Wartime Baby

The last post about Bob Cappa's dying soldier meshed today with a conversation with a friend about stateside childhood during World War II. I was born in 1942 just before my father left for his first navy duty protecting convoys crossing the North Atlantic to England. My mother stayed in Providence for a while; her diary shows she visited elderly relatives, worked when she could on books she was writing for T.Y Crowell and took care of me.

The entry for May 6 is shown above, northeast corner of the page. It was written a week before I was born: "More puttering. Eddie LaFarge dropped in to report on Ann. Her baby a beauty indeed. Corregidor falls." She had one eye on the war throughout the pages of this five-year diary, surely because of my father, but also because living alone with a baby is lonely, boring. She had written a biography of Leonardo da Vinci while she was pregnant with me. Before long she had a book contract with her editor and dear friend Liz Riley to write something that would put her fascination with the war to good use. She began writing books about nurses on active duty: Ann Bartlett, Navy Nurse, Nancy Naylor, Army Nurse, and there was Kate Russell, a spy (I read that one last year and it was damn good). She wrote so many of these books during that war that Crowell asked that she choose two noms de plume -- Martha Johnson and Margaret Irwin Simmons.

The war lingered and her worry about my father must have been searing. Several times he called from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to say that he had 24 hours of leave. She raced to New York City, once with me, and would meet him in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central. She told me once that they sat at the bar and drank Martinis, ate dozens of oysters and smooched as I played on the floor by their feet.

I remember being extremely proud of my father in his Navy uniform. He came to Cornwall twice to see us while we were living there with my grandmother. On the evening he left to go back to his ship, I was in my crib by the time she got home from driving him to the train. I remember this so clearly: She was crying. I stood up and wiped her face with my hands. She was wearing an old green quartz and silver ring which my grandmother had given her. I have the ring today, a memory of those days.

War is consuming for families, for the fighter and the ones left behind. Today many resources are brought to bear to help families. Sixty-odd years ago we waited, worried and wept. Thank God my father came back to us and lived to be 85.