My Yank
I remember meeting a soldier based at Pheasey. He was a gentle, softly-spoken lad called Bob, of perhaps nineteen or twenty. He was almost certainly the first American I ever met. My seventeen-year-old sister had befriended him either at the ice-rink or at some local dance. (What freedoms even well brought-up young girls were permitted in those days, despite the area being thronged with licentious soldiery). He had been wounded in Normandy and I am not sure whether he was destined to return to active combat - at any rate he definitely survived the war. He hailed from somewhere in the mid-West, in the bible belt. He wasn't pemitted to mention the extent of his injury in letters home and so my father undertook to write to his parents on his behalf. A grateful reply appeared many weeks later in which was enclosed a colour leaflet describing the home town - I wish I had registered which it was - and marked up to show where Bob had gone to school, the church at which he and the family worshipped and other landmarks.
Bob visited us quite a few times, often bringing a precious can of peaches and perhaps a packet of chewing gum or sweets for me. He must have walked - we were two or three miles away from Pheasey; and probably on the odd occasion my father used some of his essential user's petrol allowance to run him back at night. He was there for our 1944 Chistmas dinner to share our cockerel, a real treat. I can see him now, sitting on the other side of our dining table in his smart private's uniform with its smooth, good quality cloth - so different from my father's rough, Home Guard battledress, put away for good only a couple of weeks earlier. He ate in a manner which always intrigued me but which I was forbidden to imitate: knife in only occasional use and for most of the time lodged on the far side of the plate whilst the main work was done by the fork held in the right hand. I was assured by my parents privately that this was not the sign of an inadequate upbringing - it was how Americans did it.
At some stage Bob disappeared from the scene. He was probably posted away, perhaps back to France, perhaps elsewhere in this country. I was not conscious of his departure although I may have been present on the day of his last visit. I remember him offering my sister one of his insignia - a wide, slim, metal, pin-on badge depicting an army rifle. In fact he offered her two versions of this: one a dull, well-worn thing, perhaps his everyday one, the other pristine, gleaming, the colours bright. He asked her which one she would like. I knew that the polite thing would be to choose the scruffy one. I was shocked therefore to see my sister point to the new, gleaming version. Forever after I recalled it as the first example I had seen of the single-mindedness of the female of the species in pursuit of what she wants. It's only as I write this, though, 63 years later, that it occurs to me that what Bob was offering her as an alternative was perhaps something really precious to him - the insignia which had accompanied him through thick and thin and which many years in the future he would be able to show to his (probably yawning) grandchildren as he told them tales of his time in Europe. I'm glad, now, that my sister grabbed the new one, fresh out of its cellophane wrapper.
Chris