by Ann Swinfen
‘I don’t know what things are coming to. My Clement always used to say the US should keep out of other people’s wars. He was too old to serve in the last one, but his younger brother was drafted and served in the trenches. He wasn’t ever the same afterwards. Shell-shocked, they called it. Used to have screaming nightmares, and sometimes he’d just get the shakes, for no reason at all.’
Suddenly she recollected that Mary’s Pete was out there somewhere on a naval ship.
‘Of course, we’re all in it this time, if they’re putting up defences on our beaches. The trenches in the last war – that was some different.’
Charlie came in from the storeroom with a fifty-pound bag of feed on his shoulder and swung it to the ground with a thud.
‘Since Pearl Harbor, we don’t have a choice,’ he said. ‘It’s our war now and we have to fight it. Don’t see how they can guard the whole coastline, though. Three thousand five hundred miles of coast in the State of Maine, what with all our bays and inlets. And two thousand islands. ‘Twouldn’t be possible.’
‘They’ll have gun emplacements,’ Bert Swanson called through the open door. With the warm weather of the last few days he had moved from the Liars’ Bench by the stove and taken up his position in his favourite rocker on the store porch. ‘On some of the headlands, that’ll be. To shoot at enemy aircraft.’
‘German aircraft won’t be able to fly as far as here,’ Charlie shouted back. ‘It’s ships they’ll be watching out for. Or submarines, more’n likely.’
‘Well,’ said Abigail decisively, ‘they’ll do none of it on our property without permission, and that’s flat.’
Tobias was walking back up the farm track for his dinner after a tiring morning planting cabbages. He had made a start yesterday, even though it was Sunday, with Simon and Sam helping. The weather was right and he was in a hurry to get ahead. Today Simon was back at school and Sam had been summoned to visit his ailing mother, who had taken a turn for the worse. He had gone by bus to Augusta, and wouldn’t be back till nightfall. There was nothing for it but to get on as best he could, though it was really a two-man job.
At the end of the morning he had unhitched Dancer from the seed drill and turned her into the pasture with Lady and the two foals. He walked along the dusty track towards the farmhouse, conscious of the sun on his back marking a real turn in the weather. Outlanders, mocking the weather here, said that Maine had two seasons: winter and July. But Tobias knew every shade and tint of his local climate, which varied even from field to field, and from the fringes of the pine woods to the sandy coastal strip. It felt as though it was going to be a fine summer, but he was reserving judgement a while yet.
Looking up, his attention caught by a sound ahead of him, he was astonished to see a jeep approaching from the direction of the farmhouse, bumping over the ruts of the track. This was private land, and anyone driving down the track must first have come through the gate down on the county road, clearly marked LIBBY FARM ONLY, then driven through the farmyard past the house and come through the second gate on to the track. Tobias quickened his step, a sense of irritation rising in him. He had seen army jeeps careering round the roads in the last few weeks. They were driven by soldiers barely older than Simon, who spat tobacco juice over the side and seemed extremely cocky.
He stopped in the middle of the track, where boggy ground on either side would prevent the jeep from driving round him, and waited. It slowed down and halted circumspectly a few yards away. There were two men in it: the driver, a young sergeant, and a lieutenant, who might have been as much as a year older.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the lieutenant, ‘but we have to go on down here.’
‘You’ll do no such thing without an explanation,’ said Tobias hotly. ‘This is private property.’
‘Oh, uh, are you...’ the lieutenant consulted a piece of paper, ‘uh, Mr T. Libby?’
‘It depends who’s asking.’
‘The US army, sir. I have a permit to gain access to all coastal paths, and I understand this farm track meets up with the coastal path running north to Flamboro and south to Todd’s Neck.’
‘I’ll see that permit.’
The young lieutenant docilely produced an official-looking document. He had been told to be polite but firm with the local farmers. Tobias scanned the sheets of paper quickly. They seemed to be in order.
‘Yes, I’m Tobias Libby, and this is my land you’re on.’
The lieutenant jumped down from the jeep; the sergeant gazed into space, masticating gum like a cow chewing the cud.
‘We have to carry out a preliminary reconnaissance of the coastal area, sir,’ the lieutenant explained, ‘to decide on the best placement for guns. Sure, we have plenty of maps, but with coastal erosion and all...’
‘No erosion along here,’ said Tobias, slightly mollified by the young man’s conciliatory tone. ‘Your maps are probably pretty correct. But a lot of the ground just up from the beach is marshy. And between the marshes and the beach are the ledges – sharp, shelving rocks. Nowhere flat to give you a base. It’s like that all the way from here to Todd’s Neck. Inland from the marshy strip it’s pine woods, and that’s all my property. In the other direction the path goes up along a steep cliff edge, very narrow. The property there belongs to the Tremayne family. I wouldn’t say there’s anywhere suitable till you get to Todd’s Neck in the one direction or Flamboro in the other.’
He considered.
‘I suppose there might be a suitable area on either end of Flamboro bay, but it’s all built up with wharves and fish houses. You’d need to talk to the selectmen. My brother is one of them, Nathan Libby. Most of the land on Todd’s Neck belongs to the Mansion House Hotel, and I doubt they’d be pleased if you wanted to set up a gun there.’
‘Well, maybe we could just take a walk along there and have a looksee?’ said the lieutenant. ‘If I’m not keeping you?’
Privately, Lieutenant Benson hoped they could get on without the farmer’s slow, deliberate musings, but he was prepared to humour him if he had to.
‘Just going up to the house for my dinner.’ Tobias debated with himself. He wasn’t sure how friendly he wanted to be with these soldiers. Anyone else, he wouldn’t have hesitated.
‘I’ll just tell my missus I’ll be half an hour. Then why don’t you both step in for a bite?’
‘Thank you kindly. We’d appreciate that.’
Tobias warned Harriet to expect two extra for dinner, then he climbed into the jeep behind the soldiers and they bumped their way down the farm track until it met the coastal path.
‘Has your family lived here for long?’ Lieutenant Benson asked as they passed the meadow, where the two foals raced off at the approach of the jeep.
‘Round about three hundred years. Some of us have farmed and some have fished, and back when whaling was a profitable business some of us shipped on whalers. So now I’m a farmer and my brother’s a lobsterman, but he part owns the farm. Where do you come from yourself?’
‘Oh, I’m a city slicker. Born and bred in Baltimore. Just had a little over a year at Johns Hopkins before Pearl Harbor. I enlisted straight after. Hoping to see some action soon, if I get over to Europe.’
Tobias made a snorting noise at the boy’s enthusiasm. He hadn’t served in the last war, working as he was on his father’s farm, but five of his classmates had seen action in Europe and never come back.
‘And you?’ he asked the sergeant, who rolled his gum into his cheek before answering.
‘I’m from Chicago. Never seed anything like this in my life before.’ He gestured with one hand at the ocean opening up before them. ‘We thought Lake Michigan was big, but, babe, I never pictured anything as big as this.’
He brought the jeep to a halt where the farm track petered out and twisted his head over his shoulder to look at Tobias.
‘Don’t it give you the creeps living here with all that water and those woods and not a soul in sight? I’d go crazy in a week.’
Tobias looked at him in astonishment. Flamboro was a flourishing little town, there were busy farms all around, and in summer Todd’s Neck had visitors strung round the small beach and the golf course like beads on a string.
‘I thought the Midwest was full of wide open prairies and nothing to be seen for miles.’
‘Wouldn’t know. Ain’t never been outside Chicago before this. In Chicago you got plenty life, plenty people, always something going on, places to go – get a drink, shoot some pool. Cain’t figger out what people here do all day.’
He looked at the finger of pine woods reaching down to the ledges, dark and cool between the trees even now with the sun at its zenith.
‘Gives me the creeps,’ he said, and shivered.
They got out of the jeep and Tobias led them about halfway along Libby’s Beach in the direction of Todd’s Neck. The woods drew back from the shore after that single projecting copse, leaving a basin of marshland lying in a long oval between the ledges and the wood shore. It was covered with rough sea grasses, bayberry and wild cranberries. Now, in spring, it still squelched underfoot. By midsummer it would have partly dried out and some areas would remain fairly firm until the fall rains started. The whole mile-long area was threaded through with thin streams running down from the higher ground of the woods. These spread into flat pools and drained off, in places, through old worn cracks in the rocks of the ledges. At the centre, well in from the shore and near the ruins of an old fort, lay a small lake, known as Libby’s Pond.
‘I see what you mean,’ said Lieutenant Benson. ‘There’s nowhere suitable here. But we’ll have to sandbag all the way along.’
‘Sandbag?’ To Tobias, sandbags were used along the seafront in Flamboro in seasons of dangerous flood tides. He could not see any rationale for them here. Did the army propose to try to keep the sea out of the marsh? It flooded naturally at such times, but you might as well try to bale out the sea as sandbag the marsh.
‘Foxholes. We’ll dig foxholes all the way along this stretch of beach and reinforce them with sandbags. We won’t be manning them all the time, only if there’s an invasion alert. Then we can put men into them to pick off any enemy bastards coming ashore.’
Tobias didn’t think it would be easy to construct foxholes here, but perhaps the army knew something he didn’t.
‘And it’s like this all the way along to Todd’s Neck?’
‘That’s right. The shore changes there. The neck is really a kind of island joined on to the land by a causeway. It’s very rocky and steep, with sheer cliffs dropping into the sea, except for a couple of small beaches. No marsh. You might be able to get the jeep along the coast path, but it would be easier to go round by the county road.’
‘Oh, we’ll get the jeeps along here all right when we’re building the foxholes, but today we’ll go by road and talk to the hotel manager. Let’s have a look at the path in the other direction, beyond where we left the jeep.’
They retraced their steps past the jeep and began the climb up towards the Tremayne property. The path was so narrow they had to walk in single file. When they reached the top of the headland, Lieutenant Benson looked speculatively at the great empty house.
‘Not occupied, you said? We may want to commandeer that.’
Tobias looked alarmed.
‘Oh, I don’t know. The Tremaynes are a very powerful family. They live in Boston all the time now, but they know politicians...’ His voice trailed away.
‘Well.’
Lieutenant Benson studied the ground to his right. The strip of land holding the path was not more than two or three feet wide with no protection on the seaward side, where it tumbled away in a vertiginous drop to knife-edged rocks below. The ocean pounded against them, a swirling mass of white and green, and fell back with a sound like a huge animal sucking and slurping at its kill. The inward side of the path was bounded by a low stone wall marking the edge of the Tremayne garden. He could have stepped over it, but on the other side the ground dropped four feet to the lawn. There was nowhere here they could set up a gun without building up a massive level area to support the concrete base, which would involve all kinds of problems. With the solid rock under the path and the drop on the inland side, it would not even be possible to dig foxholes.
They walked further until they could look down at Flamboro encircling its bay below them. The wharves and harbour walls were cluttered with all the working gear of a busy fishing port. To site a gun here would mean knocking down at least one fish house. Lieutenant Benson lifted his eyes and looked across to the far end of the town where the church stood out white against the deep green of another pine wood.
‘What about over there, just beyond the church? What’s over there?’
‘The burying-ground. Then the woods.’
‘The burying-ground, eh? There will be flat ground there. And it will be away from the houses. That might be just the place.’
Tobias looked shocked.
‘You can’t set up a gun in the burying-ground!’
‘Why not? It’s not going to disturb the inhabitants, is it?’
The sergeant gave a snort of laughter – his first contribution to the conversation since they had left the jeep.
‘We could promise not to do any dummy runs during church service, couldn’t we, sir? Cain’t promise for the real thing.’
They walked back to the jeep in silence. Benson was calculating what difficulties might be involved in gaining access to the burying-ground. If the locals proved too obstinate, he had the power to commandeer it anyway, but he would prefer to avoid that. He asked Tobias the name of the minister.
‘Reverend Bridges,’ said Tobias, much troubled.
‘We’ll go over and have a word with the reverend this afternoon,’ said Lieutenant Benson, jumping nimbly into the jeep beside the driver. ‘After your wife gives us lunch. That’ll save us going back to camp, and I take it very kindly.’
Tobias climbed slowly up into the back of the jeep and before he could sit down the driver started manoeuvring it round, cutting up the thin turf and sending a spray of sand flying out from the wheels. Tobias was flung suddenly down into the hard seat, with the breath knocked out of him. As the jeep rattled back up the farm track, the debris flung up from the wheels changed from sand to grey, dusty soil. Tobias wondered how much damage would be done to his track by a fleet of jeeps driving back and forth for the building of foxholes.
They sat down to dinner around the big kitchen table, although Martha had tried to persuade her mother to lay the dining table for the soldiers.
‘They’ll just have to take us as they find us,’ said Harriet, somewhat crossly. Monday was sacrosanct as washing day, and she had been put out when Tobias had delayed dinner half an hour and assumed she could feed two extra men at a moment’s notice. With Martha and Billy here she had two additional sets of sheets and towels each week, as well as their clothes. She and Patience had just finished the washing in the big tubs in the wash-house and started on the wringing when Tobias had put his head round the door. She had hoped to have everything up on the washing line by dinnertime, but had been obliged to get out the ham she had boiled for tonight’s supper, peel extra potatoes, and open some of her canned green beans. She was just ready when the men appeared.
Martha, glad of any diversion from the boredom of farm life, had laid the table with one of her mother’s best tablecloths and the napkins bought by Simon at Mrs Larrabee’s. She found a few daffodils in the garden and put these in a vase taken from the china cupboard in the parlour and barely used since her parents’ wedding twenty-eight years before.
‘Sakes!’ said Harriet, pushing her hair back from her hot face and carrying over the big lidded dish of potatoes. ‘What are you doing, girl?’
‘Just trying to make things look a bit more civilised.’
Before Harriet could retort, Tobias came in, long-faced, with the two soldiers.
Throughout dinner, Martha talked animatedly. Harriet could
n’t remember seeing her so lively or so helpful except when she and Will Halstead were courting. After the bad temper and sulks of the last few weeks, she seemed like a different person. Watching Martha prettily drawing out the silent sergeant and talking animatedly to Lieutenant Benson, Harriet felt something like pity for her daughter. She was made for a different life from her parents’. No wonder she was bored and discontented here. She needed young people around her. Young men, Harriet corrected herself. Martha had never enjoyed sharing the limelight with other young women. Her face was flushed with colour and her eyes were bright as she argued playfully with the lieutenant about their favourite Clark Gable movies.
‘Say, is there a movie house anywhere round here?’ Lieutenant Benson asked. ‘Seems like there’s nothing to brighten life up.’
‘In Portland, yes. Not anywhere nearer. And I can’t get into Portland except by bus.’ Martha made it sound like the trans-Siberian railway. ‘In Washington, of course, we had a car, but it was an air-force car and had to go back when my husband was posted overseas.’
‘Gee, that doesn’t seem fair on the wives. Maybe you would do me the honour...’ he suddenly sounded like something out of a Clark Gable movie himself.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, we get some extra gas, and I can get the use of a jeep. How’s about us going to the movies in Portland one day?’ He turned to Harriet. ‘I promise to get her safely there and back, ma’am.’
Martha looked put out, but Harriet said gravely, ‘Thank you, Lieutenant Benson. I’m sure you will.’ The boy must be at least five or six years younger than Martha.
Just then there was a wail from the wash-house, where Billy had been banished to eat his dinner with Patience. He came hurtling through the door, and then stopped, eyeing the strangers dubiously.
‘Who’re you?’ He sounded belligerent.
‘Now, Billy,’ said Martha sweetly, ‘this is Lieutenant Benson and Sergeant Klinsky. Say how-do-you-do.’
Billy climbed on to her lap and glared at the men with his thumb in his mouth.
