To Run Across the Sea Read Online Free

writing home. I suppose they feel lonely out there. Maybe you write two or three letters and then it drops.’
    ‘Nothing else?’
    ‘We have a sort of get-together in August. There used to be about fifty of us, but now it’s down to half that. A lot of these things are dying out. I mean, times change.’
    The information Dorothea provided was vague, but one interesting aspect of the Cloate personality emerged—the clan’s attitude to education. Where their menfolk were concerned they saw schooling only as a means to an end. This end was usefulness and self-sufficiency. Boys took what the primary school had to offer, moving on as soon as possible to the education provided by life. In the old days, Dorothea had heard, a Cloate would build his own house. The function of a girl, however, was to please. If a girl was plain and dull, there was nothing to be done, but if she showed promise—beauty, even wit—no sacrifice was too great to develop her potential and place her on the road to success. Then she would be packed off to a boarding school—of an unassuming, yet rather special kind—in Woodford, London E11, where a village girl would be subjected to a process of transformation, so that at its end she would be hardly recognisable, even to her own family.
    First impressions often mislead. My original view of Long Crendon was of a poverty-stricken, backward Essex village, of the kind often described as ‘unspoilt’ because there was no money for necessary improvements. Every roof, whether thatched or otherwise, carried a television aerial, but that meant nothing. Only a quarter of the houses had bathrooms, or even inside lavatories, and less than half were connected to the main water supply or the sewer. Two houses, including the Rancho Grande, and the Pied Bull—most successful of the pubs—had central heating; otherwise, when the frost set in, coal fires burned, as ever, in small grates. The locals pretended contempt for luxuries city-dwellers everywhere took for granted. Some actually boasted of leaving their windows open through the interminable Essex winter. The fact that Long Crendon remained on the surface as it was, was a matter of stubborn conservatism and resistance to change, rather than economics. Yet a hidden transformation was in progress. In 1943 the American Allies had built an important base at Effingham, some five miles away; since then, despite all local claims to a preference for the hard but worthy life, self-indulgence and luxury were making their stealthy appearance.
    The Americans offered to employ every civilian in the area capable of holding down a job. They paid well and they were considerate, almost over-tolerant employers. Dorothea’s Dick was one of the many who benefited from their generosity. He had been considered unemployable after his accident, but as soon as he was able to get about he was taken on at the base as a timekeeper, an occupation for which nimbleness was not required. For some time Dorothea had kept him out of sight, but one day she brought him to see me, prematurely wizened and sitting askew on a pony he controlled with one arm. The story was that while working 12 years before in an agricultural smithy, the prototype of a new combine harvester had run amok, snatched him up, neutered him, torn off a forearm, an ear and most of one foot. He and Dorothea had been married a matter of weeks when the accident occurred, and their daughter, Jane, had been conceived just in time.
    I got to like Dick. Working for the Americans, according to most of the villagers, was like being on paid holiday for the rest of your life, the main problem with all the noise of the planes coming and going being where to find a place to sleep undisturbed. Dick put his endless leisure to good use. He liked people, and limped about the place getting to know everybody and picking up useful gossip. He was a treasure-house of village information, a holder of strong opinions and interested in