Mom was a war baby: English enough to have dual citizenship for her first 21 years and to give her own children the unbreakable habit of cooking with bazzle, not basil; Texan enough to go to Rice and still, decades later, roll her eyes whenever anyone displays Hook-em Horns. Her parents met amid the blackouts and drama of WWII London. She told me a bit about it:
Daddy was a major in the Air Force. He was stationed near London. He never flew, of course---terrible eyesight and mechanically challenged---but was involved in the communications end of things, broadcasting and news reporting for the folks back home. A few years after the war, he and his friend Porter Randall did on-location reports of the Berlin Airlift, with live interviews of the pilots who made the flights, among other things. He told me once that these were the best years of his life and that he had a marvelous time during the war, that he knew it was bad for many people but for him it was wonderful.
Mother was in the service too, in the British ATS, the equivalent of the Women’s Army Corps, the WACs. She went in at 18, in 1938, as did many girls who weren’t pursuing higher education. She served as a quartermaster; I don’t know her rank, though I still have her pips and pins and whatnot. She was stationed all over England during the six years she served. There are stories she told of being in Scotland, of being billeted in small villages and inside Dover Castle (where she received a small shrapnel wound during one German bombing raid; there was a small scar on her arm). She and Daddy met in an officers’ mess hall, somewhere around London, where some of the US fellows took their meals. I don’t know more details than that. She left the service when they married, in 1944. But I think she, like he, managed to have a lot of fun during a very hard time.
Theirs really was a “verifiable romance of wartime.” Just a few months before V-E day, my mother was born in London. Soon Grandpa had taken his new wife and daughter home to Texas, where life was dramatically different. Grandma soon learned, for example, that you couldn’t tell your American friends “Knock me up sometime” when you meant that you wanted them to visit you (that is, to knock on your door). But by the time I was born she had adopted Aqua-Net helmet hair as her own. Grandpa went on working in radio, DJ-ing as popular music evolved into rock ‘n’ roll; when he died, he left behind stacks of old singles. I was too young then to do anything more than find comedy in the name Fats Waller. Now, of course, I would hoard the things, and I wish I’d had a chance to know him better; I suspect we’d have had a lot to talk about.
Mom’s story leaves out the part that everyone in the family already knows: the romance of wartime turned into peacetime heartbreak. Those years in the early ’40s really would be the best of their lives. Grandma and Grandpa both died alone after a long, poisonously bitter divorce. She never got the training her artistic talents obviously demanded. They both smoked and drank their separate ways into the grave.
I don’t know if Grandma was the love of Grandpa’s life. I do know that he was not the love of hers. He was, in fact, her rebound fling after losing the love of her life. In England she’d fallen for a young doctor who happened to be Jewish. Her family was strict C of E, her mother---from what little I know---rather terrifyingly implacable. Eventually she and the young man realized they could never get their families to consent to a marriage. They wrote to each other, breaking off the relationship. Their letters crossed in the mail.
When I was young, Grandma’s story was exciting: love! blackouts! Nazis! bombs! Now what stands out is its sadness. Her life shows the power of love to damage as well as to heal, to warp as well as to grow; and it reminds me that no one’s destiny is ever hers alone.
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