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project she’d be graded on.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Public transportation is pretty good here,’ I told her. ‘Plenty of trains and buses. Where do you want to go?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜During Operation Tiger,’ Cathy added, her face grave. ‘Nine hundred and forty-six men. My father was one of them.’
    â€˜I’m so sorry,’ I said.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜ 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