July: The Letters

© Jane Harvey-Berrick

It was never my dream to buy a hotel, especially one with a roof that leaked, a chimney that smoked, damp in every room, and mildew in the bathrooms. The place was a dump, and when I saw it in person for the first time, I cried. Repairs and renovations were needed in every square inch of the place. All I saw was expense, damp and despair. It seemed impossible.

Restoring Cove Hotel had been Elliott’s dream, not mine, but Elliott had died, leaving me, his widow, with a broken heart and broken dreams.

All I had left of him was this hotel.

“Sell it,” my London friends encouraged me. “Developers are falling over themselves to buy property in Devon.”

“I suppose so,” I said glumly. “It’s got twelve bedrooms, so someone with money for repairs could do it up.”

“Or knock it down and start again.”

Up until they said that, I’d viewed the hotel as a millstone around my neck, but the moment they suggested demolishing it, I felt a strange protectiveness.

True, the hotel was unlovely, but perhaps not unlovable. There was a small Greek-style swimming pool, currently filled with leaves and rubbish, and a patio with hand-shaped flagstones, green with moss and slime. The stucco was dirty and peeling, but Art Deco bones of the building still shone through. 

The Cove had a sort of faded grandeur, and I could almost imagine Virginia Woolf motoring down from London for some sea air and a room of her own to write in, or if Jay Gatsby had visited Britain, he might have partied here in another lifetime.

But Elliott had been the architect, the one with the building know-how; I was the one who could run a spreadsheet.

And I’d been the one to watch him waste away as cancer spread through his body. For a year, we tried to believe that he’d get better. He fought so hard. And I wonder if that’s the right thing to say? Did dying mean he hadn’t fought hard enough? Because he did. He really did. And he stayed positive right to the very end, promising that he’d be okay, that he’d watch over me.

And during that year, more slates had fallen from the Cove’s roof, and more water had stained the walls and soaked into the abandoned fabric of the old hotel.

It was crazy to think I could still do this without him.

Is that what I was thinking?

It was daunting. It would be far more sensible to sell it and … and … and then what? Move back to the city?

No, I couldn’t give up before I’d started.

I wanted to.

But I couldn’t.

I owed it to Elliott. Maybe I owed it to myself.

Feeling faintly nauseous, I read through Elliott’s detailed notes, tears pricking my eyes as I scanned the detailed architectural drawings, elevations and floor plans that Elliott had laboured over lovingly – his dream.

I had to blot away more tears before I noticed that he’d also shortlisted three builders that he thought were up to the job.

I made appointments with all of them. The first two were professional, competent and didn’t talk down to me. But the third was Mr Garland. He was short, elderly, and almost as round as he was tall.

“I spoke to your husband several times,” he said. “It’s a pity he died.”

I blinked several times. “Yes, it is.”

“I’ve known the Cove, man and boy,” he went on. “Pile o’ trouble, this place.”

And he started ticking off the problems on his fingers.

“Wood worm, damp rot, dry rot, rain soaked into the timbers, no damp course, needs a new roof, new plumbing, new wiring. It’s never had central heating and isn’t connected to mains water. There’s no soakaway and the sewerage situation is another pile of manure waiting to happen. It’s nothing but trouble and nothing but a money pit. Thing wants pulling down.”

I bristled immediately.

“If that’s your opinion, Mr Garland, then I must beg to differ. I’m going to make Cove Hotel beautiful again.”

“Why?” he asked, scratching his bald head.

My mouth dropped open.

“Why bother?” he repeated. “No disrespect, Mrs Bowen, but you’re no architect and you’re no builder. What makes you think you can pull this off?”

“Because I have to!” I all but shouted at the insufferable little man. “Because it could be beautiful again … and because I promised – it was the last thing that my husband worked on and it mattered to him more than anything. And I’m going to keep my promise.”

“You’ll do,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“I’ll do the job for you,” and he turned to stare at the ruin. “I’ll make you beautiful again, old girl.” He turned back to me. “You’re wrong about your husband. The Cove didn’t matter to him more than anything – you’re what mattered the most.” He pulled a notebook out of his back pocket. “I can start a week Monday.”

“You can?” I asked weakly, feeling as if every emotion had been steamrollered out of me.

He held out his hand and hardly knowing what I was doing, I shook on the deal.

I had no quotes about costs, no idea what materials would be needed, where they should be sourced or whether I could afford them, and no idea what he charged. It went against all my training as an accountant and business manager, but somehow, I knew that Mr Garland was the man for the job.

At 7.30am on the day Mr Garland was due to start work, grey clouds hovered over the Cove and a thin drizzle made the January day even gloomier.

But right on time, I heard the engines of several heavy lorries as Mr Garland’s team arrived along with the scaffolders.

He introduced me to several hearty young men who called me ‘Mrs B’ which made me feel like one of the ancients in a Dicken’s novel, then he handed me a sheaf of papers.

“Here’s the costings for you, Mrs Bowen. I’ve priced everything as close as I can to your husband’s specifications. I expect you’ll be starting your spreadsheets then?”

“Spreadsheets?” I asked faintly.

“Mr Bowen said you liked your spreadsheets,” he said.

“He told you that?”

“Right, better crack on!” he said, then bustled off, setting his men to work with sledgehammers while he supervised the erection of the scaffolding.

It was amazing to see Mr Garland’s team tearing through the work. And I mean that literally. Walls came down, clouds of dust came up; rotten wood was carted out and the first dumpster was soon full. I stood and watched for a while, then decided to take some ‘before’ photos. I wanted to remember this day.

“This is for you, Elliott,” I whispered.

I returned to the building site every day, and by the end of the first week, the Cove was little more than four walls and a roof – and that had several gaping holes in it where rotten roof timbers had been cut out.

Mr Garland popped out to see me, his tubby frame straining the seams of his overalls.

“Afternoon, Mrs Bowen. She’s coming along nicely, isn’t she?”

I was touched the way he talked about the Cove, as if the hotel were a person.

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, laughing a little hysterically.

“By the way, Charlie found these. He was going to toss them, but I thought you might be interested.”

He passed me a dusty old biscuit tin, spotted with rust.

“There’s letters in it,” he said, opening it for me.

Inside was a packet of letters tied with a pale blue ribbon, the paper yellow and brittle with age, the inked address faded and the colour of sepia.

“Oh, look! It’s addressed to Lieutenant Isaac Gray, 28th Naval Construction Battalion, US Navy.”

Mr Garland nodded.

“There were Americans stationed here during the War, working on the D-Day landings. One of them gave my dad his first ice cream. He said they had this big old machine on the pier and they used to treat the local kids.” He peered over my shoulder. “What does the letter say?”

The writing was hard to read, sloping heavily to the right and very cramped, with every part of the page overflowing with words.

I had to squint to read it. I needed reading glasses. God, I was getting old. Was 45 old?

“It says, ‘My dearest darling Izzy…’ oh! I think it’s from his wife or girlfriend.” It felt invasive to keep reading, but I was so curious. “ ‘I miss you more than words on a piece of paper can say. I miss your lips against mine and your strong hands…’ ” I stopped reading, skipping a few rather steamy paragraphs as Mr Garland looked on in amusement. “ ‘I’m real glad that folk are friendly. It was kind of that family to invite you in for tea and cookies. I guess I should call them ‘biscuits’ like the British do. Don’t they have coffee? Maybe I could send them some to say thank you. We are all well here and send our love. Your mom told me to remind you to go to church on Sundays. Do they have Episcopalians there? And your brother Ernie wants to know if Ford Motor cars are driven much? I guess not since they have gas rationing. Oh, your pops wants you to know that he thinks the construction business is going to boom when the war is over. He really misses you – says he can’t get good employees anymore what with all the men being away. I said he should take on a woman or two, like Rosie the Riveter. He didn’t like that so much! Anyway, I must go now because baby David is fretting. He misses his daddy almost as much as I do. I can’t wait for you to meet him. All my love for ever and beyond. Your one true love, Betty.’”

I looked up at Mr Garland.

“Wow! That’s…” I didn’t have the words.

“I wonder if he made it back to America,” said Mr Garland softly.

A cold shiver ran through me.

“You think he didn’t?”

“Builders always put something in the walls of the houses they build: a cigarette packet, a coin, a message or an old newspaper. But these letters are personal. Wouldn’t he have taken them with him? He kept ‘em nice in a tin with that ribbon around them. Reckon it was hers. Reckon he held that ribbon in his hands and imagined it in her hair.”

Mr Garland’s voice was so sad and I knew why. One of the men, Dennis, told me that he’d lost his wife a week before their 50^th wedding anniversary.

I squeezed his hand and he gave me a sad smile.

“Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to find out what happened to Lieutenant Isaac Grey – and I’m going to find baby David and return the letters to him.”

Gradually, the Cove began blossom again. As Winter turned to Spring, there were signs that the old hotel wasn’t going to go silently into the night; she was being reborn. And she was going to be beautiful.

Mr Garland – whom I now called Keith – we became friends. He joked that I ran my expenditures spreadsheets like a military operation, and then he asked me to come and work for him as a project manager. I said yes.

My work days were long and full, but my evenings were still lonely. I missed Elliott so desperately in those twilight hours, wishing he was beside me, talking to me the way he had for 17 years, a conversation that had ended too soon.

But he was gone, and I had to get on with my life. To fill my quiet evenings, I began researching the 28th Construction Battalion and trying to find out what happened to Lieutenant Gray. Sadly, I found out all too soon. Keith was right – Betty’s husband had died at Utah Beach on 6^th June 1945. I couldn’t find out exactly what happened to him but assumed he must have died as part of the US Navy’s bombardment force.

So, then I tried to trace Betty. That was much harder, and if she’d remarried, it would be almost impossible to find her. And do you know how many David Grays there are in America of approximately the right age? Hundreds and hundreds – never mind all the hits I got for the songwriter of the same name.

I started leaving requests for information on message boards to do with the 28th Construction Battalion, but my quest seemed hopeless.

Until one day, I received an email.

Dear Emma Bowen,

My name is Gary Lendt. I saw your post on ‘Seabees Reunited’ message board. I’m fairly sure that you’re talking about my grandfather, Isaac Henry Gray of Fairfax, Missouri who married Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Coombs in 1942. My father is David Orville Lendt after grandma remarried a few years later.

I guess it seems strange that he joined the US Navy when you can’t get much further from the ocean than Missouri, but he worked construction like his pa before him, and the 28^th was a Construction Battalion (that’s where they get the nickname ‘Seabees’: CBs – get it?!).

You’ve got me real curious about what you found in your hotel. I hope to hear back from you.

Sincerely,

Gary Lendt, Attorney at Law

I was so excited that I ran all the way to the Cove, and showed Keith the email.

“I’ve checked him out and he’s a real person living in a town called Rockport in Missouri. Isn’t it amazing!”

Keith was as excited as I was and watched over my shoulder as I typed a reply. I think we hoped for an immediate response, but of course that didn’t happen.

“I need to go and photograph one of the letters and send it to him,” I said.

And when I woke up the next morning, there was another message.

Gary was over the moon, as was his father.

Dear Emma,

Thank you so much for sending the photograph of the letter. Dad never got to meet his father, so having this letter is a precious thing for him. He’d write himself, but he has cataracts and is waiting for an operation. He says to be sure and thank you – so, thank you, Emma!

We’d love to see the rest of the letters. Would it be too much trouble to photograph some more and email them over?

Sincerely,

Gary

After that, Gary and I emailed each other every day. At first, it was just about the letters and things his grandmother had told David about his father. But gradually, we started talking about ourselves.

He was 44, a year younger than me, divorced with a daughter at university studying to be a structural engineer. I joked that if construction ran in the family and Gary was a lawyer, that made him the black sheep.

I also told him about Elliott and Cove Hotel.

He asked me to send him pictures of the place where his grandfather had hidden those letters 80 years earlier.

By then, my hotel was looking so beautiful, and Keith and I were planning a party to celebrate ‘topping off’, which is a ritual builders do when the roof is on – or in our case, sound and watertight.

I needed to start thinking about what I was going to do with Cove Hotel. I’d never thought of myself as being a hotel manager and didn’t know much about the hospitality industry, but as Keith said, I was a ‘right Bobby dazzler’ with a spreadsheet. So maybe I could do it – or hire a manager.

And then, I got an email that knocked the wind out of me.

Hey, Em!

Guess what my dad said to me today? He wants to go see Cove Hotel for himself. Would you mind if we came to visit with you in England?

What do you say?

Gary

I took a steadying breath. Seeing him face to face would be so personal. It was easy to maintain the myth that I hadn’t fallen for sweet, gentle, funny Gary Lendt as we swapped emails for three months. But seeing him in real life – that was different. It felt like cheating on Elliott.

Keith asked me why I was so quiet, and finally, after trying to dodge his questions, I told him.

“Emma, luv, it’s not cheating.”

“But…”

“No, your Elliott loved you. I knew it the first time I spoke to him, the way he talked about you. So, I also know that he wouldn’t want you to stop living your life. This Gary chap sounds alright – but I’ll let you know for sure after I’ve met him.” He squeezed my hand. “Life if for the living, and it would be a wicked thing to waste your life on a memory.”

“That goes for you too, Keith.”

“Ah, well, there’s two rules,” he smiled, ducking his head to avoid meeting my gaze.

Taking my courage in both hands, I replied to Gary’s email.

I can’t wait to meet you.

Em x

His reply was almost immediate.

Thank you! I’ve bought the tickets. We’ll be arriving in London on July 27^th and driving down to Devon the day after. Should we go straight to Cove Hotel?

Can’t wait to meet you, too.

Gary

THE END

If you’d like to find out more about the 28^th Construction Battalion in the UK during the war ->

https://www.teignmouthshaldonww2.co.uk/index.php/american-troops-in-teignmouth