GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love Read Online Free Page A

off in all directions. Rae was transfixed. This was worlds away from the boring codes she had been learning, and she couldn’t wait to get her hands on one of the torches.
    Soon he showed each girl to a bench, on which sat a pair of plates to be welded, along with a welding rod. He distributed gloves and safety goggles and showed them how to hook up their torches to the cylinders that stood on little trolleys behind them. ‘All right, you can light your torches now,’ he told them.
    Rae was thrilled when the torch came alive in her hand and she felt the powerful heat of the blue flame. She took her rod and gently touched the flame to it, watching it sizzle and spark and the molten metal drip gently onto the plate below. It was extremely satisfying to see the metal transform under her influence.
    At the end of the eight-week training period all but two of the candidates passed, including Rae, who had proved an excellent welder even with her bad eye. Now came their real test: being sent off to depots around the country to ply their new trade among their male counterparts.
    Rae was sent to a workshop in Mansfield, a town about fifteen miles north of Nottingham, where she was the only female welder. She couldn’t wait to put her training to use, and before long she found her skills were in demand all over the workshop.
    Her first task was to help a corporal with re-bending some springs for a car. Rae warmed the metal with her torch and he teased them back into tightly sprung coils. Next, she was sent to the tin-bashers, who were working on damaged fenders. Again, Rae heated the metal, which was then coaxed into shape much more easily. Then, she was sent to the blacksmith to heat up the metal he was pounding with his hammer. She was soon a popular presence throughout the workshop, and to say thank you, the blacksmith toasted a piece of bread for her on his fire.
    Although she was the only female welder, Rae was not the only woman at the workshop, and she was billeted in a house full of other ATS girls. The house was run by a Scottish sergeant by the name of Helen, and sharing a room with Rae were Irene, a motorcycle despatch rider from Birmingham, and Eileen, a Liverpudlian who worked as the colonel’s chauffeur. Rae flourished in the company of both girls, glad that she was no longer the only tomboy.
    In the ATS, Rae was entitled to a week’s leave every three months, and she generally visited her family in London. On one such trip, she and her sister Mary decided to go out in the West End, but Rae found that London was not quite how she remembered it. ‘You have so many Yanks down here!’ she remarked in horror.
    Living in Mansfield, Rae had only encountered US soldiers occasionally, but with two brothers in the Army she had picked up their prejudice against the GIs. Relations between British and American soldiers were often tense, not least because of the Tommies’ belief that the Yanks were stealing their women. When one GI asked for a pint of beer ‘as fast as the British got out of Dunkirk’, a group of Tommies threw him in the nearest river, shouting, ‘Is that how the Yanks swam at Pearl Harbor?’
    Before Rae had joined the ATS, her brother Bill had told her, ‘I never want to see you in uniform, or dating a Yank.’ She had already gone against his first decree, but she had no intention of breaking the second.
    When Rae and Mary stopped for a drink in a pub, they made sure to choose a table in a quiet corner, where they could talk without being interrupted. But they had not been there long before a couple of GIs sauntered over.
    â€˜Hey, baby,’ said one. ‘Do you want to see my place back home in Florida?’
    He took out a photograph of a palatial beach-front property. Rae could tell immediately that it was a hotel.
    â€˜Oh, lovely,’ she replied. ‘I’ve got one just like that myself!’
    The men were not discouraged, however, and