Our Yanks Read online

  About the Book

  It was August 1943 – and the inhabitants of King's Thorpe had lived with the idea of invasion for some time – but by the Germans, not the Americans. The village had never seen anything like them before – certainly they were different with their wealth, their glamour, and their louche but romantic uniforms. Some of the older villagers, like the Brigadier, resented them on sight, others welcomed them with weak tea and fish paste sandwiches. But in some lives they were to make a long–lasting and emotional impact – most especially young Sally Barnet from the bakery, Agnes Dawe, the Rector's daughter, and newly–widowed Lady Beauchamp from the Manor.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Mayhew

  Copyright

  Our Yanks

  Margaret Mayhew

  For Isabella, George, Charlie and Luis

  and

  For all the Yanks who came Over Here –

  especially those who never went home

  Acknowledgements

  I thank the following who told me about their memories of Northamptonshire village life under American ‘occupation’ during the Second World War: Bill Sharpe, George Sansom, Arthur and Doris Hartley, Mary Bailey, Kath Fenn, Jim Brown, Mary Broughton, Arthur Bould, Doris Price, Nora Masters, Kenneth Nelson, John Wooding and Phyllis Scotney.

  I am also grateful to American Eighth Air Force veterans Merle Olmsted and Jack Ilfrey for their very generous assistance, to military aviation historians Tony Palenski and David Knight for their expert advice, to Eleanor Allen, Colin Basford, Tricia Quitmann, Andrew Vidal, Oliver and Karen O’Sullivan. And I thank Jane and John Paige for all their kind hospitality and their wonderful help with my research for this book. As ever, I thank my editor, Diane Pearson, and my husband, Philip Kaplan, who patiently answered so many questions about Yanks.

  They brought colour into our lives, and when they went away it was all grey again.

  An Englishwoman remembering the American forces in England in the Second World War.

  I still remember the Yanks almost more than I do the war.

  A Suffolk woman.

  We won’t do much talking until we’ve done more flying. We hope that when we leave, you’ll be glad we came.

  Brigadier General Ira C. Eaker, Commander of the United States Eighth Army Air Force in Britain, speaking at a dinner held to welcome him in 1942.

  All my love,

  as Always.

  And, thank you, Michael.

  Mary.

  An anniversary remembrance note on a wreath at the American cemetery in Madingley, Cambridge, left on the grave of a young American flyer killed in 1944.

  Preface

  After the Fall of France in June 1940, during the Second World War, Great Britain fought on alone against Nazi Germany until the Japanese attacked the American Fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7th December 1941 and the United States entered the war.

  American troops began to arrive in the United Kingdom in early 1942 and the United States Eighth Army Air Force started building their own operational air bases in East Anglia and the Midlands, as well as taking over some former RAF stations. Remote rural communities suddenly found themselves invaded and occupied, not by Germans, but by Americans.

  One

  The Reverend Henry Dawe, Rector of King’s Thorpe in Northamptonshire, was the first to arrive for the Parochial Church Council meeting on an August evening in 1943. The meeting took place, as usual, in a lofty room that had been added onto the back of the sixteenth-century rectory in Victorian times and was used for various parish functions. The room faced west, looking out across the old croquet lawn and the area of rough grass beyond it that sloped down towards the stone boundary wall and Willow Brook. At six o’clock, and with double summer time, the sunlight was still streaming down through the high windows showing up dust motes swirling around like plankton. For some reason, in spite of all efforts with mops and brooms, the room was always full of dust. It gathered as grey fluff under tables and chairs and snowballed across the floor to hide under radiators and pipes and in dark corners. The rector dragged one of the trestle tables into the centre of the room and flapped at it with his handkerchief before starting to move the necessary number of chairs. He was on the fourth when the outside door opened and Sam Barnet, village baker and one of the two churchwardens, stood there. Rock solid, dependable, worthy. ‘Get the bigwigs and the parish worthies on your side right from the start,’ a bishop had once advised the rector candidly, many years ago. ‘You can’t do the job without them and they can make your life a hell.’ Four generations of Barnets had baked bread for King’s Thorpe in unbroken succession and this great-grandson was, fortunately, on the rector’s side. On the whole, he thought, most people in the village were, but he was well aware of his shortcomings – of his failure to give a strong pastoral leadership, of his rather uninspiring sermons and his tendency to vacillate, of his advancing age. There was also all the awkwardness of having no wife and the circumstances surrounding that.

  ‘Evening, Rector. I’ll give you a hand with those.’

  ‘Thank you so much, Mr Barnet.’

  The remaining seven chairs were in place round the table in a jiffy and the rector was doing some more flicking with his handkerchief when the other Council members began to arrive. Miss Cutteridge, the PCC secretary – in an apologetic rush although she was several minutes early – Miss Skinner, deputy head teacher of the village school, with firm tread, Mr and Mrs Dakin, devout and unfailing worshippers, Mr Wells, retired bank manager and the council treasurer, Miss Hooper, the church organist, Mr Rate, the local builder and, precisely as the nearby church clock struck six, Brigadier Mapperton, the other churchwarden for nearly fifteen years, and one of the biggest wigs, who was on nobody’s side but his own.

  ‘All present, Rector?’

  ‘Except for Lady Beauchamp, Brigadier. I’m sure she’ll be here in a moment.’

  ‘No idea of time, foreigners. Well, let’s get on with it.’

  ‘I think perhaps we should wait a few minutes . . .’

  ‘Damned inconsiderate.’

  The rector wasn’t sure if the remark applied to himself or to Lady Beauchamp but, at that moment, to his relief, she arrived. Anyone from a neighbouring village or town counted as foreign to most of the King’s Thorpe population, but the brigadier had probably meant it literally. A Hungarian father accounted for Lady Beauchamp’s rather exotic dark looks, though it was the rector’s understanding that her mother had been completely English and that she had been born in England. She certainly spoke without a trace of any accent.

  ‘Good evening, Rector. I’m sorry to be the last.’

  He smiled at her, well aware of the brigadier glowering away beside him. ‘We haven’t begun yet, Lady Beauchamp.’ She was easily the youngest member of the council, having valiantly stepped into her late husband’s shoes in the family tradition. He felt sorry for her having to sit through what he knew to be somewhat tedious meetings, but, if she was bored, she always hid it well.

  They moved to their places round the table and he bowed his head in prayer. ‘Heavenly Father, we ask Thy blessing on this meetin
g and Thy guidance in all our deliberations. Grant us understanding and tolerance of each other and help us to discern Thy Will and so fulfil Thy purpose for this ancient and beautiful church on Earth, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’ The prayer was his own composition, tailor-made for the occasion. He varied it from time to time, but the plea for understanding and tolerance was always included in one form or another: a warning shot across the bows that he sincerely hoped would take effect. It was his task, as chairman, to keep the peace.

  The meeting began peaceably enough. The minutes of the last meeting were read out by Miss Cutteridge and duly approved and signed. An apology for absence from Mr Hobbs was also read out and accepted without quibble. Having the largest farm in the parish, he had a cast-iron alibi at harvest time and the rector suspected that Ronald Hobbs’s general unpopularity made his absence rather welcome. Arrangements for the Harvest Festival were discussed and for a forthcoming jumble sale at the village hall in aid of the Red Cross. Visits to the sick were organized, and Miss Cutteridge and Mrs Dakin volunteered to recruit ladies in the village to carry out needlework repairs to some of the church hassocks. Lady Beauchamp kindly agreed to a coffee morning being held at the Manor in November to raise money for the church flowers at Christmas. A recent inspection for deathwatch beetle had, thankfully, proved negative.

  The rector moved on to the thornier problem of the leaking roof in the north transept. At the last meeting Mr Rate had offered to carry out the work at cost price and taken considerable umbrage when Brigadier Mapperton had insisted on an estimate from another builder in Peterborough. The estimate received had been considerably more than Mr Rate’s but the brigadier was not ready to let the matter rest there.

  ‘You get what you pay for, that’s the point. Prescott’s will do a first-rate job.’

  Miss Cutteridge’s shorthand pencil faltered above her notebook and Bill Rate went as red as his bricks. ‘Are you implying that my work is shoddy?’

  ‘That chap you sent to do the leak in our conservatory was no good. Went on leaking just the same.’

  ‘If you’d told me there was a problem, Brigadier, I’d’ve come round and seen to it myself.’

  ‘No point. I telephoned Prescott’s and they came at once and did the job properly.’

  The rector intervened hurriedly, smoothing the builder’s ruffled feathers. ‘I’m sure we all have every confidence in you, Mr Rate. Your firm has carried out excellent work for us in the past.’

  In the end it was put to the vote and the brigadier defeated, but far from satisfied. The next item on the agenda was to decide how best to spend a recent legacy. The late Miss Dorothy Weatherington, a spinster of the parish, had left the church one hundred pounds in her will to be spent as the Parochial Church Council saw fit. It would have been much simpler, in many ways, if she had been more specific, the rector thought wearily: a memorial tablet, fabric repairs, upkeep of the graveyard . . . As it was, the field was wide open. Leonard Dakin raised his hand. ‘Since we all learned of this generous legacy, Rector, my wife and I have both prayed for guidance from the Lord in the matter.’

  ‘Indeed, we all look to God to guide us, Mr Dakin.’

  ‘Our prayers were answered, Rector. God spoke to us very clearly. His message was that the money be spent on creating a Lady chapel in the south side aisle. Thora and I both sincerely believe that there is a great need of a quiet corner for private prayer; for worshippers to commune without disturbance.’

  ‘I hardly think there would be enough space available, Mr Dakin.’

  ‘Oh, but there would, Rector. The aisle pews stop several feet short of those in the nave. There’s quite sufficient room to make a small chapel. It would only require, say, a dozen chairs and kneelers and, of course, an altar – carved of wood, perhaps, by a local craftsman. The altar cloth could be embroidered by our talented needlewomen in the village. The statue of Our Lady should perhaps be commissioned from outside, but Miss Weatherington’s generous legacy should be more than adequate.’

  Brigadier Mapperton shifted impatiently. ‘Our Lady? Statue? All sounds like a lot of damned popery to me. We’ve got a perfectly good altar already. No earthly need for another one and certainly not with that woman on it. We got rid of the Pope so we didn’t have to have all that nonsense, Dakin. Next thing we know you’ll want the rector dressed up in lace and throwing incense around.’

  Miss Skinner said briskly, ‘I don’t think Mr Dakin intends anything as extreme as that, Brigadier. But I must say I agree with you. I can’t see the need for a Lady chapel. In my view, the money would be far better spent on things we really do need – new hymn books, for example, new robes for the choir – some of them are almost beyond repair. There are plenty of practical possibilities.’

  Miss Hooper’s hand shot up. ‘How about the organ, Rector? The bellows are starting to go. If we don’t do something about them soon I won’t be able to play at all.’

  ‘There’s a special fund for the organ,’ Thora Dakin said stubbornly. ‘If Miss Weatherington had intended her legacy to be spent on it, she would surely have said so. In our prayers Leonard and I clearly discerned God’s will—’

  ‘What God wants and Miss Weatherington intended may not be the same thing at all.’

  ‘That’s blasphemous, Miss Hooper.’

  The organist shook her frizzy nest of grey hair. ‘No it isn’t. It’s a fact. We have to decide what Miss Weatherington would have approved of and I don’t think she’d have liked your Lady chapel idea. She was never one for anything High Church. She liked things kept simple. I know that for a fact. Isn’t that so, Rector?’

  He sidestepped adroitly: ‘As a matter of fact, I was going to suggest that the legacy might be spent on repairing the cracked bell.’

  Brigadier Mapperton shifted again. ‘What’s the point of that? We can’t ring the blessed things. Not while the war’s on. That’s the invasion signal.’

  ‘I realize that, of course, Brigadier, but it occurred to me that it would be very nice if, when the war ends, we were able to ring out a full peal of bells in celebration of peace.’

  The treasurer shook his head dolefully. ‘We won’t have much to celebrate if the Germans win.’

  Miss Skinner delivered a schoolmistress’s sharp reprimand: ‘There’s no question of them winning, Mr Wells. None whatever. We shall go on fighting until the enemy is defeated. And, of course, now that the Americans have entered the war, things should be much easier.’

  ‘Damned Yanks,’ the Brigadier barked. ‘Left it to the last moment, as usual, when we’ve done all the dirty work. Only came in when the Japs caught them napping. They don’t know the first thing about fighting . . . no discipline, no backbone. All talk and no action. Mollycoddle their men—’

  ‘Could we perhaps return to the item under discussion . . .’

  Miss Skinner nodded. ‘Of course, Rector. I’m afraid we’ve gone rather off-course.’ She looked round the table. ‘I think Miss Weatherington would have approved of the Rector’s proposal about the bell.’ A firm glance towards the Dakins. ‘And that it would certainly have God’s blessing. It’s a splendid idea. How astute of you to think of it, Rector.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Skinner. It occurred to me, you see, that the sound of church bells has played a very ancient role in our country’s history. It is a sound that was just as familiar to a man’s ears a thousand years ago as it is to ours today. A sound that summons us to prayer, that celebrates our joys, tolls for our griefs and gives thanks for our deliverances.’ He quite surprised himself with his eloquence and fervour and was even more surprised when, after only a brief discussion, everyone agreed except the Dakins, who eventually, and reluctantly, gave way. The next item on the agenda – pruning and clearing to be done around the graveyard in the autumn – went smoothly, Mr Wells volunteering to organize a working party to tackle the job by the end of October. The rector braced himself for the final item on the agenda: Any Other Business. He had another proposal to make and the
brigadier’s earlier remarks had warned him of the rocks that could lie ahead. He coughed and cleared his throat.

  ‘I think we are all aware that the aerodrome outside our village, previously occupied by the RAF, is about to be handed over to a Fighter Group of the American Eighth Army Air Force. Building has already been in progress for some weeks to accommodate what, I understand, could be a large number of American airmen who are expected to arrive imminently.’

  ‘And a confounded nuisance they’ll be,’ Brigadier Mapperton growled. ‘We must keep them out of the village at all costs.’

  ‘That would be rather difficult, Brigadier. The aerodrome is only a mile away.’

  ‘Make it out of bounds. Can’t have them slouching around the place, chewing gum.’

  ‘They have come from far across the sea to our aid.’

  ‘Only when it suited them. Had to be kicked into the war.’

  The rector cleared his throat again. ‘Nonetheless, I feel that we should welcome them – make some sort of gesture to our American cousins.’

  ‘Cousins! They’re mostly a lot of foreigners. Far more German blood than English, I’ve heard. French, Italians, Poles, Swedes . . . all sorts of odds and sods mixed up together.’

  Miss Hooper shook her head. ‘The first settlers were English, Brigadier, and they must have plenty of direct descendants.’

  ‘As a matter of strict historical accuracy,’ Miss Skinner remarked, ‘the very first settlers in North America were probably Vikings, several hundred years earlier. Not to mention the Spanish after them. Of course, that’s not counting the Indians who were there long before anyone else.’

  Thora Dakin had come out of her sulk about the Lady chapel. ‘I think the rector is quite right. It is our Christian duty to make the Americans feel welcome. Our Lord preached tolerance towards all men, whatever their race or creed. We ought to organize a reception of some sort at the village hall for them. Tea and sandwiches, say.’