All Things Undying

FOUR

‘It may seem strange but Operation Tiger, which happened so many years ago [to the Americans] is as if it happened yesterday… I have no doubt that this emotional feeling of loss stems also from the fact that they never got the bodies back. They never knew what had happened to them. All they had received were telegrams saying that their men were killed in the European theatre of operations.’Ken Small, The Forgotten Dead, Bloomsbury, 1989, p.197

At home in Maryland, there are no surprises at the breakfast table, just Paul hunched over a bowl of Cheerios with the New York Times folded open to the OpEd section and propped up against the salt and pepper grinders. At a B &B, though, every morning stars a new cast of characters and some days can surprise you, like tuning in to Good Morning America without checking the program guide first.

At Horn Hill House on Tuesday morning there were eight around the breakfast table, including a family of four from Nantes, and a rough-hewn Yorkshire man and his florid-faced wife who appeared to be huffing and puffing their way from Starcross to Salcombe along the coastal path. By Wednesday, the couple from Yorkshire had hiked on, to be replaced by an American who, if the noise on the stairway the previous night was any indication, had arrived late and out of sorts. It was well past eleven when she woke me with her grumbling as she bump-bump-bumped her roller bag up the staircase and along the landing just outside our room.

‘Good morning,’ the American chirped as she slid an expanse of Madras plaid into the chair next to Paul, grabbed her napkin, snapped it open and smoothed it over her bare knees. She leaned forward. ‘OK, so who are the other Americans here?’ Before anyone could answer, she held up a cautionary hand. ‘No, wait a minute. Let me guess.’

Through slitted eyes, she considered each of us in turn, as if we were in a police line-up and she were a victim intent on making a positive ID. ‘You,’ she said, jabbing her finger at the mother of two from Nantes who had been ignoring the whole production while helping her daughter carve up some sausage. ‘You from the States?’

The woman looked up. ‘Mais, non. I am Nicole. My family and I, we are from France.’

‘Well, can’t win ’em all.’ The new arrival snorted daintily, then turned to lavish a smile on my husband. She stuck out a pudgy hand. ‘So, you must be the Americans. I’m Cathy Yates, Cathy with a “C” from Pittsburgh, PA.’

Paul laid down his fork. ‘I’m Paul Ives, and this is my wife, Hannah. We’re from Annapolis.’

‘Indianapolis?’ Cathy inquired lazily, toying with her spoon.

‘Annapolis. As in Maryland.’

‘Holey moley! My brother went to the Naval Academy in Annapolis!’

After we compared notes and determined that Paul and her brother had overlapped, but he hadn’t been enrolled in any of the classes my husband taught, Paul and I got down to the serious business of tucking into the full English breakfast Janet set down in front of us: two eggs – I prefer mine soft-boiled, toast, baked beans, fried tomatoes, sautéed mushrooms and a nicely browned American-style sausage, not the fat, white tube of sausage-like substance one usually encountered in British B &Bs.

‘Gosh, that looks good,’ Cathy said. A strand of long, blond, stick-straight hair slipped over her shoulder and hovered dangerously over Paul’s plate as she leaned over to inspect his breakfast. ‘I’ll have what they’re having, Janet.’

When a woman reaches a certain age, the hairstyle that saw you through the peace marches of the 1960s has got to go. Get a haircut, Cathy, I wanted to tell her, or put a bag over your head. But I held my tongue.

While we ate, the newcomer entertained us with a stream-of-consciousness account of her harrowing trip to Dartmouth from Heathrow. ‘Jeeze laweeze,’ she began, ‘I thought I’d never get here. How on earth do you drive in this flipping country? I mean, cheese and crackers! It’s bad enough that you’re sitting on the wrong side of the car driving on the wrong side of the road, but you can’t see a flipping thing over the gee-dee bushes. Please pass the O.J.?’

When the French couple simply looked confused, I translated for them – jus d’orange, s’il vous plaît. Nicole passed the pitcher to Paul who poured some orange juice into a glass and handed it to Cathy.

A sip of the juice had remarkable restorative powers, giving Cathy the energy to barrel on. ‘Coming around this corner? Ran smack dab into a herd of sheep! And they kept moseying along, moseying along, all the time in the world, calm as you please. Baaa, baaa, baaa. Honestly, you think the fellow in charge would do something, wouldn’t you, but noooo.’ She set her glass down, selected a slice of wholewheat toast from the toast rack and slathered it with strawberry jam, wielding the table knife like a palette knife, covering every square centimeter of bread evenly with the jam, working right up to the edges of the crust, as if it were an art project she’d be graded on.

‘I left that rental in the parking lot down by the Tourist Center and there it’s going to stay until Europcar comes to pick the sucker up,’ she continued, aiming the toast at her mouth and taking a semi-circular bite. ‘Swear to God, I’m not setting foot inside it again. It is a miracle I got here at all.’

‘Driving in the UK can be a challenge,’ I agreed. ‘We lived in Dartmouth for almost a year, but when we first arrived, I thought I’d never get the hang of it. Once you master it, however, it’s like riding a bike. The skill is yours for life.’

‘And you have recent experience, too, Hannah, don’t forget about that.’

At first I couldn’t imagine what Paul was talking about. And then I remembered. ‘We drove on the left in the Bahamas, too,’ I added with a grin. ‘But that was usually in an island golf cart. I’m not sure that qualifies.’

Cathy’s breakfast had arrived, and she dug in, beginning with the baked beans. ‘Can’t trust a GPS, either,’ she grumbled. ‘Dang thing led me down a flipping dirt road, not that I’d dignify two ruts by calling it an actual road. Where the Sam Hill are you supposed to go when you meet somebody coming the other way?’ she asked the table at large between forkfuls. ‘I faced off grill to grill with this garbage truck, and I thought we were going to sit there all day, glaring at each other through our windshields. I honked and honked, and the guy finally backed up so I could get by. That was enough for me!’ She picked up her knife and began sawing on her sausage. ‘What I’m going to do for transportation the rest of the week I have no idea.’

‘Public transportation is pretty good here,’ I told her. ‘Plenty of trains and buses. Where do you want to go?’

‘A town called Torcross,’ she said. ‘Somewhere south of here.’ She leaned over, retrieved her bag from the floor, and pulled out a paperback: The Forgotten Dead, by Ken Small. ‘Do you know this book?’ she asked my husband, correctly pegging him as the historian in the group.

‘I do,’ Paul said. ‘It’s the story of how one man raised a Sherman tank from the ocean floor and set it up on shore as a memorial to the Americans who died near here during training exercises in the Second World War.’

‘During Operation Tiger,’ Cathy added, her face grave. ‘Nine hundred and forty-six men. My father was one of them.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

‘So am I. I hadn’t been born yet when it happened, but do you want to know the incredible thing?’ She shook the book under Paul’s nose. ‘Nobody told us! Mom always believed that Dad had died on Utah Beach in the Normandy invasion. Until Uncle Charlie sent her this book. To find out Daddy actually died in England during a dress rehearsal for D-Day was quite a shock, I can tell you.’

Cathy opened to the back of the small, well-read paperback and smoothed open a page. ‘There,’ she said, sliding the book along the tablecloth in our direction and pointing to what was clearly a long casualty list. ‘MM2 Curtis Yates. He was on LST531 when it was torpedoed by the Germans. We never got his body back.’

‘Pauvre petite,’ Nicole soothed from across the table, although ‘petite’ wasn’t the word I’d choose to describe Cathy’s plus-sized frame. ‘I know about this. El Ess Tay. Is a landing ship tank. It carries many soldiers.’

Many soldiers. That was an understatement.

One couldn’t spend any amount of time in Devon without hearing about the disaster at Slapton Sands.

Shortly after midnight on April 28, 1944, two LSTs, carrying more than a thousand men each, sank in a few fiery, terror-filled minutes after being torpedoed by German subs on routine patrol that had slipped, undetected, through Allied defenses. A third LST, although damaged, had limped back to Portsmouth harbor. ‘I can see why visiting the memorial is important to you,’ I said.

She sucked in her lips and nodded. ‘I hate the word “closure”, but that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it, Hannah? Closure.’

I couldn’t think of anything to add to that, so I simply smiled reassuringly and returned to whacking the tops off my soft-boiled eggs.

‘Say,’ Cathy continued after a moment. Head bent, she fumbled once more in her commodious bag, coming up with a set of car keys. She plunked them down on the table in front of Paul, although they were clearly intended for me, one chair over. ‘Hannah. If you can drive me down to see the Sherman tank, you’ll be my BFF.’

BFF. Best friends forever. ‘Your friend, certainly,’ I agreed, thinking that one out of three was the best this pushy American was going to get, at least for the time being. Maybe she was an acquired taste.

Cathy’s eyes widened hopefully. ‘You’ll do it?’

She looked so childlike, so vulnerable, that I felt my defenses weakening. ‘Sure,’ I agreed, figuring that there were a lot worse things than a long drive on a glorious English summer day. ‘Shall we say this afternoon, then? Nothing else on my schedule.’

Speaking of Dads, I was thanking my own, still alive and thriving back in Maryland, as I climbed into Cathy’s Vauxhall Corsa with… wait for it… manual transmission.

Back when I was sixteen, Dad forced me to drive stick. ‘You never know when it will come in handy, Hannah.’

I’m sure he was thinking about rushing somebody to a hospital, or moving a car, fast, out of the path of an oncoming locomotive, or it could even come in handy should my getaway driver accidentally lock himself in the bank vault. But, for me the ‘when’ was ‘now’, in Devon with Cathy, an American I had just met, taking her for a rendezvous – of sorts – with her own father.

As she climbed into the passenger seat to my left and buckled up, I took a moment to familiarize myself with the controls. ‘Ready?’

She nodded.

‘We’re off, then.’ Using my left hand, I shifted into reverse, backed out of the parking space, put the car in first and headed for the exit on The Quay near the Flavel Arts Centre. Fortunately, the brake and accelerator pedals are not reversed on English cars, or I would have sent the Vauxhall crashing through the plate glass window of the Visitors’ Center when I braked to avoid a child who darted out from behind an SUV. After the frisky little tot had been chased around the car park and corralled by his mother, we continued up College Way past the Naval College to the roundabout on the A379 where we made the turn toward Stoke Fleming.

I was feeling pretty comfortable behind the wheel until we got behind an articulated lorry just outside Stoke Fleming. As the huge, double-jointed truck slowed to wind its way through the twisting, one-lane, two-way streets of the village, I grabbed what I thought was the gearshift and instead of downshifting to second, rolled down my window. Next to me, Cathy noticed and laughed out loud. ‘See what I mean!’

I had to laugh, too.

Thankfully, we lost the lorry when it headed west on the road toward Bowden, Ash and Bugford. We continued along the A379 hugging the coastline. Just outside Strete, we popped over the crest of a hill to see the vast panorama of the sea spread out below us, sunlight dancing on the water like a carpet of diamonds. There was no one behind me, so I pulled to the side of the road for a moment so that Cathy could appreciate the view. ‘On a clear day, you can see France,’ I told my passenger.

‘Is that Slapton Sands?’ she asked, pointing to an expanse of beach dotted with bathers, beach chairs and umbrellas.

‘Not yet. You’re looking at Blackpool Sands, just north of Slapton. It’s a beach club now, but this area was requisitioned during the war, too.’

After a few moments, I drove on. The road, shaded by overhanging branches, narrowed even further. I took one turn a little too fast for comfort, and Cathy yipped like a terrier as branches slapped the passenger’s side door.

‘Ooops, sorry,’ I apologized, tapping the brakes. ‘I hope I didn’t scratch the paint.’

‘Scratches, smatches,’ Cathy said. ‘That’s what insurance is for.’

Eventually we popped out of the trees and over the headland, beginning the long, winding descent to Slapton Sands. Below us the sea, the beach, the road, and the Ley – a reed-dotted, freshwater lagoon – formed parallel ribbons of aquamarine, beige, slate and blue which eventually yielded to the patchwork yellows and greens of the fields in the surrounding countryside. In the bright afternoon sun, the effect was stunning. I slowed to a crawl.

Cathy rolled down her window to admire the view. ‘I can see why the Allies chose this area for the rehearsal.’ She propped both arms on the windowsill and rested her chin on them. ‘It looks just like all the aerial photos I’ve ever seen of Utah Beach in France. I can’t wait to walk on it.’

‘Soon. But first, I want to show you the memorial.’ We drove to the north end of the beach, where I swung left into the car park, slotted the rental car into one of the marked spaces, turned off the ignition, and climbed out.

Cathy followed me on to the beach. ‘I thought this was supposed to be Slapton Sands,’ she complained, tiptoeing carefully over the rocky ground in her sling-back sandals, eyes on her feet. ‘This looks like gravel to me.’

‘The Brits call it shingle,’ I explained as she caught up to me.

Arms spread wide for balance, Cathy tottered along at my side as we made our way along the wide swath of pebbles that ranged in size from marbles to golf balls. Before long, we were standing before a chunky granite obelisk perhaps twenty feet high incised with confident black lettering.

Cathy pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head. ‘This memorial was presented by the United States Army authorities,’ she read aloud, ‘to the people of the South Hams who generously left their homes and their lands to provide a battle practice area for the successful assault in Normandy in June 1944. Their action resulted in the saving of many hundreds of lives. Blah blah blah. I think it’s fishy,’ she added, turning to face me, blinking back tears, arms folded across her chest like a petulant child. ‘This ugly thing was put up in 1954, but does it mention anywhere the guys like my dad who died here? It does not. All these people did was lose their homes for a couple of months. It’s sad that they were forced to clear out and all that, but at least they got to come back to them eventually. My dad’s out there somewhere.’ She swept her arm in a wide arc, indicating the fields on the hills behind us, rising up gracefully over the Ley. ‘Or maybe there,’ she added, tugging her sunglasses down to cover her eyes and turning her face out to sea.

I stepped away, putting some distance between us, leaving her alone with her thoughts.

After a few minutes Cathy announced, ‘I’m ready to see the tank, now.’

I fished the car keys out of my pocket. ‘Let’s go then.’

We crunched our way along the shingle back to the car park, then drove another five miles to Torcross at the southern end of the beach.

Finding the Sherman tank wasn’t difficult. Hard to hide a thirty-two-ton hulk of metal in a tiny village. After being dragged out of the sea, the tank had been installed on a concrete slab atop a plinth of smooth round stones the size of baked potatoes. Its gun, silent now, stood frozen at a forty-five-degree angle, pointing out over the English Channel. Memorial plaques dedicated to the various military divisions who trained at Slapton Sands during World War Two were placed at various intervals around the tank.

‘It’s curious,’ I said as I wandered about reading the inscriptions. ‘You’d expect the names of the dead to be listed here, but they’re not.’

‘Too many names,’ Cathy stated simply. ‘Too many names.’ As I watched, she reached into the outside pocket of her backpack and withdrew a red silk rose and a laminated four-by-five photograph. ‘This is my father,’ she said, handing the photo to me.

Behind the plastic, a handsome, bright-eyed sailor smiled for the camera, his Dixie Cup cap shoved to the back of his head at a jaunty, non-regulation angle. ‘You favor him,’ I told her as I handed the photo back. ‘Especially around the eyes.’

‘That’s what Mom always said.’ She propped both the photograph and the rose up carefully on a tread of the giant amphibious vehicle.

‘It feels odd to be praying at the side of a flipping tank,’ she said after a moment of respectful silence. ‘Normal people have a grave they can visit. There’s a space for Dad back in Pittsburgh, in Allegheny Cemetery, next to Mom.’ She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Until then, I suppose this tank will have to serve as his unofficial tombstone.’

‘So,’ she said after a bit, slapping her hands together in a let’s-get-down-to-business way. ‘Why don’t you take me to the field where the bodies were buried?’

‘Field? What field?’

‘The one Ken Small mentions in his book. Here.’ Head down, Cathy rummaged in her backpack for a moment, stopped, then raised a hand. ‘Never mind, I must have left the book back at Horn Hill House. But here’s the gist of it. After the disaster, bodies began washing ashore. Hundreds of bodies. Small says they were buried temporarily in a field. He knew where it was, too, and so did this old farmer he talked to.’ She gazed west over the Ley, toward the rolling green hills beyond, shading her eyes against the brightness of the afternoon sun. ‘I wonder which field it was.’

It had been a while, but I’d read Small’s book, too. ‘Small doesn’t exactly say, does he? He’s really rather secretive about it. Too bad he died back in 2004, or you could ask him.’

‘Do you think that farmer he wrote about is still alive?’

‘I don’t know. He could be, I suppose, but since Small never identified him…’ I shrugged. ‘What can you do?’

‘I think there needs to be an investigation. I counted the number of missing and unaccounted for. Eighty. Their bodies have to be somewhere, Hannah! They didn’t simply go poof! Somebody must have seen something.’

‘I’m not so sure about that, Cathy. Everyone agrees that security was super tight back then. The Home Army kept everyone out of the American Zone, and not even the displaced locals knew what went on in their homes and in their fields during the war. The US really kept the lid on.’

‘I guess so,’ she admitted. ‘Thousands of people involved, from Eisenhower down to the lowliest seaman, and yet they were able to keep the screw-up that was Operation Tiger secret for more than forty years. I’ll bet that took some doing!’

I hated to mention it because she seemed so distressed, but I wondered aloud if her father had been one of the sailors who went down with the ship.

Cathy shook her head. ‘We thought of that, but no. Through the VFW, I was able to track down a couple of his buddies. One of them, a guy named Jack, told me they’d been asleep in their bunks, heard the klaxon, grabbed their gear and were halfway up the ladder to their duty stations when all hell broke loose. The ship was on fire, men were screaming for their mothers, they were jumping into a sea of burning diesel. Jack says that he and my father jumped together, but got separated during the night in the freezing water. Jack was picked up by a lifeboat, so Dad could have been, too. Dad could have drowned – I can concede that – but I know he didn’t go down with the 531.’

I laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘I hate to deflate your balloon, Cathy, but some people around here believe that Small made up the bit about the bodies as a publicity stunt to help drive business to his guest house.’

She ran her hand along the flank of the vehicle as if it were a prize steer. ‘I don’t think so. I believe it’s all part of a massive cover-up.’

I’d heard anecdotal tales about bodies being unearthed while doing back garden renovations, but nobody had ever confirmed that. Alison Hamilton’s father in particular had pooh-poohed the whole notion, going on and on (when Alison let him!) about the inaccuracies he’d discovered in The Forgotten Dead. I could tell Cathy about them now, or…

Looking at my new friend’s hopeful face, I took the coward’s way out. ‘I know someone who grew up on a farm near here. Her father was one of the people evacuated back then. Stephen Bailey. He might be able to answer some of your questions.’

Cathy’s face brightened like a child on Christmas morning. Santa Claus might be coming after all. ‘That would be super! Would you put me in touch with him?’

‘Of course.’

‘How soon can you do it?’ she hurried on. ‘I have to fly home next Thursday.’

‘I’m seeing Alison for dinner tomorrow night. I’ll ask for her father’s telephone number. Best if you talk to him directly.’

‘I really appreciate this, Hannah.’

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I knew almost precisely what Stephen Bailey would say. If Cathy actually got to speak to him, I knew he would totally shatter her hopes.