Slapton Sands Read online

  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.

  ‘Don’t you want to be published?’

  ‘Eventually. Of course, eventually. It’s not my principal motivation, though, for this.’

  In Colorado, in the fug of stove heat and the late light of a short winter day, she’d listened to the old infantryman tell his story, incomplete and staccato, like all true war stories were, he insisted, except for those concerning the generals, who were the only people privileged to see the picture in its entirety. To other ranks it was not quite chaos, because they had discipline and training and the comfort of routine. But it was sometimes close to chaos because they were men confined together, in huge numbers, in an alien place, operating in conditions of absolute secrecy, some of the men very raw. And in the sea they were confronting an element most of them had seen for the first time only when they embarked for Europe in convoy from New York aboard passenger liners hastily turned into troopships for the task.

  ‘I say it wasn’t quite chaos,’ he told her. ‘But it was chaos all right that April, when I came back from London.’

  He’d gone to London because that was what they did after weeks of drills and punishing night endurance marches and small arms practice and confinement with other men in a Nissen hut. They did it even though it meant a long bicycle ride to Totnes Station and a cramped ride aboard a train in blackout conditions to Paddington. At least on the way back they’d be too hungover to care about the length of the ride or the suffocatingly small compartments or abiding absence of refreshment of any sort. They went to London because the alternative was the Red Cross Club or a Totnes pub serving weak cider drunk among farm hands until they were forced to leave at halfpast ten when the place was obliged to close. They went for sex and hard liquor and bustle and anonymity; for the chance to sing and brawl and misbehave and do it all in the relative safety of a metropolis under an imposed and absolute darkness.

  ‘Most of us thought we were going to die,’ the Colorado veteran told Alice Bourne, rolling a cigarette, deliberately, between steady fingers. ‘The Germans had been in France a long time. They were a battle-hardened army of occupation. We didn’t know where we’d be landing, but we assumed the coast of France. The beaches had been mined. Tank traps had been constructed, pillboxes built, all the machine-gun emplacements would have unimpeded fields of fire. Field Marshal Rommel had masterminded those coastal defences. They would be thorough, formidable. We thought we were going to die, all right. Most of us.’ Years of mountain sun and tobacco had seamed his face. His features had not altered since the taking of the picture at the wheel of a Jeep on the wall. But time and the habit had drained all the youth out of him and lined him in those places in his face where youth had once been deposited. He looked like he had been mined for his youth. ‘Course,’ he said, ‘we assumed we were going to die fighting.’ He smiled. ‘All of us assumed we’d be dying at least in battle, for a cause.’

  So making the most of life in the face of death he’d gone to London and painted the town on a two-day pass and returned late in the evening to a changed atmosphere of silence and empty billets and armed sentries strung along the shore as though they were expecting to repulse invasion rather than practising carrying out an invasion of their own. A field hospital had been hauled together out of canvas and wood behind Slapton Leys. He’d heard the stifled cries of casualties under sedation and seen the yellow lights they used in makeshift operating theatres creeping like glowworms along seams of canvas through the blackout.

  ‘I couldn’t get any information,’ he told Alice Bourne. ‘I didn’t see many guys I recognized, which was curious, but those I did recognize weren’t talking. Then a captain told me to shut up and sit tight or I’d be doing plenty of talking of my own to our MPs. I must have looked pretty upset. I didn’t know it then, but I’d lost a lot of friends. Anyway, this captain, he relented a little bit. Sit tight until morning, soldier, he said. Things’ll be a lot clearer tomorrow than they are tonight.’

  Alice nodded. Behind her, she could hear her skiing friends becoming louder in their laughter and talk with warmth and alcohol.

  ‘He was lying. I don’t know, maybe he was just trying to be sympathetic. Either way, he wasn’t telling the truth.’

  At first light, the Colorado infantryman had gone down to the shore. A thin, persistent rain was dimpling the sand and the still water, and the grey horizon rested no greater distance than what seemed a pebble’s throw away. The sentries were still there, strung along the shore, slick in watery light in their green rain capes. But the gulls had gone, which was unusual. And the shallow sky was grey and seemed absorbed with a roof-like silence. Start Bay extended to either side of where he stood, a shallow curve stretching as far as it was possible to see in the wet, diminished light. Water in salt droplets gathered and dripped from the brim of his field cap. The bay, the featureless sea and dimpled sand, looked like a place harbouring secrets.

  ‘But the sea gives up its secrets,’ he told Alice Bourne, thirty-odd years later in the warmth and comfort of his little bar. ‘An infantryman in full kit will sink, weighed down by his boots and his ammunition. But corpses bloat on the bottom. Belts, clothing – they’re shrugged away by the currents under there. The bottom of the sea i
s a restless place. Pretty soon, bodies started washing up. And they didn’t just restrict themselves to the six miles of beach we’d seconded. No. Those boys washed up all along the south Devon coast and beyond.’

  ‘What killed them?’

  He’d looked at her for a long time. He took a drink of the whisky he’d poured himself. ‘I don’t know. I do know that far too few of them found the burial proper to them.’

  ‘How many of them were there?’

  ‘I’d be guessing,’ he said.

  ‘An educated guess.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, miss,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ He shifted in his seat and drank. ‘I’m used to it. It comes with age. But my guess is educated. I’d say over a thousand men. I’d say we lost close to fifteen hundred.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  He’d smiled when she said that. ‘I don’t think Jesus was at Slapton Sands, miss. Not ever, I don’t think. But certainly not on that day He wasn’t.’

  Maybe that’s my true historical gift, Alice thought now. Finding out from bar-owning war vets about the conflict as seen through beer-soaked, ageing minds. As she left the Neptune for home, Whitstable fully dark now, she looked out over the sea wall and was surprised to see that the jellyfish had gone. Where they had loomed and coalesced in white clouds under the water was only a smooth blackness reflecting the sky in starts and winks of jittering, silver light. Some jolly acoustic ditty followed her out of the closing door of the pub, something by Steeleye Span or Fairport Convention about a day trip to Brighton that had become a hit after being used on a television commercial for butter, or for bread. She’d heard Long John Silver playing it in the room above hers and thought it a departure from his usual aural diet of austere progressive rock. Then she’d heard the squeal of his crutch tips and remembered he had a telly as he dragged himself across the floor to turn it off, she supposed, in disgust.

  The song was folky, nostalgic. They employed nostalgia often to sell things here. It was a weird thing about the English, she thought, their reluctance to divorce past and present. They seemed infinitely more beguiled by the past than people were at home. Even in Camden Town they wore collarless shirts and corduroy, and wood and leather clogs or nailed boots, such as a rural labourer might have had no choice but to wear a century ago. You’d see a character straight out of Thomas Hardy at the wheel of a Volkswagen Beetle stuck in a London traffic jam. Yet nobody seemed to think it incongruous. The green man leered out at you from the labels of beer bottles. There were harvest festivals and morris dancers and none of the shops opened on a Sunday. You couldn’t see a movie on a Sunday either. They were extremely reluctant about refrigeration, even in this record-breaking heat. They viewed ice cubes as an exotic and impractical affectation and seemed to consider food a necessary evil, something to be endured only because one had to endure it in order to avoid weakness and eventual death. They stuck stubbornly to traditional recipes, few of the listed ingredients actually qualifying as food. Tripe. Black pudding. White pudding. Suet pudding. Steak and kidney pudding. That stuff they called spotted dick. Did any other country seriously consider a whelk edible? Then there were their austere, ration-book beverages. Marmite. Horlicks. Ovaltine. Could anybody convincingly explain Ovaltine?

  It was morris men that baffled her most. Alice believed, intellectually, in assimilating other cultures. But she’d happily risk accusations of closed-minded bigotry to exclude morris men from this general principle. Then there was John Barleycorn. What place did John fucking Barleycorn realistically occupy in the late twentieth century? The key, clearly, was to get yourself on to the capricious and bizarre agenda propagated by the morris men. Alice paused, extended her right hand, felt the rough granite of the sea wall against her fingertips, warm despite the night, the stone, to her touch. She was drunk. Tiredness and sun had conspired to make her drunk on a few glasses of pale Kentish beer. She took a couple of deliberate breaths, tasting stored heat in old stone and salt from the supine Whitstable sea. And she thought of the Apache and his friend, Sir Lancelot, drunk, at the party that afternoon. It seemed a long time ago now. He’d been cute, was cute; but both of them had stressed to her the gulf in maturity that stretched all but unbridgeable between the undergraduate and postgraduate student. Their study was a diversion still, while hers was a cause. Then she hiccuped and laughed at herself, at her own drunken pomposity. We’re not supposed to do that, she thought, hiccuping again. We’re not supposed to be able to laugh at ourselves, we Americans. We don’t possess that sly, ironic English gift.

  She was almost home. She’d never felt further from home. She fumbled in her bag for her key. She looked up, and the night stars winked back at her conspiratorially. Had Peter Cushing capered past her then in Hammer Horror resplendence, she wouldn’t have turned a hair. But she opened her door begging herself not to dream the cormorant dream that night.

  ‘I’ll fix myself a Horlicks,’ she mumbled, feeling her familiar way around the confines of her room. ‘Or an Ovaltine. Maybe a Bovril.’ She hiccuped again. ‘A Bovril. Beef extract. Jesus. Bound to do the trick.’

  She switched on her desk lamp. She sat on the bed and took off her shoes. The giddiness ebbed out of her. It was here, after all, that she dreamed.

  By student standards her room was uncluttered. She didn’t have candles, scented or otherwise, despite the fashion for them. And she didn’t like the big paper globes popular as lampshades for overhead bulbs. Alice thought them a dreary fire hazard so ubiquitous it was a wonder students weren’t nightly incinerated. Her room was illuminated by an Anglepoise and a bedside lamp from Habitat in Canterbury. When she had moved in, there had been posters on the walls. The dead girl in the lily pond and the blown-up movie still of Butch and Sundance about to meet their maker she had rolled and secured with elastic bands and stored beneath the bed. The painting of Gandalf she’d ripped up and put in the bin. An area at the bottom left of the poster had been carefully torn off, probably, she thought, to be used as roaches. The paper was laminated and the subsequent joints would have tasted disgusting. But she was glad of the justification for throwing the image away. At the age when these things are decided, Alice had opted for Narnia over Middle Earth. She’d been eight. Aslan was cool, the White Witch cooler. The Hobbit, by contrast, was a jerk.

  Her walls were decorated now with historical photographs. She had the famous Frank Capra taken at Normandy. She had a Lee Miller shot of Ernest Hemingway having dinner with Marlene Dietrich at Jack Dempsey’s restaurant in New York. There was a very primitive photograph of Abraham Lincoln atop his makeshift platform delivering the Gettysburg Address to a blurred multitude. The raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. A strutting Theodore Roosevelt. Kennedy reading the Robert Frost poem on the bitterly cold morning of his inauguration. Christ, she thought for the thousandth time, what heartbreaking promise had resided in that frozen moment of time. There was a picture of a wounded Panzergrenadier officer lying on a cot in a field hospital with an SS Gruppenführer standing solicitously over him. Winter plumed the senior officer’s breath as he patted the wounded man’s shoulder with one gloved hand. The final shot showed an English firefighter, unshaven face gaunt with soot, sitting, spent, on coping stones at the edge of a ragged pyramid of smouldering rubble. One of the tin helmets made mandatory in the London Blitz lay upturned like a melancholy relic between his boots.

  People studied history for all sorts of different reasons. Alice Bourne thought that she was being educated in a time and in a place when the principal function of the study of the past was justification for the political ideologies of the present. That wasn’t her motivation, though. She thought it was probably that of her professor, and explained Champion’s glee in using the bicentennial anniversary to turn his gift for analysis to America’s historical shortcomings. They were doing that at home, too, of course. And recent events in American history made it an agonizing process.

  But it wasn’t why Alice studie
d history. If she had an axe to grind, she was honestly unaware of it. She was fascinated by the past and by its secrets, that was all. And she preferred the study of the recent past because it seemed sometimes so tantalizingly close, as if almost within touching distance.

  You could study medieval history, but it was so speculative a subject as to be almost abstract, she felt. Whatever awe and admiration she felt for the men who had built Canterbury’s cathedral was felt a substantial remove away for what she felt about the people in the pictures that decorated her walls. They were real, they were corporeal. You could source documentary evidence to discover exactly how successful Abe Lincoln’s career in law had been before politics claimed him. Champion’s brass rubbings, by contrast, thin faces in their parsimonious frames, portrayed people so remote from the secular world that Alice felt inadequate to get inside the meat and mystery of their lives. Perhaps this was because she was American and came from a youthful country.

  It wasn’t that she lacked imagination. She would never know who the young German tank killer was in her picture on the wall. But she knew that abiding strength lay beneath the trauma and blood loss that had drained his face of vigour. She wondered if he had lived to regret the appalling purpose to which his strength was being put. But she was in no doubt that he had lived, had survived this wound, this particular episode in his life.