Irene Bellwood Clontz was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in northern England on 6 August 1926. Her father Arthur Bellwood was a World War I veteran who had served in France and returned to England to become what is known as a locomotive fireman (the person who drives a locomotive). Her mother Grace was a fulltime housewife, who passed away when she was only nine years old. After her mother passed away, Irene remembered her father being completely devoted to her and her older sister, never dating or spending time at the pub with his friends, and spending much time with them at home. The two-story terrace house they lived in was small by the standards of twenty-first century Americans, sitting directly on the street without a front garden, but it was a special house in many ways. It was one of the first houses in the area to be electrified and to have a telephone. More importantly, it was a home where there had been much loss, so it was open to others. Many weekends, Arthur even looked after two sisters living in a nearby orphanage whose deceased parents had been friends of the family. They were like sisters to Irene and she kept in touch with the one who lived longer right up until her last years.
Soon after World War II began, Irene’s sister died of what Irene later thought must have been tuberculosis. When German air raids began, like many children in Britain’s industrial cities, Irene was evacuated to live with an older married couple in the country. but she was so homesick for her father that she begged to return home. He finally relented in spite of the dangers. Luckily their home was spared being bombed, but one night, Irene said that her father heard a bomb falling and jumped over her in the hallway to save her life. Luckily for them (but undoubtedly unluckily for some other family), the bomb did not fall on their home, but it came so close that it blew out glass from windows and left a black layer of soot on the open sugar bowl in the kitchen. The bombings haunted Irene all her life. In her twilight years in Arizona, when there were loud thunderstorms, she would want to rush outside. It seems she thought the thunder was bombs and that she would be safer outdoors. She would also spend hours watching planes flying overhead as they landed and took off from Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, whispering “coming home on a wish and a prayer”, which was a line from a popular song during the war about the American and British air force personnel.
Irene’s schooling basically ended with primary school. Although her school, Queen Victoria Jubilee School, was not directly bombed, many teachers lost their lives and in the ensuing chaos, Irene ended up looking after a kindergarten class for a while. In any case, her father did not feel that girls needed higher education. She spent her days looking after her father, keeping the house clean, cooking, and doing other household chores. She flirted with the young boy in the butcher shop to get a few extra ounces of rationed meat and met up with her friends under the clock on the main street of Newcastle. She did not remember the war years as unhappy years. As she said years later, “The blitz happened and bombs fell, but we didn’t have any grief counselling. We just got on with life.” She always found it difficult to sympathise with people who let their problems define their lives.
Months after the war ended, tragedy struck. Her father was between two locomotives uncoupling a connection when a young man started one of them up and crushed his head. Irene was left an orphan. But the night after her father was buried, Irene remembered waking up and seeing him at the foot of her bed. He told her he was looking after her and that she would always be safe. She said that feeling stayed with her all her life and she was never afraid.
He had indeed been looking after her. Unbeknownst to her, he had been buying savings bonds over the years in her name and keeping them in a locked drawer. When her uncles opened the drawer, they realised that she had enough to start a life on her own.
But what was she, a young orphaned girl of 19, going to do with this life on her own? She asked this in a letter to her penfriend in Oklahoma City, USA, who suggested that she should come and visit them. She asked her aunt and uncle, her legal guardians since she was under 21, for advice. Her aunt said that she had no business going to another country, but her uncle overruled his wife, saying that Irene had had so much tragedy in her life, this was her one chance in life to have some happiness.
So, after arranging a tourist visa and plane tickets, she found herself on a plane with Johnny Weissmuller, the original movie Tarzan actor. Irene remembers he had had too many drinks by the time the plane stopped for refuelling in Goose Bay, Labrador, and while they were waiting to get back on the plane, he was persuaded to make his famous Tarzan ape howls for his fellow passengers.
Irene fell in love with America the moment she got off the plane ⏤ “Meat and nylon stockings after all the rationing in England,” she said years later. She spent nearly all of the 300 pounds that she was allowed to take with her out of the country on tinned meat to send back to her family in England.
The family in Oklahoma turned out to be the stereotype of open-hearted Americans. They were enthralled by her northern English accent, although they had to tell her to slow down because they couldn’t easily understand her. They were a well-connected family; Irene was even invited to attend the wedding of Roy Rogers, a famous Western film star of the time (she had a date that day, so didn’t go). The family belonged to some boisterous evangelical church with services quite different to the staid Church of England services Irene was used to. She said that when they would all go to the altar every Sunday and loudly pray for Jesus to forgive their sins, she used to wonder just what kind of sinning was causing them to be so loud. And why they sinned so much that they had to repent every single Sunday.
Irene returned to England with a job offer to be a receptionist and a host of new American friends, and immediately began to apply for a green card to emigrate to the USA. She soon got her green card and after disposing of what was left of her English life, returned to Oklahoma.
Irene found that along with her good looks and her now blonde hair, in a somewhat isolated state like Oklahoma, her British accent opened many doors, especially for work as a receptionist. Her British English also caused laughs, as when she started work in her new office and asked her boss where the rubbers (erasers, not condoms) were kept or when she went camping with friends and she innocently asked one of the men to “knock her up [‘wake up’ in British English, but ‘impregnate’ in US English] in the morning”.
She had one special girlfriend who had a steady boyfriend who had a best friend who needed a date. They set Irene and this friend, Jesse Volker, up on a blind date. In a short time, they fell in love and ran off to Las Vegas to get married in 1950.
Three years later, when they were living in Marin County near San Francisco, their only child together, Craig, was born. Soon after Jesse’s work with Gilford, a military contracting company, took them for a short time to Massachusetts and then to Newbury in Berkshire, England.
Irene was coming home, but as an Americanised wife. Life in England was good for Irene and Jesse. They lived well on an American wage and met people who became Irene’s lifelong friends. Irene also relished being able to reconnect with family in Newcastle. She and Jesse travelled through Europe with her favourite cousin and her husband.
Then Jesse got posted to Great Falls, Montana. Irene had no idea about Montana and asked Jesse what it was like. He told her it was “God’s country”. It became the centre of her life until she left for Arizona in old age. In England they had saved up enough money to buy a new car and a house on five acres of land outside of Great Falls. Jesse bought 13 horses for their little ranch, and Irene found herself living a new life next door to a neighbour who had a pet bison behind his house. They raised chickens and sheep as well as horses, and Irene planted over a hundred baby trees to break the prairie winds. In many ways, it was like life out of a movie script.
But there were growing strains in their marriage, and they divorced. At the divorce hearing, Irene discovered that the man she thought was born in the same year she was, turned out to be two years younger than she was. It seems that on their very first date, when they were making small talk, Jesse had asked Irene how old she was. When he realised she was two years older than him, he was afraid she wouldn’t continue dating him if she knew he was younger than she was, so he fibbed and said he was the same age. After that, he was too ashamed to confess his real age to her and never had a chance (or courage, it seems) to reveal his true age.
As a once-again-single woman, Irene found a job as a nursing assistant at McAuley Nursing Home in Great Falls. She was a reliable and hard-working employee, so much so that when the McAuleys sold it years later to a local physician, she was asked by the new owner to continue as its manager. In many ways, she was the epitome of the fulfillment of an immigrant’s American Dream, moving up from someone who emptied bedpans to the women who ran the whole establishment.
This kind of social mobility was inevitable in the life of a woman who didn’t see barriers, even when others did. One barrier was home ownership. At a time when banks did not give loans to women, especially divorcées, Irene persevered until she could obtain a mortgage and buy a newly built home in an older, respectable neighbourhood of Great Falls. It gave her independent financial security even after she sold it.
Irene enjoyed a gregarious social life and was wooed by a number of men. In a small country town in Montana, her British accent and sense of fashion brought her much attention. After her son graduated from high school in 1971, she ended up marrying John Clontz, a rancher from Havre in northern Montana who, like her father, was also a locomotive fireman. Her condition to accepting John’s wedding proposal was that he build her a suitable house on his ranch. He kept to that promise. Irene retired from work to live on a ranch, once again with horses and wide-open spaces. She finally became an American citizen and voted for the first time, helping to elect Ronald Reagan as US president.
When John retired, John sold his ranch so they could try living in San Diego to escape the bitterly cold Montana winters. But after eight months, they found they did not like living in a large, anonymous city. They returned to Great Falls and “snowbirded” in a camper van to Arizona several years until they came across a house in Sunland Village, a retirement community in Mesa, Arizona they fell in love with. Eventually they moved fulltime to Arizona, becoming the centre of an active and close-knit social group, many of whom were also from Montana. In many ways these years were the happiest years for Irene ⏤ her son was by then out of university and professionally established, she was financially secure, she had two grandchildren whom she loved deeply, and she was being taken cared by a man that reminded her in many ways of her locomotive-fireman father.
She remained fearless. When her grandson Jalal was born in Papua New Guinea, she was determined to travel on her own to be with him on his first birthday. Even when her flight to the remote part of New Guinea where her son’ taught, she just used her charm and went up to the first foreign pilot she saw and asked if he was flying anywhere close to Goroka, the town close to where her son and his family were living. He was, and she arrived in time. The next day she was greeted by a group of local men with machetes on the porch who wanted to welcome her. She went out and greeted them with friendly words, coming back inside to say that “My God, craig, they could have chopped us to bits with those machetes.”
When John grew physically and mentally ill and then passed away, Irene was left living on her own, but still with her active group of friends. By then she had fallen in love with Arizona and its heat ⏤ as she said, it was the opposite of what she had grown up with in England.
But there was one more chapter to add to her life before her book was closed. When she was convalescing after surgery, she met the man who ended up being the love of her life, Jack Womack. A retired pilot, during World War II he had been one of those young American airmen whom Irene had watched flying over her as a teenager, “coming home on a wish and a prayer”, as she said. They moved in together in a retirement home, living a comfortable life together, travelling on cruises to Hawai`i, and enjoying visits from her son and his family from overseas and Jack’s family, who lived in Arizona. That family embraced her as one of their own and so Irene was spared the awful loneliness that so many older women suffer with in their last years after their partner passes away. She kept her petite figure and sense of fashion; after all, as she said, “there is nothing wrong with vanity as long as you have something to be vain about”. She was remarkably active, walking every day. Her granddaughter-in-law Shadi remembers her running in her high heels down the hall in her retirement complex after her infant grandson Thomas.
Irene passed away in the adopted country she loved so much on 7 September 2017, not long after her granddaughter Ayisha had visited and introduced her partner Peter to her. Her son was holding her hand as she departed this world. She is buried in Mountain View Cemetery, in Mesa, Arizona, a cemetery she had chosen years earlier, with her remains placed in a wall where the warm Arizona sun never lets them get cold.
Irene has left behind her son Craig in Papua New Guinea, and her grandchildren Jalal and Ayisha and her great-grandsons Thomas and Rohan, all in Australia. They have continued Irene’s journey around the world and like her, they remain fearless.