Editing A Canterbury Tale (section)

==Plot==
[[File:Canterbury - Turm der St. George's Church, in der Marlowe getauft wurde.jpg|thumb|left|St George's Church tower, seen in the film after being gutted in the [[Baedeker raids]] (modern photograph)]]

The story concerns three young people: British Army Sergeant Peter Gibbs, U.S. Army Sergeant Bob Johnson, and a "[[Women's Land Army|Land Girl]]", Miss Alison Smith. The group arrive at the railway station in the fictitious small [[Kent]] town of Chillingbourne (filmed in [[Chilham]], [[Fordwich]], [[Wickhambreaux]] and other villages in the area), near [[Canterbury]], late on Friday night, 27 August 1943. Peter has been stationed at a nearby Army camp, Alison is due to start working on a farm in the area, and Bob left the train by mistake, hearing the announcement "next stop Canterbury" and thinking he was in Canterbury.

As they leave the station together Alison is attacked by an assailant in uniform, who pours glue on her hair before escaping. It transpires that this has happened to other women, and the mystery attacker is known locally as "the glue man". Alison asks Bob if he will spend the weekend in Chillingbourne to help her solve the mystery. The next day, while riding a farm cart in the countryside, Alison meets Peter, who surrounds her cart with his platoon of three [[Bren Gun Carrier]]s. Alison agrees to meet Peter again. The three decide to investigate the attack, enlisting the help of the locals, including several small boys who play large-scale [[Military simulation|war game]]s.

The three use their detective skills to identify the culprit as a local magistrate, Thomas Colpeper, a gentleman farmer and pillar of the community, who also gives local history lectures to soldiers stationed in the district. Alison interviews all the glue man's victims to identify the dates and times of their attacks. Gibbs visits Colpeper at his home and steals the fire watch roster listing the nights Colpeper was on duty in the town hall, whilst a paper drive for salvage by Johnson's boy commandos lets Johnson discover receipts for gum used to make glue sold to Colpeper. The dates of the attacks correspond with Colpeper's night watches, for which he wore a [[Home Guard (United Kingdom)|Home Guard]] uniform kept in the town hall.

On their train journey to Canterbury on the Monday morning, Colpeper joins the three in their compartment. They confront him with their suspicions, which he does not deny, and they discover that his motive is to prevent the soldiers from being distracted from his lectures by female company, as well as to help keep the local women faithful to their absent British boyfriends. In Colpeper's words, Chaucer's pilgrims travelled to Canterbury to "receive a blessing or to do penance". On arriving in the city of Canterbury, devastated by wartime bombing, all three young people receive blessings of their own. Alison discovers that her boyfriend, believed killed in the war, has survived after all; his father, who had blocked their marriage because he thought his son could do better than a shopgirl, finally relents. Bob receives long-delayed letters from his sweetheart, who is now a [[Women's Army Corps|WAC]] in Australia. Peter, a [[Theatre organ|cinema organist]] before the war, gets to play the music of [[Johann Sebastian Bach]] on the large organ at [[Canterbury Cathedral]], before leaving with his unit. He decides not to report Colpeper to the Canterbury police, as he had planned to do.