Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (19 page)

Equally heedless to possible consequences was the Guernsey girl who threw a bucket of dirty water over a German soldier at the start of the final year of Occupation. The lead-up to this aquatic encounter was not related, although Rev. Ord claimed that “great admiration is felt, and rightly” for the girl's action. The girl herself simply said that she had “always wanted to do just that.” Ord believed that her escape with just a warning had much to do with her “frankness and cheerful good humour.” Chances are that the soldier was unmistakably out of line in a manner that both the Guernsey and German authorities were invested
in preventing.
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In general, stories of plucky shop assistants, mischievous servant girls, and other young women who refused to tolerate “cheek” from German soldiers bolstered a sense of control and normalcy where none existed. As Ord put it, “When one sees young girls going about unconcerned, the Occupation seems an evil dream.”
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Matching the fears for young women was a deep concern for the elderly left in the Island. The apparent number of “very old,” a term now used for those in their eighties or nineties, left in Guernsey during the Occupation really is staggering when you consider that average life spans were shorter in the 1940s than today. It says something about the high quality of food and physical activity of Islanders during peacetime that so many very old were alive at the start of the Occupation. Granted, the percentage of elderly is skewed, because these were the very people who felt they could not make the evacuation journey into the unknown. Many had a sense that, coming as they were to the final portion of their lives, it was best to ride out the future in familiar surroundings. For some it would be a very short ride.

By August of the first summer of Occupation, Winifred Harvey noted that “several old people have died rather suddenly,” among them “Old Dr. Collings” and Mr. Rose, the Presbyterian minister. Colonel Perceval Carey, who had been caught in the streets with Winnie and his wife Doris during the air raid of June 28, was on this short list. Doris came home from a trip into town and found her husband lying on the kitchen floor, dead of a sudden heart attack.
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Winnie believed that the loss of private cars, leading to unaccustomed bicycling and carrying heavy parcels, combined with anxiety and grief over the deaths of his “lovely dogs” conspired to end the colonel's life prematurely.
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Such speculation over whether a natural death of older Islanders, often a heart attack or stroke, could be laid at the feet of the Occupation becomes a notable pattern throughout the contemporaneous narratives. Those who were ill had less opportunity to rest and recover, and some older Islanders pushed themselves, sometimes unnecessarily. During May of 1941, Jack Sauvary's good friend Dr. Jones had a heart attack while standing in the Market fish shop and was taken home by ambulance. By that afternoon, however, he was out in his yard chopping wood. One has to wonder why a doctor would do something so plainly contraindicated for a heart condition.
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The Doctor, as Jack called him, had another heart attack in October 1942, but Jack ascribed this spell to the stress brought on by Dr. Jones's recent eviction from his home.
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Jack lavished the Doctor with his concern and any resources that came to hand: picking up the Doctor's rationing coupons,
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killing the last cockerel he had saved for himself, so the Doctor would have a good Christmas dinner.
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But the Doctor gave as good as he got, having Jack over to Sunday lunch regularly,
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and providing a little free medical advice along the way.
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This was a meeting of minds and resources of two aging widowers and was the type of deepening friendship and mutual concern that older Islanders showed for each other in tenuous times.

In other instances, very elderly Islanders were effectively “adopted” by others in a way that masqueraded as simple friendship. Such was the relationship of Jack Sauvary to Miss Lihou, Mrs. Godfray, and Elsie (Mrs. Godfray's maid). Mrs. Godfray turned eighty-nine in March 1941, and Jack's diary shows how he quickly became her benefactor on the quiet.
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Jack seems to have had Miss Lihou and Mrs. Godfray in mind much of the time, taking them gifts of flowers, or port (when possible), killing three fowl (“How cruel,” Jack says in an aside), and even parting with one of his wife's 1938 Christmas puddings, all to ensure that they had a decent Christmas.
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In giving them the smelt that had been given to him, along with the sultana cake Mrs. Rowe had baked for him, Jack admitted that he didn't
“like to think of these old ladies being short of food at their ages (89 and a few years less).”
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This was giving out of want, not plenty, for Jack was rapidly losing weight at that time, “a stone since January,
and
my ‘Little Mary’,” he wrote, using the British slang of the day for stomach.
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It was of great concern to Islanders that their oldest citizens were suffering under conditions that broke the health of those much younger. Bill Warry watched an old lady in the Market one day as she casually eyed a “rough-looking” bone lying in the sawdust of the floor. Apparently of little use, it might have been tossed in the direction of a starving dog when no one was looking. The old lady “pleasantly” claimed it for her own, slipping it into her basket. “All helps to make a meal,” thought Bill, “but pathetic.”
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If it was heart-rending to watch a stranger suffer, lacking food to give an elderly relative in one's own home must have been emotionally draining. Such was apparently the case with Ambrose Robin as he watched the rapid decline of his eighty-two-year-old Uncle Phil in the summer of 1941. Thus, the simple note one Sunday morning that “Phil had
BACON
for breakfast” conveys strongly his feeling of triumph in finding a special treat for a loved family member.
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Deaths of the elderly often came in clusters, usually at the close of the difficult Occupation winters. Jack noted in January 1941, “We have had lots of deaths lately, old people between 85 and 95.”
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In actual fact, that January was one of the most deadly months of the entire Occupation, second only to January 1945, with a death rate of 41.1 per 1,000.
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The following winter, which was very cold, there were 182 deaths in January and February alone.
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Even before the starvation period of the final year of Occupation, malnutrition was taking its toll on older Islanders. Elizabeth Doig wrote in April 23, 1944, “Oh! how this war drags on, so many people are dying here from malnutrition, especially elderly people who cannot get about to find food.”
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In losing their oldest citizens, Guernseymen and women could sense their history slipping away from them. This is one reason that the deaths of the elderly held almost as much symbolic as personal meaning. In one fortnight in March 1943, the Island lost two of its mainstays. Many of the diarists mention the passing at age eighty-eight of Mr. Gervase F. Peek, a man described, almost universally it seems, as “the grand old man” of Guernsey. Bill Warry carefully pasted in his scrapbook the funeral notice and a newspaper picture of Mr. Peek, noting that he was “an old friend &
one of the best
.”
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For Jack Sauvary, a more wrenching loss came hard on the heels of this death. On April 12, the Doctor passed away. Jack had watched as his friend faced his impending death with equanimity, slowly weakening until his heart finally gave out. Like Mr. Peek, Dr. Jones was a key member of the community, and as Jack put it, “All the old landmarks now seem to be dropping out.”
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If human landmarks were disappearing, so too were the physical landmarks of their beautiful island home. The Island of Guernsey joined young women and the elderly as a major concern for the Islanders, seeming particularly vulnerable to destruction by the Germans. Kitty Bachmann watched with deep concern as the Germans dug themselves in and “the Island [was] slowly but surely being absorbed into their War Machine.”
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It was the “desecration of our ‘Sarnia Chérie,’” she said, referring to the National Anthem of Guernsey (“Sarnia; dear Homeland, Gem of the sea. Island of beauty, my heart longs for thee…”). The concrete bunkers and fortifications that they built, particularly all along the coast, were “grotesque” and seemingly designed to be “as lasting as the pyramids.”
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Would the Island ever recover from what Jack Sauvary called the Germans' “concrete complex”?
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This concern was justified, for the concrete fortifications, tunnels, and watchtowers are still much in evidence in the Island
of Guernsey. Immediately following the war, Islanders may have wanted to remove these physical artifacts of the Occupation, but were in no position to expend the money and effort. Today's Islanders have melded them into the history of the Island with a relatively new initiative, Festung Guernsey, dedicated to preserving the fortifications and making them available to academics and historic societies for study.

What is absorbing history for later generations was simply pain and loss for occupied Guernsey. Kitty Bachmann could only pray that the end of the war would come “before the face of Guernsey is changed beyond recognition.” And her use of the term “face” is appropriate, for the Island is generally described much like a person subject to disfigurement. It was, in Bert Williams's estimation, no less than the “mutilation of Guernsey.”
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Peter Bachmann came home one day to describe what he called “the Crowning Horror,” a new expanse of road that would reach across the beautiful common land and stretch from Fort Le Marchant to Les Fontenelles.
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The biggest problem was not what the Germans were constructing, but what they were destroying in their tendency to “knock down anything in their way.”
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Whether it was massive, ancient trees, the Weighbridge railings,
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or the demolition of historic old homes,
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the Germans merely plowed through anything that intervened between point A and point B.
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On December 7, 1943, came “the last straw,”
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with the destruction of the Delancey Monument, a memorial built in 1876 to Admiral Lord de Saumarez, considered Guernsey's most distinguished sailor. The States were able to remove the bronze plaques on the plinth of the monument, although they were unable to prevent its destruction, because the monument was in the way of some big guns that the Germans were installing in the park. “But what destruction!” mourned Jack. “That beautiful monument and such a wonderful piece of work, all of Guernsey granite, and all done by Guernsey workmen.”
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There was general despair that such an important and historic landmark, so prominent that pilots used it to get their bearings when flying on the east coast of the Island, could be so irrevocably destroyed. As Jack put it, “Now it is no more.”
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The final crystallized point of anxiety appearing often in contemporaneous narratives was the fate of the Island's animals, particularly the family dogs and cats that had not been euthanized in the pre-evacuation tumult. This was not a frivolous concern in a nation of animal lovers, and the absence of their children made many Islanders cling to their family pets. Winifred Harvey's grief and guilt over Rolf never fully abated,
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and even when upset over the German destruction of the Island, Rolf was never far from her mind. She bemoaned the same road being driven through the Island that upset Peter Bachmann, in part because they “blasted right through the little old quarry there, one of Rolf's favorite walks in the happy days.”
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One year into the Occupation, Winnie counted her blessings that she still had food and was, at that point, still in her home. “Courage, Faith, and Endurance,” she writes. Yet her next thought is, “Rolfie has been gone a year and I miss him still all the time, my dear little friend.”
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In some ways, their animals stood proxy for all the constraints and deprivations that the Islanders were undergoing themselves, except that their pets' helplessness and dependency made every hardship that much more acute. Because the Germans were bringing dogs over from France, there was a new danger of rabies, something that did not normally concern Guernsey. In fact, Ken Lewis speaks of it as something totally unfamiliar, putting the term in quotation marks, as you might a foreign or slang term, when he described the fear that Guernsey dogs “might get ‘Rabies’ a continental disease.” The order went out in December 1940 that Guernsey dogs were to be on leads, and that any dog running loose and entering a public thoroughfare was liable to be shot.
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Since Islanders had adjusted to the lack of cars
by riding bicycles with their dogs running beside them, this meant that the dogs would be tethered loosely on long leads to the bicycles, a dangerous proposition all the way around.
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