GI Brides
Sunday Times bestseller GI Brides weaves together the real-life stories of four women who married GIs stationed in Britain during the Second World War. The Americans of the ‘friendly invasion’ arrived in 1942, bringing romance and excitement to the lives of young women who had grown up in Blitz-ravaged Britain. As well as gifts such as chocolate, nylon stockings and lipstick, they offered something even more tantalizing: the opportunity to make a new life in America. Some 70,000 GI brides crossed the Atlantic at the end of the war to join the men who had captured their hearts – but the long voyage was just the beginning of a much bigger journey. Once there, the women had to adapt to a foreign culture and a new way of life thousands of miles away from family and friends, with a man they hardly knew out of uniform.
The story is one of social history and love - what was you inspiration for writing it?
We first learnt about the GI brides through Nuala’s grandmother Margaret, who married a captain from the deep south but found that life in rural Georgia wasn’t quite as glamorous as Gone With the Wind. Her husband had a terrible drinking problem and eventually she ran away back to England and remarried, to the man Nuala grew up knowing as her grandfather. It was only after he died that her grandmother began to speak about her first marriage. We discovered that she was one of 70,000 British brides who had crossed the Atlantic for love during and after the war, and decided to track down some more and tell their stories.
Would you class this as fiction or non-fiction?
GI Brides is written in the same style as our previous book The Sugar Girls, which was about four women who worked at Tate & Lyle’s East End factories in the 1940s and 1950s. We write our books in the style of novels rather than history books, but all the stories we tell are true. Where we have to invent small details or guess at the exact words people might have used, we run what we’ve written by the person whose story we are telling to check it feels right to them.
Sylvia O' Connor is one of the characters in the book. How do we see her evolve through the course of the book?
Becoming a GI bride was an eye-opening experience for Sylvia, who had lived quite a sheltered life growing up. When she started volunteering at an American Red Cross club she suddenly found herself inundated with offers of dates, and went out with lots of GIs. She eventually fell in love with an Irish-American from Baltimore called Bob, and after the war she flew over to America to marry him. Sylvia was a naturally shy girl, but she really had to learn to stand up for herself when living with Bob’s family - they were all gamblers, and his father was very cruel to her. When it became unbearable, she booked herself on a boat home to England and gave her husband an ultimatum: either find them a place of their own, or she wasn't coming back.
Which is your favourite GI Bride?
Since Margaret was Nuala’s grandmother she was the GI bride we were closest to, but we feel incredibly lucky to have met all the women who feature in the book, and we are inspired by them all in different ways. Sylvia has a great sense of humour and is very funny. She was a bit of a Calamity Jane - when she was on the Queen Mary she lost her wedding ring in the ship's swimming pool and was mortified when it had to be drained for her. Rae is a strong woman and a real survivor who knew how to stand up for herself – when a GI saw her in her ATS uniform and called out, 'It's the ATS - the American Tail Supply!' she walked up to him and punched him in the face. Lyn’s story was very romantic, and her husband Ben stuck by her through thick and thin. All of them are very special women and we feel honoured to share their stories.
What kind of reception has your book received?
The book has had a lot of positive press coverage, including a good review in the Daily Mail and it went into the Sunday Times top-ten bestseller chart after less than a fortnight. It shows that although these stories are about things that happened 70 years ago, they still mean a lot to readers today. The wartime years were a time when ordinary people found themselves in extraordinary situations – and the constant danger could be exciting as well as scary. In such heightened circumstances, there were a lot of passionate relationships, and not knowing whether you would still be around tomorrow added to the excitement of the romance. Perhaps that’s one reason that people are still so fascinated by the war years.
The book deals with themes such as love, loyalty, betrayal, and separation. What can it teach us about our own lives?
Everyone's had their share of romantic difficulties and disappointments, but what strikes you about all these women’s stories is the enormous inner strength they seem to have. They had to cope with life’s difficulties in a foreign country, with no family or friends to support them, at a time when a ticket home to England was a luxury most of them could not afford. Often the only support networks these women had were ones they made themselves with other GI brides, who set up clubs where they would get together and socialize. But women of that generation generally didn’t complain – they put on a brave face and got on with things. As Sylvia puts it: ‘I lived through the Blitz, I can stand anything.’
Did you have to do much research around the 1940s? If so, what did it involve?
Most of our research involved drinking cups of tea with old ladies and hearing about their wartime romances, so it was a very enjoyable way to find out about life in the 1940s. We did also read a lot of books about the history of the era, and visited the archives of the American Red Cross, which are packed with reports on the cases of the GI brides they helped on board the ships going to America, some of whom found out their husbands had already divorced them before they'd even arrived. We also found quite a few guilty pleasures when it came to watching films about wartime romances with the GIs, from 'Hanover Street' – featuring a young Harrison Ford as a lieutenant caught up in an affair with a married British woman – to 'Yanks', in which Richard Gere falls for a local girl when he is stationed in a small town in Lancashire.
How did your careers in writing develop and how have you come to this point?
We’ve come to these books by different routes, Nuala from a background in journalism, which is very useful when it comes to conducting interviews and getting people to open up about their lives – and Duncan from publishing, having worked on other people’s biographies and memoirs. We first worked together on our previous book The Sugar Girls, and have developed a real passion for telling the stories of ordinary people’s lives in the past. Too many historical books focus on the rich and powerful, whereas ours give a sense of what life was like for the ordinary people whose lives were shaped by history, but who don’t normally make it into the history books.
What's it like writing books together as a couple?
It’s definitely true that two heads are better than one, and although we write our books in a very readable style there is a lot of preparation and planning that goes into them, from choosing which women’s stories to focus on (we interviewed over 60 GI brides before we settled on the four in this book) to working out how to interweave the different stories so that we tell the bigger picture as well. We plan everything very carefully together in advance, and then divide up the writing work between us – then we pass our work over to the other person for rewrites, and by the time the book comes out we often can’t remember who wrote what. Writing a book is such a big project, and it can completely take over your life, so it’s nice to have someone to share that with who understands what it’s like – and who can bring you cups of coffee at one in the morning when you’re still struggling to finish a chapter.
What is the last book you read in your leisure time?
We are big fans of Tracy Chevalier, so we’ve been enjoying her latest novel, The Last Runaway. Although her books are fictional, they are always very well researched, and we love the way she brings the past to life. We’re also big fans of Melanie McGrath's Silvertown and Hopping – like our books they are written in the style of novels, but tell real people’s extraordinary stories.
Interview by Saima Omar
GI Brides: The wartime girls who crossed the Atlantic for love, by Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, is published by Harper. For more stories, pictures and audio clips of war brides, see www.gibrides.com.