To Run Across the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the married American servicemen and their families were more than content to stay on base, and the base did its best, with considerable success, to provide all those things that made home sweet to them. Only young soldiers ventured out and when they did it was usually in search of female company among the local population. They were a godsend to the girls of Essex, which had become a sad backwater of a place for young people. The Essex girls found the Americans more polite, considerate and enthusiastic than the English boys; and in their approaches to the opposite sex, they often displayed an outmoded gallantry, sometimes evoking pretended amusement but always well received. Apart from drinking sessions in the pubs, Saturday night discos were about the only form of entertainment surviving in country places. A girl escorted to one of them by a local lad had to resign herself in advance to a loutish rather than a romantic experience. By contrast, the weekend dances organised at the base offered a model of propriety and good order.
    The calm, homely and rather formal atmosphere of the social club at the base seemed to exert a tranquillising effect upon even the most unruly and pugnacious English males. Finding it impossible to pick a quarrel with their urbane American hosts, they soon gave up trying. Drinks at the base were better and much cheaper; the music was good and played on a system streets ahead of those at the discos, and the decor was tasteful and relaxing, with an avoidance of cheap effects. No one was ever overcharged at the base, and the old, sly trick practised in so many local clubs of turning up the heat to increase thirst and alcoholic consumption was here unnecessary, since American hospitality was not perverted by the profit-motive.
    Above all, it was the servicemen themselves who impressed. The story had gone the rounds that before arriving in Britain they had been issued with a booklet telling them how to behave, but this struck all those who came into contact with them as an absurdity. These, the girls decided, were nature’s gentlemen; handsome, clean-cut both in appearance and motive, sophisticated and rich. In the most discreet fashion, and always careful not to provoke the rivalry of their English escorts, their new American friends had shown them photographs of themselves in their civilian days, often at the wheels of enormous cars, in the glamorous environment of their homeland: Santa Barbara and Beverly Hills, the Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone Park, Miami Beach and Disneyland. Few impressionable young girls could resist such an emotional assault. It was an experience that turned many a head, including, to Dorothea’s horror, that of her daughter Jane. To defeat the ruling by which any girl under the age of 17, unless accompanied by her mother was excluded from the magical Saturday night at the base, Jane—tall for her age and dressed and made up by her friends to look like an 18-year-old—was smuggled past the scrutiny at the door. She came home at midnight, smelling of alcohol and defiant. After her brief glimpse of paradise, Dorothea knew that she would never settle to monotony in Long Crendon again. But it was already July, and the dangerous weeks were coming to an end. ‘Only a couple of months to go and she’ll be safely out of harm’s way at Woodford,’ Dorothea said. ‘My feeling is we’re just in time.’
    For a while after our visit to the old gravel-pit, Dick was under a cloud. He could not shake free from the attentions of the sinister sergeant, who refused to allow Dick to break what he claimed was an agreement, and began to adopt a threatening posture. Then suddenly the man dropped out of sight. The English plain-clothes man on permanent duty with base police went the rounds of the village with his photograph, and took a few statements, including one from Dick, but there the matter dropped. Dick learned through the grapevine that the sergeant had been arrested and packed off