Now That Spring Is Here

Parachutes bloomed in fluffy skies as airborne troops rehearsed their desperate act. Cowslips gleamed in English meadows and harebells nodded by English streams as toiling infantrymen sweated and wriggled through the final stages of their training. Across the pale green of awakening countryside, endless convoys lurched, Bren gun carriers clattered, jeeps buzzed and tanks clanked. Assault troops splashed wearily ashore on countless nameless stony beaches; the thunder of artillery practice on Salisbury Plain mounted toward unbearable climax.

Forbidden Ground. On the invasion rim, from King's Lynn on The Wash down past Great Yarmouth, the herring port, past Harwich, home of Britain's famed gunnery school, to the misty mouth of the Thames, where Sheerness and Shoeburyness stand guard, to the North Foreland around by Dover and Beachy Head to Southampton and on to the Devon towns and Land's End in Cornwall, only those with identity cards might go.

By day, tight formations of silvery U.S. bombers roared across the shoreline and straggled gamely back. At night the drone of British Lancasters filled the sky. Last month an impatient young lady wrote to the papers complaining that the noise kept her awake.

But in the pubs men still lifted their glasses to the sound of evening planes, and in their little gardens many Britons prayed when they saw the morning bombers go over.

The Long Past. As the mighty tide of Allied power surged outward toward the beaches, England's ever-present past Stirred and cast its shadow.

At Sandringham, in Norfolk, near The Wash, the King's farmers clucked to the King's horses and turned the King's sod as they and their fathers did for George V and his father, Edward VII. The King was born in York Cottage, Sandringham, and his father died there.

The Cinque Ports -- originally Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, Romney and Hastings, later all the southeast coastal towns -- dot the chalk-cliffed coast where France leans closest to the British Isles.

Caesar landed where Deal now drowses and William the Conqueror made good his bid at Hastings. just beyond the Sussex line. Much later the furtive wink of smugglers' lamps enlivened coastal life, put money in the pockets of those who cared to lend a hand to circumvent the King.

The West Country. Westward still, where Brixham's whitewashed houses climb the red sandstone cliffs above Tor Bay, patient Devon fishermen mend their nets and watch for signs that offshore fishing is again allowed. Napoleon paused at Brixham on his way to St. Helena. Brixham fishermen were among the last to abandon sail for steam, but claim to have been the first to find the teeming Dogger Bank in the Bay of Biscay.

At Plymouth the bombs came down hard in 1941. St. Andrew's Church, where the congregation ran away one Sunday in 1573 to welcome Sir Francis Drake back from the New World, is now a mocking, roofless shell. So are thousands of other buildings. But Plymouth has Parliament's permission to plan for postwar reconstruction along bold new lines.

Around Land's End, in sleepy little Camborne by Tintagel, where men say King Arthur was born, a dour Cornishman sat at the foot of a weathered statue. It is a likeness of Richard Trevithick, who harnessed steam so well that he, not Thomas Watt, really launched the industrial revolution. In a turn of phrase the men of Cornwall have used for centuries, the Cornishman broke a bit of news to a neighbor: "Tomorrow, I'm going out to England."

Out in England last Sunday, lean young men from the U.S. took English girls punting on the placid reaches of the upper Thames. English children played at storming the walls of Festung Europa. Maimed men, for whom the war is already over, sunned themselves by convalescent homes. The drone of motors grew steadily stronger.

* With British Minister of State Richard Law, U.S. Ambassador John G. Winant, Anthony Eden.

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