"He Called Me His Girl" ~ Part One

“I feel as if I am walking on the top of the world, I have received two grand letters from you, enough to make a man happy, time and time again.”

This is the love story of an Aberystwyth student, captured in time; extracts from personal letters from family correspondence during World War II, written by airman 1418101 No3 Squadron,  Alfred T Lloyd known as Fred.

Alfred’s rather solemn photo was always on my mother’s dressing table next to a beautiful photographic portrait of my father smoking a pipe when he was about 25.  It always intrigued me that she kept this image of this dashingly handsome, blonde, Anglo-Saxon gentleman next to Dad’s photo; after all, she loved my father dearly, they had a good marriage. Where, when, what and why was there this  emotional pull? Why was my father happy about this?  Dad and her were happy and they had a strong friendship, but of course I only observed this from a child’s perspective.

Image of Fred Lloyd on my mother’s dressing table

 

In 2019, after my mother’s death, I was tasked to look for the essential and other important documents that solicitors request at these stressful times. Tucked away in the bottom of a wardrobe, amongst her everyday clothes, stiletto shoes and not so everyday crocodile skin handbags from the 60s, was a gold and turquoise cardboard Quality Street box; it could have so easily been thrown out. Intrigued, I opened the box to find love letters, photographs, condolence letters from her parents, his parents, aunts and the head of Aberystwyth University Geography Department, together with newspaper clippings about Fred from a United States newspaper, The Tampa Morning Tribune.  What I had stumbled upon was a time capsule linked to this blonde gentleman in the photograph on the dressing table; it swallowed me whole and was to take me along a path I hadn’t anticipated. 

My mother wasn’t secretive about the relationship with Fred, I knew who he was; but when questioned she would just smile and say, ‘I was his girl’.  The box of correspondence including the letters from Fred completed the circle and intrigue of my mother’s story of love and loss; a pain which she had been locked away from the family for 78 years. I am really not sure if members of the family or her friends knew about him or this intense friendship; perhaps she had confided in my sister, with whom she was close to. I was the last od her children to be born with two older siblings.

People say that you only really get to know your parents after their passing. A wake is the time that families and friends share those stories. To me she was just Mum, the carer, provider, highly practical and stoic. My mother was ninety-eight when she passed away, she had outlived many of her friends therefore I didn’t experience this privilege of gathering stories but I had made some audio recordings of her talking about her life during the war on one of my visits.  

I never saw my mother dance or teach; such secrets remained with her until the close of her passing. I always also thought it odd that I grew up in a house void of music, just Radio Four; friend’s houses always had music. Reading these letters revealed a surprising side to my mother; a happy and carefree girl, very conscientious, a hard worker and a poet!   

During the latter months of grief after my mother’s death, I steadily worked through about fifty of Fred’s letters; they were beautifully hand-written with fountain pen and on both sides of tiny sheets of writing paper.  He regales his experiences and is careful to ask her how she was coping with her studies. He describes his life, his hopes and his dreams to her. The most common day he writes on is a Sunday. The early letters from Radnorshire describe the busy working farm; the latter letters were only written when he had a bit of leave between training for flight school.  This intense and profound spotlight during wartime has helped me piece together and realise why my mother was how she was in so many respects.  Not the stoic matriarchal woman I knew.

Let me set the scene. It was 1940, Fred was eighteen and in his second year of studies in Geography and French at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth (Coll).  Rosemary Hall, my mother, was an evacuee undergraduate student from Chelsea Physical Education College, London and living in Borth; she had just turned 19. This is when they met. Fred departed early from the university to join the air force with the dream of wanting to learn to fly. His father had been a community Watchman, logging and tracking the flights and planes over the mountains on the sorties to Dublin.

Rosemary describes Fred as extremely bright; he matriculated with 98% from school; she spoke of him with great love and wistfulness.  He was a humble farmer’s lad from New Radnor; he liked the nightlife of Aberystwyth; his letters are full of memories of Rosemary and him enjoying the popular big band music of the time. They had originally met at a dance at the King’s Hall on Aberystwyth promenade. She told me before her death that she was attracted to him because he was a good dancer. She thought that he had learnt to dance in the village hall in Radnor.  They liked to waltz, foxtrot and quickstep. His latter letters indicate that he wanted to learn the Rumba and Tango so he could dance closer to her. Dancing was the fashion and a way of meeting and getting close to the opposite sex.  I can picture the scene from a Hollywood movie of the time, like Brief Encounter. That frisson of a moment; a precious jewel; the keepsake that he was to take with him when he left Aberystwyth for voluntary active service.

Just like the scenes in movies; the band played; they glanced at each other from across the dance floor; she was swept away – the perfect romance. He had previously already spotted her; she had caught his eye earlier as he explained in a letter:

‘I first saw you from my bedroom window (8 Vulcan St),  you were downstairs walking on the street,  I then saw you from one door of the Kings’ Hall and you were at the other. I remember that look on your face, I can always see it…the way you seemed to walk, impressed a picture on my mind’… I then briefly saw the back of you walking up Great Darkgate Street’…‘I hoped to see you again the week after at the Coll dance…’

Rosemary and the girl students’ of the PE College were under strict control in the Grand Hotel, Borth; she describes of her frustration and discomfort of being shut in to the hotel, in a letter written to Fred who had by then departed from Aberystwyth and was in London. He comforts her by writing back:

 ‘I should think the Grand Hotel does get to seem a bit like a nunnery, it does seem ridiculous that you should be kept under so much…there is always the same trouble in the girl’s hostel in Aber...I really can’t understand them barring you from Coll dances…Have the (University) women got control? They know they don’t have a chance at the dance if the ‘Borth girls’ are allowed in.’

His letters describe the weight of the guilt he felt from leaving his family to tend the farm at Radnor whilst he studied at college; he knew that he was privileged to have such an opportunity:

“I feel ashamed of myself when I come home and see my mother working like a slave after I have been leading a life of comparative idleness in Aber.  I spend most of my time there [in Radnor]  doing manual work – Here I am totally living a different life from yours. You wouldn’t recognise me. I wear rather old clothes smeared with patches of oil and mud, a dilapidated trilby or in the summer, a tatty straw hat.’

He talks of heavy labour, keeping the tractor running and maintaining the vehicles on the farm:

‘Someone has to do the hard dirty work, it makes one thankful for one’s own food and other things…but people pay no thought of the amount of work needed to produce them.’

His early letters describe his modest home life in some detail, his farming life of his early teens:

‘…scything thistles, harvesting oats and breaking in ponies… this is the country I have lived the whole of my life, I can remember of which I know as well as the back of my hand.’ 

He sends her a postcard of the hill that he climbs above Knowle Farm where he wrote his letters to her. He and his younger brother broke in a Welsh cob and would ride the hills during the small windows of free time in the farming calendar:

‘Below me is a flat valley, a mosaic of different coloured fields studied with pieces of woodland. Beyond are the Black Hills more undulating and at a distance I can see the Clee Hills.’

Was Fred aclimatising Rosemary to what their life together would be like if they stayed together? He was aware that she was from the Fylde, Blackpool. She had all the entertainment one could ever want and within easy access. During his university holidays he wrote letters to Rosemary from his walks up on the hills, overlooking Hereford and across to the Malverns. Correspondence was the umbilicalcord to each other. Fred clearly missed his home life, and latterly his country and ‘his girl’. Further letters describe his life, preparing Rosemary for the country life with no sparkly dance halls, Big Bands and bright lights.

Before being transported to his first barracks, he was isolated in Radnorshire to ride out a bout of the measles, like so many locals at that time. This prevented him from seeing Rosemary before being stationed for pre-training and fitness. He wasn’t aware of where he would be transported. They all just had to wait. Due to his illness  he mentions his father giving him lighter duties on the farm with the added bonus of being able to write to her more often:

 ‘I could not read your letter because I was already working driving the tractor. It seemed to burn a hole right through my pocket, I had to start reading whilst driving along, the noise of the machine sank to the background and I felt as if I were riding through the air, so wonderful did your words sound.’

That treasured childhood, nestled in the hills, gave him the experience of seeing the landscape from above. Was this why he also had the desire of wanting to meet Rosemary on that headland, high above Clarach to catch the sunset, watch the sea from the high point, as if in an aircraft? The desire for flying was so strong in him, he writes in one letter from The Knowle, Radnor, before leaving his home pastures:

‘Tomorrow I am entering on a new life, the one which has really been my dream since I saw my first aeroplane.’

Rosemary was an impressionable girl; evacuated from London, she lived with the staff and students at the Grand Hotel at Borth; her room faced the sea. She talked longingly of the spectacular sunsets from her bedroom window, sitting on the roof balcony in her smalls and the walks to the peak of the hill [now the memorial at Upper Borth] where she and Fred had met regularly. It was the rule at the time that male University students could only meet the opposite sex within a certain radius away from campus; there must have been a lot of long walks.

 

Camping near Clarach – the mid way point between Aberystwyth and Borth. Fred on the right

 
Both staff and students were evacuated for the duration of the war; many students were never to see their London college buildings as they spent the whole three years of study in Borth. They arrived and left by train, departing from the wind swept Borth station; a long thin platform overlooked by straw coloured marram grass, looking out on to the vast peat bog. Often this outlook that could be seen from the rear of the Grand Hotel was enveloped in sea fret hugging the bog. Students were transported weekly in an old charabanc to Aberystwyth for special Saturday classes at the Edward Davies Building (now the School of Art) in order to use the university’s Chemistry Department for their anatomy lessons.  Since week-ends were the only time the laboratories were available to them; the Chelsea girls were only allowed to enter from the rear of the building, of course! Intense classes were given in the morning but once endured, they had Saturday afternoon and evening free to look at the shops and have baked beans on toast in the local cafes and watch the RAF trainees march the promenade.

The evacuation of these modern girl’s brought their modern ways to Borth.  I imagine that they turned the local boy’s heads, with their perfectly coiffured hair, seeming highly sophisticated to local eyes, lipstick and nylons and wearing fashionably adapted back seamed stockings drawn with eyeliner all the way up the back of their legs. What a spectacle they must have been; kitted out in their tailored PE divided shorts and blazers; wearing their gowns in winter over their divided skirts; their heavy Lodencloth capes tightly wrapped about their person, protecting them from the horizontal sea winds, as they gaily walked down Borth High Street to attend lectures in the Memorial Hall, or spend their pocket money on ‘the best donuts I have ever tasted’. 

 

Rosemary pictured on the left in her academic gown outside the Grand Hotel

The girls were kept very busy, their physical games and life saving classes were taught around the tides; the only free space that changed rapidly. All their lessons, regardless of weather were outside on the sands when it was low tide, battling the wind.  Each day they drew out the lacrosse and hockey pitches with a cricket stump between their knees. They snatched precious days out on Constitution Hill, Cwm Woods and Clarach Bay; camping with their chums or cycling up the hills to meet by the Memorial. In an early letter before Fred left Aberystwyth, written from Vulcan Street, Fred first describes his love for Rosemary:

 ‘No person has ever occupied my mind so much as you are. I find thoughts of you running through my head all through the day, all combined with wonderful memories of our times together’.

He was clearly smitten.  Waiting in a ‘holding barracks’ in St John’s Wood before being stationed elsewhere in London he wrote and reflected upon his new temporary life, so different to his life in mid-Wales:

‘It is quite different awaking to the shout of the corporals, the buzz of many voices in a long cry, to the low of a cow and the clucking of hens in Radnor.'

Like many others, Fred had a long wait before his transportation and new adventure. He was billeted in London for months, in three different living quarters. His letters explain that he felt quite out of place in the big city; while his peers’ families lived close by and they could drop home for a few hours if they so wished. The inconvenience and great distance from New Radnor was understood as part of the process and the honor to be part of the air force. It gave him time to reflect on what he would be leaving behind – his girl.

 ‘Sitting by the river [Thames] is a nice spot. But it would be so much better if you were here with me; I can feel your presence… I can imagine Cwm Woods just turning into many variegated colours- a sight to feast upon…I am sitting on the train, in the carriage, opposite me, is a picture of Aber, how I do miss it’.

Weeks passed by while the trainees were occupied by parade marching along the London Embankment in order to gain fitness in preparation for pilot training. Fred underwent rigorous psychometric tests; polished buttons, (they tarnish quickly) wrote letters and attended to his duties. It was clear the troops were bored and were rarely allowed out of the barracks. He later wrote that he had been confused by the London underground, but was getting a little bit more acquainted with the city and relished that he was allowed out between 5.30-10pm. None of his squadron had any idea when they would be seconded; they just had to wait and keep fit. The letters are full of desperation for some leave so he could return to see Rosemary and meet up with her before being stationed abroad. The train ride to Wales was just too far to make the journey as the leave was a day or so.

 “I have bought a postcard of the view of Borth, I think of the new view of this earth, from the lofty heights I hope to reach. I see nice fluffy clouds and think of the time when I shall be able to gamble in and out of them.’

He wrote with excitement: ‘Yesterday I had my psychological test, I think I am booked for a bomber.’ 

 

Blog by Alison Pierse 

Images (c.) of Alison Pierse/the Lloyd family