Slapton Sands by Francis Cottam Page A

the girl had asked, her mouth twitching with horror. ‘Did he shoot it at people?’
    â€˜Nah,’ Alice had replied. ‘My dad was more like those two cops on TV in
The Sweeney.
When the bad guys pulled their weapons, my old man just took them to a bar and drank them to death.’
    The veterinarian’s daughter hadn’t really seemed to get the joke.
    In truth, Sergeant Patrick Bourne had been well enough armed. There’d been a heavy-calibre revolver strapped to his hip. There’d been a pump-action twelve-gauge clipped under the dashboard of his car. Neither weapon had saved him on the night he was shot to death, forced to kneel on corn stubble, executed outside a derelict barn on the outskirts of Emmaus.
    Her collision with the vet’s daughter had been the first of the many culture clashes Alice had experienced in the relatively short time she’d been in England. Whether she had endured or provoked them was a matter for debate. She didn’t think of herself as being particularly confrontational. But a kind of low-level anti-Americanism seemed topervade all aspects of English life. It felt after a while like one of those flu bugs they had here. It made you feel lousy without debilitating you to the point where you needed to consult a doctor and have antibiotics prescribed.
    In her first week, Professor Champion had invited her to sit in on a seminar. He ran a course of his own devising called the American Century. It was a very popular course. His American Century seminars were held one afternoon a week. Entering the room a couple of minutes late, Alice was almost felled by the heady, combined assault of Alliage and Tabac. Champion was chain-smoking, but doing so next to a window. Looking at the eight or so faces around the table, it was tempting to think that the professor cast his students for their looks more than for their brains. The subsequent discussion did nothing in her mind to challenge this view.
    They were talking about American films. The best French and German films apparently addressed Issues. The most influential American film of recent times starred a vindictive rubber fish and had emptied beaches. This was not considered by the group to be a pertinent achievement. That’s why mainstream Hollywood studios made
The Candidate
and
The Parallax View
and
Three Days of the Condor,
Alice thought. That’s why they were all solid box-office hits. But she didn’t say anything, because she’d been invited to observe. We don’t address issues. That’s why Pakula was right then having to shoot
All the President’s Men
on a shoestring, forced to resort as his leads to those two underground actors, Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
    The group moved on to cultural imperialism. Coca-Cola seemed to be the principal culprit in this particular area of discussion.
    She cracked when they began to talk about Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan as representatives of America’s counter-culture.
    â€˜I don’t think you can be part of the counter-culture if your work forms window displays in Barnes and Noble,’ she said. The words weren’t out of her mouth before she remembered that Professor Champion had written a paper on the lyrics of Dylan in the context of something called the American Dissident Tradition.
    â€˜You don’t think Dylan has anything authentic to say about what is wrong with his country?’ Despite the heat and cloying odours in the room, the professor’s tone was arctic.
    â€˜I think he was always a middle-class, urban boy performing in borrowed clothes. I think Woody Guthrie was a phoney, too. All that riding freight was just romantic posturing. They’re troubadours, not itinerant labour. They are to popular music what Jack London was to literature. There’s a new blue-collar hero on the scene. A fellow called Springsteen. His credentials are equally bogus, and I’m sure he’ll be just as