Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [608]
The growing mutual respect with regard to the fighting itself had been a help. In 1942, the arriving Americans had often been contemptuous of their allies who had failed to win the war. At the same time, the first batch to reach Sarum in the summer of 1942 had come straight from training in Florida and arrived to face the English summer dressed in cotton and without a greatcoat between them. Even by English standards, that summer had been exceptionally cold and wet. The new arrivals who had made their scorn rather plain now retired in droves to hospitals with ’flu and even pneumonia. It had not been a good beginning.
The Africa campaign had changed all that. The contempt had gone; so had the arrogance. “Our boys were like a bunch of bananas,” a cheerful G.I. informed Patricia: “some green, some yellow, some plain rotten.” They had a new hero, too, that they shared with their allies: the British General Alexander.
The citizens of Salisbury also learned to know them better. For the American army, they soon concluded, organised itself in a somewhat different way; unlike the English, whose smaller numbers usually forced them to try, at least, to convert every soldier into a fighting man, simple observation soon taught the people of Sarum that in the U.S. Army there were two very distinct categories: those groups who had been selected as only good enough for support duties – clerks, paymasters and the like – and the combat troops, who, though they seemed to lean up against any free-standing object in a casual way that was surprising, had a tough, resilient quality about them that had to be admired. Soon, anyone in Sarum could tell one group from the other at a glance.
“Our best men seem like coiled springs,” Patricia had once remarked to Forest-Wilson; “theirs are like rubber.”
“And just as indestructible,” he assured her.
Despite their respect for the fighting men, however, it was less easy for the townspeople to accept it when they heard their modest terraced houses referred to as slums; and although there was some fraternisation, it was soon clear to the girls of the town, the English nurses and the women in the services stationed nearby, that the visitors found them and their rationed clothes dowdy. When the first American nurse arrived at the hospital with the unheard-of luxury of nylon stockings, there was an outcry.
Of course, there was the problem of money. The further down the scale in rank one went, the more striking the difference. For instance, the generals or senior officers that Patricia drove around the plain were about as well off as their American counterparts. A colonel was a little poorer, but not so much as to be noticed. A major, however, was paid only two-thirds as much as his American colleague; a captain, half; an American second lieutenant was two and a half times as well off as his English equivalent. But below this, in the bulk of the enlisted men, the difference was truly extraordinary. The private in the U.S. Army made, in English currency, the princely sum of three pounds, eight shillings and ninepence a week. This was almost five times the pay of an English private.
Faced with this spending power, the people of Sarum were simply flabbergasted. It was for most of them the first time that they had realised that their island, at the heart of the mighty British Empire, was poor.
The lingering misunderstanding between the locals and their visitors however, concerned two things: attitude, and food.
The problem lay partly with the G.I.s who, being homsesick, endlessly told the Sarum folk how much better life was back home. Partly the fault also lay with the U.S. authorities who, to counteract this homesickness, sent their men a vast selection of foodstuffs utterly unobtainable to their hosts, and who, it seemed, had also forbidden their men to drink British milk on the grounds that it was dangerous. And partly, the everyday habit of America was to blame: for the people of Sarum had never seen waste like this. Food was left on the side of plates, paper, string cheerfully discarded, things