on their faces, and for a moment I suspected they had forgotten all about me.
“I’ll be perfectly safe,” I repeated. “There’s no danger since the Blitz ended. You know we’re going to win the war — it’s only a question of when. If people like me join up, it’ll be over that much sooner!”
Oxford, England
November 19, 1941
Dear Mother and Dad and Jack,
I arrived here yesterday, imagining myself a world traveller already. The trip across Canada was gorgeous until we reached Ontario, and then it was nothing but huge boulders and huge tree trunks. In Quebec City we stopped for an hour while a party of French Canadian soldiers boarded, and it was so funny to hear our boys in uniform speaking a “foreign” language. We finally arrived in Halifax and saw the ocean for the first time. Yes, I stuck my finger in the water and tasted the salt, just like all the other land-lubbers!
Our crossing was uneventful. I spent most of my time on deck, peering into the water for periscopes. One girl even got a reprimand for throwing up over the side, in case the contents of her stomach were spotted by a U-boat!
I can’t tell you where the ship docked, but it was a ghost town: old Georgian houses along the waterfront, windows boarded up, no vehicles on the streets, no people except for a few in uniform. On the beach were the most gigantic rolls of barbed wire, each one big enough to fence our whole farm!
The next day Mrs. Simpson put me on a train for Oxford, and Roger and Pamela met me at the station. They persuaded me to spend a few days getting my bearings, as we sailors say. Pamela looks like Joan Crawford — black eyebrows and red lipstick, and silk scarves fluttering behind her like flags. She even uses an ivory cigarette holder. Dad would say she wears the trousers in the family. And she does wear trousers, all the time.
Roger reminds me of the Duke of Windsor — the first person I’ve ever seen wearing a silk ascot. He makes fun of me because I say bitter instead of bittah. But then he says Canader instead of Canada!
This house is colder than a morning in January, and as damp as a root cellar. Three days ago I washed my socks and hung them up in my bedroom, and this morning I squeezed water out of them. I keep imagining I can see my breath.
Pamela’s first words were: “What did you bring me?” Thank goodness I had chocolates. She’s still complaining about the lack of servants. It’s true she isn’t much of a cook. Last night we had cabbage soup and tinned meat. I tried to keep my fork in my left hand so they wouldn’t think I was a proper barbarian.
After supper — they call their noon meal “luncheon” and their evening meal “dinner” — we ladies “withdrew” to the drawing room so Roger could smoke his pipe. While we were sitting there, the cat, Fanny, jumped onto the windowsill, and five minutes later the air warden banged on the door and yelled at us because a crack of light had flashed out when the cat moved the curtains. (Pamela sewed the blackouts herself, and you should see them, Mother — the hems are so crooked.)
Pamela says a few times the front door opened at night and a strange red-haired man walked in. “Sorry, wrong house!” he’d say, and off he’d go. Then one night, she opened what she thought was her front door and found the red-haired man sitting in front of his own fire! He lives one street over, and it’s easy to get confused. You never saw anything like the blackout here on a cloudy night — you can hold your palm an inch from your nose and see absolutely nothing!
You’re going to think I’m crazy, but the biggest surprise is hearing little kids on the street speak with an English accent. They sound so darned strange, as if they’re putting it on.
I miss you so much. The first thing I saw when we came down the gangplank was a poster that said: “Homesickness is like seasickness — it soon wears off.” It isn’t true. I wasn’t a bit seasick, but oh, I am terribly homesick!
Give Laddy and Pansy a hug from me.
All my love, Rose
I spent hours walking the streets, memorizing details for my letters home. The dreaming spires, the church towers, and the ancient monuments were beautiful, but I was forced to admit that England wasn’t quite what I expected.
Maybe it was the dirt. The stone statues were filthy, their heads and shoulders stained with pigeon droppings. The elaborate brickwork on the buildings was pitted with age and the cobblestoned streets were littered with rubbish.
Or maybe it was the damp. One afternoon I stood on an arched bridge while university students dressed in white punted down the river. It was a lovely scene, but the wind cut through my coat like a blade. Even the sun shone weakly, a pale imitation of the sun back home, more like the prairie moon.
I was disoriented, having lost all sense of proportion. This must be how Alice felt when she ate the toadstool, growing bigger and smaller by turns. The sky had shrunk to a patch of pale blue overhead, its horizons covered with rooftops and trees so enormous that I felt like an ant scurrying through a vegetable garden. The leaves that drifted to the ground were bigger than dinner plates. Yet in spite of the monstrous trees, everything was made of brick.
Other objects were so tiny that I felt like Gulliver in the land of Lilliput. Pamela’s narrow brick house shared walls with the homes on each side, as if the buildings had been squeezed together like an accordion. The front yard, lined with ugly spiked railings, was the size of my old sandbox.
“Where do you keep everything?” I asked in genuine amazement, when Pamela showed me the kitchen, no bigger than a pantry with a small porcelain sink. That was just after I had cracked my forehead on the low beam over the doorway.
And England was strangely primitive, lacking in the amenities I took for granted. Here, in the midst of one of the world’s most civilized cities, there was no telephone. I couldn’t understand it. Even old man Thorpe who lived on the bald prairie ten miles out of Touchwood had a telephone.
Pamela and Roger weren’t quite so appealing at close quarters, either. I had been so eager to meet my English flesh and blood — especially my glamorous cousin and her husband, a real university professor. But Pamela wore a perpetual smear of cigarette ashes down the front of her blouse, and Roger was always putting his arm around me in a way I didn’t quite like.
Three days later, when we had exchanged all the family news and the effort to make conversation was wearing a bit thin, Pamela and Roger exchanged a long look over the dinner table. “Shall we take her to the Green Boar tonight?” Pamela asked, blowing jets of smoke through her nostrils.
“Righto, I’ll fetch my cap and stick.”
Stumbling though the pitch darkness and accompanied by Pamela’s curses, we found the doorway with difficulty and came into the warmth. I was eager to see a real pub, since women weren’t allowed in bars back home. Sometimes when I had walked past the Queen’s Hotel in Touchwood, the doors opened and a smoky, yeasty smell blew out. I always tried to peek inside.
But I guessed that this English pub was quite different. It was delightful in the cozy room, with wooden timbers and stone fireplace where a blaze was crackling. Blackout curtains covered the door and windows.
There was one drawback. To keep the light to a minimum,
