LSF Publications: spanking fiction ebooks

When I met my husband in 1949, he was in the army. I first saw him checking the train times at Grand Central Station. I was 21 and he looked like a man of the world straight off the cover of Life magazine. I sidled up to him and pretended to be also checking my train when he spoke.

"Excuse me Ma'am, you don't happen to know where I can get a train to Vicksburg, Louisiana?" he asked me in a wonderful Southern accent.

I blushed not knowing what to say, my sophisticated New York City girl persona deserting me.

"Hey that's kind of cute. I thought all you Yankees had a smart mouth."

I don't remember my reply, but I certainly forgot my shyness and gave him a mouthful. He just laughed and said that was the New Yorkers he knew and loved. Ten minutes later, we were drinking coffee and ten days later, we were engaged.

His name was George Baines. He was a sergeant in the heavy infantry, whatever that was. He called me Lizzie right from the get go. Although I had always been Elizabeth and hated the diminutive Lizzie, coming from him I didn't mind.

Under normal circumstances, I would have gone to meet his folks and we would have had a long engagement. But things did not work out like that. Being in the army, he was always being called away, so in the eight months between meeting him and marrying him we were together less than 30 days, then the Korean War broke out.

I had originally come to New York from Boston to study business and secretarial studies; I guess I never got around to going back. It was not that I particularly took to big cities, but I had no close family of my own, so there was nothing to go back for. My mother had divorced my father when I was eight and I had stayed with dad and I had all but lost touch with her. I had gone to live with a great aunt when the Second World War began as my father had been called up. Even then, my mother showed no interest. So when he did not come back from somewhere called Sainte-Mère-Église in France I was pretty much on my own.

We had originally planned to spend a long holiday with his folks in Louisiana during the summer of 1950 but the threat of war that June had thrown our plans into disarray.

Having lost my father in the last war, I was devastated by the prospect of another. When George failed to turn up for his leave I telephoned every number I had for him and his friends. After one hysterical tantrum on the phone to, as it turned out, the wrong section at his base, I finally received a call from him.

He was not amused. He said if I was going to be a good Army wife then I had to get used to him going away and not calling for days, or even weeks.