Slapton Sands

by Francis Cottam

  Her room in Strete was the upper room in a small cottage facing the sea. She was admitted and shown around by a neighbour of the woman who owned the cottage. ‘Neighbour’ was a loose term, since the cottage was isolated, the only building on that section of the bay. But the cottage owner had been called away to deal with some emergency concerning her daughter in London. Positioned under the eaves, the room had a cosy quality better suited to winter than to summer. But its double window opened on sand, sea, horizon and sky. There was no heat ripple to impede the view. Looking out over the water, Alice felt it was the most space she had seen since her arrival in England. At the margin of water and land, the sea gathered in long, undulant, foam-crested waves. They rippled shorewards, dense with strength and momentum, each different, each its own elemental proposition of force and teeming consequence.

  David Lucas had been right: it was nothing like the coast at Whitstable, where the sea was constrained by the bulk of Sheppey and the shingle beach ordered by its neat rows of equidistant groynes. Whitstable bustled and crowed on the edge of the water. It cultivated oyster beds. Its snug harbour and nautical pubs and sailors’ cottages somehow domesticated the sea. Here, by forbidding contrast, all was exposure. The sea was ragged and the sand desolate. The sea was blue, of course, under its blameless blue sky, which was different from her dreaming of it. In her dreams, the sea at Slapton was coloured a treacherous green. Despite the weird, enduring stillness imposed all over England by the heatwave, there seemed the suggestion on Start Bay of a breeze. It did nothing, really, to cool the air, but it delivered a faint, untameable tang of salt.

  *

  Rory Carnegie had laughed, over his black market drinks with Rachel Vine, about the Higgins boats, the landing craft that the American strike troops came ashore in when they practised their seaborne assaults at Slapton Sands. Flat-bottomed, constructed of wood, they had the handling capabilities, he said, of a fruit crate with the lid removed. They were high-sided, not to provide their human cargo with armour, but simply to prevent them from being swamped. But they were notoriously difficult to manoeuvre. They steered badly and tended to broadside a swell of their own accord, regardless of what the steersman did with the tiller. Underpowered and heavily burdened, they didn’t have the speed or mass to respond to what an uncertain sea was doing. And the Americans were learning on the job. Rory would watch through his binoculars, his nets dragged bulging to either side of his own wash, as the Higgins boats were delivered into the sea off an American cruiser and were buoyed this way and that in the unhappy chaos of a stranded flotilla, two or three out of a dozen of them making for their target of the shore with anything approaching certainty as the rest pitched and wallowed on the swell.

  But the mirth dried on his lips fairly soon. Even Rory had to admit that the Americans were ferociously quick learners. They lost a few of their landing craft. They must have lost a few men with them, because the fruit crates sank with alarming swiftness and he never saw any rescue craft. But in weeks their handling of the Higgins boats became dexterous and confident. They’d be dropped in a heavy sea and chug in a relentless, disciplined formation for the shore. Rory’s crews began to see odd, fugitive lights flickering when they fished at night, and the Scotsman realized that the Yanks were practising moonlight assaults. Soon they were moonless assaults. Not long after, Rory stopped joking at the expense of the Slapton Sands Yanks altogether. It was the Americans, after all, who had constructed his excellent radio sets. They mean business, he said to Rachel Vine with a shrug. Rory Carnegie was not just grudging in his acknowledgement of others’ accomplishments. He was a king among begrudgers. But she could tell he was increasingly impressed by what it was he spied on.

  There was a note from her landlady on the bureau in Alice Bourne’s room. It outlined the idiosyncracies of the plumbing and told her where her key was hidden. The neighbour had let her in. The note said that there was a bicycle she could gladly use leaning against the potting shed at the rear of the cottage. Under the note was a small map, detailing local amenities. These were scant, unless she chose to cycle to Dartmouth or Totnes. Hence the dimensions of the map. There was a pub at the northern end of Slapton Sands that served reasonable food. She would find tea, a jar of instant coffee, sugar and powdered milk along with a kettle in her room.

  And someone had telephoned her here yesterday. A woman called Emerson seemed most anxious that Alice return her call at the earliest opportunity. The landlady had written a number down. There was a payphone in the pub, she added helpfully. There was a phone in the cottage, too. Alice had seen it on its dedicated table under a directory on a chain in the cottage entrance hallway. But the English were peculiar, she knew, about the use of their phones.

  Alice looked at her watch. It was two o’clock. She was hungry and she felt dirty from the train. But there was something she needed to do that did not immediately involve plumbing, a bicycle ride or Sally Emerson. She needed to walk along the coast road to Slapton Sands. She needed to look landwards at the coast there from the limit of the sea.

  The coast road was a straightish, narrow strip of asphalt edged on both sides by tussocks of razor grass. Small avalanches of sand had trickled here and there down the banks on to the asphalt. At intervals, she saw grey ruins of reinforced concrete half-buried in sand and grass. She supposed these were the sangars and pillboxes built by the Americans as mock fortifications. Except that there was nothing mock about them, really. They had been built to the same specifications as the real thing and then defended with grim obstinacy by men using live rounds in their guise as the German defenders of conquered French territory. The concrete had weathered in salt and wind exposure, and the ribbed steel reinforcing rods showed here and there amid stains and trickles of red-brown rust. The fortifications were pitted in clusters and rows with craters gouged by high-velocity rounds. If they had been defended stubbornly, they had been attacked with the fury of an invading force that faced extinction if it was driven back from its beachhead into the sea. She had read that they had trained and drilled with such exhaustive relentlessness that their war games became indistinguishable from actual combat. The citizen army resented their chickenshit tasks, the kitchen fatigues, the endless saluting of officers for whom they had scant personal regard. But they didn’t mind so much the field practices designed to keep them from becoming disaffected and bored. And so they became highly efficient. And so when the real thing came, it was thought, they would do it by rote, performing their murderous, terrifying task with no greater fear or forethought than they would give to yet another drill.

  The bay extended to the left of the road she was on. If she stepped up on to the grass bank she could see the width of flat sand descending to the sea. The sand was vast and largely featureless. There were strands of fleshy seaweed and some bits of beach debris, indistinguishable from this distance, down there on the tide line above the foam-edged breakers. But there was nothing suggestive of violence or tragedy. To her right, scrub and thorns clung to sandy soil. The small shrubs and trees were stunted and deformed by wind. They grew withered, tenacious. There were wild blackberry bushes and dune pines in little clusters. Behind them, the land had begun to rise. On the road itself, she encountered no people, no traffic. Birds coloured the bushes, singing, industrious. And there were gulls flapping and shrieking above the flotsam and weed on the tide line.

  There was no sign announcing Slapton Sands. It was a place that had existed for so long at the forefront of the mind of Alice Bourne that she had half-expected to see some physical commemoration of the fact of the place at its boundary. Not one of those illuminated signs erected out of civic pride to announce some hick town in America, but something ancient and English. She’d seen such a sign at St George’s Circus in London near where they’d parked the Apache’s minivan for the visit to the War Museum. Solemn and time-battered, its face bore the chiselled legend: ‘Westminster lies one mile to the west of this Monument.’ Information about the cartographic fact of Slapton wou
ld surely have been just as valid. The Slapton signpost would be stone, cracked, canted. It occurred to her, as she looked for it in vain, that there may very well have been just such a post. But it would have been plucked from the ground when England faced the threat of invasion before American soldiers had ever arrived here. It gathered moss on the bed of the gravel lagoon at Slapton Leys. It had been re-rooted in the garden of a Devon village pub for morris men to dance around at Midsummer’s Eve as they travestied some ancient pagan rite.

  It didn’t matter. She knew she had reached the place. Alice left the road and walked out on a diagonal line towards the edge of the water. The sand was firm under her feet, and the approaching sea began to roar like a dull, rhythmic reckoning. She’d brought a small shoulder bag with her, and she stopped now and took off her shoes and rolled her jeans up above her calf muscles and put flipflops from the shoulder bag on her feet. The breeze was faint when she stood again, but it was noticeable, a sensation of freshness on her face and in her hair. And salt. Not the rank malevolence of the salt smell oozing through wallpaper and linoleum in her Whitstable flat, but a clean suggestion of the sea. She had reached the water’s edge before she turned back to look at the land.

  They would have dipped and plunged shorewards in their Higgins boats, heavy with hampering kit. Then the ramps would have splashed down into the waves, and with their rifles raised over their heads they would have leaped, racing, into the surf and, gulping with cold and the weight of waterlogged pack and clothing, seen what it was she was looking at now. From a soldier’s perspective, the beach was a vast and featureless killing ground. Infantry landing here would be fired down on from the sangars and slit trenches and pillboxes, which were now the partially bulldozed ruins she’d seen from the coast road. There was no natural cover at all. Even without such obstacles as mines and coils of defensive wire, the beach was a suicidal location for an assault. Seeing Slapton for real, she realized instantly what she had not from her conversation with the Colorado veteran, from her reading on infantry tactics and from her scrupulous study of the detailed aerial photographs she had located in the library and mounted on the epidiascope at Kent. The soldiers who practised for Normandy here could master the mechanics of their landing craft until they were able to embark, beach and disembark in their sleep. But the only way for them and their commanders to know whether their battle plan would work would be to try it out for real. They would have to land tanks to provide cover for an infantry advance. They would need to pulverize the beach defences using the heavy guns aboard their battlecruisers. They would need fighter-bomber support to strafe and harry defending units. Without all of these, the result would be obvious. It would be butchery. It would be a massacre.

  Alice turned around to face the sea. Rory Carnegie’s secret lay somewhere on its bottom, if Rachel Vine had told her the truth in a pub in Lambeth which had felt towards the end of their conversation as hushed and sanctified as a confessional. Well, the sea would tell her nothing. But Rory Carnegie might, if she could locate the man and persuade him to talk to her. Rachel hadn’t known if Rory was alive still or dead. He’d be about seventy years old, she calculated. Fishing has always been a deadly profession, but he was a canny fisherman. And he took pretty good care of himself off the water. For a Scot.

  She turned her back on the sea and studied the land again. Not this time in the disciplined way a soldier might, but as someone would seeing it the way she did, as an American, as a visitor seeing a foreign landscape properly from this perspective for the first time. Beyond the ridge of the coast road and the undistinguished scrub to its rear, the land must have gathered soil and mineral richness, rising as steep green hills with patches of verdant woodland. The trees were a mix of cedar, sycamore, elm and larch. There was no precise element to this vista of grass and tall trees and gentle hills that defined it specifically as English. At least, there was no element she could identify, unless it was the soft light and crepuscular shadows. But the indefinable, defining something, was there nevertheless. The scene was English in the same unmistakable way as would be churning milkmaids, maypoles, a girning fool in a smock on a country stile. And you may as well include the green man, she thought to herself. And those damned morris dancers.

  She was filled, looking at the hills and the dark shapes of gathered woodland, all at once with a feeling she always associated with English twilights. It usually crept up on her in that silence when the singing of birds became suddenly more audible, with the sun sinking and the sky starting to flush pink in the west and objects gaining a gloamy, summery luminescence, as though they were not real, those pub benches, those tables and table umbrellas and garden walls. As though they were pretend objects cut from crepe paper, from the intense fabric of stage or film props. Usually, there would be music, something recently familiar but fundamentally strange. She recalled Sandy Denny, her voice ululant and sad, singing ‘The Banks of the Nile’, on a cassette player at a Canterbury garden party. At first, she had mistaken this mood for melancholy. And then, because it felt vaguely sad, with homesickness. But what it was, she realized now, was alienation. It was the feeling of being somewhere, somehow strange, and being unable to escape your surroundings and return to the familiar, to the recognizably safe, to the effortlessly known and understood. It was a childlike sentiment. She felt it at twilight because the coming of darkness signalled to her instinct that she was spending another night away from home. She felt it now because it must have been what those boys had felt thirty-odd years ago approaching this inalienable English landscape from the sea.

  What would they have made of the south Devon hills, those boys from the wheatfields of Nebraska, from Iowa and the flat, arid earth of west Texas? Would their collective hearts have sunk each time they rehearsed their landing at the sheer, remote-from-home strangeness of where they fetched up?

  Perhaps they did. But Alice Bourne believed that Americans were tougher, too, back then. They were far less given to indulgent sentiment. They were still a pioneering people. Childhood was a swift rite of passage, not a coddling America’s youth felt any collective reluctance to leave behind. Sure, they were boys. But they were tough boys, in it together. They had their army buddies; they had what their German enemies called camaraderie. She could hear the sea behind her. It seemed to shudder and hiss against the shingle and sand. The sea. The encroaching, whispering, assaulting waves of the sea. Each of those boys was alone in death, though, she thought. Camaraderie compensates only the living.

  Alice went back to the cottage in Strete and took a bath. She got the sit-up-and-beg from the lean-to behind the cottage. She cycled to the post office on her landlady’s map that doubled as a provisions store. She bought a bottle of lemonade and cream crackers and triangles of processed cheese wrapped in foil in a wheel-shaped, compressed-paper box. She put her purchases in the basket mounted between the handlebars of the bike and cycled back and ate a picnic on the beach. I could be right out of an Agatha Christie story, she thought, chewing. Except that I’m too messy an eater. And I haven’t a smooth but sinister vicar with me to move along the plot. She was beat when finally she got back to the cottage. She read for a while and then hit the sack. The phone rang twice after she went to sleep. The second time it rang and rang before it finally stopped. Either her landlady had persistent friends, Alice thought, snug under the eaves and the covers. Or she owes someone urgent money.

  It was the following morning before she saw her landlady’s note and remembered she was supposed to call DS Emerson. By the time she saw the note, she was on her way out of the door with her camera loaded with film and her notebook in her bag. She looked at the telephone in the hallway. It was pink, this instrument, the precise colour of cheap nail varnish. The note was in her hand. Should she call Emerson now? The English were funny about their phones. Thirty miles was considered long distance and the cost of a trunk call astronomical. The only place she’d seen the phone profligately used was in episodes of The Sweeney. She wouldn’t do it, she dec
ided. The very fact of the phone put her in a position of trust she wasn’t about to abuse. It was eight o’clock that evening and she was in the pub on the northern end of Slapton seafront when she finally fished the number from her bag and returned DS Emerson’s call.

  ‘Sally Emerson.’

  This surprised Alice. She’d expected to have to leave a message. She was momentarily silent, coins in her fingers over the slit in the metal box you pushed them through.

  ‘Is that Alice Bourne?’

  ‘Yes. It’s me. Hi.’

  Nothing. Then: ‘We got a match on that latent. The print we took from the note in your room where it was pressed over the gum?’