Romance during the Second World War

Author of Should You Ask Me Marianne Kavanagh explores how the world handled romance in times of strife.

Should You Ask Me is set in rural Dorset just before D-Day in May 1944. The town of Wareham is almost empty of British men – they’re all away fighting. In their place are GIs from the famous US 1st Infantry Division (known as the Big Red One) that would go on to fight on Omaha Beach in the Normandy invasion.

US troops started arriving in Britain in February 1942. By May 1944, there were one and a half million combat and service troops here. Better paid than British soldiers, friendly and easy-going, handing out cigarettes, chocolate and nylons, the GIs dazzled young women starved of male company. ‘Overfed, overpaid, oversexed and over here’ summed up hostile British reaction.

My research for the book led me to Terence Davis’s Wareham’s War, a history of the real-life inhabitants of the town. In Wareham, the GIs were given a warm welcome. Mothers recognised that these were boys a long way from home, and did what they could to make a fuss of them. June Thompson invited Gene back to meet her parents after he’d been working long hours in the army kitchen. When she went to look for him, she found him in the sitting room, asleep under a blanket. ‘Mother had put him on the settee, lit the fire, and he slept the whole afternoon away.’

There’s a sad postscript to this story. June and Gene fell in love, became engaged, and said goodbye when the 1st Division left for France. A few weeks later, Gene was killed in the village of Caumont, a few miles inland from the Normandy beaches.

Novels and songs from the war years were full of the sense that life was precious and fleeting, and that you had to live for today because tomorrow might never come. Weddings were hastily arranged when men were posted overseas. (Babies didn’t always wait for the ceremony – the number of babies born out of wedlock doubled between 1940 and 1945.)

Wartime romance meant constant separation.  British soldiers generally had only seven days’ leave every three months (brought forward if they were about to be sent abroad). Letters were delayed or censored, and very few families had phones. Even the journeys home were hazardous – by January 1940, one in five people had been involved in some kind of blackout-related accident.

Relationships survived on snatched meetings. In Wareham’s War, Terence Davis describes how Wareham sweethearts Vic Lillington, who was in the RAF, and Audrey Frost, who worked at Bletchley Park, could hardly get any time together at all because of their conflicting schedules. ‘He used to spend the night on Rugby station.’ On her twenty-first birthday, because the trains were all delayed, they managed just five minutes at midnight outside the Nottingham YMCA.

Even when couples did get together, reunions could feel awkward and strange. In Juliet Gardiner’s wonderful history of Wartime Britain 1939-45, Ethel Mattison, whose husband Jack was called up in January 1941, went to see him where he was based in Somerset. ‘I was terribly excited, but when I saw him in uniform it was like meeting a stranger.’ John Phillips said in a letter to his wife Peggie, ‘Uniform does something to you…In that hotel room I felt quite shy with you…’

Not all relationships made it through. Some soldiers returned home with physical and mental injuries so severe that they were hardly recognisable to the women who had waved them goodbye. Violent memories constantly replayed in their minds, cutting them off from everyday life. William, the young police constable in my story, can hardly hear what Mary is saying because of flashbacks to his past.

Should You Ask Me is set against the background of wartime romance – flirtation, misunderstandings and constant separation. But it also weaves together two passionate love stories, seventy years apart, which have been buried for a long time.

Mary and William, facing each other in Wareham police station in a town full of US troops just before D-Day, must tell the truth about what they’ve lost. Until they do, life can’t begin again.

Should You Ask Me is out on the 18th May in all good bookshops and online.