The WAAF who married a Yank

This story is taken from an interview with Miss Lil Davis, and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interviewer was David Reid, and the transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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There were Americans [in Belfast]. Because I was in a flat where before I went to the house in Marston Gardens, and I had a friend and she had a little … her uncle’s and aunts were friends of mine in Dublin years ago. But she came and she joined the WAAFs, or whatever you call them. And she went to a dance, and she met an American. And her mother was forever writing to me, won’t I look after Nancy-Ann, won’t I be good to Nancy and all the rest of it. When I left I said to leave I’d be good for her. Anyway, she said she’d bring this boyfriend for me to see. Which I said, thanks be to god, that’s not too bad if she’s bringing him for me to see I’ll have some idea. Not that I know perfectly well whether I liked him or didn’t like him it wouldn’t have made any odds. I had enough sense, but her mother couldn’t see that. If I liked him it was going to be all right. But anyway, dear, they eventually got married and she couldn’t have picked a better man. He would have been about 8 or 10 yrs older than her, but I remember when he came in through the door first in his American uniform. I took one look at him, and I said “You have Indian blood in you”. Just one look, straight away, and I knew he had Indian blood in him. Now, I … some of them had long features and high cheekbones. There are so many of them that faces of them. People don’t realise that when they talk about the Indians they think that there are so many tribes of them. Then there’s one particular set of them, and the faces are a little bit square and not so high.
But anyway, him and I got off great. And he treated me as if I was his cousin or his sister. And he talked about the various things that had happened. He was reared on a farm, and he was an only child. He had no brothers or sisters, but he had cousins living nearby. But his mother used to write to him every night, and she would write “Friday night” N-I-T-E. you know? And she would tell him all that was happening, and he would tell me. And it was what was going on at home, about the hay and the crops, and corn and the potatoes and different vegetables and all there is. And then he got so tired with telling me, he would have 2 days off maybe this fortnight, and maybe it would be 2 nights the next, and maybe that sort of thing. And they had a flat not far down the road from me. But my house was a meeting house, you see? If he got to the flat and she wasn’t there, he upped to my flat because he knew she’d be with me. But anyway, this particularly … they are there as all fire, and letters. He got tired of telling me all that was in the letters. “You can read it all now”. So this is how I know so much all about them.
But anyway, they eventually went back together. First they went back to England, and they were honeymooned for a year, and their first baby was born in England. And then they went back to Ohio. They went back to America and disbanded, you see? And he went back to the home place, Ohio — Mancefield Ohio. And they, his parents were farming, and he of course would be the one for the farm because there was no other help. But he worked in a drapers shop in mancefield, and he used to come home by bus and go to his work by bus. And he came home, didn’t have time for his dinner, and this particular day he came home for his dinner and poor Nancy had this made Nancy []. And he went out and he stood by the bus stop to get the bus to back to his work, and he dropped dead. Without warning, just like that. So that was the end of him.

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