For Meritorious Service...

[Originally published on July 2, 2009 at 2:53 pm]

For My British Grandmother, born on the 4th of July.

And for all who have served.

When my grandmother died, she was just shy of her 102nd birthday.  She was still living on her own in an apartment in Kearny, NJ, where she’d lived since her immigration some eighty years prior.  She’d been born Mabel Wright in Rochdale, England, in 1892, and was the only child of Sophia and Thomas Wright; the latter of whom had died when she was a little girl.  To survive, Sophia cooked suppers for workmen and took in boarders, and this is how Mabel met my grandfather, Harry Chadwick. He’d run away from home when he was thirteen, lived with Sophia and Mabel until he was sixteen when he joined the Lancashire Fusiliers to go and fight the Turks (as the family legend goes). When he came home, he married Mabel, and in the early 1920’s, all three: Harry, Mabel, and mother Sophia, immigrated to America.

There goes an old saying (and a Billy Joel song) that suggests Only the Good Die Young; perhaps this is true, or maybe we just regret the deaths of good folks more than we do the passing of not so good ones.  In the case of my grandmother’s extended life, many years surpassed that of her husband (a truly good man), many years past the death her first born child, many years past the lives of most of her friends and acquaintances, making the adage kind of true.

Nana was not exactly the “nicest” person.  She dominated her home, husband, friends, and family. When she was “wronged” she would tear into the perpetrator with the voracity of a prosecutor using the vernacular of sailors – no one was safe. After she’d settled in America, she sponsored immigrating family members by offering room and board in exchange for near-indentured servitude, if not downright slavish returns. She was cunning, manipulative, self-serving, and sometimes just plain mean. Were it not for my (sainted) mother, who made sure my grandmother had a place at every single holiday table for the entirety of her life, my father’s promise to his dying father: Take care of your mother, may not have been fulfilled.  And yet, with the exception of socio-paths and the likes, most people are not only good or only bad, and in spite of the stress of our family holidays when my grandmother would run us all ragged with her demands, or swindle us – grandkids – out of our weekly allowances by cheating us at cards, or would push my mother to tears (and scotch) with her criticisms, my grandmother was not all bad….

In 1943, at the height of WWII, my grandmother was contacted by an old friend from back home –Betty Nuthall.  Betty Nuthall was, in her own right, an accomplished tennis player who had also immigrated to the U.S. touring and playing in tournaments. Betty had settled for a period of time in Asbury Park, South Jersey, near the ocean, and a distance from Kearny which is across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Betty knowing my grandmother’s proximity to New York had asked my grandmother if she would house some furloughing British sailors who desperately wanted to spend a weekend leave in The City. In spite of becoming an American citizen, my grandmother had never stopped being a patriotic and loyal British subject, and so without hesitation she welcomed the sailors.

As the story goes, what had started with just one or two lads – as my grandmother called them – away for an occasional weekend, began growing in requests, numbers, and longer furloughs. And this is where my grandmother’s determination (the one that in other circumstances caused turmoil) and ingenuity brought her a kind of small celebrity, as well as one of the highest civilian honors bestowed by the Crown.

Kearny is a working-class immigrant town; it always has been, although the Diasporas have changed over the years. At this time in my grandmother’s life, it was a Scots, Irish, English town. As a kid, I remember being stunned the first time I heard a senior citizen with an American accent, my childhood circle of elders had all come from some back home, not from here. And so, as the requests for sheltering Scots, Irish, and English sailors increased, my grandmother began organizing. First, through her church, she gathered groups of families who readily and eagerly opened their homes to the lads. When this reached its peak, my grandmother convinced the mayor to re-open the doors of the local Boys Town – a home for orphaned adolescent boys that had closed when they all went to War. She then talked a few local physicians into providing phone lines and electricity, a baker to donate day-old bread, and then she called for a city-wide donation of white-goods: sheets, pillows, blankets etc.

On Friday nights, she would stand sentry at the entrance of the dormitory to welcome and sign-in her weekend lads. Most were first-timers, but a few would return with news of others whom my grandmother had come to love but would never be back. At the start of their weekend furlough, she would lay down the rules of the house, demand the men’s respect, somehow garner their adoration, and would receive their kisses to her cheeks before they went off carousing across the river. To her lads she was affectionately known as Ma.

One evening at her home, she was visited by a pair of British Intelligence officers. It seemed, in my grandmother’s very midst there hid a German spy, a Scottish boy by the name of Jackie Stewart. He’d been at Boys Town a number of times, and was – in my grandmother’s recollection – one of her favorites.  She was shocked at first to hear this news, and tried to convince the officers that they were wrong, that there must have been a mistake – not her Jackie – no. However, as an American citizen and loyal subject to the Crown, she would – she told the men – do whatever was asked to catch the bloody bugger.

What they asked of my grandmother was quite a lot if you consider the times.  It was a World War. Both my parents, children at the time, recalled pulling down black shades during air-raid drills, huddling in closets as sirens wailed, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and London, and more and more gold stars signaling sacrifice appeared in windows in the homes of the fallen. These were frightening times. And my grandmother was really just an uneducated, immigrant mill-worker who suddenly found herself at the center of a dangerous international espionage episode. The evening of the capture, the officers had arranged to be hiding within the Boys Town dormitory. The simple task they had asked of my grandmother was merely to identify Jackie Stewart when he returned from his visit to The City.  They would be hidden inside with a few British MPs ready to apprehend the traitor.

Some time after midnight, my grandmother sat poised at her desk at the entrance of the building. She knitted and read a detective novel as the men started trickling in.  The ones who came earliest were usually the least tipsy and would often visit with my grandmother, telling her of their girls back home, of their own mothers, fathers, and siblings who they missed just a little more than the smell of fish and chips, the taste of a good lager, and the resounding thwack of cricket bat. But this night, she did not encourage their nostalgic ramblings, this night she hurried them to their bunks and away from the entrance.

My grandmother was relieved when Jackie Stewart arrived alone. It made her job less complicated. It only required that she say in a loud voice It’s you, Jackie Stewart to alert the forces readying down the darkened hallway. And when he entered the foyer, she barked her lines, and in return the spy replied “That it is, Ma! That it is!” As quickly as she could, she sent Jackie on his way, and hurried out the front doors and onto the sidewalk.  There was a scuffle inside, loud voices could be heard from her position where she stood shivering, waiting, and praying, and she watched them wrestle Jackie from the building and into a nearby vehicle.  He had not seen her in the pool of light where she’d stood watching his apprehension.

She was called to Ryker’s Island where Jackie Stewart was being held before his extradition back home – to Scotland – for his trial for treason. My grandmother was chauffeured through the Lincoln Tunnel by the British Secret Service, and escorted to the hearing where she pointed to the shackled Jackie, identifying him to the court – not as the lad she’d once loved, but as the traitor he’d become, both to his country, but more importantly to my grandmother’s heart. And so as they led him away across the tarmac, passing my grandmother he’d beseeched her: “Please, Ma, tell ‘em it ain’t so!” lifting his cuffed wrists to the heavens. Then my grandmother, looking into his boyish eyes, the ones that had once twinkled as he’d spun a roguish tale, spit between his feet and said, “Rot in hell, you traitorous bugger.”

Sometime after the war, my grandmother received a box in the mail.  Inside was a letter from the British government and a small brass pin. At the top of the pin is a cross sitting on a round disc with a gold lion centered in blue and surrounded by the words For Meritorious Service.

I had never seen this medal until it appeared pinned to the dress my grandmother wore as she lay in her casket. I had heard the story, admittedly, more often than I’d cared to making most family holidays unbearable. Perhaps, I’d never actually believed the story till I saw the pin. I’d never believed that a woman so mostly mean could actually have done something so unbelievably good, but she had. And it was then that I realized that there was something else in my grandmother more complex than just good or bad – my grandmother was courageous. It took courage to cross an ocean and begin a life, it took courage to first open one home and then a whole town to a group of her fellow countrymen, and it certainly took courage to catch a spy.

The medal was to be buried with her. Perhaps as it should have been, maybe she would have preferred that so she could show it off when she got to hell or to heaven (who am I to guess). I thought about just taking it in some small rebelliousness that rose in me, but before we closed the lid to her coffin, I asked my father if I could have it.

At the church, as the organ began the closing hymn of the memorial service, the opening riffs to God Save the Queen, I smoothed a finger over the medal now in my pocket, tracing the raised lion’s mane at the center, and then, like Braille, I spelled out the words circling around the edges. As he sang his homeland’s national anthem, tears began in my father’s eyes, inspiring my own. I found myself considering not whether this particular life was lived good or bad, or whether any life could be considered wholly one or the other, but instead how during a lifetime there are many ways to act, many choices to make, and that for one patriotic moment of this one small life, a kind of courage was mustered and given in Meritorious Service.

God Bless America.