so real I saw guys return the salute. The museum had been bombed during the Blitz, and according to the cab driver, ‘They found Mary Queen of Scots’ head in one place and her arse in another.’
“The Parliament buildings and Big Ben were protected with barbed wire, and all the important buildings had sandbags around them. The moat around the Tower of London had a Victory garden in it, as well as huts for the women in the RAF who operated the barrage balloons.
“Out on the street, there were thousands of servicemen looking for the best show in town. I saw Sikhs wearing turbans, Aussies wearing bush hats, and West Indians, who were as black as the ace of spades, all mixed in with the local residents. The government encouraged the Brits to walk, so there would be more room on the buses for all the servicemen on leave in London.”
Rob could have been describing wartime Washington, D.C. Because the hotels were filled to capacity and then some, many of the men simply walked around all day long until they were so tired that they curled up on a bench in Union Station or fell asleep on the stairs leading to the different monuments. When they were awake, they were out looking for action and usually finding it. The newspapers reported that there were enough venereal disease cases in the city to overfill the 30,000-seat Griffith Stadium, and a few of my co-workers found themselves in a family way.
Rob informed me with a straight face that Air Corps officers usually got the best looking girls. “I’m not kidding. We were envied or hated, depending on your point of view, because we were the glamour boys. There was more than one fight between a groundpounder and a flyboy. Because we had triangles on our faces, we were easy to pick out. Above 10,000 feet, you have to go on oxygen, and you might have to stay on it for several hours. Because of the cold air and the sweating, and believe me you can break out into a sweat, even at 25,000 feet, the mask leaves chafe marks around your nose and mouth, making us look like raccoons.
“The British girls figured out pretty quickly that officers had more money to spend, and they’d get to go to nicer places. Remember, the Brits had been at war since ’39, and for some girls, this was the best way to get a decent meal. Pat Monaghan, a bombardier and crew mate, and I went into London and hooked up with two swell girls, and we took them to see the play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and then to the Savoy Grill for dinner. The Savoy Hotel was a hangout for American reporters, and one of them interviewed us for the hometown papers. The Savoy had been hit several times during the Blitz, but even so, it was a real classy place.