Wartime Romance : The Old Sailor Faded, but His Love Never Did

Love may be blind, but it has a memory that won’t quit.

Consider the story of James Amlin and Diana Hayden.

The two met as teen-agers in the tumult of World War II--he a callow 18-year-old California sailor waiting to join in the Normandy invasion; she a fair-haired Devon lass of 16 summers waiting out the war in southwest Britain.

James and Diana fell in love and spent a few delicious moments daring to dream of a life together. But the war intervened, and James and Diana were separated.

They did not meet again--or exchange letters or telephone calls--for four decades. Each went on with his life, both of them marrying twice, divorcing twice and having families. But neither forgot.

And because they did not forget, they soon will have a day to remember.

Amlin is preparing to return to England, courtesy of a soft-hearted London tabloid, to reunite with his old girlfriend--and maybe, just maybe, rekindle an old flame.

‘Never Forgotten Her’

“I’ve never forgotten her--all these years, I have never forgotten her,” Amlin said after learning that he will be able to return. “And she said she never forgot me.”

The reunion won’t be in time for Valentine’s Day today, but waits only for the State Department to issue Amlin a new passport. It results from a long and unlikely series of events.

Amlin said he decided on impulse a few years ago to try to locate “the only woman I’ve ever really loved.” He was recently divorced, down on his luck and lonely, he said.

He assumed Diana had married, but had no clue about her married name, so he decided to randomly call Devon families named Hayden. Miraculously, one of the families he reached--after two years and hundreds of dollars of transatlantic toll calls--lived next door to a Diana Hayden Young.

She was then 56--the right age--and had spoken of a young American she had known during the war. The neighbor rushed to summon Diana to the phone.

“She was happy as all get-out,” Amlin recalled. “She kept saying, ‘I’ve been thinking about you.’ I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about you too, honey. And I’ve never given up hope of us getting back together.’ ”

Exchanged Letters

Neither could afford to travel, however, so for two years they were content to exchange letters--some approaching 100 pages. An effort to reunite the two on a British television show called “Surprise, Surprise” failed when she learned of the idea--and thus could not be surprised.

That is when the London Star stepped in. The newspaper, a colorful combatant in London’s fierce, sensationalist circulation wars, called Amlin and offered a free round-trip ticket--in exchange for his story.

“We couldn’t resist,” said James Wardlaw, an editor on the Star news desk. “When we heard . . . their story, we knew we had to help.”

It was almost too good to believe, said Amlin, who squeaks by on his modest telephone company pension, living in a tumbledown old trailer at the crowded Royal Oaks Mobile Park, just behind the Longhorn Saloon in Rocklin, about 10 miles northeast of Sacramento.

But whenever he needs to reassure himself, he said, he just looks again at an old photo of Diana coquettishly hiking her skirt a bit to show off her legs.

Fond Memories

“She looks better now than she did then,” he said, smiling with some pain, thanks to facial cuts suffered during a recent assault. “She was only 16 and I was 18 the last time we saw each other; now we’re both grandparents. How time moves on.”

Snippets of time, however, can remain still in memories. He vividly recalls the first time they met at a servicemen’s picnic in the resort town of Torquay in 1944--and the last time they saw each other as he boarded a bus for London in 1945.

What he can’t recall is why they let themselves drift apart.

“Why we fell out of love, I don’t know,” he said with a frown. Then, with a smile, he added: “But I’m falling back.”