Early Days in the US - and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Standing at the rails of RMS Sylvania in the pink and grey dawn of Sunday, 8^th October 1962, I was choked with emotion as I caught sight of the Manhattan skyline. The tall buildings reached for the sky while the more mundane waterfront buildings were lost in the murky grey and blending into the background. It was, without doubt, one of the most memorable moments of my life.

            Despite the seeming nearness of the skyline, it took hours before the ship finally docked and hours again before we were finally allowed down the gangplank, having been told to wait in the Customs shed till I was reunited with my trunk, which had been stowed in the hold. Mr Peters, a tall man with thinning hair and a wide grin, was waiting for me. Somehow he got that huge trunk in his car on his own.

            Being a Sunday, Manhattan was comparatively quiet. I say comparatively because, of course, Manhattan is never really quiet. It truly is the city that never sleeps. There is often a pre-dawn lull in the ever-present traffic when the streets are quieter. But in fact, there is a steady hum all the time from the traffic, probably because it is trapped between the tall buildings on either side of the wide streets. Driving through Manhattan on that very first day seemed like we were driving through a canyon. To me though, the most noticeable sight was the steam rising from manholes in the road. Mr Peters told me that these were the ventilation shafts of the subway. In my fanciful dream-like state, the whole seemed like a vision of hell, made even more noticeable with the speed of the cars flashing past us and weaving in and out of the traffic in a lunatic way.

            Soon we were going through the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River to bring us out into New Jersey. As we came out of the tunnel and swung round 360°, Mr Peters told me to look over towards Manhattan. It was the most spectacular view of the city from the New Jersey shoreline over the Hudson River. It was a view I always looked out for, even more spectacular at night when everything was lit up and one I never tired of. Then we were on the New Jersey Turnpike.

            After about an hour’s driving, we were in the leafy suburbs of Princeton, where the

The Peters' comfortable home in Princeton

Peters lived, mainly notable for its University, one of the so-called Ivy-League universities. Soon, we were pulling up outside a typical clapboard house, built on several levels, which I learned later was a split-level house, and I was being ushered through what Mr Peters called ‘The Den’. It was a sort of family room with several easy chairs or sofas, all well-worn but comfy looking, and a TV in the corner. Up a few stairs was the kitchen which, it seemed, was full of people although there were only four of us, including me. Mr Peters introduced me to his wife, a tall angular woman, wearing a wrap-over denim skirt and a pretty flowered blouse, a typical uniform for her. The third person was a man, wearing tennis whites, perched on one of the worktops, who was introduced as a cousin. I was instantly smitten and had a crush on him for the remainder of my time in Princeton. The odd thing is that I can’t remember his name.

            I do remember that he thought it was ‘kinda cute’ that I wanted a cup of tea. Mrs Peters had to rummage in one of the cupboard that lined the wall before she was able to produce a packet of tea bags, unknown to me at that time. Back in England we were still using loose tea. Even odder was their reaction to my wanting milk and sugar in my tea instead of lemon.

            I don’t remember too much else about that first day. I must have been introduced to the children, who were called in from the yard, what we would call a garden, a large expanse of grass with a few shrubs dotted around, where they had been playing. Rick, the eldest, was about eleven, a stock lively-looking boy with very short spiky hair; Jonathan, who was seven, was a quiet-looking boy with a dreamy look about him; and David, who was three, was a typical toddler, sweet-faced and chubby.

My room was next to the den and overlooked the drive and car port. The single bed was covered in a pretty orangey cotton patterned spread that matched the curtains. There was a chest of drawers-cum-dressing table, a wardrobe and a low table on which was, joy of joys, a record player. It was a lovely restful room and I was thrilled with it.

            My room was to become a haven to me over the following months. It sheltered me in many moods, weepy, happy, sad, lonely. That first night, I cried myself to sleep, overcome by the awesome realisation that I was on my own in a strange land, missing Mum and Dad, even my pesky little brother, Mark. I didn’t recognise it at first as homesickness but that was what it was. It was a feeling I was to become familiar with over the next few weeks. I honestly didn’t believe I was going to be able to settle down and more than once wondered about the possibility of going home. This feeling mostly came over me on a night when the children had gone to bed, the Peters were having their own dinner and I was alone in my room listening to music, writing in my diary, or letters home. I could have watched the TV in the Den but in the early days I wasn’t familiar with the American TV schedules. I kept that diary faithfully all the time I was there and afterwards, only getting rid of it when I married. I’ve regretted that so many times.

            Fortunately, during the day, I had much to occupy my time, new things to experience, new sights to see, the children to look after. Mostly that was seeing to the two youngest, Rick, being older didn’t need much looking after, getting all their breakfasts, seeing Rick and Jonny off to school (or at least to the end of the street from where the yellow school bus collected them). The daytime consisted of keeping an eye on David while doing some light household chores, like the children’s rooms, their bathroom, my own room and bathroom, washing and ironing. For the first time, I became aware of a clothes’ dryer and how much easier it made life.

            I often had an hour or so to myself in the afternoons because David still had a nap. Soon after, the two older boys would be home from school and it was all action stations from then on till they went to bed.

A particular bonus to me was the fantastic central heating. Coming from the freezing cold house in Brunswick Avenue, central heating was a revelation. The temperature was set at a constant 75°F which meant that at most I needed to wear a cotton blouse and a denim skirt (a wrapover style like Mrs Peters, one of my first purchases) in the house. The heating didn’t go off at night either; it stayed on at a minimum of 68°F. The thermostat was located in the den, adjacent to my room, and it was one of my jobs to turn the thermostat down before I settled for the night. The constant warmth was, to me, pure bliss.

            Mrs Peters showed me everything I needed to know, that first few days, and took me around the town. It was a pretty town, still with many old buildings, some of which had been incorporated into the University, and it reminded me very much of Cambridge. As it was early October, the students hadn’t started back yet, though would do so in a week or so. She explained that the town would then become much busier. Mr Peters was an investment broker in Manhattan and commuted there daily. Not by car, though, it would have taken too long. Instead, he drove to Princeton Junction, caught the train to somewhere on the New Jersey coast, then crossed the Hudson River by ferry.

          

  I hadn’t been in America very long when I began to pick up, from the TV news and from the Peters’ conversation, that there was some kind of crisis facing the US over Cuba. What I did understand, when I delved a little deeper, was that Cuba had installed Russian-built missiles aimed at the US in general, and Florida in particular, only 80 or so miles away. America, feeling understandably vulnerable, made threatening noises to Cuba, who turned to Russia for back-up. They, in turn, sent some of their fastest ships heading towards Cuba. For about ten days, there was a stand-off between Russia and America, when the threat of a nuclear war was very real. There was much hysteria on American TV and I was frightened, being so far from home. If anything was to happen, I wanted to be home with my family. Impossible, of course, but this, combined with my homesickness, made it a difficult and anxious time. I would have given anything for the measured tones of a BBC news reader reading out the news. Then, just as the situation became more tense, the Russians backed off and the missiles started to be dismantled.

The Cuban Missile Crisis appeared to be over.

Challenging Times!

Taken at the Bolton Evening News in 1962

By early 1962 when I was 23, I was still single, at a time when if you weren’t at least seriously ‘courting’ or engaged to be married, you were considered to be on the shelf.

While I pondered on my seemingly bleak future, changes were taking place at the Bolton Evening News where I’d worked for a couple of years. In our little accounts department, we'd been doing more work and an extra person had been taken on, Lucy*. Her family had gone to live in South Africa a few years previously and with going to school there, she had become indoctrinated with the apartheid ideology. As a child in the Fifties, I'd become used to and accepted the influx of West Indians but her attitude was the first time I’d come across outright racism. I remember one day she came into work, shaking and crying, ‘because a native came and sat next to me on the bus.’

              One of the girls I'd worked with had married and moved away from Bolton with her husband. The vacancy caused by her leaving was filled by Elaine*, Lucy’s sister. Elaine was completely different than her younger sister and although she’d been married for a year or so, they’d returned with her family to England because they weren’t too happy with the apartheid politics of South Africa. She invited me to the family home and there I met her brother, Fred*.

              Older than Elaine or Lucy, he was different again to either of his sisters, small, slightly built, with a gentle quietness of manner. He and I started to go out together, enjoying each other’s company. He loved ballroom dancing and was very good at it. We used to travel to Manchester in his little Austin every Saturday to go to the Tudor Ballroom at Belle Vue. We had to be there was soon as they opened, while there was still room to dance properly. There was a great feeling of freedom in the way we swirled and dipped round the ballroom and we talked more than once about entering competitions.

Belle Vue dancing days!

              Neither the idea nor the romance came to anything for I soon found that poor Fred suffered from depression. Then he’d talk about his time in South Africa and I learned more about the inequalities of the apartheid system from him than I did in the newspapers. I learned too of the fear in which the far-outnumbered whites lived, with high security and guns, and the heavy drinking they indulged in to blot out the unspoken dread in their hearts.

              If I’d still been at the Bolton Evening News working with Elaine, it would have been difficult but by this time, in early 1962, I was working as a shorthand typist for an advertising agency, F John Roe, in St Ann’s Square, Manchester. At first, it seemed as if it would fulfil all my expectations. Even the tedious bus and train journey was exciting, especially when Philip Lowrie, who played Dennis Tanner in the new and innovative serial, ‘Coronation Street’, sometimes caught our train in the morning on his way to Granada Studios. Walking through the streets to and from work with worldly-wise commuters made me feel that I was much more at the heart of things, even if I was only a minor cog in the wheel of advertising.

              I worked for several people in a small typing pool at F John Roe’s and they were all very patient with me for my shorthand was abysmal. I could take it down fairly well, a mixture of shorthand and abbreviated names, but I could never read it back. That never changed. Being used to doing nothing more than invoices at the Evening News, letters were almost beyond me and more ended up in the waste bin than in my out tray.

              I made one very good friend there, Kathy, a down-to-earth girl and although she was younger than me, she took me under her wing. She was also at a loose end and we started to go around together. We solved the problem of me not being able to get home to Horwich from Manchester after a night out by me staying at her house a couple of times a week.

              Manchester, for all that it was a large city, still had that small town feel about it, an intimacy that meant you were often likely to bump into people you knew in one jazz club or another, or come face to face with Dennis Law of Manchester United or Peter Adamson, who played Len Fairclough of ‘Coronation Street’, at a party in Prestwich.

              Yet it was about to change again. Kathy had started going out with the lovely man who was to become her husband so I didn’t stay over in Manchester quite so often. With no boyfriend of my own, I was lonely once more. As was often the case, it was Mum who solved the problem. She still purchased ‘The Lady’ magazine every week in case that superlative job turned up. One day, she spotted an advertisement for an American couple who wanted a ‘Mother’s Helper’ for their three boys in Princeton, New Jersey. I was dubious at first, wondering if I could cope with three boys especially if any were like my young brother Mark. Although I loved him, he was a little terror and one of the few things my parents and I argued about was that they let him get away with so much when they’d been so strict with me. Still, I decided to give it a try and sent a letter off, telling them about myself.

              Letters and photographs flew back and forth across the Atlantic. When the Peters, as the couple were called, offered me the job, sight unseen, I think it was the fact that it rained nearly every day that summer that finally decided me to accept. There were no restrictions then about people going to work in the United States providing you had a job to go to. It was decided that initially it would be for a period of a year, they would pay my fare there and back, but if for some reason I left before, I’d have to pay my own return fare. It was an exciting day when my tickets for the Cunard Line’s ‘Sylvania’ departing from the busy port of Liverpool, arrived.

              With so much to do and a visa to arrange, it seemed as if I was on a roller coaster. The trip to the American Consulate in Liverpool was a nerve-wracking experience. It was awe-inspiring to be faced with armed guards standing stony-faced in the entrance lobby of the Consulate. And the form I’d had to fill in was something else, pages long and virtually wanting to know every detail of my past life and those of my parents. There was even a section on subversive activities, which listed peace organisations. I was glad then that I hadn’t actually joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament during its Aldermaston period although I had been on the fringes for a while. Young people everywhere, having seen pictures of the devastation caused by the two atomic bombs in Japan in 1945, felt threatened by the seemingly endless conflict, known as the Cold War, between the two super powers, the US and the USSR who tried to outdo each other with bigger and more powerful weapons.

              If the armed guards were daunting, being ushered into the Official Presence was worse. She sat, a middle-aged woman, at an enormous desk with the Stars and Stripes flag at her side and a picture of John Kennedy, the new ‘glamour boy’ President on the wall behind her. Peering over her spectacles, she meticulously took me through every aspect of the form I had filled in. She made me feel decidedly uncomfortable as if I’d got something to hide and I squirmed several times. Finally, I walked out with my brand new passport stamped with that precious visa.

              Almost before I knew it, it was 29 September 1962 and time to go. My cabin trunk, purchased second-hand, with my favourite books and records wedged in between clothes that I wouldn’t need until I arrived in Princeton and my suitcase for the journey had both been packed.

              Having to accept whatever date I was given, my departure date had clashed with one of Mum’s periodic day trips that she still organised for the women from the Beehive Mill. She was horrified when she found out, but then she had an inspired thought. She’d juggle the day’s programme a little and divert the coach, so that the whole party, many of whom I knew from my mill days, could wave me off.

              And that is precisely what happened. My last sight of Mum was being

surrounded by many of her friends. Everyone from the coach was waving frantically as the ‘Sylvania’ edged her way down the River Mersey. Though my eyes were blurred with tears, it was a sight to treasure and one I shall never forget.

              Slowly, the gap grew wider and the coach party on the quayside grew smaller so that Mum was no longer distinguishable in the crowd. I stood there, hands clenching the rail, until all I could make out of Liverpool were the twin towers of the Liver Building. Time to face the rest of my life, I decided, and turned away from Liverpool and England.

*Names changed to protect their privacy.