Slapton Sands

by Francis Cottam

  What the fuck: what the fuck. Everything was in that bookbag. All her text sources, her notes, her photocopies, outline—everything. Warned to go home, she’d defied the warning. And then she had acted with criminal carelessness. Her work had been thrown from a train window as she endured unwanted sexual approaches in the beige purgatory of an InterCity buffet bar. It was singeing, now, on some burning embankment.

  She looked at the sign at the end of the carriage for the lavatory. The sign said VACANT. She opened the lavatory door expecting to see her work torn up, dumped in its waterlogged pan. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the lavatory opposite, either. Pale with panic now, she went back to her seat. Had she missed something? She forced herself to sit down. Images from the past days inventoried themselves in her mind.

  Public art, painting lies across the Peckham badlands. The rings in the lions’ mouths. The House of Commons, undulant in heat. London, burnished in afternoon light from the heights of Hampstead. David’s body, toiling in dawn light in a Bloomsbury bed. Doughboys on the march to Ypres, with the man from the cathedral. Rachel Vine, cigarette smoke roiling around her like incense in the pub with a pulpit bar.

  She felt a tap on her shoulder. It was the ticket collector. He beamed hotly. He was a man with whom Will Hay’s stationmaster could happily have bantered. They were cut from the same cloth. They were soul mates. And he had her bookbag in his hand.

  ‘Can’t be too careful, miss,’ he said. He waved the bag. He brandished it, more accurately. She could not believe it was real, intact and whole, swinging from his bright fist.

  The cathedral man. The cathedral man?

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  Her father had taught her to do it. You’ve got the basics, he had told her. You’ve got better than twenty-twenty vision, alert hearing, the intelligence to discipline yourself into remembering only the significant. The meat and potatoes, her old man had called it. Forget the rest of the stuff. The salt and pepper, the relish, the ketchup and mustard are all fine and useful in their way. But the meat and potatoes is the meal. You don’t have them, honey, you don’t have no dinner.

  Her father was an indifferent grammarian, but an excellent cop and a patient and diligent teacher. On top of which, his daughter was an alpha-plus student keen to impress him with her cleverness in a way he would finally, fully appreciate. So she learned afresh from him a skill that she already thought she possessed. She learned to look and to remember, to break down a situation into its component parts to gather disciplined and accurate detail. Significant detail. Or, as he always impressed on her, every significant detail. Alice distinguished herself in this study. After the course was completed, she always got her meat and potatoes. It became ingrained, like instinct, to do it. She was good at it, too. She’d never gone unfed.

  The War Museum picture had been posed, as all photographs had needed to be back then because of the limitations of relatively primitive camera and film technology. It had been a sunny summer’s day, so the light had been good. That had helped clarify the resulting image, of course. A superior lens and the slow shutter speed had given the picture a surprising depth of field. The photographer had used a tripod. She could tell this not just from the absence of camera shake but also from the angle relative to height from which the picture had been taken. The subjects had tried for a look of jolly spontaneity, probably at the coaxing of the photographer. It would have been a pooled picture, Alice assumed, taken for the American dailies. They had then, they still had now, no national newspapers in America. The photograph would have appeared on an agreed date in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and the Kansas City Star. It was a propaganda picture in essence, a morale-booster. There would have been a bullish caption printed underneath along the lines of ‘Our Brave Boys in Good Cheer on the Way to Join the Fight’. It would have been read with sardonic smiles in barbershops and on shoeshine thrones by men equally cheery they weren’t joining the fight.

  One person had not remained obediently still for the full length of the exposure. The platoon sergeant had shifted, his movement probably compulsive rather than some militant gesture of non-cooperation. The resemblance was partially in that captured elusiveness. He’d hidden his hands, curled them into his tunic cuffs. Most of his features had been hidden in the picture by the flat brim of his hat and the shadow cast by that brim. But the thin mouth and lantern jaw were familiar to her. So was the cold reproach of the one seen eye. Mostly, though, and ironically, it was the reluctance of that thin, angular body to remain still, scrutinized, that cemented the link.

  The sergeant leading his doughboy company in one of Bedlam’s warren of Great War picture galleries was as close in appearance to the cathedral man as would have been a twin. And the man at the cathedral had been watching her. He hadn’t been a tourist at all. She’d known it at the time, really. She definitely knew it now. She thought about this for a moment. Then Alice took a deep breath of air. The air aboard her train smelled of stale upholstery and burning fields. Was she going mad? No, she thought. Her bookbag, intact, sat on the table in front of her. No. She didn’t think she was going mad at all.

  *

  ‘I saw a Will Hay film,’ she’d said to Rachel Vine.

  Rachel Vine had blinked and stared at her. ‘Don’t they have laws in America to protect juveniles from that sort of thing?’

  ‘I saw it a couple of days ago. Here. Is that what you used to watch? George Formby? Gracie Fields?’

  ‘You’re forgetting Old Mother Riley,’ Rachel Vine said. ‘And Arthur Askey. Musn’t forget Big-Hearted Arthur.’

  Alice nodded. Champion had mentioned Old Mother Riley. But he hadn’t mentioned Askey. Perhaps her professor was unfamiliar with the Askey oeuvre.

  ‘Personally, I preferred Frank Sinatra to George Formby,’ Rachel Vine said. ‘Truth be told, I never really warmed to the ukulele. Athough it was all downhill for Sinatra—wasn’t it?—once he parted company with Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra.’

  Alice sat back against her seat. ‘You’re not quite who you pretend to be, are you, Mrs Vine?’

  The woman opposite turned her Zippo lighter between nimble, nicotined fingers with her wrist cocked on the pub table between them. When she spoke, she’d dropped the cod cockney altogether. ‘I was born in Kennington. My father was a Member of Parliament and bought a house in Walcot Square. It’s within the sound of the Division Bell.’

  Alice nodded. She knew about the Division Bell.

  ‘I really was a land girl, too. I’ve still got the callouses. Based near Totnes, also true. I did encounter the GIs. I was there the night in a Totnes pub when a seriously pissed ranger became so incensed by our licensing laws that he offered to buy the entire liquor stock at closing time just so he could carry on drinking. When that ploy failed, he got together with three buddies at the bar and made a bid for the pub. The offer was accepted. They woke up on the floor the following day, in an eighteenth-century coach-house to which they now owned the deeds.’

  ‘What were they like?’

  ‘Hideously hungover, I should imagine. Poorer, too.’

  ‘The GIs generally. What were they like?’

  ‘That’s a question unworthy of you, dearie. And you don’t look like Carly Simon, by the way.’

  ‘Why do you persist with this “dearie” shit, Rachel?’

  ‘It goes down very well with most of the punters at Bedlam. They like characters. And I like the job. Without it, I fear I’d gather dust, like the leaves on those potted plants over there.’ She nodded.

  Alice looked at the potted plants. The pots were brass. The plants were the sort you saw in the vicinity of christening fonts. ‘What were they like?’

  ‘Very randy, most of them. They were young men, deprived of the company of women, who had never been fitter in their lives. They may not have been as obsessed by sex as they were reputed to be, but they weren’t far off it, in what free time they were given. They liked to drink. Not even the taste of English beer cou
ld dull their enthusiasm for alcohol. God, they were thirsty. They tended to be courteous and cheerful. They were a terribly soft touch, most of them, around kids. Most of them weren’t much more than kids themselves.’

  ‘They sound like the troops from Disneyland.’

  Rachel Vine lit another cigarette. ‘All sweetness and light?’ She exhaled at the ceiling. ‘Not entirely. The segregation was pretty shocking to us even back then. Separate but equal, I believe was the phrase. The blacks were paid the same and wore the same uniform, but they were kept apart. There were some really vile bigots, not all of them from the South. And there were a few out-and-out psychopaths. Every army has a few of those.’

  Alice looked at her watch. They had been there half an hour. The pub might have an ecclesiastical feel, but the time passed a lot quicker here than she’d ever known it to in church.

  ‘What can you tell me about Slapton Sands?’

  Rachel Vine squinted at her through smoke. Her eyes were quite small, feline and glittery in the thin beams of sunlight through the window. She’d been a head-turner in her time, Alice could tell. It was pretty obvious, removed as she now was from stacks of crockery and her cash register and cake display. Divested of her period pinny, her scarf. She’d been what David and his friends would call a stunner. Now she said: ‘The deaths occurred in April of 1944. No details ever reached the public domain. But corpses are difficult things to keep secret when they start washing up all along the coast. I’ve no proof to offer you concerning any of this. All I can tell you is how I heard several hundred of those soldiers met their end.’

  In the spring of 1944, Rachel Vine was twenty-seven. The man she was dating was a thirty-three-year-old American infantry colonel called Richard Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick had a wife and two young children at home in Rhode Island. Rachel knew all about them. The colonel kept a family picture in his wallet. And she didn’t particularly approve of what she was doing. Her previous boyfriend had been in the RAF. He’d flown a Blenheim until the night when it set out over the North Sea on a bombing mission to Germany from which the aircraft never returned. Rachel justified her affair with Pat by telling herself she was on the rebound. That was what she called him. Everyone called him Pat. He, in turn, justified his infidelity by saying that if he was going to be killed, he wanted to live until he died. Put to the pin of their collars, it was something similar to what all the adulterous Americans said.

  Pat was training men at Slapton Sands. It was an open secret in the towns and villages of south Devon that the Yanks were training there for invasion. The big questions were where and when. Pat could make the same educated guess as anyone. But only the chiefs of staff really knew. The possibilities were so widespread that Field Marshal Rommel had been obliged to fortify the entire Atlantic coast of France. Wherever they landed, the assault would be costly. The Germans were expert and well-equipped fighters. Everyone was aware of the casualties suffered by the Canadian commandos in the abortive raid on Dieppe. All the Americans could do was rehearse and rehearse again in the hope that they were as well prepared as possible when the real thing finally came.

  Pat didn’t discuss the detail much with Rachel. At first she put this down, cynically, to an adulterer’s talent for discretion. Then she wondered if he wasn’t trying to glorify the importance of what he did by pretending it was more secret than it was. There were plenty of braggarts in the pubs, cryptically claiming to do hush-hush work for this ministry or that. But after a few weeks of seeing him, Rachel realized that Pat was largely silent on the subject of what went on at Slapton Sands out of professionalism. ‘You have a saying here,’ he told her with a smile. ‘“Careless talk costs lives.”’

  She nodded. She was familiar enough with the posters. Everyone was.

  ‘It’s as simple as that, honey. I don’t want to turn a slogan into a prophesy.’

  Rachel thought that two things helped the American military maintain their secrets better than the British were able to do. The first was the fact that they were in a foreign country. No matter how welcome they were made to feel, participating in choral societies and harvest festivals and whist drives and village sports days, they were guests confronted by a culture so alien to them that it couldn’t do other than remind them at every baffling turn of the reason why they were actually there.

  The other consideration was their stubbornly insisted-on autonomy. Yes, they pedalled out on their bicycles to win hearts and minds in Britain’s rural heartland. Their endurance marches often concluded at convenient wayside inns. They baked cakes for school Christmas parties. But they lived on their own bases, guarded by their own sentries, eating rations shipped from Australia. Unlike the Anzacs, they were never billeted with British families. Even if they committed a crime in England, and some were caught doing so, they were tried and punished under American military jurisdiction. The worst case involved a GI who shot to death his English girlfriend in full view of the owner of the tailor’s shop in the Midlands where she worked as a cutter. More typical was the case of two GIs stealing a car at gunpoint. They’d been drunk, lost and footsore, and they’d needed to get back to their base.

  Rachel Vine learned the details of both these cases from Pat, who took an interest because in civilian life he’d worked as a lawyer in the state prosecutor’s office in New York. In both the cases he told Rachel about, the victims had been British. Both crimes had been committed on British soil. But the offenders were tried, found guilty and punished by American military courts. The shooter would have gone back to the USA and got the chair, Pat told Rachel, if he hadn’t put the gun under his own chin after killing his footloose sweetheart. The GI highwaymen were properly found guilty. Their jail sentences were served in the United States.

  America’s citizen army was in but not of Britain, just as its soldiers were in but not of the army itself. They were training for a job. They’d do the training, do the job and then go home. And in the meantime they’d keep the secrets they were supposed to. Maybe Pat would have cracked under Gestapo thumbscrews, the threat of a dawn firing squad. But seduction, as Rachel Vine discovered, left her ex-lawyer tight-lipped about what he did during the daytime.

  Of course, she told Alice, there were other ways of knowing what went on at Slapton Sands.

  Rory Carnegie was a Scottish trawlerman forced south by some scandal involving an unsafe boat that sank with all hands in a squall off Aberdeen. The tragedy taught Rory a bitter lesson about maritime safety. But the lesson came too late as far as the licensing authority for fishing out of his home port was concerned. Exiled south, he tried fishing first out of Penzance, but fell foul of a Cornish cartel of boat owners who slashed his nets and put sugar into the fuel tanks of two of his craft as they sat at anchor. What was left of his little fleet limped along the Devon coast as far as Dartmouth. Here, Rory was greeted grudgingly. But at least his boats were not vandalized in the night.

  His Aberdeen mishap had cost eleven lives. He remained a careful man with a pound note. He was a Scot, after all. But he sent his boats out after Aberdeen alert to every safety requirement. They had life rafts, gimbals compasses, distress flares and, if they were of a tonnage expected to fish beyond coastal waters, two-way radios.

  The radios were top notch. But this was a happy fluke. Rory bought them as a job lot from a Liverpool shipping agent who sidelined in bankrupt stock. The wireless sets were American. A manufacturer in Chicago had been pitching them to the German military, on the point of signing a deal when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

  The Americans in the South Hams claimed not just land but a substantial square mileage of sea. Putting all that water out of bounds to fishermen did two things: it put the trawlermen’s backs up, and it quickly enriched the fishing stock.

  Rory Carnegie fished the forbidden Devon waters with impunity. He fished Start Bay, his boats the only ones to do so. The Americans were often on the water. But Rory was never caught. He listened to the American boats giving their positions, communicating order
s and instructions on an open frequency, able thus to steer well clear of them. Incredibly, they didn’t bother to encode or scramble their radio transmissions. Rory eavesdropped on them. And so, one disastrous day in April 1944, did the German navy.

  ‘How did you know him?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Black market,’ Rachel Vine said. ‘Grey market, really. It wasn’t a case of spivs selling nylons and contraband whisky on street corners. It was strictly perishables, foodstuffs with toff appeal and a short lifespan. And no lineage, if you get my drift.’

  ‘You were a war profiteer?’

  Rachel Vine squinted at Alice through smoke. Her eyes were misted, squinting emeralds. ‘I organized a lunch every Sunday for the disadvantaged children of Totnes, most of them evacuees. We’re talking about a time in England of rickets, of polio, of plain old malnutrition. Lots of protein in fish, love. Lots of goodness in Rory Carnegie’s cod and whiting.’

  ‘Oh God. I’m sorry.’

  ‘He was partial to truffles and asparagus. Lordly appetites for a Scot. And he had a sweet tooth. Most of them do, apparently. Sugar beet. Couldn’t get enough of it.’

  “I’m so sorry, Rachel.’

  ‘We’d go for a drink, after the trade. And he’d tell me what the Yanks were up to off the coast.’

  A war profiteer. Alice couldn’t believe she’d said it. She felt mortified.

  ‘Don’t worry, love,’ Rachel said, patting her hand. ‘You had to be there. And you should thank God, really, that you weren’t.’

  A gold Cortina headed the rank of minicabs at Totnes Station. It formed a convoy of one by a painted sign saying ‘Rank’. The cab’s interior smelled of leatherette and, stalely, of cigarettes. There were quick splotches of Shake ’n’ Vac on the corduroy carpet in Alice’s footwell. The driver was sitting in a raised bucket seat, wearing a four-part seat belt that organized itself around a circular disc in the middle of his chest. He looked a bit like a picture of a Red Arrows pilot Alice had seen in a photo essay in one of the glossy magazines that came with the Sunday newspapers. Except that his wrap-around sunglasses made him look like a Red Arrows pilot with the head of a grinning fly. Status Quo were playing on his cassette player. Judging by the acoustics, the speakers had been positioned beneath the rear seats. The Fly drove as fast as the Cortina allowed along empty, winding roads. The engine had been race-tuned, souped-up; you could hear the whine of its pistons even over the Quo. She cluched her bookbag, trying to distract herself from the obvious danger she was in by looking at a view mostly obscured by tall, tangled hedgerows. She felt a thrum of excitement in her stomach that had nothing to do with the speed of the car or the percussive thump of the music. She was here. She could imagine Jeeps and Sherman tanks and columns of marching men on these roads. The topography was the same. The roads had not been widened, painted with white central lines, punctuated by the reflective Catseyes that rippled under tyres on most of the English roads outside the cities. The South Hams seemed unchanged and unchanging. Surely, she would find here what it was she was looking for.