Memories of Life and Death in Tidewater Virginia

Memories of Life and Death in Tidewater Virginia

I’m having another night of not being able to get back to sleep. The coyotes serenaded us a while ago, and I am so wide-awake I might as well get up and tell you what is on my mind.

For the last week I have been feverishly boning up on the history of settlements on the Atlantic coast, especially the English settlements of Virginia. I’m preparing to write articles for soon-to-be launched US History for Gather.com. For four years, while my husband was stationed aboard the USS Midway and later at Breezy Point, also in Norfolk, I lived in the Tidewater region not very far from the historic towns of York, Jamestown and Williamsburg. 

When my husband re-enlisted in the Navy in 1948, it took me two months to sell our house in Tampa, learn to drive, and buy a car, before I could move to the Midway’s homeport in Norfolk. When I arrived the ship was out on a cruise, so I had to find a place for us to live by myself. Housing was still hard to find in Navy towns so soon after WWII.  I found a three-bedroom place partitioned off from another apartment in a large old Quonset hut on East Oceanview Avenue. At $70 it seemed expensive for my $200 a month budget, but it was the best I could find on short notice.

As a navy wife with two toddlers, I was left ashore taking care of the mundane things of life while hmy husband was out to sea. During the time we lived in Norfold he was on an extended cruise near Newfoundland and the arctic regions in the Davis Straits. The unitiated sailers were usured into the Blue Nose Society on that trip. If I remember right, it was also on that two year tour of duty that the Midway  did a six-month cruise to the Meditteranean, and ran low on supplies. My husband remembered they ate too much pasta with no salt. I think he made two trips to the Med.

While I was making the move from Tampa, my husband had found a buddy who asked me, via a letter from my husband, to look up his wife Mae. I found her living in two dark and gloomy rooms She was a nice girl from a large Irish family in Boston where she had been mother to her five siblings since their real mother had died when she was twelve. I took to Mae right away, but I could see that she was frightened and depressed. I invited her to live with us, at least for the six months that our husbands aboard the Midway would be at sea, and she accepted. 

We had some jolly times in the two months we lived in the sparsely furnished Quonset hut. One night a group of drunken sailors appeared outside our large undraped front window and tried to coax their way inside. We yelled at them to go away, and then we turned out all the lights to lay low until they left. About an hour later, with our lights were back on, two shore patrolmen knocked on the door to ask if we had seen the culprits. They had stolen lingerie from someone’s clothesline, and the shore patrol was trying to return it to its rightful owner.

Mae and I didn't feel safe at the Quonset hut, and we found beach cottages down the street for a lot less money. We each rented one. The cottages had two tiny bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room so small I could lean far over each way and touch a wall. My little son and daughter liked it because the four rooms were joined so that they could run through the house in a circle on rainy days. 

It was here that bad things began to happen that I still find so disturbing I may not be able to tell you all that happened. It involves the horrible deaths of two small children, a haunting pregnancy, insanity and death. This is not fiction, it all really happened. But these events did include trips to Williamsburg, a town designated by the Gather folks to be a topic for historical articles, and they are part of my personal history. It all happened 60 years ago, but it still haunts me. I’m an old, old lady now, and for the sake of my blood pressure, I think I’d better put off the telling of this part of my tale.