Soon Rae found that it was impossible to avoid the Yanks in Mansfield too, thanks to the arrival of an American hospital division in nearby Sutton-in-Ashfield. On market day, she and her housemates headed into town and found the ancient square thronging with American uniforms.
They decided to go into the nearest pub to get away from the crowd, but it was even more packed inside. They jostled to the bar and eventually got a round of drinks. ‘Where shall we go?’ Eileen asked.
Rae could see three GIs at the end of the bar. ‘This way,’ she said, heading in the opposite direction. The girls were lucky to get to a table at the front of the pub just as the people sitting at it were leaving.
They had barely taken a sip of their drinks, however, before the three Yanks came over. Rae and Irene were at the end of the table, and to Rae’s annoyance the men started trying to chat them up.
‘Hey, baby, how about you and me get out of here?’ one of them asked her. He was a tall, thick-set American at least ten years older than her, with short-cropped blond hair and small eyes. But if he had been Clark Gable, Rae still wouldn’t have given him a second look. He was a Yank, and therefore not to be trusted.
‘Get lost,’ she told him.
He laughed. ‘Oh, c’mon, don’t be like that, sugar,’ he said. ‘Lemme buy you a drink.’
‘No way,’ she said, turning her back on him and trying to talk to her friends.
But the man seemed to be enjoying her ripostes, and to her annoyance everything she said made him smile more. The GIs were used to rebuffs from English girls, and even had a nickname for their attempts to wear down resistance: the Battle of Britain.
Rae was furious – once again, the Yanks were ruining her day. As soon as she and her friends had finished their first drink they left as quickly as they could.
But the men were not so easily deterred. All the way back to the girls’ billet on Layton Avenue, they followed them, calling, ‘Oh, come on girls, we’re lonely!’
‘Just ignore them,’ muttered Rae, relieved when they got back and could shut the door behind them.
Rae didn’t give the men a second thought, but a couple of days later there was a knock on the door.
She went and opened it, only to find the big, thick-set American on the other side, smiling at her.
‘Hey, baby, can I take you for a drink?’ he asked.
‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ Rae replied.
‘Oh, c’mon, give me a chance,’ he said, laughing. ‘What’s your name, sugar? I’m Raymond.’
‘I’m not interested,’ said Rae, and slammed the door.
A few days later, there was another knock. Once again, she opened the door to see the GI’s big, grinning face looking down at her.
‘I thought I told you to get lost!’ she said, pushing the door shut.
Raymond stopped knocking for Rae, but when she left the house to go to the cinema the following Friday, there he was, hanging around on the pavement.
‘I don’t believe it!’ said Rae angrily. She turned on her heel and marched straight back into the house before he had a chance to speak to her.
After several weeks, Rae’s admirer still hadn’t given up, and he had become a regular fixture outside her billet. ‘There’s your boyfriend again!’ the girls teased whenever they spied him from behind the curtains.
‘Why don’t you just put him out of his misery and go out with him?’ suggested Helen. It was clear he wasn’t going anywhere until he got what he wanted.
The next time Rae saw him, she was heading to the cinema again.
‘Hey, wanna go to the movies?’ he asked her, smiling. Rae sighed. She couldn’t be bothered to go through the whole rigmarole again. Nor did she want to miss the film. Maybe Helen was right and she should just put him out of his misery – then he would see he wasn’t going to get anywhere with her and he wouldn’t bother asking again.
‘Well, I’m going anyway, so you might as well come along,’ she said.
Raymond didn’t need to hear any more. He was already by her side, his grin bigger than ever.
3
Margaret Boyle finished typing the letter the American army sergeant had dictated to her, and proudly pulled it out of the brand-new Royal typewriter. She went into his office, laid it on his desk with a smile and returned to her seat. She was confident of her typing skills and felt sure she was doing well in her new job at the European Theater of Operations, United States Army (ETOUSA) headquarters in Mayfair.
But the sergeant, a plump man in his thirties with oily, slicked-back hair, was finding his English secretary rather frustrating. A few minutes later, he emerged holding the letter. ‘Who is this?’ he asked, pointing to the top of the letter, where Margaret had faithfully typed, ‘Dear Bird.’
‘Well, that’s the man you’re writing to, isn’t it?’ Margaret replied. ‘Bird.’
‘I said Bud!’ he exclaimed. ‘B.U.D.’
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ responded Margaret, ‘but I simply can’t understand your accent.’
The sergeant went away grumbling, but she didn’t care – her eyes were on the other officers who milled around the headquarters. All the best, most ambitious young men the Americans had were here, and none had failed to notice the pretty new secretary, with her tall, slim figure and blonde hair pinned up in luscious curls on top of her head.
Margaret was making the most of it, having been starved of male company for years. Since her teens she had been living in the depths of the Irish countryside, where her mother had dragged her and her three sisters after running away from their father, a major in the Royal Artillery.
For as long as Margaret could remember, her parents had endured a tempestuous relationship. She had witnessed the terrible rows that Mrs Boyle provoked with her husband, always for the most spurious of reasons. Sometimes she would vent her frustration by hitting her daughter, or stabbing her with knitting needles. Margaret had learned to obey when told to pull down her sleeves, to hide the telltale marks left by these attacks.
Her parents’ final showdown had come when Major Boyle was posted in India, where Mrs Boyle had invented an affair between her husband and their nineteen-year-old nanny Elfreda. Using all her theatrical talents, she had played the part of the spurned wife to perfection, dramatically sailing off from Bombay vowing that he would never see his children again.
She had chosen rural Ireland as her new home, since it had the advantage of putting the sea between herself and her relations in England, enabling her to reign over her daughters without any outside interference. There, she subjected them to a primitive life in a crumbling old mansion, where they had no electricity and had to cook on an open fire in the hallway.
With her children a captive audience, Mrs Boyle – a creative if unbalanced woman – invented strange plays, which she performed to them in the evenings. She continued to fly into irrational tempers, and took to beating Margaret with a broom as well as her fists.
When Margaret turned eighteen, Major Boyle had arrived unexpectedly, offering to take her back to England with him. She was overjoyed to be rescued from her mad mother, and left before she had a chance to stop her.
Once she was safely in England, Margaret wrote to her mother, asking for her clothes to be forwarded. There was no reply, but a trunk soon arrived. Inside it were Margaret’s clothes – all cut to shreds.
Major