Bride of the War
Описание книги
With a warm, genuine voice, Provenzano draws you into her life in war-torn Liverpool, filled with air raids and blackouts, backyard shelters, incendiary bombs on parachutes, food rations and grade-school gas masks.<br><br>She marries an Italian-American GI at the age of 17, and brings us across the choppy Atlantic in a converted cattle ship, heading for post-war America, train rides, headlines in newspapers and sudden deaths. Longing for mother England and friends back home, she paints a picture of her own headstrong children, journeys back home and abroad, and unexpected twists of fate.<br><br>A unique blend of eyewitness history, nostalgia and the joy and pain of American immigrant family life, this lively, illustrated story reminds us of the 'Greatest Generation' and their hard-earned independence. With heart and a British "Scouser" sense of humor, Provenzano will bring a tear to your eye, and a smile to your face.
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The city of Liverpool sits on the river Mersey in northern England and was once one of the busiest shipping ports in the world. Slaves were brought in from Africa and sold at the docks there over 200 years ago, and there are still chains attached to the walls; a sad reminder of man’s inhumanity to man. Many of the slaves were sent to America to pick cotton, which was then sent back to Liverpool for processing in the cotton mills. Ships returned to America, delivering guns and cannons. It’s home to many Irish immigrants from across the Irish Sea, just a three-hour ferryboat ride away. It was also a stopping off place for many immigrants from Europe on their way to America; they went there to find work in the many factories, iron foundries and the Lancashire cotton mills, hoping to make enough money to finish their journey. Many of them got no further, having families to support, that’s why Liverpool is a melting pot, the same as America; in fact, it was often called “Little America.”
Long before anyone ever heard of the Beatles and eleven years before World War II started, I was born in a Liverpool suburb called Fazakerley. Growing up with two brothers and a sister, we would play outside until it was dark, which was ten o’clock at night in the summer. We would play a game called rounders; it is much like American baseball but with four bases, then home. We used four trees in the street for bases.
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Our upstairs bedrooms were cold. All we had throughout the house was the fire in the living room, no central heating. My sister Margie and I would take the oven shelf out, wrap it in newspaper and put it in the bed to warm our feet. It was hard getting out of that bed in the morning, we went down the stairs real fast, to get in front of the fire, my dear little mum would have it going for us. She called that fire the heart of our home; I didn’t think so when I had to clean out the ashes.
The fire’s most useful function was to dry our clothes; the English weather is so wet and rainy. On wash day the clothes would go into a boiler with a gas jet under it. She would stir the clothes around with a wooden stick, lift them out with the stick, and drop them into cold water in the bathtub next to it. She’d rinse them out by hand, then put them through the mangle, between the rollers. All by hand, my mum would get everything washed, wrung through the mangle, hang them out on the line, then the rain would come down. Everything was brought back in the house and hung around the fire on a clothes rack called a maiden; never ending work for my mum.
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