Yanks and Tea & Sympathy

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

I found this in my Dad's writings. He lived with my grandparents in west London (Heston, just north of Hounslow, Middlesex):

A story, which I related for a few years after the war, concerned a lady who lived in Sutton Square and an old iron bed frame. This lady, whose husband was fighting overseas, to combat loneliness used to invite American servicemen from their camp in Bushey Park, to have a cup of tea. I believe the phrase was “tea and sympathy”. Now children have very funny degrees of morality. They would think nothing of scrumping fruit from the local orchards, which really was a form of theft, but they would find infidelity something that was abhorrent. Such was the case with a group of my friends who were disgusted with this lady - one of them was her young son whom she had shunted off to stay with one of his aunts, presumably because she felt that she couldn’t cope bringing him up single handed.

Something had to be done about it to show her the error of her ways. The Yanks always arrived by American Army vehicles that they conspicuously parked in front of her house. An obvious target for any one intent on righting the wrong. So the first thing that was always done, and this lasted a few weeks, was to deflate a tyre or two depending on one’s ability to do so without being caught. Regrettably this didn’t appear to put this lady off. She didn’t have to re-inflate their tyres, so why should she worry. A solution to our problem presented itself in the shape of an old bedstead on a local dump. They simply dragged this up as far as her front door, making certain that there were no ‘visitors’ present, and then knocked loudly.

On opening the door she was confronted by a half dozen ‘snotty nose kids’ who shook her to the hilt by saying, “ hello missus, we was finking that as yer had lots of Yanks to stay, you might want an another bed”!

Whatever happened to this lady I just can’t remember, and whether my friend’s father came home safely from the wars, I’ll never know. In fact I just can’t remember his name, or to be absolutely honest, whether it really true or not, but it is quite likely that it is.

Bushey Park is a Royal Park of which the extreme corner is across the road from Hampton Court Palace. Yours Truly was born across the road from the park. By 1944 it was a major US encampment and HQ.