Chapter 12

I woke in the morning, semi-glad to see that I was still Cooper James. The part of me that wanted to go back to being Harley Scoville had lost the argument long ago. The most convincing argument was the morning wood we'd been waking up with the past couple of days. There was a function long and sorely missed!

Both sides of the coin would gladly settle for knowing why this had happened, even if we never learned how. Both sides also wondered what the hell we were going to be doing with our life and wondered just how useless the skill set we brought with us from that other life would prove to be.

Harold Lee Scoville was born on November 11, 1918. Armistice Day. I was the son of privilege, growing up in New Jersey to Harold and Virginia Scoville. My father was a printer and publisher, and more importantly at the time, an influential man in the politics of the area. He had come to America from England with his father at an early age. He had been academically brilliant and his father's skills with the typesetting equipment of the day made the family prosperous. By the time he was in college, his father owned his own business, and while he had no interest in politics, he understood its importance to anyone whose business was printing the news and opinion of the day. He arranged my father's engagement to Virginia Caldwell of the New Hampshire Caldwells ( as she laughingly would say it when I was young). Like my father, she had come to America from England as a child with her parents, and was resistant at first, due to the much higher station her ancestors held there than ours. She watched my father blaze a path through the halls of academe, and forge friendships with the power brokers of both her home state and those of his in New Jersey though, and eventually she ended her resistance.

As he was fond of telling it, this success opened her to the possibility of a relationship and their 'compatibility' once they'd had a couple of chances to spend some time together unchaperoned did the rest. My mother would act quite indignant at such times, but I never heard her disagree.

I was a member of the Dartmouth freshman class of 1936, and like my father, I found academic success with relative ease. When the winds of war stirred again in 1939 though, my parents, both of whom had been born in England and still felt a great deal of loyalty to the land of their birth, began urging me to leave school and head to England to join the British Army and help fight against the Kaiser and protect British interests.

I was an American though, and refused to end my college education early, especially since I was only a year short of graduation. Instead I promised that if the war was still being fought when I had graduated in a year then I would indeed go to England and sign up. In the meantime my parents and their parents were among the many working hard to get America into the war, though to us all it didn't appear likely to happen any time soon. The European conflict just didn't seem that much of a threat.

I made that promise, and I meant it, but the potential fly in the ointment was Rebecca Worthington.

I met Rebecca at the beginning of my Senior year. She was the sister of William Worthington III, a freshman assigned to the dorm where I was assigned to assist with getting the new sheep settled. He was Billy, he said, or 'Bad Billy' as we called him later when we got to know him better, and she had accompanied her parents in seeing him to school. Rebecca was a lovely girl, and I was shocked to discover the family also lived in Blackwood. We lived only a few miles apart and I'd never known her. Perhaps it was the age difference, for she was only a year older than her brother.