A Memoir Across the Atlantic I was born in 1932 in Yorkshire to parents who had survived World War I and had seen England change from an agricultural to an industrial country. A visiting American engineer changed our lives when he asked my mother to leave my father and accompany him to Spain, which she did, taking me with her. When World War II changed Europe forever, my English mother, my sister, and I fled to America, leaving my stepfather behind to work for the OSS and to begin an affair with a Spanish spy whom he later married. The war over, my mother, sister, and I returned first to Europe then back to America, where my mother struggled to put a life together for herself and her two daughters.