After the Last Dance (38 page)

I have tried to be a stickler for accuracy in the historical sections of this novel. However, for the sake of dramatic licence: although the first V2 rockets were launched at London on 8th September, they didn't fall on Holborn but Chiswick, killing three people, and Epping with no casualties.

 

I don't know if it's because I read Noel Streatfeild's
When the Siren Wailed
at an impressionable age but I've always been fascinated with what life was like for the people of Britain during World War Two. I've devoured countless novels, diaries and non-fiction about the Home Front and imagined that some day I would write a novel set in London during those tense, turbulent times.

Then, a few years ago, I was watching a documentary series,
The Making of Modern Britain
, and saw a five-minute segment on a place called Rainbow Corner. It was a social club run by the American Red Cross which opened at the end of 1942 and was a place where American servicemen could go for a small slice of Americana.

I couldn't believe that in all my reading I'd never heard of Rainbow Corner. For years I'd worked on Orange Street, the other side of Leicester Square from where Rainbow Corner had once stood on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Denman Street. I'd walked past that very spot a hundred times and on Fridays I'd often gone to the New Piccadilly Café on Denman Street for a lunchtime fry-up.

Rainbow Corner sparked something in me. I imagined a teenage girl watching a Pathé newsreel in a cinema far away from London and being just as transfixed by Rainbow Corner as I was some seventy years later. How her whole life would feel as if it were monochrome, drab and dreary until she stepped through the doors of Rainbow Corner and saw the whole world explode with colour, glamour and possibility.

I started plotting a novel about the girl in that cinema desperate to run away to London and began to research Rainbow Corner in earnest.

When America entered the Second World War in 1942 and American servicemen were stationed in Britain, they discovered a country battered by a brutal Nazi bombing campaign, strict food, petrol and clothing rationing and unfriendly natives. ‘Overpaid, oversexed and over here' was how the British described the GIs, as the Americans were known, an abbreviation of ‘Government Issue' because everything from their uniforms to their toilet roll was supplied by the US government.

The American Red Cross were charged with the task of providing their servicemen with a taste of all the things they missed from back home. There were the famous Clubmobiles that welcomed the US troops at the docks and travelled to their bases, even following them to France after the invasion, to serve them coffee and doughnuts.

There were also clubs for American servicemen, mostly in London, and the largest, most legendary one was Rainbow Corner. Originally a famous restaurant called Del Monico's and an adjoining Lyons Corner House, Rainbow Corner was created as a Little America for all those GIs thousands of miles away from home.

I didn't have to make up any of the details about Rainbow Corner in
After the Last Dance
because Rainbow Corner really was that magical place. It had two dining rooms, a snack bar (Dunker's Den) in the basement and, as far as I know, it was the first place in Britain to stock Coca-Cola. They held boxing and wrestling matches, and dances five nights a week where English hostesses like Rose, Sylvia, Maggie and Phyllis would jive with the soldiers. Even the Where Am I? room really existed.

Rainbow Corner was a place where GIs could get their hair cut in the American style, their shoes shined, their cigarette lighters filled. Glenn Miller, Ed Murrow, Fred Astaire and countless other celebrities came to entertain the troops and when it opened on a foggy night in November 1942, they really did throw away the key as a symbolic gesture that for as long as US troops were fighting in Europe, Rainbow Corner would never turn any of them away.

One of my most prized Rainbow Corner finds was a yellowed and musty copy of
Picture Post
magazine from April 1944 with a four-page story on the club, complete with photographs that I pored over. I scoured accounts from the women who worked there. I even tracked down an obscure 1946 film,
I Live on Grosvenor Square
, because the director had recreated the Rainbow Corner basement snack bar on a film set in Welwyn.

My magic a-ha moment was when I discovered that Pathé had put their news archive online. There was a newsreel showing volunteers at Rainbow Corner helping GIs to wrap Christmas presents to be sent back home and a newsreel of the night that Rainbow Corner closed in February 1946.

Hearing Eleanor Roosevelt speak the exact same words that I later transcribed for
After the Last Dance
, seeing the hordes of people standing out on the street as they finally locked those doors struck a chord deep in my heart and I truly understood what a special place Rainbow Corner had been for all the men and women that had visited.

Many months later, when I was writing the chapter where Rainbow Corner closes, I watched the newsreel again. This time, I scoured the footage for Rose, for Mickey Flynn, for Edward, because they'd become as real to me as Rainbow Corner and when I heard Eleanor Roosevelt talk once again about its legacy, tears streamed down my cheeks. And I'm a stony-hearted non-crier.

After Rainbow Corner closed, they put up a plaque at the site in 1949:

THIS
PLAQUE
IS
PLACED
HERE
AS
A
TRIBUTE
TO
ALL
RANKS
OF
THE
UNITED
STATES
SERVICES
WHO
KNEW
THE
ORIGINAL
‘
RAINBOW
CORNER
'.
 

But in 1959 the Del Monico restaurant (and the plaque) was demolished to create a faceless office building.

Now, it's as if it never existed, but I think that the spirit of Rainbow Corner still survives. All of us yearn for somewhere that will never turn us away, that will always be open when we need a haven, a magical place where we can be our best selves.

 

Sarra Manning, London, 2015