So when I had a letter from Miss Summerville to say would I go
back to help get the GI brides back, because it seems that there’s
a number of Americans landed in Scotland so all these Scottish
girls they got married, you see, and they were clamouring to get
back to New York. And so I went there and we had all these girls
and they came on the ship. Oh they were so happy to see all
the food they had and all their bunks. There was four girls
in a room, with four babies. The girl on the top had a metal
crib to put the baby in and then the one underneath had one
metal...to put the baby in there. There was all these babies,
(laughs) and they were so thrilled with all the food they
had. They …they were terribly sick and so were the
babies. When we got to New York we helped the mothers take
the babies ashore and the American mother-in-laws you see all came
down to meet them and I remember one American said, 'what beautiful
babies, we'll have to send our American children over there to get
some colour in their faces', you know. But those girls cried
when they left the ship, they felt they were leaving
England...really leaving England for the last time. These
little things keep coming back to me now.
Question: When you were on the Mary and then war was
declared on the way over to New York.
Yes. We went into London, instead of going into Southampton,
and we zigzagged like this because there was one of our ships sunk
while we were going over, and you weren't allowed to throw any
rubbish out of the portholes, because you weren't allowed to do
that in port at all because it would float and the Germans would
see that, you see, so you had to wait until it got dark. So
we landed in London and we had to stop in the hotel there and then
the next morning we were coming home to Southampton, we got to
Waterloo and there was all the little children there with their gas
masks, and the mothers were crying, and some of the children were
upset.
Question: They were evacuating them?
Evacuating them.
