Chapter 4. London to Bristol

First night overseas survived!  Something I could write about in the “Red Cross Rover,” a column that The Lamar Daily News, my hometown paper had been publishing since I had joined the Red Cross.  The next day at my persuasion, Mary Kate, Master’s degree in social work and about my age, joined me in journeying by train up to Bristol so I could visit my brother, Dr. Neill McGrath.  Having just received his degree in Internal Medicine, he had been stationed in the Army General Hospital, which was staffed completely with medical personnel from his alma mater, the University of Michigan.  I think it was the 91^st Army General Hospital.

They were beautifully organized and settled in, complete with medical and surgical services and their well-run Red Cross recreation program. 

After a most pleasant day or two we took the evening train back to London, taxied to our old “boarding house,” arriving about bedtime, very hungry.  Eating on the economy was to be avoided if possible because it took food from the mouths of the English.  No food was offered on a commuter train anyway.  But disaster was ahead.

When we opened the blacked out door we learned the shocking news that the boarding house no longer was our home.  The 3 others of our team had been kicked out, bag and OUR baggage and were miles away across London somewhere.  The landlady said she would start trying to get a taxi for us and offered us any food that we could find in the kitchen while we began the long wait for a taxi.  It was a pitch black night: again buzz bombing expected. In the kitchen there were cold boiled Brussels sprouts, some Brussels sprouts soup we might heat up and a small dish of Brussels sprouts salad.  Nothing else.  So we settled on Brussels sprouts.

Finally we heard a car.  It was a new experience to feel our way into a very small back seat of a miniature sedan with only a middle-aged sounding voice for a driver.  We never did see his face!  The tiny slits of the headlights gave so little light it seemed impossible to see the street.  Mary Kate and I gradually moved closer to each other; we went on and on, it seemed for hours.  Soon we picked up each other’s hands, squeezing tighter and tighter.  At one point we sensed rather than saw that we were driving crammed between two inky, blacker than black, walls barely squeezing through a narrow alley.  None of us made a sound. On and on we went.

Mary Kate and I just clung tighter and tighter to each other.  My mind raced to figure out what to do if I really was turned over to the white slave trade, or forced to spy for Germany, all sorts of horrible outcomes. I can’t recall our arrival.  Obviously we arrived safely, somewhere, unloaded and found our baggage and our buddies safe and sound―with blessed light, though low wattage, in a completely blackened out room with its opaque blackout curtains somewhere in London.

Our next stop was Tidworth, a military post south and west of London where we finally joined our hospital personnel and for the first time accompanied the 500 GIs, nurses, and doctors whose names had been drawn to put together the 1000 bed 95^th General Hospital.