Immigrant Read online

  This book is dedicated to my husband,

  Marshall H. Segall,

  with love and appreciation for his support

  during its long gestation,

  and to my children, Edward Bennett Wilson

  and Diane Olivia Block,

  with my love and admiration.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 1932: Yorkshire

  Chapter 2 1933–1940: Spain, Portugal

  Chapter 3 Flight

  Chapter 4 1940: America

  Chapter 5 1941: Savannah

  Chapter 6 1944: Savannah, Hendersonville

  Chapter 7 1945: The Crossing

  Chapter 8 Portugal Redux

  Chapter 9 Mont’Alegre

  Chapter 10 The Confidant

  Chapter 11 School

  Chapter 12 1917: England

  Chapter 13 Bill and Doris

  Chapter 14 Sylvia and Jack

  Chapter 15 Fraulein

  Chapter 16 Goodbye, Portugal

  Chapter 17 1946: England

  Chapter 18 Leyland House: Part One

  Chapter 19 Leyland House: Part Two

  Chapter 20 Bennett

  Chapter 21 Goodbye, England

  Chapter 22 1947: America Redux

  Chapter 23 1947: Winchester

  Chapter 24 1950: High School

  Chapter 25 1951: Richmond

  Chapter 26 The World

  Afterword

  Appendix

  References

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1

  1932: Yorkshire

  Sally, 2 years old

  In my earliest photograph, which precedes memory, I am perhaps two years old, wearing a bonnet with an embroidered ruffle to keep the sun off my face, sitting in a pram looking up at someone. The expression on my face is one my sister says she sees to this day. Is it disapproval? Of what am I disapproving? Am I being pushed too slowly or too fast, or not at all? I recognize it as quick to judge, easily disappointed, impatient. Perhaps many of us, as children, judge our adult caretakers before we have language to express it. Perhaps we seethe with resentment at our helplessness, able only to howl or beat our little spoon against the table. Those of us raised in the 1930s by nannies were subject to a more doctrinaire regimen than any child experiences in today’s permissive environment. It shaped us and, perhaps surprisingly, came to our aid when the going got tough.

  Sally, 2 years old

  I was born in Harrogate, Yorkshire, in 1932, a little more than halfway between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II in Europe, as a consequence of a deliberate but failed attempt by my parents to save their marriage.

  Doris and Bill Bennett

  It was a time of fundamental social change that, like the wars themselves, threw people of different backgrounds and experience together and changed their lives in ways not previously thought possible.

  My mother and father, both solidly English and descended from the various European tribes that ranged over Europe, had grown up close to each other in middle-class families profiting from the industrialism of the 18th and 19th centuries. Both had lost sons to the First World War, which my father, William Deverell Bennett, survived.

  He and my mother, Doris Sylvia Pynegar, were married in 1918 in Catford, Kent. The Pynegars had settled around Heanor in Derbyshire, where most of them worked in the coal mines. Henry Pynegar, my grandfather, married Jane Coulter, also of Heanor, in 1881, and by 1901 they were living near London in Beckenham, Kent, and had produced 12 children. Henry is listed in the 1901 census as an electrical engineer and, besides their children, two relatives lived in the house as servants. By 1901, two of the children had died, one aged five and one less than a year old. My mother, Doris Sylvia, and her twin, Rex, were born in 1891.

  The Bennetts were French Huguenots who fled persecution and settled in Gloucestershire to work in the cloth mills of the l8th century. Some became accomplished indigo dyers. Later, the family was moved to Yorkshire in a “carrier cart” to work for Billy Sheepshanks, who started the cloth industry near Leeds. Billy Sheepshanks was a wellknown and wealthy industrialist who became interested in art. His collection of paintings now hangs in The Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

  As a girl, my paternal grandmother, Annie Lister, was sent to Germany to learn how to use the new machines, which eventually put many of the English workers out of business. The German machines were faster and more efficient, outpacing their slower English counterparts.

  Eventually, both Pynegars and Bennetts moved closer to London for business reasons, and the children grew up together. Two from each family married each other; both marriages ultimately failed. The temperaments of the two families were fundamentally incompatible, according to my mother. She described her brothers, of whom she had seven, as high-spirited, with a keen sense of humor they got from their mother, Jane Coulter. The Bennetts, on the other hand, were quieter and more serious. My mother’s and father’s temperaments represented their families: my mother was a romantic adventurer, whereas my father was a gentle man interested in gardening and books. My brother once asked the rhetorical question: how could those two ever have married? The answer, as trite as it seems, is that they lived next to each other. You marry people you know, especially before travel and long distance communication made other choices possible.

  When I was two, my mother and father divorced and my mother married an American, Jack Cooley Pratt, and took me to live with them, first in Spain and then in Portugal. This loss of my family of origin, especially my father and brother, has remained with me. I understand the immigrant’s seemingly perverse longing for a place called home, a siren song that often precludes creating a happier life in new surroundings. The familiar voices, customs, and landscape set down in infancy seem normal and right. Whatever comes later, after language allows us to shape our world, determines the course of our lives, but our emotions are forever washed in these earliest impressions.

  I have often wondered what I would have become had I stayed with my father and brother in Yorkshire when my mother left to marry Jack Pratt. By her own account, she was not a very maternal woman and might not have suffered from being separated from her infant daughter. I had an English nanny, trained to care for the young, who lived with us. My father bought a large old Georgian house outside Leeds, where he had moved to become one of the directors of the Forgrove Machinery Works, which made candy wrappers. I would have been well cared for and been able to grow up with my older brother, who was sent away to school (like all middle- and upper-class boys of the time) but who lived with his father during the holidays. This has been my dream of a twin life: a life imagined but unlived, lost in infancy.

  This alternative would, of course, have been impossible. It was one thing—unusual as it was—for a wife to leave her husband just because she preferred another man, but quite another to leave behind a baby. So off we went with the American: my mother, me, and my English nanny.

  Jack, an engineer and colleague of my father’s, already had a wife and daughter. His first wife, named Elsa, was Swiss. Together, they had a daughter named Betty. He told my mother he was divorced, but that was wishful thinking on his part when they met. Later, after Jack and my mother married, she must have learned the details of his daughter and his mother, June, who seemed to support his daughter and perhaps his first wife. Betty visited us in Portugal when she was a young girl at least once, as there is photographic evidence of her visit. My mother told me that she had suggested Betty live with us, but this offer was refused by Jack.

  My mother, born in 1891, was already more than 40 years old in 1934 when she left her husband, her son, her family, and her country to marry a stranger and live in Spain.

  CHAPTER 2

>   1933–1940: Spain, Portugal

  Sylvia, Nanny, and Sally, Barcelona c. 1934–5

  After their marriage in London, Jack, Sylvia, Nanny, and I moved to a flat at 198 Calle Majorca in Barcelona.

  Barcelona was the center of Catalonia, an ancient kingdom with its own language, which had been given the right by the central government to use its language and retain certain traditional customs. After the Catalan separatists refused to support the Nationalist Party, headed by the dictator Francisco Franco, these rights were revoked. Catalonia joined the Republicans, and Barcelona was one of the first cities to fall to the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936.

  Living the life of expatriates with American dollars, we had no shortage of food or any luxuries, but the streets of Barcelona were full of the poor, as well as refugees from the Russian revolution. Many former aristocrats were looking for work as maids—or anything that would pay enough to buy food. Barcelona is cold in the winter, and there was little food or fuel. Years later, my mother remembered pregnant women and small children who were starving and freezing on the streets. It is said that Franco particularly hated the Catalonians because of their bitter opposition to him and his regime.

  One day, my mother went out to do an errand or take a walk and saw a man step into the street ahead of her, raise a gun, and shoot another man walking a short distance ahead. Shortly afterwards, in 1935, Jack was relocated by his company from Spain to Portugal.

  Portugal was quieter, less developed, and poorer than Spain. However, Lisbon was an international city, proud of its seafaring and aristocratic history. Estoril, a seaside resort, was a short train ride down the coast. It had a gambling casino and a long beach with soft white sand. Here the monarchs of Europe, both legitimate and deposed, along with the famous and wealthy, entertained themselves during the war.

  The rest of the country had not changed much in centuries. On the roads, donkeys still pulled carts or carried baskets laden with all manner of grain, vegetables, chickens, and household goods.

  Ingersoll-Rand was one of the many European and American companies whose employees lived comfortable lives in countries poorer than their own. Estoril had luxury shops filled with foreign products. The hotels and casino catered to expatriates prior to and during World War II. Portuguese workers supplied their labor, learned to cook their food and care for their children, but otherwise lived separate lives.

  Our family, including my English nanny, moved to a small town not far from Estoril called Paço D’Arcos. We lived in a spacious house surrounded by a park. There were maids and a gardener. My mother, now 44 years old, was pregnant with her third and last child. She had believed she was too old to become pregnant and had not bothered with precautions. This carelessness produced a 10-pound girl she called Janine.

  My earliest memory is of standing in a sunlit hall outside my bedroom, with its bed full of dolls and a verandah overlooking the garden. The day is already hot in the October sunshine. I am four years and eight months old and do not know that in my parent’s bedroom my mother is giving birth. From where I stand, it seems a long way to the open door. Women are moving about in the room. The one in a starched cap and apron leaves the room and closes the door behind her. She pays no attention to me.

  Usually, Nanny gets me up in the morning. After washing and dressing me, we have breakfast together at a little table in my room. This morning, no one is there. Where is Nanny, Mummy, or Daddy?

  Daddy appears and kneels down beside me. I cling to him. His cheek is scratchy, and he smells of tobacco, not soap. “Get dressed,” he tells me. “I am going to take you to Jennifer’s house to play.”

  Jennifer was having breakfast when we arrived: hot milk and porridge, which tasted different from Nanny’s. Jennifer got white sugar to put on it while we always had brown and then Jennifer ate a boiled egg because her Mummy said she needed the vitamins. Jennifer was very thin. I did not want an egg; eggs were for lunch.

  Jennifer’s nurse was Portuguese. She combed and plaited my hair and washed my face while Jennifer ate her egg. I cried when she pulled my hair over my ears instead of behind them. It felt funny. I was lonely and frightened that something had happened to Mummy. Jennifer’s nurse hugged me, saying things in Portuguese, but she smelled strange, not starchy and clean like Nanny or perfumy like Mummy. But soon Jennifer got out her dolls and we started a game and I forgot to be unhappy.

  Daddy did not come for me until after supper. When we got home, we went to see Mummy, who was lying in her big bed, looking sleepy, with a bundle beside her. Nanny was there too. I hugged Nanny and cried a little because I was so glad to see her. Then she took the baby from Mummy’s bed and showed her to me. She was very small with dark hair and eyes and tiny fingers, the size of my doll’s fingers. When she yawned I laughed, and she started to cry and had to be given back.

  When my sister was born, Nanny informed my parents that she would need an under-nanny to wash the baby’s diapers and do other menial chores required for a newborn. This was standard practice in England where being a nanny was a professional job with certain rules, one of which was that, when a second child arrived, Nanny got a helper. This was, of course, news to Jack who knew nothing about the rules of being an English nanny.

  He had hired two maids to cook and do housework. They could wash the diapers along with everything else. Two children to care for did not seem beyond one woman’s ability—mothers did it all the time. But Nanny stood firm and soon was on her way back to England and we were looking for a replacement. This time, Jack hired a German Fraulein, a young woman to teach us German as well as care for us. He admired the Germans for their industrial and cultural superiority. We called her “Fraulein.”

  I have no memory of my first Nanny, who had been my primary caretaker since I was born, and I don’t know whether I liked the young Fraulein. In photographs, she looks kind and pleasant, and my sister and I appear healthily disheveled from play and the sun. I never seemed to smile in photographs, while my sister can’t seem to stop. In one photograph the three of us are dressed in traditional Portuguese dress, worn at that time on feast days or weddings. As she spoke no English, we spoke German together. My memory of that language, like my mother’s marriage to Jack, did not survive the war.

  We were pampered in ways we could not have afforded in England. My bed was covered with the dolls I loved. Once, Daddy took my favorite doll, whose porcelain head had broken, to the doll clinic in Lisbon for repair. For weeks, I waited every day for him to bring her home after work. One day, she was ready. When I opened the box, her head had been replaced by another, making her someone else, not the doll I had loved. I thought she had died and someone else had taken her place. She had been a real person to me and now she was a stranger. I felt very sad and angry.

  Mont'Alegre, Estoril c. 1939

  Shortly after my sister was born, Sylvia and Jack built their own house on a hill above the casino in Estoril. They called it Mont’Alegre, happy mount. Even though Jack said he despised America, that it was a “country of back porches,” his new house had all the latest American conveniences. We had central heating, a large American refrigerator, a large hot water boiler, and two full bathrooms. The good-sized kitchen, with a gas stove, was next to the dining room and large living room, which my mother called the drawing room, and the patio.

  Upstairs there was a master suite with bedroom, dressing room, bathroom, and verandah, as well as three other small bedrooms and a bathroom. My sister and I shared one of the bedrooms, with a small window that looked into the room next to it. This was so Fraulein could see into the room without disturbing us.

  In the mornings, I climbed into bed with my mother while Daddy dressed for work and she had her morning tea. In their large, sunny bedroom, I watched Daddy walk back and forth between his dressing room and the bedroom, partially dressed in his shirt and undershorts. He had joined the American Army during the First World War and been injured during training exercises, spending
most of the war in a hospital. This left an impressive scar on his stomach, which looked like a map, the lines all running toward the center. A map, we learned later, of his personality.

  My parents liked entertaining at home when they were not out dining with friends at the casino. My mother had a long white dress covered with blue butterflies. Can I have it when I grow up? I asked. Behind her was her handsome husband. They were happy. I wanted to be grown up.

  Fraulein, Janine, and Sally. Estoril

  Adelia, Sally, and Eduarda. Estoril

  Besides our family and Fraulein, we had a cook, Eduarda, and Adelia, the housemaid. Eduarda made her own potato chips for serving with “Gin and It”—gin and Italian vermouth—the cocktail of choice. Early in the day, she had stopped the herdsman with his flock of turkeys to feel their breasts and thighs looking for the plumpest. She carried it to the kitchen, asked my mother for a small glass of brandy, which she poured down its throat—to sweeten the meat, she said—before wringing its neck. Then it was plucked and placed in a cool spot to wait for evening. Once, a dog ran off with the turkey. Eduarda gave chase and recovered a portion of the carcass. By this time, it was late in the day: the guests were imminent. Eduarda purchased a second bird somehow, repeated the preparations, and got it into the oven in time to present it at table on time. My mother, so the story goes, only knew of this caper because she spotted half the turkey carcass the next day.

  Jack and Sylvia must have been happy with their new house and their active social life with the other expatriates, living a version of the colonial life away from home, where money went further and there was a supply of cheap labor, sunshine, civilized diversions, and no taxes.

  My mother was certainly happy. She had found the life for her, outside of England in the sun with a man she loved and two of her children. If she missed my brother she never spoke of it. She always dismissed my later questions by saying that he was away in school. Perhaps she thought that leaving him and also the church, an important part of her youth from which as a divorcee she was now excluded, was a bargain struck. Stoicism was a strong value among my mother’s generation— for women as well as men. She did not look back and did not complain, even afterwards, when the happy times were over and she had been abandoned by the man for whom she had left family and country. She always said she would not change anything. I believed her.