Slapton Sands (31 page)

‘Puny little thing,' she said.

‘Me? Or the bike?'

‘Guess.'

‘Steve McQueen rode one of these in
The Great Escape
.'

‘Probably why he didn't get away.'

God, it felt good to see him again. She had become so isolated since their parting at Paddington Station. She had felt alienated. She had genuinely tried, and sincerely failed, really to understand what England was about. And she'd been under siege, haunted. The sour, vindictive soul of Johnny Compton had haunted her.

‘Do you believe in ghosts, David?'

‘Only revenants.'

‘Only what?'

He had his back to her. He was on his haunches at the side of the coast road struggling with his motorcycle. It was only just after dawn, and there was no real heat in the day yet. But she could smell oil from the cylinder head and petrol leaking from the choke. She was coming round to the belief that the guy who'd sold David the bike had really seen him coming.

‘My nan was a psychic,' he said. ‘She was genuine, gifted. She did it reluctantly, had to be cajoled, but she could discourse with the dead.'

Alice nodded. A month ago. A month ago, this stuff would have had her laughing out loud.

‘But you never see the dead. It's only revenants hang about, apparently. They're suicides and restless on account
of it. Like uninvited guests who can't get into the party.'

‘So they do what? Loiter outside?'

‘Pretty much.'

He took off the rear wheel of the motorbike with tools from the bike's toolkit and stripped out the inner tube to repair the puncture. All the while he kept glancing towards a pile of cement debris and reinforcing rods topping a man-made excavation at the side of the road. Alice walked across to the construction. It was a sangar. Further down the road, to right and left of the sangar, she could see evidence of pillboxes, also the objects of untidy and half-hearted attempts at demolition and clearance. His claustrophobia, of course. David's claustrophobia had put him under the stars last night, in the sangar, rather than in the ruins of one of the pillboxes, with their enveloping roofs and imaginary risk of entombment. She stood on its lip.

‘It stank like rotten fish down there last night,' David said, nodding. ‘And it was freezing. Jesus, it was like the grave.'

Alice climbed down. The smell was there, rotten and rancorous, familiar to her but fading now, with the advent of the sunshine, of the day.

She found Compton's note in a cheap metal cigarette case under an inch of sand beneath one of the stones that still remained from the paved sangar floor. His Zippo lighter lay next to the case. He had written his note by the flame from his lighter and then buried them and slipped aboard a Higgins boat for the short voyage that would terminate his
life. He apologized to whoever found the note. And he apologized for what he had done. He had not known about the surge tides they experienced in the spring on this section of coast. The surge tide had delivered his targets closer in and so higher up the beach than he had calculated. So his machine-gun companies had fired full belts from twenty-four guns into, rather than over the heads of, the assault troops on the beach. It was an appallingly easy mistake. Someone like Rory Carnegie could have pointed his error out to Johnny Compton long before it was allowed its terrible consequences. But Johnny Compton had never met anyone like Rory Carnegie. He had never been allowed to.

The note was heavily scored in its folds where time had further creased and scarred the cheap paper. It looked like the kind of document an eighth-grade student might have produced after much painstaking toil. Alice felt no sense of vindication or triumph holding her proof in her hand, only a deep and abiding sadness for the fate of so many determined young men. She knew she would never dream the cormorant dream again. She felt glad, at least, of that. Everything the dead machine gunner had done to her had been done to prevent her from achieving this moment of revelation. Yet she felt equally sure that the discovery had been predetermined. She had dreamed the slipping over the side of the craft into cold oblivion. But the detail would have continued to accrue, wouldn't it? The dream could go back as well as forth in its enaction of events. The
cormorant dream could advance and recede much as the tide did. Eventually she would have dreamed the note and its careful burial, too. But what did the note say, really? What did it say of true and authentic significance?

Rory Carnegie, without knowing he was doing so, had probably summed it up best. Outside the careful mausoleum he called a home, in blinding, abstract sunshine, he'd grown garrulous following his recollection of the unacknowledged, floating dead. They were always going to go, Carnegie said. Whatever the mistakes and mishaps encountered in the preparation,
the Yanks were always going to go.
By her own, now fully informed estimate, they had lost around fifteen hundred men at Slapton Sands over the course of a couple of days. But those days had been six weeks before D-day, and the urgency of the schedule had demanded that they simply absorb the losses and whatever fatal lessons they could learn from them.

General Bradley had lost two thousand men on Omaha Beach. He'd lost a further forty thousand over the following eight days as his infantry learned the hard way how to fight the Germans in the hedgerows of Normandy. But he had not faltered, had he? Bradley had not so much as paused.

What Alice had discovered at Slapton Sands she felt was more detective work than history. She had succeeded in locating her primary source. But Compton's admission was not the holy grail of historical investigation which she'd sought. It was a suicide note, written by a bad man trying
and failing terribly to redeem himself through a noble cause. The mystery of Slapton Sands had been more in the end than Professor Champion's dismissive anecdote. But it had been less, in the end, than what Alice had hoped to reveal. The Normandy invasion had succeeded, after all. The war had been won. What she had discovered hadn't mattered in the overall scheme of things.

Shame and remorse shaped the revenant Compton. Shame and remorse and his father's forgotten glory. Well. She'd let them lie intact. Compton had striven towards the end of his mostly misbegotten life for a nobility of purpose that had proved cruelly, catastrophically beyond him. But it was in the gift of Alice Bourne to do something noble and forgiving now for the poor man's wretched soul.

Later, they lit a fire together on the beach. His bike repaired, David had been to buy breakfast for them in Totnes. In his absence, Alice gathered wood from the beach for the fire and thought of the memories she would take with pleasure from her time in England. Canterbury Cathedral shimmering in the June heat. The first time she had heard John Martyn sing ‘May You Never' on the jukebox of a Whitstable pub. Dancing shadows cast by glass on a vicarage floor. Knickerbocker glory, spooned from an ancient glass in the ice-cream parlour at Tankerton. Will Hay performing for an audience of one in a flickering, black and white world. And David Lucas, whoever David Lucas was, whoever he would discover himself to be. She'd take him
away with her, too, ageless and intact, a part of the England that would live unchanging now in her mind for the rest of her life.

They had eaten their toasted bread and grilled bacon and kippers and were sipping tea and watching the waves when Alice Bourne took something from the pocket of her jeans and screwed it in her fist and threw it into the embers of their fire. It unfurled in the heat before burning with a bright, brief flame.

‘What was that?' David asked.

‘It was nothing,' Alice said. ‘It was nothing of importance.'

I first visited Slapton Sands in the late summer of 2001 when a friend chose to celebrate his birthday by block booking a guest house there and inviting anyone who wanted to come over a long weekend. This old Victorian country house was a solitary building on a hill above Start Bay and the sands—more accurately shingle—stretched below it in a long curve extending as far as it was possible to see.

From the start it seemed an enigmatic, atmospheric location; not just because the owner of the guest house had the place littered with decades of mementoes. On the hungover morning after our arrival we went down to the beach. Waves broke violently and the wind shrieked and it was empty apart from a few distant figures struggling to stay grounded under the pull of sport kites. Partly to explore and partly to shake the morning after feeling, I set off on a run. And to the south of the sands, near the village of Towcross, was confronted by the surreal bulk of a Sherman Tank,
dragged from the seabed in 1984 and left as a makeshift memorial to American dead.

The Sherman is a small tank, an awkward little vehicle with a stubby little cannon. This one had been painted with pitch, black over barnacles and rust. It looked incredibly sad and solitary, there.

Something awful happened at Slapton Sands. It happened in conditions of great secrecy in the spring of 1943. You don't need to be a psychic to sense it. You don't need a memorial, either, though the Americans certainly deserve one. The place is a wilderness of stones and water imbued with a deep and intimate feeling of loss. I've never believed in ghosts, and I've never been anywhere in my life that felt more home to them.

The Americans prepared at Slapton Sands for D Day because it so uncannily resembled the Normandy coast. They evacuated 13 square miles of South Devon in order to do it without being seen. Here, the citizen army of the United States practised what they would do for real on the Idaho and Omaha beach heads. Field Marshal Irwin Rommel had masterminded the Normandy defences and the German soldiers manning them were battle hardened. So practice for invasion was certainly required.

Opinions differ as to what went wrong at Slapton Sands. But Operation Tiger generally takes the blame. This exercise involved a small flotilla of American assault craft communicating, apparently, on an open radio frequency. It sailed without its planned Royal Naval
escort and was raided by German E-boats dispatched from the French Coast. Three vessels were hit and almost 500 soldiers died. But that doesn't explain the accounts of officers from a British battle cruiser who claimed that during a planned practice bombardment, they were horrified to see American soldiers on the beach they were shelling. Nor does Operation Tiger address the persistent rumours of a mass grave at Slapton Sands. If the men died at sea, why did the Great Storm of 1953 expose so many infantry artifacts in one small location on the beach itself?

As a novelist, I was actually less interested in the secret than in the soldiers. Beyond the surf and pebbles, you could not imagine a location more English, with its gentle rise of verdant hills and stands of swaying trees. What must they have made of this empty place, these farm boys from Nebraska and street kids from Queens, pitched and tossed towards it aboard plywood boats?

There were three million American service personnel in England in 1943 and to a large extent, they kept themselves to themselves. They lived in their own camps. A Gi's daily beef allowance – shipped here from Australia – was as much as ration coupons would get a British adult in a month.

I set the novel in the seemingly endless summer of 1976. Sadly, I'm old enough to remember that one vividly. But nostalgia wasn't the reason—it was the year of America's bi-centennial; a year of analysis, breast-beating and navel-gazing done not by a red-neck populist
like Michael Moore, but by the likes of Normal Mailer and Gore Vidal. It was quite respectable then for American intellectuals to criticize their own country. It was even quite respectable to be an American intellectual.

I thought it would be interesting to have my protagonist—American, female—examine American heroism in a climate hostile to her country, her values and her beliefs. In 1976, America hadn't long lost its tatty war in Vietnam. It had almost seen a President impeached. In England, in 1976, we didn't seem to think very much of America. But then America didn't seem to think all that much of itself.

Slapton Sands
is also about England. It is about the things about England that have changed and the things that never will.

Francis or F.G. Cottam was born and brought up in Southport in Lancashire, attending the University of Kent at Canterbury where he took a degree in history before embarking on a career in journalism in London. He lived for 20 years in North Lambeth and during the 1990s was prominent in the lad-mag revolution, launch editing FHM, inventing Total Sport magazine and then launching the UK edition of Men's Health. He is the father of a two and lives in Kingston upon Thames. His fiction is thought up over daily runs along the towpath between Kingston and Hampton Court Bridges.

A Shadow of the Sun
Slapton Sands
The Fire Fighter