“All through my life,” Norwood Thomas said, “I had this little thought of, ‘what if?’” What if he had been more serious about the beautiful girl he met in London while on leave there during the Second World War? What if he hadn’t lost track of her all those years ago? What if he’d said something different in the letter he wrote asking her to marry him?
He’d had a good life, a wonderful marriage, three kids, a home in Virginia. He was happy with his lot. But still, the 93-year-old sometimes wondered, he told local TV station WTKR: “What if?”
He might still be wondering, if not for the fact that a woman on the other side of the globe was asking herself the exact same thing.
Joyce Morris, an 88-year-old divorcee now living in Australia, also had lingering questions about the handsome paratrooper with the southern drawl she’d met in 1945. What if she’d said yes to marriage? What if she’d moved to the US with him? What might her life have been like? Where might they be now?
The thought came to her a few months ago, while her son was sitting at the computer, Morris told the Virginian-Pilot newspaper. “Can you find people on that thing?,” she asked him. A search for Norwood Thomas, 101st Airborne turned up an old Virginian-Pilot article about a man who went skydiving for his 88th birthday. Morris’s son contacted the reporter, who called Thomas.
“Joyce Durrant?” he said, struggling to place the name. Then he gasped: “Oh, my God.”
Soon after, they were chatting on Skype like teenagers, reminiscing about their whirlwind wartime romance — “You were such a scallywag,” Morris joked; “I did enjoy beauty,” Thomas replied — and lamenting the miles between them. “The only one big problem is, I can’t take you in my arms and give you a squeeze,” Thomas said. “Well, we’ve got to get on that then.”
And they will. Thomas will fly the 10,000 miles from Virginia Beach to Adelaide to hug Morris for the first time since 1945 sometime this week. He expects to be there for Valentine’s Day, according to CBS News. “I’m numb,” Thomas told the Virginian-Pilot. “I have no idea what my emotions are going to be once we meet.”
Some of the funds for the trip were raised by Barbara McDonald, a Navy veteran who started a GoFundMe page for the couple after reading the article about their Skype date back in November. Her campaign brought in about $7,500 (Dh27,550) for Thomas and his son Steve, who cares for him and will accompany him to Australia. Air New Zealand also contributed.
Morris and Thomas met 72 years ago on the banks of the Thames, just months before Thomas was to parachute into Normandy. They spent weekends together, laughing, taking walks, dining at their favourite café. And then it stopped.
Thomas shipped out to France shortly after and wound up moving back to Virginia after the war. He wrote to Morris from there, using the address in Surrey she’d given him. He can still recite it all these years later.
But when Morris received Thomas’s letter asking her to marry him, she was confused. Something he’d written made her think he was already married but wanted to leave his wife for her. “And that was the end of it.” Thomas said, “You broke my heart.”
But it mended. Just after the rejection, Thomas met the woman who would become his wife. They remained married until her death not too long ago. That’s when he began to think about Morris and what might have been.
Morris, meanwhile, had married and moved to Australia. She left the father of her two sons after 37 years. Since then, she also had been wondering.
The pair spoke for almost two hours and were reluctant to end their conversation. “I just wish I could give you a hug and tell you goodnight,” Thomas told her. “But since I can’t, I’ll just say, ‘You take care.’” Morris responded in kind.
“Goodnight,” he told her, “for now.”
Washington Post
