(Great-Aunt Nan, Camp Lee, 1944 “Overseas Cap Issued”)

My great-aunt Nan was Grandpa Al's younger sister, born in Reading in 1903. They were the children of Great-Grandpa George's second marriage, to Alice Page of Middlesborough, Yorkshire, who had trained as a nurse, until she had contracted blood poisoning from an infected wound. A formidable lady, given to good works and knitting for charities, she worked tirelessly as a volunteer nurse during World War 1, and when informed of the danger of German invasion during that war had straightaway gone and bought poison, determined to never be taken prisoner, or allow anyone of hers to suffer the same fate. Great Aunt Nan left some typewritten pages recounting those days:"Food in England was very scare, and Mother would send me each morning early to the store for food--- after I had stood for hours, in a long queue, she would come and relieve me only to have the store close in our faces and a sad note from the owner "No More Food Today". The Germans were sinking the fishing fleets very fast, also, so we could not resort to fish. The horse chestnut trees have a beautiful blossom like candles and when the blossoms fall, then a nut forms... these were used for horses, but during the war, they were ground and put to other meals for flour. On Armistice Day, everyone went and crowded the streets for days on end--- I was very sick with the flu (a bad epidemic had hit all over England) but everyone was gone from the house and I crawled out of bed on my hands and knees and down the stairs to the living room to listen to the crowds....I can remember that eggs were so scarce and the doctor ordered them for me so Mother paid something like a dollar and egg and then she could only buy two at a time..."

Great-Grandpa George had been butler and valet in a well to do household. He parlayed a tidy inheritance from an employer into a thriving society catering business, and ownership of five houses and a pub in Reading. The older of his two sons was killed on the Somme, during the war, and Great Grandpa George decided upon immigration, to join his younger son, my Grandpa Al, who had gone first to Canada, and then to Detroit.

The family settled there, while Grandpa Al traveled back and forth from Toledo to Detroit for American Express, and Nan trained to work for Western Union. But after a year of this, Great-Grandpa George fell ill and died suddenly of pneumonia. Nan wrote that her mother seemed very weak, and could not seem to recover from the deaths of a husband and the stepson of whom she had been quite fond. "Al had been to California with a friend on vacation, " she wrote" They drove in a Model T-Ford so we all decided to pack up and come out West. We bought a Hudson Touring car, and Mother, Auntie, Al, Elmer (Al's friend who roomed with us) and I, plus Dad's dog (a bull terrier) and endless belongings, plus a tent, poles, kitchen equipment and clothes all piled in, and we took six weeks to make the trip, camping each night in the tent and making our meals over a wood fire. We came through Yosemite Nat'l Park over the Tioga pass and encountered roads that had waterfalls over them, not at all like the tours of today. We thought California was just right..."

Nan went back to working for Western Union, and lived a fairly uneventful life in Long Beach and Los Angeles, until 1942, when she took the extraordinary step of volunteering for the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps. She was a calmly devout maiden lady, a well educated professional, and was accepted as one of the earliest women recruited for Army service, thus betraying a not entirely unexpected taste for adventure.

I only interviewed her once about her WAAC days, to my sorrow, I did not have a tape recorder on hand, and any notes I took at the time are long gone. From some other sources, I know that the Army was in rather a quandary about training the women's auxiliaries. They picked the first recruits carefully, but seemed to have made up the rest as they went along; some elements in the program really wished, for a variety of reasons ranging from the pragmatic to the patriotic to have the WAACs be a success, others foamed at the mouth at anything to do with servicewomen, and were pleased to expect the worst.

They lived behind barbed wire, great-aunt Nan said, with armed guards all around: unclear if it was to keep the women in, or the brutal and licentious soldiery out. Their uniforms were generated by the Army, unlike the Navy, which contracted with one of the more modish designers for uniforms for their female service. Nan’s uniforms, as revealed in pictures, were not the least modish, or even flattering: khaki long-sleeved shirt and skirt, with a tie tucked into the shirt opening, a sort of kepi hat, and quite ugly shoes. Even their underwear was Army issue, and comprehensively hideous. However, Nan quite enjoyed WAAC service, otherwise. Drill, or "square-bashing" was not an insurmountable challenge, weapons training was just another sort of technology to be mastered. It was all a grand and patriotic adventure. For several years after her tour in the WAACs, she worked for the Army, and was required to keep a side arm in the office and be prepared to use it.

One way and another, the WAAC experiment proved successful, in part because many of the women accepted for training were older, and well-educated professionals in technical and clerical fields. I didn't think to ask about whatever social life she had, but I don't think there was much to be had, and if there was any, great-aunt Nan probably wasn't interested anyway. I used to speculate that she was lesbian, but eventually concluded she was just unenthusiastically hetero. She never married, but seemed to live a quiet, self-contained life, traveling in England and Europe, Africa and the Far East, working here and there, and living in a series of small apartments.

I have some things of hers: a small red-bound book which was intended to be distributed to members of the military as a diary, but which she used as an autograph album, and collected signatures from her basic training and tech school classmates. A dozen pictures of Nan and her friends are tucked into the front. I also have a little silver “Ruptured Duck” pin, given to veterans for service which was hers, and a gold and diamond ring which she gave me the last time I saw her, when Blondie and I were on our way to Greece. It had been Great-Grandma Alice’s’, Nan said, bought for her by Great-Grandpa George on their honeymoon. Her wedding ring and engagement rings were too large for her finger, and Grandpa George bought it for her to wear as a guard ring, to keep the other rings from slipping off. Did I want it? Nan asked diffidently, and I said, oh, sure. I have worn it always on the third finger, right hand, where it saved me a bundle of grief in Greece because that’s where women wear their wedding rings.

The last letter I had from her I delayed answering, because I was about to go on a TDY and I thought I would wait to answer it when I got back, so I would have plenty of amusing things to write to her about. Instead I had a letter from Dad on my return, telling me that Nan was gone. I wrote back, saying that I was terribly sorry I was to have delayed writing to her, but Dad wrote back and said when they cleared away the things in her apartment, my previous letter to her was found… unopened.

She was the one reason the family did not come collectively unglued when I decided to run away and join the Air Force and have adventures myself: everyone knew that Great Aunt Nan had already done that, and been a perfect lady besides.