Slapton Sands

by Francis Cottam

  She did this now, noticing milky jellyfish on the placid surface of the sea, hundreds of them, brought here, she supposed, by the unfamiliar heat, the slow, relentless raising of the water’s temperature through this unprecedented summer to something almost tropical. The sea was new to her, an elemental novelty still, as it must have been to many of the men whose fate thirty-odd years ago she intended to explore despite the reluctance of her professor fully to sanction the project. Patriotic drum-banging. Mere military history. Jesus! She hadn’t come over three thousand miles to explore blind alleys.

  The lights were coming on now on the Isle of Sheppey. There were lights strung along a late fishing boat, and the flat shape of a dredger was outlined in electric lamps on the horizon as darkness deepened the sky. The sea at south Devon would not be like Whitstable, she knew, with its shingle and groynes and snug little harbour. The sea where she was going was capricious and exposing, its swell powered in tumbling waves along a vast wilderness of shore.

  She sat on the breakwater outside the Neptune and wondered if anything ever washed up on Slapton Sands. Were badge caps and buttons and rifle bolts lightened by rust and corrosion on the sea bottom ever cast back on to the land? Was there a beachcomber living in the bay nursing a careful hoard of clues about the catastrophe? Alice Bourne was a historian, not a marine archaeologist. But when she arrived, knowing nothing after the struggle just to go, it would be interesting to see some tangible relic of the men who were rumoured to have perished there.

  She’d sat in Champion’s campus office and waited to plead her case while he’d taken an important telephone call that interrupted their meeting almost at its outset. The blind over the single window was drawn against heat and glare. A spindly electric fan failed to create much of a breeze, noisily, on his desk. A collection of precise brass rubbings hung on one wall, long medieval faces in thin, gold leaf frames. It was hard for Alice to imagine such features ever having belonged to the living. Titles Champion had authored were given pride of place in his bookcase. They consumed almost a full shelf. He sat leafing through her proposal as he spoke into the phone, a habit she hated, regarded as dismissive, cavalier. She noticed that his moustache was stained with nicotine at its centre. He finished his call and lit a cigarette from the flame of a heavy desk lighter shaped out of onyx.

  ‘Why have I never heard about this event?’

  ‘Because it was covered up?’

  Champion smoked and considered. He held the cigarette between the fingers of his right hand so that when he spoke and gesticulated smoke rose in a ragged column in blinkered sunlight through the blinds. ‘So how did you hear about it?’

  She’d been on a collegiate skiing trip to Colorado. It was January and shudderingly cold. She’d walked towards the close of the day with her friends into a bar that was really nothing more than a shack, freezing, tugging gloves from clumsy fingers and stamping snow in melting clumps from their boots, inhaling woodsmoke, feeling the radiant creep of heat from an iron stove. At the back of the bar she’d seen a photograph of a man who looked like the bar owner’s son, in uniform, outside a whitewashed house at the wheel of a Jeep. Only it wasn’t his son. It was the bar owner in another life. Beside the Jeep, blinking into the sunlight, were two women in britches carrying hoes. She’d asked about the photograph.

  ‘Where was that taken?’

  He still wore his hair in the crew cut he’d probably worn under his field cap then. It was grey and soft, like ermine, now. It would have bristled, salt and pepper, then. ‘You tell me,’ he said.

  Alice Bourne considered the picture. ‘The architecture looks like rural Ireland. But they’re land girls, aren’t they, in the photograph with you? So it must be England.’

  ‘Very good. It’s England all right. It’s Devon. And it was taken in 1944.’

  The bar proprietor had talked about his war service overseas. He’d talked cautiously at first, with some self-consciousness. But he’d recollected more easily when he realized how well informed his listener was about the period in which he’d most intensely lived his life. And as her friends sipped buttered rum and nibbled at potato chips, thawing out, this veteran had mentioned Slapton Sands to her. And she’d absorbed from him, in his words, the whole incomplete, horrifying mystery.

  ‘It’s an anecdote,’ Champion said now. ‘In context, I mean. It was a training accident. Logistically, I suppose they were unavoidable. Their scale reflected the scale of the enterprise. You want a cover-up, you should look at Watergate. That’s a cover-up. And that, my dear, is real history.’

  A sergeant called Delroy Boone had taken the photograph in the bar. Boone had been killed in Normandy, cut to pieces by machine-gun fire like hundreds of his comrades on Omaha Beach. The fact could be used to illustrate Champion’s point. To illustrate but not to prove it, Alice Bourne thought.

  ‘And the old boy in the bar was probably exaggerating,’ Champion said. ‘I’d embroider a tale in front of an audience as comely as you undoubtedly looked, snugly wrapped in ski clothes. It’s only human nature. Probably his way of flirting.’ He ground out his cigarette. After a short silence between the two of them, he took another from the packet on his desk and lit it. There was more silence. It wasn’t really silence, with the odd call or cry of laughter carrying from the student world outside, behind the shuttered blind over the one window, but it seemed like silence to Alice in the smoky seclusion in which they sat. When Champion spoke again, he spoke softly. ‘We’re talking here about your doctoral thesis. You’ve an original mind. I won’t stop you writing about whatever did or did not happen at Slapton Sands. But I would sincerely recommend you look for a subject more suited to your undoubted gifts.’

  She said nothing. She looked at her linked fingers in her lap, waiting the moment out.

  ‘Military history,’ he said. ‘It’s like writing up a game of dominoes.’

  ‘The military say it didn’t happen.’

  ‘Watergate happened.’

  ‘Watergate is still happening,’ Alice said. ‘I’m an historian, not a journalist.’

  ‘That’s that, then,’ Champion said, dismissing her.

  He’d been ushering her out of the door when he mentioned the tutorial party taking place the following week. An opportunity for her to meet people, he said. Can’t live your life in a scholarly vacuum of reading and research. She briefly pictured jugs of Pimm’s and cricket sweaters. Dappled, sunny aphorisms. Leather and oiled willow. But her departing smile was forced.

  Water lapped against the breakwater outside the Neptune, everything dappled and flushed in the water’s reflection under the descending sun. Alice lifted her glass and sipped beer. It tasted warm and hoppy. The sky was empty, apart from a few torn threads of vapour trail, remote, almost at that reach where the sky became space. She thought a boat slipping out of the harbour must have caused the brief agitation of the water. Otherwise the stillness was complete. She felt remote from everything, without purpose and more isolated than she could ever remember having felt. In a few days she would travel to Slapton Sands, brave a journey west across the smouldering country to discover what she could about what had really happened there over a few days in April in 1944.

  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 t
he 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.