A Wartime Love Affair

It was a hot, sunny afternoon when I first visited, the heat bouncing off the pavement. Seeking some respite, I turned off the street and through the archway of the fourteenth-century gatehouse, savouring the momentary coolness before emerging into the humid calm of gardens laid out on the site of the former abbey.

Drifting along a path to the right, I soon found a formal garden, my eye drawn to an unusual bench on the far side. Fashioned from curved silver metal, it was positively inviting me to sit on it and caress its smoothness. This thing was made from the wing section of a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber, and it suggests the very sharpest of contrasts: it will have passed through barrages of murderous flak over Nazi Germany, yet now it sits in the tranquil scented air of an English rose garden. We’re in the heart of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, and this is a memorial to those American airmen stationed at the USAF base on the western edge of this pretty market town, and at numerous others across the area. Only the control tower at Rougham survives as a reminder of the former RAF Bury St Edmunds, preserved as a museum. But the airfield’s proximity to the town meant its B-17s would have been a familiar sight, roaring over at rooftop height on their way to and from its runways. Bomber crews lived with the grim juxtaposition of apparent normality with the horror of aerial combat – attending a dance or having a drink in a country pub, then within a few hours running the gauntlet of 88mm guns over occupied Europe. Their home bases were for many a portal to death, and those fragments that remain tend to be very atmospheric places. Eastern England from 1941 onwards must have been extraordinary. Sites were being selected, medieval fields concreted over, aircraft dispersal points and bomb dumps positioned in woodland. Pull up an active online satellite image of East Anglia and it won’t be long before you spot a tell-tale triangle amid the greens and russets of the field system. Wartime aerodromes were most often, though not exclusively, planned with their runways arranged in an extended ‘A’ shape. Even now, as they fade back into the landscape, a surprising number of traces are left, scar tissue from an unimaginably terrifying period in our history, one still – just – within touching distance. I was mulling over all this following the discovery of a small book, first published in 1948, entitled Suffolk Summer, by John T. Appleby. The dust jacket features a lovely painting of Lavenham by Albert Ribbans, and the flyleaf confirms it has been published in accordance with Book Production War Economy Standards. But it was the blurb that won me over:

This is a book about Suffolk – and other parts of England, too – by an American who was stationed here during the latter part of the war. On a ramshackle bicycle he explored the countryside, revelled in its beauty, gloried in its churches, offered friendship and received it, and loved every moment of ‘the happiest summer of his life’.

Here is Suffolk – and England and the English – through American eyes. It is a book of great charm and simplicity, of history, humour and good comradeship. But above all, it is a book of deep sincerity by a true friend of Britain. Not only that. I learned later that this book had a direct link with the rose garden in which I had been sitting. Appleby’s arrival at his base in Lavenham was inauspicious: a classic example of the kind of administrative farce so typical of wartime.

I had an interview with the Personnel Officer, who was stumped by the fact I had been a Celestial Navigation Trainer in the States. The Eighth Air Force had no celestial navigation trainers . . . Furthermore, celestial navigation was not practised by the Eighth Air Force, since its operations were carried out by day and all its navigation was done by the radio aids.

He was eventually assigned to the Director of Training, who greeted him with ill-concealed amazement.

There was obviously nothing for me to do . . . However, I was given a chair and a little table in a corner, and I contrived to keep out of the way as much as possible and to be unobtrusively useful by stoking up the fire, answering the telephone and doing occasional bits of typing.

This uninspiring environment did, however, give him plenty of opportunities to get off the base and out into the countryside he was so keen to explore. Suffolk Summer is a beautifully written tale of what quickly became a love affair between an American serviceman and the country he had been thrust into as a result of war. Appleby had a journalist’s keen eye for detail. Following an English degree from Harvard in 1928, he had gone on to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, helping to make ends meet by working as a jobbing reporter. Back in America, he had joined the staff of the Washington Post, reviewing books for its ‘Post Impressions’ column before joining up. His flair for writing certainly explains Suffolk Summer, but I have been unable to ascertain quite why he was sent over as an air force celestial navigation trainer when there was absolutely no need for one in England at the time. Mind you, both my parents served in the RAF during the Second World War, and Appleby’s experience of wartime administrative eccentricity had a familiar ring to it. When she joined up, my mother was asked what she did for a living. When she said she was a dress maker, the RAF immediately assigned her to a bomb-tractor maintenance team. My father was asked where he would prefer to be stationed given the chance. He opted for Scotland, and was promptly posted to a flying-boat station in Cornwall. Appleby’s first impressions of England were of the usual kind. He was struck by how green everything looked, appalled by some truly execrable food and drink, and awed by the sight of so many medieval buildings, but he is at his warmest when describing his interactions with British people on his long cycle rides into the countryside. Visiting Hadleigh in Suffolk one day, he decided he needed refreshment.

I had tea at a shop in the High Street. A young mother was there with her infant, who was just beginning to warble. Instead of his native wood-notes wild, however, at the sight of me his mother tried to induce him to say ‘Got any gum, chum?’ This led to general laughter and an easy, friendly atmosphere, but it also led me to wonder, not for the first time, if our influence upon the English were wholly to the good.

Occasionally Appleby managed to travel further afield and, on the recommendation of new local friends, went down to Rye. They had assured him the place would be deserted, but he arrived to find every hotel and lodging-house booked up. A sympathetic landlady suggested he try the police station, where the desk sergeant took pity on him and offered him a vacant cell for the night.

He showed me into a big and immaculate cell, visibly scrubbed within an inch of its life, and indicated a cot with two thick mattresses, a heap of blankets and a snow-white pillow. ‘What time would you like to get up in the morning?’ he asked. ‘Shall we say seven?’

Then I settled down for the most comfortable night’s sleep of many months, to be awakened the next morning with a cheery ‘Here’s a nice cup of tea for you, sir.’

Thanking the friendly officers, Appleby added that having experienced the comforts of an English police station, he wouldn’t be so careful about his conduct in the future. ‘I shouldn’t advise that,’ the sergeant said. ‘You’ll find that we make quite a distinction between voluntary and involuntary visitors.’ Appleby’s passion for history looms large in this gentle, affectionately crafted book. But despite its charm, Suffolk Summer is no sugar-coated account, and Appleby does not attempt to gloss over any of the less palatable aspects, particularly the underlying tensions and resentments harboured by some British soldiers and airmen. He puts the root cause down to the vast difference in their respective pay. British privates, he writes, earned 60 cents a day, whereas the Americans were on an overseas rate of 2 dollars. ‘Our food was much better than theirs, our pockets were bulging with cigarettes, candy and chewing gum, and we gave the impression that we had more money than we knew what to do with.’ He also expresses embarrassment about the insularity of the Americans when it came to hospitality. Their British hosts in the town had thrown open the doors of a gracious eighteenth-century assembly room, known as the Athenaeum Club, where servicemen could get tea, sandwiches and cakes, and use a lending library and mending service. They were also made welcome at the canteens of the YMCA, the local study centre and the Salvation Army.

At all of these places I was given a most cordial welcome and made to feel thoroughly at home. Indeed, the reception given American soldiers at British canteens and hostels was in marked and, for an American, humiliating contrast to the attitude displayed by our own Red Cross Clubs to British servicemen, who were barred from our clubs except when they came to the canteen as guests of American soldiers.

Suffolk Summer proved to be hugely popular, and Appleby generously signed his copyright over to St Edmundsbury Borough Council to maintain the rose garden as a memorial to the American service personnel who had been based in the area. Despite this wonderful gesture, he never returned to England to see the garden for himself, but it remains as a poignant reminder of a time when Britons and Americans stood together with genuinely shared values and resolve. After the war, Appleby returned to his home town of Fayetteville, Arkansas, to farm one of his family’s orchards. There, he continued to indulge his love of history, producing several scholarly biographies of twelfth- and thirteenth-century English kings and becoming associate editor of the American Historical Review, a post he held until his death in 1974 at the age of 66.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © Anthony Longden 2026