The GI Bride

by Simantel, Iris Jones

  On many occasions, I tried to entice him into having sex with me. I would try to emulate the seductive poses I’d seen in magazines and movies, wear sexy nightwear and such, but he simply wasn’t interested. I often cried myself to sleep. I discovered after I’d lived with him for a while that he had a strong dislike of women: he seemed to have no respect for them and often said demeaning things about them. I’m sure his beliefs and behaviour had something to do with his childhood and upbringing: I knew he had no respect for his mother but, then, he had even less for his father.

  On a couple of occasions, we went to Peoria, Illinois, to visit Palmer’s parents. The fun part, especially for Wayne, was travelling on the Peoria Rocket, which had run from Chicago to Peoria for many years. Palmer would book us into a private carriage, which made it even more of an adventure. It wasn’t a long journey, but there was enough time to have a meal on board, which seemed a luxury to me. Peoria, though, was dreary, at least where the Palmers lived in their converted attic apartment. Mrs Palmer made a special tomato soup every time we visited; apparently, it was one of her son’s favourites and she made it with milk. I tried to duplicate the recipe several times but each time it curdled; I was sure there was a secret ingredient that she hadn’t divulged. We ate most other meals out, usually at my father-in-law’s local tavern, which stank of stale smoke and spilled beer.

  One Peoria visit stays with me. I had to confide in my mother-in-law that I was terribly constipated and asked if she had any medicine I could take for it. I don’t remember if she did, but later that day, as we were all sitting around the table playing a game, she brought up the subject of constipation. ‘If you don’t get relief,’ she said to me, ‘for goodness’ sake, don’t do anything drastic.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, already embarrassed at having my problem discussed in front of the men.

  ‘Well,’ she proceeded, ‘someone we knew years ago had a terrible problem with constipation. He got so desperate that he dug around down in there with a rusty nail file. He got blood poisoning and died.’ I had to excuse myself and only just made it to the bathroom before I threw up. These people are weird, I thought. Did she really think I might be stupid enough to resort to such bizarre methods to relieve myself?

  We had some good times living at 431 North Central Avenue, even though Palmer was already creating problems with his drinking. I believe the support system within the apartment building kept us going for as long as we did.

  While we were living there, I made a concerted effort to gain favour with my in-laws by inviting them and a few more of Palmer’s relatives for Christmas dinner. Seven came, including a couple of aunts and cousins. With my own family and friends, we had about eighteen in all, including small children. With an additional borrowed dining table, we managed to squeeze in to eat together and, from what I could tell, a good time was had by all. I had spent days preparing food and presented an impressive feast, but on Christmas Day, as I cooked the turkey and brought the meal together, I began to feel very ill. How I got through it I don’t know, but it was a great relief when some of the guests offered to help with the clearing up. By the time everyone left that night, I was dizzy and had a splitting headache. I took my temperature and discovered I had a dangerously high fever. Then I must have fainted. The next thing I knew, I was in the hospital with pneumonia. No wonder I’d felt so ill. Almost everyone who had been at our Christmas dinner sent thank-you cards and said what a wonderful day it had been; we heard nothing from Palmer’s parents.

  I couldn’t believe it when they arrived unannounced at our apartment while we were having our traditional Saturday-night hot dogs and beans with the Nicholsons. We invited them to join us, cooked more hot dogs and beans and opened another tin of date bread. Seemingly, the meal went well and we had pleasant conversation, but we later learned that our uninvited guests had badmouthed me to anyone who would listen, telling everyone that they had travelled all that way from Peoria only to be fed ‘lousy hot dogs’. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I heard that. I was livid. Did Palmer come to my defence? Never.

  ‘Did they think I could pull a special meal out of the air for them?’ I asked Palmer (I might have said something other than ‘out of the air’). He had no answer, just shrugged his shoulders dismissively.

  One of the many interesting things that happened during our time on Central Avenue began with an evening stroll that took me past the Central Plaza Hotel. A small knot of people was standing outside, chatting on the sidewalk. As I passed them, I thought I recognized one of the men in the group. I couldn’t remember where I had seen him before until several minutes later. When I was about a block away, it came to me. He was Thomas Cronin, a hot item in the press and on television in 1960. He had been butler to Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones and had recently left their employ to write a tell-all book about life with the couple. He was presently on a tour of America’s television talk shows. I turned around and went back.

  When I got to the hotel, he was standing alone so I decided to speak to him. ‘Excuse me, sir, my name is Iris Palmer. Aren’t you Thomas Cronin?’

  ‘Yes, madam, I am indeed,’ he replied, in a posh British accent.

  ‘I’m from London,’ I told him, ‘and I’ve been following your story in the magazines and newspapers. It’s all very interesting and exciting.’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ he said. ‘I’m just enjoying a little break.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I hope I haven’t offended. I always like to talk to anyone from home,’ I blabbered. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude on your privacy.’

  ‘You haven’t intruded in the least. I’m glad to talk to someone normal for a change, without cameras flashing in my face.’ We both laughed.

  ‘Well, my husband and I live just along the road, and if you should get fed up with all the fuss and want a quiet cup of tea, you’d be very welcome,’ I told him, and gave him our phone number and address.

  The following day, quite by chance, Palmer met the same man in the hotel bar where he often stopped on the way home from work. After some conversation, Cronin realized that he had already met this new acquaintance’s wife. Surprised by the coincidence, Palmer invited him to have dinner with us.

  I was a wreck about serving dinner to someone who had been a royal butler. I was even nervous about serving him tea, which never happened anyway since he preferred very expensive Scotch. Over the next two weeks, we ended up spending a lot of time with Thomas Cronin and I came to realize he was nothing but an opportunist and mooch. I remember thinking, as I waited on him hand and foot one evening, how ludicrous it was that I should be serving someone who had never been anything but a servant himself. Palmer and his cronies even took him to a strip show, which was something the man had never before experienced. In all the time he was around, he never offered to pay for anything or even bring a bottle of wine to dinner. The only redeeming feature of his visit was the stories he told about working for royalty and other prominent figures.

  He said he had worked a five-year term for the American ambassador to the United Kingdom, and, of course, he had worked for Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones. At the time, there had been much speculation about the princess and her husband’s relationship.

  ‘Did Armstrong-Jones have much say in things? Did he wear the pants in the family?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t use such an expression,’ he huffed, ‘but I will say that, unfortunately, not only did Mr Armstrong-Jones want to be the master of the household, he also wanted to be the mistress. You must understand that I was very protective of Princess Margaret and her royal standing, especially in view of her fondness for drink. I often clashed w
ith Mr Armstrong-Jones over household decisions to the point that I felt it best to seek alternative employment.’

  Aha, I thought. Perhaps all the rumours about that particular royal marriage were true.

  Of course, when the press got wind of Cronin’s sudden departure from Kensington Palace, they jumped on him to get the inside scoop. Apparently they’d made him an offer he could not refuse. Now, having betrayed the royal family’s trust, he could probably never work as a butler in Britain again. I believe that after he finished his tour of America Thomas Cronin went to work as a maître d’ at one of the big Jai Alai hotel casinos in Florida, and that was the last anyone ever heard of him. While I was checking the accuracy and dates in this part of my story, I learned two things: first, he had been in the employ of Princess Margaret for just one month, and second, he was purported to be a spy.

  On 20 February 2000, the Mail on Sunday published an article written by Jason Lewis, an investigative editor. The headline reads:

  THE KGB’S SPY AT THE PALACE: Soviet intelligence files reveal the extraordinary story of how Princess Margaret’s butler and top author Derek Tangye sold secrets to Moscow.

  The article in part reads:

  The Soviet Union spied on the British Royal Family during the height of the Cold War and even succeeded in getting an agent employed as Princess Margaret’s butler, the Mail on Sunday can reveal.

  Today we unmask Thomas Cronin – code name Rab – as the key agent in an audacious plan that led to the Royals’ most intimate secrets being sent to spymasters in Russia.

  Highly classified files in Moscow reveal how Cronin, who also served a five-year stint as butler to the American Ambassador, was just one of a number of Soviet spies given the mission of infiltrating London high society.

  Wow, what a surprise. There we were, unsuspecting and naive, thinking it was a bit of a privilege meeting a royal butler when all the time we’d been entertaining a spy!

  Meeting Cronin had been the hot topic of conversation at my next meeting with all my GI bride friends; I wonder what they would have thought if we’d known about this side of the infamous butler, and the threat to our royal family!

  14: The TBPA and Convention Capers

  By this time, as well as belonging to the Daughters of the British Empire (DBE), I had discovered another organization for British women. I’m not sure if my parents heard about it first or if I learned of it from my friend Bobby McCarthy. The Transatlantic Brides and Parents Association (TBPA) was founded to provide GI brides in America and their parents in Britain with a meeting ground for mutual fellowship and support. I knew how much it meant to me to have other girls like myself to talk to but it had never occurred to me that perhaps the parents we had left behind might need the same kind of support. I thought it was wonderful that someone had thought to include them. I later learned that the parents had started the club. The added bonus of belonging to the TBPA was that, because of the large number of members, they could organize and offer charter flights between the two countries. With commercial airfares being out of reach for most of us, the cut-rate charters were a boon.

  The girls I met in this new club were, for the most part, younger than those in the DBE. Members of the DBE were almost all war brides, but those of us in the TBPA had married servicemen after the war had ended. We seemed to have more in common, especially since most of us had younger children. Our meetings were always great fun: we’d chatter and laugh over tea, cucumber sandwiches and homemade cakes and biscuits, all the things our American counterparts didn’t understand.

  ‘Cucumber sandwiches?’ one American woman said. ‘With no meat? It sounds dreadful.’ And I’ll never forget the reactions when I mentioned such delicacies as fish paste, bread and dripping, and toad-in-the-hole.

  ‘I always thought you English were weird, but that is just plain disgusting,’ our friend Cindy said, when my sister-in-law, Brenda, and I were talking about the food we missed.

  ‘Well, do you want a list of all the things we think are weird over here?’ said Brenda. We were always laughing about such things, and we could never have had such laughs without other English girls to share those things with. So many conversations began, ‘Do you remember this or that?’ We bonded through our mutual reminiscences. Without those shared joys and sorrows, I’m sure many of us would have found life in America far more difficult, especially if they’d had the misfortune to acquire in-laws like the two sets I’d had. Most of us missed our families, and many British girls I met had never been home for a visit; a very few didn’t want to go, but others yearned for the opportunity. I used to watch a TV programme called Queen for a Day in which if your hard-luck story was that week’s winner, you wore a crown, received a bounty of gifts and had your wish come true. My wish would always have been the same: an all-expenses-paid trip home to visit my family or to bring them to me. The longest I ever went without going home was seven years. I was frightened I might never see my family again.

  One thing I believe we all agreed on was how lonely and isolated we felt when we had given birth to our children and didn’t have family, especially our mums, with us to offer support and share the joy. Until I met all those other GI brides, most of whom were in the same or similar situations to my own, I had often felt sorry for myself about the conditions I had married into. All of us had had dreams that were shattered by reality. I felt foolish when I heard some of their stories, and wondered at their ability to laugh about them.

  ‘You think you married into a bad situation, Iris,’ said my dear friend Shirley Ashburn, who had arrived in America just a few months after I had in 1955. She continued, ‘After Wayne [her husband] was processed out of the army in New York, we bought a used car and drove it to Tennessee, which was where we’d be living. On the way, he said he’d forgotten to tell me that the house had no indoor plumbing. Well, that was a bit of a shock. His parents did get plumbing fairly soon after that, but while I was there, I had to go to a neighbour’s well to fetch water. It was down by the river, and because I was scared of all the creepy-crawlies I’d heard about, I’d run all the way back. By the time I’d get there, most of the water’d be gone out of the bucket. They must’ve thought I was crazy, but Wayne had told me all about the poisonous snakes. They had rattlers, water moccasins, copperheads, the lot. I wasn’t taking any chances,’ she said. She deserves a medal, I thought. I bet she was glad when they moved to Illinois!

  Another friend, June Hegedus, told me she’d been so unhappy in America that her husband had rejoined the air force in the hope of being stationed back in the UK. She said they’d had two other postings, one in the US and one in France, before finally getting to the UK.

  Yet another GI bride friend, June Gradley Armstrong, said it had been seven or more years before she’d made the trip home. She told me that if she had gone during the first few years, she wasn’t sure she would have returned to America. That she couldn’t go back forced her to adjust and settle into American life. June’s mother and mine had been neighbours in England, and June and I were old friends from the South Oxhey council estate.

  There were so many stories like that and it certainly put mine into perspective. I felt especially sorry for the unsuspecting girls who had married African Americans. They wouldn’t have had a clue what lay ahead. Thankfully, things are different now, but back then, a white girl married to a black man was ostracized by the black and white populations alike; they would have been labelled white trash. I can’t imagine what they went through. I wondered what, if any, support they had received, and was relatively sure they wouldn’t have had anything like the TBPA or DBE to turn to. I considered myself fortunate to have such a valuable sup
port system. In addition, if it hadn’t been for the TBPA, I’m sure my parents could not have afforded to visit me in the States, or I to visit them.

  The person who began organizing charter flights for us in Chicago was a Scot, George Hudson. We also had him to thank for starting up a business importing British food products. We used to flock to his little shop when we learned he’d had a new shipment of goodies. The prices were high because of shipping charges, but we all thought we deserved a little splurge after giving up so much for so long. At last we had real British tea, Irish sausages, lean back bacon, Cadbury’s chocolate and Marmite. We could even buy a new tea-cosy, and tapes of our favourite British music.

  A Welsh couple opened a fish and chip shop; I believe it was the first ever in Chicago. Again, the prices were a bit steep after all, they’d had to import the deep-fat fryers, not to mention the malt vinegar. As I’d approach their shop, the smell of fried fish and malt vinegar invaded my senses and I’d be salivating before I even got there. I loved that aroma. It had everything to do with memories of home. That smell still has power over me, and if it wasn’t for all the health warnings, I’d probably be eating dinner out of newspaper on a regular basis. I can close my eyes and smell it now.

  The owners did a roaring trade and worked so hard that it ended up wrecking their marriage and, alas, our fish and chip shop closed. We were devastated. Someone else eventually bought the equipment and reopened at a different location, but it was never the same without our Welsh friends.

  I became very involved with the TBPA, and because of my knowledge of the convention business and the connections available to me through Palmer, I was instrumental in bringing one of the first TBPA conventions to Chicago. The organization sent me to Columbus, Ohio, to put in a bid.