To Run Across the Sea (4 page)

Dorothea and Dick continued to live on Cornish pasties and sugar-beet tops. Dick did not like to talk about finance but Dorothea confided that, in the first few months of his operations, they had been able to add enough to the cache of money somewhere under their floor to pay for a year’s schooling at Woodford. It was arranged that Jane would enter Gladben’s in the coming September.

These mildly illicit activities brought Dick close to others of a more dangerous kind. He was approached by a senior sergeant newly arrived in the country with what sounded at first a tempting proposition. The sergeant had heard of Dick’s connections and said that a source of supply of goods of a better kind had opened up. He showed Dick a Sears Roebuck catalogue and said that most of the items listed could be made available at about half-price.

The feeling I got was that he had already half-committed himself, but something was clearly worrying him.

‘The first thing you have to do is to find out where the stuff’s coming from,’ I told him.

‘I have. It got sent here instead of to Germany and they’re stuck with it up at the base.’

‘Why don’t they send it back?’

‘He says there’s no laid-down procedure. If it’s here, it’s here. They’ve got to get shot of it as best they can or it’ll stay here for ever. All they want to do is recover the cost price.’

‘Nobody will believe a story like that,’ I told him. ‘Where is it now?’

‘In Warehouse 8. I’ve seen some of it.’

‘How does this man strike you? Do you get the feeling he’s a crook?’

‘He’s like any sergeant. A bit tough. They get used to ordering people about.’

‘I hope you’re not in this already,’ I said, ‘but if you are, get out of it as fast as you can.’

Dick went back and told the sergeant he wanted a day or two to think about it, and the sergeant told him to keep his mouth shut.

A few days later he was back again, full of excitement and alarm.

The story was that he was out fishing in a flooded gravel-pit at six in the morning when something happened that had made him suspicious. He asked me to come and see the place, and having nothing better to do and inclined to enjoy visits to abandoned rural places, I went along.

This site was where a company had been taking out a great variety of gravel, pebbles and sand for as long as anybody could remember, and then suddenly they had dropped everything and pulled out. This had happened 10 or 15 years before, and in true Essex style there had been no attempt to tidy up before departure. Whatever was no longer of use had been left behind exactly as it was, and a half-dismantled pump protruded from the water and rails carried several shattered trucks down to the bullrushes sprouting in the verge of what was now a small lake. There were old breeze-blocks, buckled oil barrels, the base of a wheel-less vehicle sitting on its springs, and iron gates in a section of wall, wide open upon further devastation. All these objects were host to rank but vigorous creeping plants that would eventually muffle their outlines with coarse leaves and insignificant flowers.

Dick, very jumpy, insisted that we should go through the pretence of being there to fish, and we had taken rods with us. I fixed up my line and helped him to fix his. We then clambered down the bank and waded into the shallows among the bullrushes, where I noticed that he was steadier than on dry land. A moorhen scuttled away, dragging splashes across the water, and I breathed in the heavy odour of decaying vegetation and mud. It was a school holiday and two small boys had found their way down here and were hacking with knives at the bushes and seedling trees. Part of a large brick and corrugated iron building showed among the elders on the further bank. It was reached, Dick said, by an overgrown track from the main road. He had come here a few days before at about six in the morning, a good hour to fish at that time of year, and was down in the bushes by the water, baiting his hook when a big US Air Force truck came down the track and stopped outside the building. Three US servicemen got out. Dick recognised one of them as the top sergeant. They unlocked the door of the building and began to unload packing-cases from the truck and carry them in. He thought it took them half an hour to unload all the cases, after which they drove off.

‘And what do you imagine it was all about?’ I asked him.

‘Stuff nicked from the base,’ he said. ‘I was shit-scared.’

‘Why?’

‘The sergeant. He’d have cut my throat if he saw me and thought I was spying on them.’

He then admitted to knowing of the racket that was going on, and explained how it worked. There was a fix back in the States with whoever it was handled the air-schedules by which the transports flying in always landed after the warehouses had been locked up for the night. The C-Van containers, unloaded and left in the parking bays—theoretically under armed guard—were promptly opened and up to a quarter of their contents spirited away. The consignment sheets corresponding to the abstracted goods were simply torn from the shipping documents and next morning the chief storeman cheerfully put his signature as OK.

‘Why come to me about it?’ I asked Dick.

‘What do you think I ought to do?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Steer clear of it. If you know what’s happening, so do a lot more people and it’s only a matter of time before somebody blows the whistle. Tell the sergeant anything you like and then keep away from him. If they found you mixed up in this it would put paid to your other business. And go somewhere else to fish.’

Most of the married American servicemen and their families were more than content to stay on base, and the base did its best, with considerable success, to provide all those things that made home sweet to them. Only young soldiers ventured out and when they did it was usually in search of female company among the local population. They were a godsend to the girls of Essex, which had become a sad backwater of a place for young people. The Essex girls found the Americans more polite, considerate and enthusiastic than the English boys; and in their approaches to the opposite sex, they often displayed an outmoded gallantry, sometimes evoking pretended amusement but always well received. Apart from drinking sessions in the pubs, Saturday night discos were about the only form of entertainment surviving in country places. A girl escorted to one of them by a local lad had to resign herself in advance to a loutish rather than a romantic experience. By contrast, the weekend dances organised at the base offered a model of propriety and good order.

The calm, homely and rather formal atmosphere of the social club at the base seemed to exert a tranquillising effect upon even the most unruly and pugnacious English males. Finding it impossible to pick a quarrel with their urbane American hosts, they soon gave up trying. Drinks at the base were better and much cheaper; the music was good and played on a system streets ahead of those at the discos, and the decor was tasteful and relaxing, with an avoidance of cheap effects. No one was ever overcharged at the base, and the old, sly trick practised in so many local clubs of turning up the heat to increase thirst and alcoholic consumption was here unnecessary, since American hospitality was not perverted by the profit-motive.

Above all, it was the servicemen themselves who impressed. The story had gone the rounds that before arriving in Britain they had been issued with a booklet telling them how to behave, but this struck all those who came into contact with them as an absurdity. These, the girls decided, were nature’s gentlemen; handsome, clean-cut both in appearance and motive, sophisticated and rich. In the most discreet fashion, and always careful not to provoke the rivalry of their English escorts, their new American friends had shown them photographs of themselves in their civilian days, often at the wheels of enormous cars, in the glamorous environment of their homeland: Santa Barbara and Beverly Hills, the Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone Park, Miami Beach and Disneyland. Few impressionable young girls could resist such an emotional assault. It was an experience that turned many a head, including, to Dorothea’s horror, that of her daughter Jane. To defeat the ruling by which any girl under the age of 17, unless accompanied by her mother was excluded from the magical Saturday night at the base, Jane—tall for her age and dressed and made up by her friends to look like an 18-year-old—was smuggled past the scrutiny at the door. She came home at midnight, smelling of alcohol and defiant. After her brief glimpse of paradise, Dorothea knew that she would never settle to monotony in Long Crendon again. But it was already July, and the dangerous weeks were coming to an end. ‘Only a couple of months to go and she’ll be safely out of harm’s way at Woodford,’ Dorothea said. ‘My feeling is we’re just in time.’

For a while after our visit to the old gravel-pit, Dick was under a cloud. He could not shake free from the attentions of the sinister sergeant, who refused to allow Dick to break what he claimed was an agreement, and began to adopt a threatening posture. Then suddenly the man dropped out of sight. The English plain-clothes man on permanent duty with base police went the rounds of the village with his photograph, and took a few statements, including one from Dick, but there the matter dropped. Dick learned through the grapevine that the sergeant had been arrested and packed off in handcuffs back to the States. The transports ceased to land after dark, and the volume of American luxury goods in circulation went into steep decline for a time. Some time later, as a matter of curiosity, Dick visited the old shed where he had seen the crates unloaded and found it open and empty.

‘It has all been a bit of a fright,’ Dick said, and now, suddenly, he was nervous about his involvement in the disposal of the base families’ surplus gear. Dick had learned that such imported items were for personal use only. Somebody had broken a law, but Dick was not sure whose law it was, and who had done the breaking. The visits of the plain-clothes man occasioned further unease. The villagers interviewed would have been crafty enough to keep him out of the kitchens where any piece of machinery of American origin would certainly be on view. Still, one never knew. A man like that was trained to use his eyes. Despondently, Dick decided to play safe and pull out of the business, and then, just as his hopes for Jane’s future began to recede, new prospects for commerce opened up. This time they were above suspicion.

The complex idea of status had hardly reached Long Crendon at the time of my arrival, and the alterations made by the newcomers to the houses they bought were seen by the natives as unreasoning and eccentric. Why, the villagers argued, should a man enclose his garden with a fence that kept nothing out? Why, instead of spending a hundred or two on renovating a barn, should he have it rebuilt in Norman style at a cost of £2,900?

Slowly an inkling of what was behind this madness began to seep in, and here and there a villager became infected with it. The problem was how, in their gentle and unassertive manner, were village people to acquire any of this magical property enabling a man to stand out from his fellows? Nothing a man could do to alter his house—by a lick of paint on the outside, by a glass front-door, or a chiming bell—could conceal the stark facts (known to all) of pump-water and outside privy. Almost every employable male worked at the base for a similar salary. Village life was one of total equality; all were at the bottom of the pyramid. Humility had been inherited from the feudal servility of a not too distant past. Now, suddenly, the idea was abroad that a man could be ‘different’—command a little more than average respect. Nothing could be done about the house, but as Dick pointed out, the possession of a good car set a man apart, and by cutting down expenses in other directions, such a prize could come within reach of all.

American servicemen normally arrived in the country for a three-year tour of duty, and often brought their cars with them. When the time came to move on they were quite ready to part with the vehicle for a reasonable price. Dick had discovered this and acted accordingly. He came to an agreement with the Customs over the matter of excise duty, and after a period of trial and error, was able to cope with the paperwork required. Everyone knew Dick and knew that they would get value for money. Within a few months one in eight of Long Crendon’s cottages had a shining American car parked at its front door.

After Christmas and Easter the third most important feast celebrated in Long Crendon was the ancient secular one of August bank holiday. At this the Cloates, for all their slow loss of power and influence, appeared together again in public as a clan and, assisted by alcohol, the old defiant spirit flickered strongly for at least several hours on this day.

On the bank holiday the people of Long Crendon, who usually preferred to stay indoors when there was no work to be done, felt suddenly and briefly the mysterious call of the open, and those who could gathered up their families to go down to the sea-shore, or on picnics amid the few trees remaining where there had once been woods. It was almost a point of honour to escape from confining walls. The local pubs which normally served, at best, a sandwich at the bar provided full-scale lunches on the bank holiday. The traditional holiday dish was eel pie, although Long Crendon was possibly the last place in Essex where it could be tasted. It was not what it had once been, since the eels were no longer caught in the Blackwater or Crouch, but imported frozen from Holland. Nevertheless, eel pie was not to be avoided on this occasion.

Several tables had been reserved for the Cloates in the pleasant garden at the back of the Pied Bull. Some of the clan had moved away from the area but had made the effort to be present at the annual reunion. Of these I knew nothing at all, nor had I had contacts with the Cloates living in the village who were notorious for keeping to themselves. I knew only Dorothea and Dick, and their cousins the Broadbents.

This was an exceptional occasion for the two families. Both Jane and Patricia would shortly be saying goodbye to the village for a while; Jane to face whatever Mrs Amos had in store for her; Patricia, having completed with distinction her course at the school for models, to join a party of them visiting Brazil, where they were to be photographed wearing the creations of a famous couturier against that pageant of water, the Iguazu Falls.