Slapton Sands Read Online Free PDF Page B

bottom. Belts, clothing – they’re shrugged away by the currents under there. The bottom of the sea is a restless place. Pretty soon, bodies started washing up. And they didn’t just restrict themselves to the six miles of beach we’d seconded. No. Those boys washed up all along the south Devon coast and beyond.’
    â€˜What killed them?’
    He’d looked at her for a long time. He took a drink of the whisky he’d poured himself. ‘I don’t know. I do know that far too few of them found the burial proper to them.’
    â€˜How many of them were there?’
    â€˜I’d be guessing,’ he said.
    â€˜An educated guess.’
    â€˜Don’t patronize me, miss,’ he said.
    â€˜I’m sorry.’
    â€˜It’s all right.’ He shifted in his seat and drank. ‘I’m used to it. It comes with age. But my guess is educated. I’d say over a thousand men. I’d say we lost close to fifteen hundred.’
    â€˜Jesus.’
    He’d smiled when she said that. ‘I don’t think Jesus was atSlapton Sands, miss. Not ever, I don’t think. But certainly not on that day He wasn’t.’
    Maybe that’s my true historical gift, Alice thought now. Finding out from bar-owning war vets about the conflict as seen through beer-soaked, ageing minds. As she left the Neptune for home, Whitstable fully dark now, she looked out over the sea wall and was surprised to see that the jellyfish had gone. Where they had loomed and coalesced in white clouds under the water was only a smooth blackness reflecting the sky in starts and winks of jittering, silver light. Some jolly acoustic ditty followed her out of the closing door of the pub, something by Steeleye Span or Fairport Convention about a day trip to Brighton that had become a hit after being used on a television commercial for butter, or for bread. She’d heard Long John Silver playing it in the room above hers and thought it a departure from his usual aural diet of austere progressive rock. Then she’d heard the squeal of his crutch tips and remembered he had a telly as he dragged himself across the floor to turn it off, she supposed, in disgust.
    The song was folky, nostalgic. They employed nostalgia often to sell things here. It was a weird thing about the English, she thought, their reluctance to divorce past and present. They seemed infinitely more beguiled by the past than people were at home. Even in Camden Town they wore collarless shirts and corduroy, and wood and leather clogs or nailed boots, such as a rural labourer might have had nochoice but to wear a century ago. You’d see a character straight out of Thomas Hardy at the wheel of a Volkswagen Beetle stuck in a London traffic jam. Yet nobody seemed to think it incongruous. The green man leered out at you from the labels of beer bottles. There were harvest festivals and morris dancers and none of the shops opened on a Sunday. You couldn’t see a movie on a Sunday either. They were extremely reluctant about refrigeration, even in this record-breaking heat. They viewed ice cubes as an exotic and impractical affectation and seemed to consider food a necessary evil, something to be endured only because one had to endure it in order to avoid weakness and eventual death. They stuck stubbornly to traditional recipes, few of the listed ingredients actually qualifying as food. Tripe. Black pudding. White pudding. Suet pudding. Steak and kidney pudding. That stuff they called spotted dick. Did any other country seriously consider a whelk edible? Then there were their austere, ration-book beverages. Marmite. Horlicks. Ovaltine. Could anybody convincingly explain Ovaltine?
    It was morris men that baffled her most. Alice believed, intellectually, in assimilating other cultures. But she’d happily risk accusations of closed-minded bigotry to exclude morris men from this general principle. Then there was John Barleycorn. What place