Petticoat Pilgrims

I am an accidental immigrant. I had no intention of staying here. I thought a year or so in the United States would be an adventure, and I would then return to my former life. I had very little idea of what to expect when I came. Didn’t all Americans ride horses through the vast grasslands of Texas, cruise along Sunset Strip in convertibles with guys called Cookie or live in small but elegant apartments with magnificent views of Manhattan and neighbors who looked like Rock Hudson and Doris Day? I did actually do the Sunset Strip bit (though it was in a white Buick with a Classics professor called Ernie), but none of my misconceptions mattered, because I didn’t have to stay. And by the time I realized that I would be staying, I had become so familiar with my surroundings that I felt right at home.

In the seventies we worked with a Vietnamese family who were seeking asylum. Coming to the United States wasn’t a choice. I don’t know if, like me, they had a sketchy view of this country gleaned from American movies. I felt sad for them as they wrestled with a new language, unfamiliar food and all the baggage of an alien culture, but my biggest concern was that every day they woke up knowing that they could never go home again.

In February The Washington Post ran a wonderful article about another group of immigrants, the 70,000 British war brides who arrived in 1945, some already with children. The British media dubbed them “petticoat pilgrims.” Many were still in their teens and most of them had little idea of the reality of life in America. One service man went to meet his wife in the Norfolk train station. “He was shocked to find her in the baggage room, sitting on the ‘colored’ bench. Segregation was an alien concept to her.” There must have been many cases of culture shock. “Some women found themselves isolated in rural areas, London birds recast as prairie wives in the Dakotas, or married no longer to a dashing soldier but to a trapper living in a backwoods cabin with no running water or electricity.”

There were some sad stories, but the Post article chose to celebrate the happy unions, even as many of the couples are in their seventies and eighties and reaching the end of their lives. The Virginia group featured in the article hold a Guy Fawkes party in November and garden parties in June to celebrate the Queen’s birthday. They still delight in trifle—“the testimony to the English culinary arts involving unset Jell-O and Matterhorns of whipped cream.” One widow mused, “Who would think all this would come out of war?”


I treasure this photo, taken in 1945. Victory parties were held on every street and the mothers raided their cupboards for hoarded scraps of sugar and flour to make “treats for the kiddies.” If you look carefully at this faded photo, you will see a white blob in the middle. That’s my brother, being held by my mother. And who knows, maybe one of those women ladling out food at the front of the photo had a sister or a cousin who was on her way to the States, leaving all that was familiar for the love of an American.