UNWANTED WAR BRIDE.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume VII, Issue 1956, 22 May 1920, Page 11

UNWANTED WAR BRIDE.

RUSSIAN GIRL'S WOES IN ENGLAND. An extraordinary story of inhuman treatment to. a Russian girl-wife was unfolded before the King's Lynn Magistrates, when Leonora, the 17-year-oUI wife of Reginald Bullen, was granted a separation from her husband and an allowance of a pound a week. It was stated that the parties were married in the English Church in Archangel last September, when the husband was about 21 years of age. Telling her pathetic story, Leonora. a bright, intelligent girl, stated that last year, when she was 16, she served as a waitress in the sergeants' mess at Archangel, where the. defendant, a member of the R.A.M.C., was staiioned for several months. "Good morning," was all she said to him. One day he asked her to marry him. "Do you love met" she asked him. "Yes," he replied. "You shall have a good home in England, and my mother and father will welcome you." Describing her welcome home, Leonora said her mother-in-law neither kissed her nor took any notice of her. Within a. fortnight of taking up their abode with her husband's people, continued Leonora, her husband's "nice" attitude towards her changed. He smacked her face and pushed her downstairs, and she became so miserable that she tried to kill herself, and might have done so Jut for a kind neighbour who had been a mother to her. Leonora went on to say that her mother-in-law used to swear at her and throw food at her. JI ci- mother in-law made her live in a room apart from her husband. There was a bed and a chair and nothing else in the room. She denied that she put a knife under her pillow to kill her husband. She wanted, she said, to lull herself, not her husband.* " It: was a cat and dog life," said the girl wife. " 1 did not want to live like That. My husband told m.' to go with other boys, as he had finished with me." Owing to her misery, she had had to leave the house, and. she said, she would rather kill herself than go back. The defendant and his mother denied the allegations, but neighbours supported the girl's story.