Slapton Sands (3 page)

The known facts were straightforward enough. The American army had needed to rehearse for the invasion of France. They chose this particular section of the Devon coast for their practices because it so resembled the coast of Normandy. Slapton Sands looked strikingly, eerily similar to Utah Beach. Slapton Leys, the shallow, gravel-bedded lagoon beyond the beach, was as close in conditions and topography as they could approximate to the flooded hinterland of the Cotentin. Action was sanctioned in the autumn of 1943. The whole of an area known as the South Hams would be evacuated: seventeen thousand acres of farmland, two thousand, seven hundred and fifty people, six miles of coastline, the villages of Blackawton, Strete, Torcassow, Stokenham, Chillington, East Allington and Slapton itself. The people were told they had to leave in meetings held at their village halls on the evenings of 12 and 13 November. They were given a deadline for departure of 20 December. The decision was taken in private, never even discussed by the full War Cabinet of the British government. The American ambassador to Britain lobbied and Winston Churchill agreed. So it was that families who had lived in south Devon since the compiling of the Domesday Book were given six weeks to leave with no offer of compensation or assurance about when they would be able to return. There were protests, which were futile. There were suicides. But the deadline was met. And when the soldiers of the United States army's 4th Infantry
Division arrived in their twenty-six-square-mile Devon domain, they marched along empty roads, through fields glutted with forgotten crops, past schools and shops, post offices, pubs, churches and cottages which lay silent, empty and abandoned.

Summer darkness had almost come. Light through the window of the pub pitted and scarred the old stone of the breakwater. Jellyfish glowed pale and thick as spawn now on the water. She'd take a train to Totnes and then a taxi to the guesthouse she'd located in Strete. She didn't have a car. She didn't have a telephone or a television either, come to that. These absences seemed unremarkable in England.

There was a TV room in each of the colleges, but it was a long way to go to watch television and anyway a kind of censorship was imposed, an insidious insistence on what it was and wasn't ideologically proper to view. That dim friend of David Lucas, Oliver Deane, had grumbled about it at the party earlier in the day. David had wanted to watch a televised world title fight involving some Panamanian champion called Duran. But boxing was ritualised brutality, considered too thuggish for the student union rep in charge of the TV watching in Elliot, the college among the four colleges at Kent of which Lucas was a member.

‘David called her an Apache,' Oliver said admiringly. ‘Told her she was an Apache.' He sipped wine. ‘To her face.'

Some of the students on the campus brandished copies of
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
with the same totemic pride
with which copies of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
were just then being routinely flourished. In the year of the bicentennial, treatment of its native tribes was one more stick with which to beat America. But Apache was not, had not for a long time, been a term of disparagement. Quite the opposite, in fact.

‘You're sure he didn't call her something similar-sounding to Apache? Apparatchik, maybe?'

‘Absolutely not,' Oliver said. ‘Well. Maybe.'

He looked keen to change the subject. He produced a matchbox from a pocket and began to fumble with it. Alice watched, for want of anything else to occupy her attention. When he managed to open the matchbox, it was full of small, circular pills.

‘Blues,' Oliver said to Alice. ‘Billy.'

‘Billy?'

‘Whiz. Speed.'

‘Amphetamine isn't very good for you.'

‘I know. I've got a death wish.'

‘It rots brain cells.' Though to be honest, the damage looked to be done.

‘Would you like one?'

‘Thanks. I'll pass.'

‘Come again?'

‘She's wisely declining,' David Lucas said, returning from a visit to what they all called the loo. ‘What have you two been talking about?'

‘Sitting Bull,' Alice said. ‘Little Big Horn.'

They both looked at her, the one appraising, the other clueless. David Lucas was very good-looking, she decided. It was only a shame about the embellishments.

Alice decided to have another drink before leaving the pub. It was fully dark now. The black bulk of the oyster sheds formed a solid rectangle of darkness concealing the harbour from where she stood, but the lights of Sheppey twinkled prettily enough across the sea. She'd been born and raised in the middle of her home state of Pennsylvania and never tired now of the novelty of the coast. So she lingered over the night view for a moment before going into the saloon bar to order another glass of bitter and listen to whatever was playing on the Neptune's old jukebox. She didn't know enough about the English to establish whether it was someone's ironic joke, but a high proportion of the records on the jukebox had a nautical flavour about them. You couldn't escape Chicago's terrible dirge, ‘If You Leave Me Now', that summer. And Elton John and Kiki Dee were for ever warbling their duet. But when she walked through the door of the pub, the regulars were playing their games of darts and bar billiards to the Fleetwood Mac instrumental, ‘Albatross'.

Alice was served by the landlord. He was a brusque man with little time for students. But he'd been a pilot sergeant in the war and seemed to appreciate how knowledgeable she was about events then. She was a good listener and had opened him up to an extent that she thought had surprised
and perhaps even embarrassed him. He was naturally reticent, as so many men were recalling their part in the conflict. She persisted, though, because she thought oral history was important, and she knew that it was finite. He told her once about the briefings they were given prior to duelling with German fighter-bombers in what later became known as the Battle of Britain. Principally, these talks concerned the importance of fuel economy, he told her. They listened to pep talks on how to save petrol as they washed down Benzedrine with mugs of weak tea. Historians like Champion were efficient with statistics and dates, but they had no real experience of the world. Men like the Neptune landlord did. Alice owed this insight to her father, whose own life and death had taught her an indelible lesson.

She would not ask the landlord about the war tonight, though. She was tired, and he had an intolerant look that tightened his smile of welcome to something near a grimace. She'd had enough of conversation for one day at the party on the yellow grass. She would have loved a proper talk, full of the ease and intimacy of home; but it wasn't to be. The only way she could reach home was through shovelling coins into the telephone box outside the Salvation Army citadel on the high street, with its broken panes of glass and a receiver that smelled faintly of old saliva and cigarettes. There was no intimacy there; only unwarranted expense and the dislocating awkwardness of satellite delay forcing pauses that prevented conversation.
Besides, who was there at home for her to swap intimacies with?

Looking at the wisps of vapour trailing the sky earlier, she'd thought of home. She'd read somewhere that some English flight tycoon was selling transatlantic returns for a hundred pounds. But she hadn't really envied the passengers in the jets that left those soft streaks of white earlier daubed on the sky. And it wasn't homesickness that kept her now in the light and comfort of the pub. As she found a vacant table and sat down with her fresh drink to the sound of Procul Harem and ‘A Salty Dog' (surely it had to be a joke, didn't it?), she was honest enough with herself to admit the fact. She was there not because she craved company or fresh stories about sorties over the Kent Weald from the horse's mouth, or even the beer, hoppy and pale and still challenging her stubborn will to acquire an acquired taste for it in its glass on the tabletop. She was there because she didn't want to go home and slip into sleep over a book and dream the cormorant dream again.

Alice thought of herself as comparatively tough, fairly resourceful, independent by circumstance, if not by nature. But each time she dreamed the dream it found some fresh detail to insinuate forboding into her. She'd awaken chilly with dread in the close heat of this strange English summer. And sleep would prove elusive after that.

She studied the other people in the pub. Nobody there smelled of Alliage or Tabac. Those were scents more potently grouped on the campus, in the college bars. Here
there were mostly students in denim, much of it embroidered, the girls in smock tops and clogs and the boys shod in clogs or cowboy boots. Alice thought most English university student fashion arcane, rural even. Location didn't seem to have too much bearing on this. The same arcadian dress code applied equally in the pubs in Camden Town she'd visited on her one real weekend in London since her arrival in England. You'd see the odd dyed David Bowie wedge cut on students from the school of art in Canterbury. But most pub males dressed in the biker-farmer hybrid style pioneered, if that was the right word, by the ramshackle bands they listened to. There was a lot of unkempt hair, a lot of rolling your own, a surprising and possibly even dismaying amount of corduroy. She'd saved hard doing two vacation jobs for her own wardrobe and had had to tone it right down here to avoid looking hopelessly out of place. She didn't really understand this deliberate dressing down among the men. Even if you were really, really into Jethro Tull, you surely wouldn't want to be reminded of Ian Anderson when you studied your reflection. Would you? And the dressing down among the women was even more baffling.

Alice Bourne had been brought up poor. She hadn't been dirt poor, but she'd learned an appreciation of the good things in the most emphatic way possible. She hadn't had any of them. Every material possession in her life, like every intellectual accomplishment, had needed to be earned. She had never resented the fact. You played the hand life dealt
you. But the modest circumstances of her upbringing had taught her to like good clothes and good shoes. English folk wisdom insisted that a person never missed what they had never had. Alice considered this to be total horseshit. But her suits and her skirts languished with her leather briefcase in the wardrobe of a Whitstable room while she strove for the drab conformity of the general student body.

She'd worn her good clothes in England only twice. The first occasion was her formal interview with her supervising tutor, Professor Champion. She'd considered it a necessary formality, a demonstration of respect. He'd seemed loftily indifferent to how she looked. It hadn't been a mistake, at any rate, because the interview had gone well. He'd thought it necessary to reminisce about the carpet bombing of Cambodia, deride the peanut farmer striving for the White House, name-check Gore Vidal and Ruben Hurricane Carter and Gil-Scott Heron. But it was the bicentennial year and he was a liberal historian and, anyway, she was getting used to it.

It was the second time she wore her good clothes that got her upset. She wore her Bill Blass suit from Bloomingdales to the cathedral. And a woman with cropped hair in a boiler suit and work boots had sneered in the transept and offered Alice the unwelcome information that she looked like a hooker on the make.

She had not personally sanctioned the carpet bombing of Cambodia. She didn't mention this fact to Professor Champion. She didn't mention either that her older
brother, Bobby, had been a casualty of the seventy-seven-day battle of Khe Sanh, dead at twenty, killed by septicaemia thirty-six hours after he was hit in the chest and legs by grenade fragments as his platoon tried and failed to hold a desperate position from being overrun. And she didn't say anything in reply to the hooker remark. What was the point? The feminist agenda here seemed unalloyed, unmitigated, unremarkable in its predictably fixed hostilities and hard-core resentments.

She was angry, though, about Bobby. She was angry whenever English students and campus academics aired the theory about the draft conspiracies that tried to solve America's social problems by sending its ghetto dwellers in disproportionate numbers to fight in Vietnam. She'd seen no evidence of this as an adolescent in Pennsylvania, where the draft had seemed pretty indiscriminate and she'd not been aware of a single case of a boy trying to avoid it.

She'd been reminded about Bobby at the tutorial party earlier that day when David, the cute English undergraduate, had commented on what a tragedy it was that Muhammad Ali, in what would have been his best years in the ring, had been prevented from boxing for refusing the draft. What kind of a tragedy was that, she had wondered. A sporting tragedy? An aesthetic tragedy? She'd enjoyed Ali's courage and grace in the ring herself on television. Who hadn't? But tragedy for Alice Bourne was her drafted brother dying in the bewilderment of delirium on a foreign battlefield. She burped surreptitiously and sipped hoppy
beer. Smelling patchouli oil and hand-rolled Old Holborn, she reminisced, for a few seconds of indulgent weakness, about jukeboxes devoid of foghorns and barnacles, about cold draft in chilled jugs and pizza and voluble, civilized, Ivy League sanity.

Champion had suggested that she study a subject with what he insisted was greater substance. He suggested the Marshall Plan and its catastrophic effect on Britain's post-war economy. Or what about the segregated black GIs in Britain in the 1940s, he said, and the appalling racism they endured from their own army? She could investigate whether the crime wave enabled by the London Blitz was anything other than folk myth.

‘It's your best interests I'm thinking about,' he'd said. ‘I've a mind to publication. What you suggest sounds more appropriate for one of those popular paperbacks which discuss Krakatoa and the Kraken and alien abduction and the Bermuda Triangle.'

She'd said nothing.