‘Did you know there’s Yankee soldiers in the town?’ Dolly asked.
‘I did,’ said Ursula. ‘I saw half a dozen wandering round. What lovely uniforms.’
‘Sam met some in the park, apparently there’ll be thousands when they all arrive. I expect that’s exaggerated, but there’s a big camp on the Andover Road. Sam asked these lads to tea. Lord knows what I’m going to do, I never met Americans before.’
‘Give them what you’d give your own boys, anything to fill them up.’
‘I didn’t really mean that.’ Dolly, unused to articulating her concerns was hesitant. ‘Well… people like us aren’t really like you when it comes to strangers. Ordinary working people just aren’t used to having strangers in their houses. Our house has only got the living-room and kitchen.’
‘Young lads away from home won’t mind, they’ll be glad enough to be away from camp and with a family. Ordinary American homes aren’t much different from English ones – plenty of them aren’t as good.’
Having seen America at the pictures, that was hard to believe.
The young soldiers came. Dolly could scarcely wait to tell Ursula on the day following their visit.
‘Did you like them?’
‘Oh yes, they were lovely. No different from anybody else once you got used to the way they spoke. Bonnie didn’t care, she wanted them to keep saying things. They didn’t mind, and kept making her laugh.’
Ursula Farr worked on, encouraging Dolly by gestures and smiles, knowing her well enough not to ask too many questions if she wanted to get the whole story. Niall could have made such a wonderful documentary film of the first meeting between the Partridges and the first Americans.
‘I tried to give a good impression. I used damed-near the whole of the family’s high days and holidays hoard of sugar and dried fruit and made cake and pies.’
‘I’ve got a bit you can have.’
‘Oh, I didn’t mind. It’d be a lie though if I didn’t admit that I felt a bit peeved when I saw my only tin of peaches disappearing as though they weren’t a treat, and the sandwiches with my only put-by tin of red salmon. I never expected them to eat so much. Poor little Bonnie, I had to rescue her a few slices for later. But I kept thinking to myself about Charlie always getting invited into people’s homes in Canada – it’s the least we can do.’
In spite of the quick despatch of the salmon sandwiches, Dolly had felt pleased with her first try-out of having strangers to tea. The only time Bonnie had ever seen such a spread was at Christmas. ‘Because it’s there, doesn’t mean you can take it all,’ Marie warned beforehand. ‘Don’t go mad: choose cake or fruit, but not both.’
The four soldiers seemed to have about them an air of explosive vitality that was meat-fed and sugared. At first there was a polite awkwardness when Sam was effusive in his welcome and Dolly, Marie and Paula showed excessive politeness.
The young men had been made freshly aware by their sergeant of their delicate situation as a visiting army ‘…not invading, not conquering… but a visiting army.
‘The British have been at war for some time: it didn’t start for them at Pearl Harbor. You might not like it, but some of them think we should have come in before we did. These people are short of things like sugar, so their food might be kinda unappetizing, but you eat the goddam lot and enjoy it.
‘An’ you wanna take a good look at the section on Language. Bum’s a butt, and a rubber’s an eraser – they call rubbers johnnies – and don’t nobody ask me why. And carry the goddam things. Don’t talk about’m, don’t even think of need’n them, keep off the women. I’ll have the goddam balls off any sonofabitch touches local ass.’
The soldiers had enough to think about in their capacity as ambassadors to worry about the correct terms for a rubber. They worked at not being unmannerly by refusing the food, consequently they accepted generously of everything and, to their surprise, found it not half bad and not so different from what their own mothers might have made. They kept saying how real good it all was and refilled their plates.
‘I don’t reckon that camp feeds them properly,’ Dolly said later.
Strangers from abroad, coming like that, made it one of the most important occasions in the Partridge family’s history, and in the neighbourhood generally. Many of their neighbours went by, glancing or craning to see if it was true that there were Yankee soldiers at Number 24. Marie, Paula and Dolly had dressed themselves up, and as they both had a bit of money to spend on themselves these days, had had hair-dos – Paula’s brown riot of curls showing through the mesh of a red snood and Marie’s silken fairness tied in a large velvet bow.
Neither of them had seen their husbands for a long time, for both Charlie and Robbo were now in Africa – Charlie in the north, and Robbo in the east. The Americans, ambassadors for their country and especially for their own states, tried to keep lechery from their eyes, but Paula, whose legs went right up and didn’t stop till they reached her neat little ass, moved like a chorus girl, and Marie was as curvaceous as a movie queen – it was not easy for the young men when they discovered that an old English park-keeper had such unexpected women in his family.
Sam, who seldom talked about his war, soon found himself with an audience who were keen to hear about it. They called him Sir.
Dolly, enjoying having sweet-smelling young men round her table again, wondered at the craziness that sent Charlie and Robbo to Africa and Harry to train in God-knew-what secret place, and replaced them with boys taken from their own mothers in faraway places with names like Talahassie or Mobile.
Over the food, the formality began to ease. Fascinated at Sam doing his one-handed roll-up after tea, the ice was finally broken by a square young man called Studely but known as Studs.
‘Say man,’ said Studs. ‘Ah never seen that one-hand roll done outside a movie. Could you teach me? Say, Ah hope Ah’m not out of turn, Sir, but would you care to smoke a Camel?’
Bonnie giggled, and kept giggling until first Marie and then Paula was set off.
Sam hung the dartboard on the yard wall, and in two teams they played until the sun went down, when the Yanks left, having thanked Dolly profusely with renewed praises for her baking, left Sam with an entire carton of Camels, Bonnie with a box of wide-eyed candy-bars, and Miz Paula and Miz Ma-ree an invitation from their Commanding Officer to a camp dance.