I should say here that I am not knock-out beautiful, but I must be sexy. I don’t think of myself as flirtatious, but I guess I suggest, in some mysterious way, availability. At least I have never had trouble attracting men. My third, my Jewish, husband used to call me zaftig, which he defined as having lots of curves and all in the right places.

I didn’t plan my pregnancy with Van. We made love on the back seat of his 1948 Plymouth and, with one exception, always used condoms. The exception, of course, proved the rule, or maybe I should say the fool. A fool is certainly what I felt walking the halls of Batesville High my last semester there pregnant. A fool and ashamed. After we married, Van and I found an apartment in town. Not long after graduation, and six weeks before our baby is to be born, he comes home to report that he has enlisted in the Navy. I could have—I really should have—killed him.

My mother stood by me through the birth of my first son—I seem only able to produce boys— moving into my small apartment for the first month after Donald was born. My father, less than pleased by the embarrassment that having a knocked-up daughter caused him among his pals, pretended the whole thing never happened, and was a no-show until his grandson was three months old. Around that time Van had finished boot camp, and was transferred to Norfolk, Virginia, from where he called to say that he had found an apartment for us, and would send money for Donald and me to meet him there in a month or so.

I took my little son on a Greyhound bus trip up to Norfolk, Virginia, to meet his father. Van was an awkward father at best. When I put Donald in his arms the expression on his face seemed to say, “Where did this come from?” I realised right then that even with the best will in the world it wasn’t going to work out. I was on my own. A girl of eighteen, with an infant child, and no job training of any kind. Meanwhile, Van informs me two weeks later that he is shipping out, to just where he isn’t certain.

Van is not gone two weeks and I wake at four in the morning, needing to throw up. Morning sickness. Pregnant again. I suppose I could have arranged an abortion, though in those days it would have meant a back-alley kitchen-table nightmare. So my second son, Allen, was born. He looked like his father, whom I suppose I was by now looking for some excuse to ditch. Van gave it to me by allowing me to discover that he was seeing another woman—a girl, actually—in Norfolk, the daughter of his chief petty officer.

So there I was, with two small kids, no work, and a husband—soon-to-be ex-husband—on enlisted man’s Navy pay. My only choice was to return home to Batesville, which I did. But life there soon became impossible. I left the children with my mother and returned to Norfolk, hoping to find work. The work I found was bar-tending. The bar was a large place called Jimmy’s that used women bartenders to attract sailors. The pay wasn’t great, but the tips from drunken customers helped a lot: tips from the tipsy, I used to call them.

One of the rules at Jimmy’s was that the help was not allowed to go out with the customers. But I broke it one night when a sailor named Mitchell Hendrix, a regular, finally prevailed on me to let him take me out to dinner. He was tall, slender, with a wide mouth and lips that had a slightly collagen look, long before anyone had ever heard of collagen. He had a mischievous sense of humour, Mitch did.

Mitch was from Bozeman, Montana, where, he told me, his father had been a state senator. His family had a ranch there and lots of land. Mitch was in the Navy because, at the age of twenty, after being caught stealing a car and holding up a garage, a judge in Bozeman gave him the choice of three years in jail or three years in the Navy. “Not much of a choice, really,” is the way he explained it to me that first night at dinner.