In The Mind's Eye

WW II With Sandcastles

Recently, I've discovered what people have known for centuries. When I crossed the Rubicon from age 50 to age 51, my retrospective changed radically. Yesterday and the day before now blur indiscriminately, but my childhood's days have focused into precise detail. So now the everydayness of when I was six feels much more exciting than it did at the time and has taken on extraordinary significance. I can now peer with recollected child's eyes and have my mellowed adult voice impose meaning. Suited in this confidence, then, I'll revisit my World War II.

Things were not so tranquil on the New Jersey shoreline between 1943 and 1945. That is, they weren't for my parents and the other adults. As far as I was concerned, the challenges of sand and surf consumed those summer days. Each day presented a simple, imposing question; what style of sandcastle and adjacent moat can best sustain the ravages of a rising tide? My older brother and sister made it easier for me. I simply followed their orders.

Our hours would toil through the thickly tarred sand, and we would use the splintered crating of the wreckage that had been beached by the most recent drift from the horizon. This was the normality we worked with. Except for rationing shortages, we had little consciousness through our daily routine that a major war was being waged within sight of the very beach that we played on. Few people today can believe me when I tell them such things. They claim the war never came that close to our pristine shores. The threat was on the west coast from the encroachment of the Japanese. This first came to me when I was lecturing on a story from John Barth, "Lost in the Funhouse," a fictionalized version of a childhood experience along another eastern shoreline, probably Ocean City, Maryland. When I told my group of students from the Seventies about the truth of seeing the gun flashes from the ships warring off shore, they became scowly and threw my general credibility into serious doubt. And that incident sparked my child's eyes into focus.

It had not all been the building of sandcastles, however. It had been the sound of thunder and flashes of light over the horizon in night skies choked with stars. It had been the amusement of watching the target practice flights of training aircraft out over the ocean. It had been the child's awe in seeing a flyer going down in the bay behind my grandmother's house after he lost control of his plane during a stunt flight. It had been asking my mother why I had to remain on the dunes and not join all the people gathered in a circle at the rim of the ocean's foam, huddled around a mound of some sort and covering it with that strange rubber sheet. And it had been the daily wash of wreckage, garbage, wood and metal on the shore that provided our supply of tools and playthings.

Our vacation home, my grandmother's house on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, was seven miles out to sea and about thirty miles north of Atlantic City. Long Beach Island had been serving as a playland for as long as the native Americans would canoe there from Manahawkin on the mainland to escape the humidity of southern New Jersey. As time went on and the railroad faltered, it became too far south of New York and too far east of Philadelphia for day trippers to give it a second thought. So it became a clean, safe and not-so honky tonk environment for families with kids to spend some long vacations. During WW II those same attributes made it a very attractive spot strategically and logistically for the Axis folks who needed a quiet spot for their own purposes.

What was ordinary then seems intensely dramatic now. Yes, the cars really did have shielded headlights. And yes, when the alarm sounded we really did have to lower the opaque window shades and not allow a flicker of light to escape them. Back home in the suburbs of Philadelphia, my father really was an air raid warden, wearing his pith helmet and badge and whistle. I felt especially important those nights he responded to the sirens. Two blocks up a gradual hill toward the main street of our neighborhood, the water company owned a vacant acre of land for their local supply tank, and they donated the plot for a victory garden. Some friends and I would see how many mounds of bean rows we could skip a stone over. We would wail to see the puffs of dried dirt rise into the heat of a midday sky, just like bullets ricocheting in the battlefield.

All a kid knows are the feelings of enthusiasm the adults impose on the facts of life. I can remember those times when the neighborhood gathered to check the garden and work their plots. I could feel the importance of their communal labors, because I was witness to them. I also had my infantry fatigues and model Springfield rifle, so that I could act out the war movies I saw at the Waverly theatre down the hill and across from the trolley stop. John Wayne really was a hero, but there were also John Payne, William Bendix, Randolph Scott, Alan Ladd, and the men who played the young guys whose names I forget, who always had to be the youth who were sacrificed for the sake of the greater glory. I was there for "A Guy Named Joe" and for "Forty Seconds Over Tokyo." Spencer Tracy held the grit of a nation in the clenched twitch of his jawline. I guess what makes it clear to me now is the sight of all that going on during the days and nights of my beach times in the glow of a driftwood bonfire.

I returned to the Island several times after a long hiatus away, preparing for adulthood. My parents retired there during the Seventies. We buried my father back on the mainland, just to the north of Manahawkin. He would rather have been placed in the Island, but at about thirty inches you hit water, so that's not allowed. I have whole catalogues of Island memories, everything from the blush of teenage romance to the challenge of adult child's responsibilities. But the clearest memories now have to do with those incredible few years before V-E Day and V-J Day.

The sand was different then. Things hovered tensely in the crisp blue air that still hugs the Island. Everything we did seemed to have special importance. The adults would speak to us of the urgency of necessities. Planes and alien noises meant imminence. Anything my father did could be significant. So despite the fun of the sand, the surf and the adventures of discovery in the marshes and muddy bay life, I can still see the backdrop of war, its glorious immensity and particular absurdity.