Mr and Mrs Baker refused to have an Anderson shelter in their back garden, however, and preferred to take their chances in their beds. Their one concession to safety was putting the children to sleep under the stairs when the air-raid siren sounded. Most nights Mr Baker was out anyway, since he was an air-raid warden, and sometimes he took June on his rounds with him. It was frightening witnessing the terrible fires burning all over the city, but June preferred to be outside, hearing her father blow confidently on his whistle, rather than cowed under the stairs with her sister.
June’s grandparents had a lucky escape when a bomb landed right outside their house. It came in at an angle and went under the building, doing some minor damage, but did not explode – and when the bomb squad came to disarm it, they soon discovered why. Inside the shell case was a note that read, ‘From your friends in Czechoslovakia’. The prison-camp workers who had constructed the bomb had kindly left out the fuse.
June knew that many people were less lucky than her own family. One night, Mr Baker had bundled his wife and children into the car and driven them up into the hills. June had sat and stared, transfixed by the immense fires raging in the distance. It looked as if her whole city was being burned to the ground.
June left school at fourteen and, keen to get away from pub life, volunteered for the Land Army. She had seen the posters showing girls cradling baby lambs under the words ‘Back to the land. We must all lend a hand’. Having never been outside the city except for her brief period as an evacuee, she pictured an idyllic scene of rustic bliss.
June and her fellow new recruits were taken by bus to a farm some way outside Birmingham, where to her horror they were issued with manly corduroy trousers and clumping great boots. The next day they were up at dawn, and set to work digging potatoes. It was back-breaking, and while the other girls were hardy types who seemed unfazed by the physical labour, the diminutive June struggled to keep up, her shovel barely breaking the stone-hard earth.
It was almost dark by the time the girls returned to the farmhouse, and they had built up an enormous appetite from their exertions, but the meal provided by the farmer’s wife was far from hearty.
After dinner, June was looking forward to a nice hot bath to relieve her sore muscles and wash away the mud that was now caked onto her skin and hair, but she discovered that there were to be no such luxuries. Each girl was allowed a small bowl of cold water to perform her ablutions, before lights-out at 9 p.m.
As she lay shivering under a thin blanket, June realised she had made a terrible mistake. Being a Land Girl was far from the fluffy experience the posters had suggested, and there could be few girls less cut out for hard labour than she was. Within days she was back home.
June’s father quickly saw to it that she was contributing to the family finances, however. Her headteacher’s reference had declared her ‘pleasing in her manner and appearance’ and ‘fastidious about details’, and it was enough to win her a job as a trainee telegraphist at Birmingham Post Office. There, she cut and pasted the ticker-tape messages, many of them expressing condolences to the families of men killed in action. After work, it was back to the dreaded pub, where she would sometimes be called on to help out behind the bar.
There was little to relieve the tedium of her weekly routine. June had no love life to speak of, since most of the eligible young men she knew had by now been called up. The cinema remained her only escape, and the Odeon was increasingly becoming her second home. She revelled in the glamour of the silver screen, and found herself longing to live in America – a land where young women drove sports cars and lived in huge houses with swimming pools. She idolised Hollywood stars like Ingrid Bergman, Betty Grable, Lana Turner and Hedy Lamarr, and lusted after the fashionable clothes they wore, so different from the drab fare on offer in English shops. Having seen a pair of peep-toe heels on one Hollywood starlet, June had rushed home and immediately cut the toes out of a pair of her own shoes, but it didn’t quite have the same effect, and to her annoyance her mother made her throw them away.
To June, America was a mythical land that seemed a million miles away, and growing up she had never thought she would actually meet an American. But when the United States joined the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, GIs began arriving in Britain in preparation for the invasion of Europe. One day, June was cutting through the graveyard of Birmingham Cathedral to catch her bus home when she noticed a soldier walking towards her. His light mushroom-brown uniform – which was of a superior cut and quality to that of a British Tommy – instantly marked him out as an American. He was tall and tanned, with cropped blond hair so fair that it almost looked white. In the drab setting of the churchyard he seemed utterly out of place, as if a movie star had just dropped out of the sky.
Oh my God, he’s coming to talk to me, June thought, doing her best to contain her excitement as the man sauntered over.
‘Say, do you know any place round here where I can get a bite to eat?’ he asked.
June was dazzled by his eyes, which were a sharp, piercing blue. It took her a few moments to process his accent, which had more of a drawl to it than the Americans she was used to on the silver screen.
‘Um… My parents have a pub not far from here,’ she said eventually. ‘My mum could make you something to eat.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ he replied, and accompanied her to the bus stop.
It was only two stops to the Lister Tavern, and all the way the GI kept up a steady stream of conversation. He told her his name was Omar Borgmeyer – ‘Borgy’ to his friends – and that he was from Saint Charles, Missouri. June nodded, although she had never heard of Missouri, and wondered if it was anywhere near Hollywood. All she could think was: I’m talking to a real, live American!
As June and Borgy came into the pub, Mrs Baker sprung up from her bar stool in surprise. ‘Who’s your new friend?’ she asked, her eyes going over Borgy’s smart uniform and the sergeant’s insignia on his jacket.
‘This is Borgy,’ June replied, feeling herself go red. ‘He wants something to eat.’
‘If it’s not troubling you too much, ma’am,’ the GI added.
‘No trouble at all,’ replied Mrs Baker with a little laugh, clearly enjoying being called ‘ma’am’. ‘How about a nice cheese and pickle sandwich?’
June felt mortified – surely Americans were far too glamorous to eat cheese and pickle sandwiches?
‘That oughta just about hit the spot, ma’am!’ Borgy replied, to her astonishment.
They went over to one of the battered old pub tables, and Borgy pulled out a chair for June. He certainly has good manners, she thought.
A few moments later, her mother arrived with the sandwich, which she had garnished with a pickled onion speared on a toothpick. June watched as Borgy wolfed the food down hungrily, declaring it to be the best meal he had ever had.
Then he pulled out a packet of Lucky Strikes and lit up. ‘Want one?’ he asked.
June nodded, and he handed her his cigarette, then lit another for himself.
June had smoked before, but as soon as she took a drag on the Lucky Strike she realised it was much stronger than the English cigarettes she was used to, and she couldn’t help coughing. Borgy smiled. ‘Too much for you, huh?’
‘It’s fine,’ June said, smiling. She didn’t want him to think she was unsophisticated.
June was shy enough at the best of times, but in the presence of the American she found herself more tongue-tied than ever. Fortunately, Borgy did enough talking for both of them, telling her all about his job as clerk to an army general, and how he had joined up straight out of high school.
‘I wanted to go to college, but I’m the oldest of eleven so I had responsibilities,’ he said.
June