Trenarth is a little place on the railway, at the junction of the main line and the North Coast line. It is a place of about a thousand inhabitants, with a small market square, a church built in the year 1356, and a public house. The construction companies were all Negro except for a few white technicians; the impact of fifteen hundred coloured soldiers on this little place was considerable.

There were some misunderstandings to be cleared up when they first arrived. A party of white American surveyors from the Eighth Air Force had come first to pick the site and mark it out, and they had told the village about the blacks who would arrive in a few days. They said that the Negro soldiers who were coming were rather primitive, and that the villagers would have to be both careful and tolerant. They said the Negroes could speak little English and did not understand the use of lavatories. When they were hungry, they would bark like a dog, and they had small, rudimentary tails concealed within their trousers, which made it difficult for them to sit down. Having drunk their beer and marked the site and had their fun with perfectly straight faces, the surveyors went away, and left the village in perplexity.

Old Mr Marston, the gardener at the vicarage, raised the matter in the White Hart one night. "I asked Mr Kendall if it's true what they were saying about these black soldiers that are coming," he said. "About them barking when they want their victuals. He says it's all just a story they were telling us, to get a rise out of us."

"Aye, that's right," said Mr Frobisher, the landlord of the pub. "They was just pulling our legs. Negroes don't have tails, not any that I heard of."

A mournful little man who worked as a porter at the station said, "Well, I don't think they was pulling our legs at all. Very nice and straight they spoke to me, they did. That corporal, he said this lot come straight from Africa. Africans, they are-that's why they can't speak English. There's rum things happen in Africa, believe me."

The consensus of opinion was that the stories were improbable, but that it would be prudent to maintain a strict reserve when the visitors arrived.

The story reached the Negro soldiers very quickly. In the March dusk, after their evening meal in the rough camp they were making on the bleak hilltop, a few coloured men walked down into the village. They came in a little party, smiling broadly. As they passed each villager they gave a realistic imitation of a pack of hungry dogs. They thought it was a great joke, and barked at everybody, in tones varying from Pekinese to bloodhound. By the time they reached the White Hart, the village had come to its senses; in the bar they were accepted as interesting strangers to whom was owed some sort of apology.

who were taller and wispier than the other boggies and who lived in the forests, where they maintained a thriving trade in leather goods, sandals, and handicrafts. They did periodic interior-decorating work for the elves, but spent most of their time singing lurid folk songs and accosting squirrels.