OPEN POST
• By DEREK SEVERN
THAT stretch of road was seldom quiet. All day, and often all
THAT
the Harvards and Stearman PTI7's which we, R.A.F. cadets, were learning to fly buzzed round in the intense heat, per- forming every evolution which the makers allowed, and several which they did not, The road was a convenient landmark, an infallible guide in the terrific thunderstorms which blew up every afternoon. From Fort Myers on the Gulf of Mexico it stretched almost without a bend through the cypress swamps and the long fields of beans and sugar-cane to West Palm Beach on the Atlantic coast. We came to know it well, both from the air and from the ground. It was the road we travelled whenever we were on Open Post.
Generally we made for Clewiston first. The signboard on the roadside described it, with typical American reticence, as a city ; it had perhaps twelve hundred inhabitants, half of them negroes. You would hardly notice the place from a fast car—the long road, tree- lined for half a mile and dustier than in the open country, a hotel, a couple of drug-stores and two or three shops separated from the rest of the town by an avenue of trees. But there were houses if you cared to search for them, white wooden bungalows crouching behind thick bushes as though ashamed to be seen, and if you had time to look you would also find a post office (which seemed never to be open), a tiny chapel, a cinema, a saloon and a Cadet Club. And in the centre of the city, visible from ten miles away, a silver water-tower, of the kind which one finds all over Florida, stood over the palm trees, with the name of the town painted on it to guide erring navigators. To us, with no larger town within fifty miles, Clewiston was a metropolis.
Apart from the week-ends, we had Open Post on one night a week. The routine never varied—a " coke " in the corner drug-store, a visit to the cinema, and then on to the Cadet Club until the bus arrived to take us back to camp. Indeed, there was little else to do. But, strangely, however often one went, one was never bored. The place had an atmosphere of its own. It was remote, cut off, a microcosm dropped accidentally into the middle of a vast swamp. You might spend a year there and never notice the passage of time ; and the fighting at Salerno and Kharkov was scarcely more remote than West Palm Beach and Miami. Now and again a car passed through, or a bus, messengers from another continent ; but they seldom stopped, and when the dust had settled Clewiston also reverted to its own leisurely, disinterested existence, an endless siesta disturbed only by the noise of aircraft and the English voices which broke its peace for an hour or two each week.
In retrospect, that atmosphere seems to have been compounded of heat and dust, of the calmness and slow imperturbability of the people, but above all of the solitude of the place. Within the city there was the warmth of human contact, but a hundred yards outside its boundaries space seemed to creep up on us as night creeps, and as inevitably, its remoteness emphasised by the impersonal drone of the aircraft that flew above us. And that loneliness, I think, was with us always in Clewiston, as one must always be lonely in an oasis. It permeated the empty streets ; the very shops with their one or two customers were less than half alive, and whichever way one looked along the road there was nothing but the level plain stretching away for eighty miles to the sea. We accepted it at first as the strangeness which all new places have, and then as part of the spirit of the place, slowing down our lives for a few hours, until its freedom from the noise of men became positively enjoyable, a thing to be savoured before it dissolved into the frenzy of civilisation. At night its quality underwent a subtle change, for the evenings were cool and still after the afternoon's storms, and there were more people about, congregated round the drug-stores and the ten-cent bazaar. But then, more than ever, one realised how remote this place was, how independent of the great hinterland which invaded us only by way of the juke-box and the cinema. Often I walked along the Main Street where the Creole Indians, with their wicker baskets and their wonderfully patterned clothes, were packing provisions into a battered 192o Ford. There were shops here where one could buy fruit and groceries at ten o'clock at night, and beyond them, beyond the last light, a wooden bridge across a stagnant stream, where weeds covered the water with a green film and the road crept on into the darkness. Beyond this there was nothing ; only emptiness. There was no life there. Time, which moved slowly for everyone in Florida except us, seemed almost to have stopped.
But there were distractions. The Dixie Crystal cinema was most popular on Saturdays, when one could see the Dick Tracy serial. It was understood that you never missed the latest instalment if you were in Clewiston, and when we left for Canada with three instalments still to go it grieved us bitterly to think that we should no longer be able to hiss the villain and whistle at the heroine, nor ever know how the hero escaped from the Invisible Man's latest trap and caught him in the end. Only once during that autumn-1943- we saw a British film, The Young Mr. Pitt, but the cinema was full of British cadets, and we had no means of discovering the native reaction.
And there was the Cadet Club, a large house taken over and made habitable by a lady in West Palm Beach, whose generosity was limit- less. Here we could eat and read and drink milk and iced tomato juice until the cinema opened or the bus arrived, or even, if the Atlantic were kind, listen to the B.B.C. And sooner or later a little American corporal from Sick Quarters, with a Greek name which we could never pronounce, would switch on the radiogram and jitterbug for half an hour, until there was no partner with sufficient energy to join him. He had a round, moon-like face, and when he grinned, as he did constantly, it was as though a slice had been cut from a ripe melon. He was short and fat and lethargic, but when he began to dance his whole body was electrified, a tense, vibrating bundle which weaved and jerked around the room, flinging a girl across his shoulder or twisting through a strange contorted tangle of arms. And always there was the grin. To Eddie jitterbugging was ecstasy. If it were forbidden in heaven, he would probably have preferred to remain outside.
Memory is selective, and kind to places as to people ; but it seems to me now that Clewiston, with its solitude, its aimlessness and its contentment, had a quality I have not found since. Preparing for war, we found peacefulness.
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