Slapton Sands Read Online Free PDF Page A

overrun. And she didn’t say anything in reply to the hooker remark. What was the point? The feminist agenda here seemed unalloyed, unmitigated, unremarkable in its predictably fixed hostilities and hard-core resentments.
    She was angry, though, about Bobby. She was angry whenever English students and campus academics aired the theory about the draft conspiracies that tried to solve America’s social problems by sending its ghetto dwellers in disproportionate numbers to fight in Vietnam. She’d seen no evidence of this as an adolescent in Pennsylvania, where the draft had seemed pretty indiscriminate and she’d not been aware of a single case of a boy trying to avoid it.
    She’d been reminded about Bobby at the tutorial party earlier that day when David, the cute English undergraduate, had commented on what a tragedy it was that Muhammad Ali, in what would have been his best years in the ring, had been prevented from boxing for refusing the draft. What kind of a tragedy was that, she had wondered. A sporting tragedy? An aesthetic tragedy? She’d enjoyed Ali’s courage and grace in the ring herself on television. Who hadn’t? But tragedy for Alice Bourne was her drafted brother dying in the bewilderment of delirium on a foreign battlefield. She burped surreptitiously and sipped hoppybeer. Smelling patchouli oil and hand-rolled Old Holborn, she reminisced, for a few seconds of indulgent weakness, about jukeboxes devoid of foghorns and barnacles, about cold draft in chilled jugs and pizza and voluble, civilized, Ivy League sanity.
    Champion had suggested that she study a subject with what he insisted was greater substance. He suggested the Marshall Plan and its catastrophic effect on Britain’s post-war economy. Or what about the segregated black GIs in Britain in the 1940s, he said, and the appalling racism they endured from their own army? She could investigate whether the crime wave enabled by the London Blitz was anything other than folk myth.
    â€˜It’s your best interests I’m thinking about,’ he’d said. ‘I’ve a mind to publication. What you suggest sounds more appropriate for one of those popular paperbacks which discuss Krakatoa and the Kraken and alien abduction and the Bermuda Triangle.’
    She’d said nothing.
    â€˜Don’t you want to be published?’
    â€˜Eventually. Of course, eventually. It’s not my principal motivation, though, for this.’
    In Colorado, in the fug of stove heat and the late light of a short winter day, she’d listened to the old infantryman tell his story, incomplete and staccato, like all true war stories were, he insisted, except for those concerning the generals,who were the only people privileged to see the picture in its entirety. To other ranks it was not quite chaos, because they had discipline and training and the comfort of routine. But it was sometimes close to chaos because they were men confined together, in huge numbers, in an alien place, operating in conditions of absolute secrecy, some of the men very raw. And in the sea they were confronting an element most of them had seen for the first time only when they embarked for Europe in convoy from New York aboard passenger liners hastily turned into troopships for the task.
    â€˜I say it wasn’t quite chaos,’ he told her. ‘But it was chaos all right that April, when I came back from London.’
    He’d gone to London because that was what they did after weeks of drills and punishing night endurance marches and small arms practice and confinement with other men in a Nissen hut. They did it even though it meant a long bicycle ride to Totnes Station and a cramped ride aboard a train in blackout conditions to Paddington. At least on the way back they’d be too hungover to care about the length of the ride or the suffocatingly small compartments or abiding absence of refreshment of any sort. They went to London because the