Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (21 page)

The ormering season seemed a time of particular danger, beginning with the first spring of Occupation. On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1941, an ormering party of five men managed to convince two fishermen from I'Islet to ferry them to the outlying rocks of Saints Bay, an area in the forbidden zone. The fishermen dropped the men off on the rocks and left in the larger boat, leaving behind a nine-foot punt, a type of flat-bottomed boat. As the men headed up the beach, one of the German sentries warned them off with a shot and then a series of three rapid shots in warning. The men “lost their heads,” in Ambrose Robin's opinion, and the five of them clambered into the flat boat, setting off into the middle of the bay. Swiftly, the small punt filled with water and overturned. Three men drowned and their bodies were never recovered. The fishermen who had dropped the men off earlier saw what was happening and returned in time to rescue the two remaining men.
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Although these men seem to have unnecessarily put themselves in harm's way (Ambrose Robin called it a “stupid business”), later deaths caused by the mines surrounding Guernsey were the result of more calculated, and desperate, attempts to augment the dwindling food supply. In February of 1943, Gertie Corbin, in her terse way, mentioned the death of “Elvina's nephew, nice boy 18, killed while ormering, a mine exploded.”
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Arthur Mauger elaborated on the details that it was a group of men from the Gallienne family who decided to take the risk to go ormering. On the way down to the beach, it was the father who struck a mine, the resulting explosion killing his only son and wounding all the rest in the party. By this time,
the crisis in food was acute enough that these deaths were considered “a sad accident” rather than a risky gamble.
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That June, proof emerged that the mines surrounding Guernsey could be deadly to those doing their job in the correct way. The Quinain brothers were fishermen out in their boat off the Humps with two other men when they found themselves caught on some ropes or cords. Believing it to be a lost net, they were untangling the boat when they pulled up a black object. It was a mine, one that exploded immediately, blowing the boat to pieces and killing the two men with the Quinain brothers. The brothers managed to hold onto some floating debris and were picked up by fishermen who had been in a boat some distance away. It was not merely the tragic loss of life that affected the Island, but the loss of a large boat and skilled fishermen during a time when fish was so necessary to sustaining life.
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Mines also posed a threat for anyone who strayed into particular portions of the Island, and this was a source of worry for those with children or with elderly parents. On December 6, 1942, ninety-two-year-old Henry Robillard of Castel died of injuries sustained in a minefield. He had gone for a walk alone, so it was difficult to say what led him into the mined field, although his family had frequently reminded him about the dangers of that area. This did not seem to be a case of senile dementia, for Henry's mind was described in the newspaper account as “quite clear,” and he still served as the primary cook for the family. Bill Warry confirmed this assessment in his comments beside the news article: “Old Harry was as game as a pebble right up to his death…& as lively as a good many young men.”
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A child's excitement or a momentary lapse in an older person could lead them into an area once open to them but now potentially deadly.

It was not simply German guns and mines that posed a danger to Islanders. The roads of Guernsey are narrow and treacherous still today; they definitely were not designed for large German lorries, sometimes driven at a breakneck speed by the soldiers. Often the lorries would come up quickly, sometimes around a curve, and strike a bicyclist from behind without warning. Even when civilians saw lorries bearing down on them, there was little opportunity to get out of the way because of the stone walls edging many of the roads.
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Some of the stories of these deaths were particularly tragic, such as the six-year-old child crushed to death by a tractor hauling one of the gigantic German guns through Ville-au-Roi.
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German soldiers often went unpunished for their reckless driving, which also meant that the same men were out again driving on the same roads.
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Rev. Ord experienced the horror of sudden death face-to-face on a day in September 1943. He and Grae had met two friends, Mrs. Pearsall and Mr. H. G. Jackson, in St. Peter Port for their usual cup of what was currently passing for coffee. The Ords walked their friends to the foot of the hill leading to Fort George and were standing talking when a huge Luftwaffe groundsman came careening around a sharp bend in the road on a bicycle, clearly out of control. Ord just happened to turn at that moment, a move that probably saved him, and shouted, “Watch out!” The bicyclist struck Mr. Jackson full in the face, breaking the Guernseyman's neck—an injury from which Mr. Jackson never regained consciousness. The Luftwaffe man was also injured and knocked unconscious. As the distraught Ords and Mrs. Pearsall waited at the scene for a doctor, a car containing Von Schmettow happened by. The four German officers walked over to look at the German lying senseless in the road, then silently returned to the car and left. They spared not even a glance for Mr. Jackson. That such a close friend could be lost so suddenly to the actions of a “drunken sot” devastated Ord, and the loss made Guernsey seem still more of a prison.
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The curfew imposed in Guernsey also took its toll, because it led to an extended period at night when medical help was difficult, if not impossible, to come by. An inquest was held into the death of a stillborn child in 1941 because the curfew regulations kept the husband from obtaining a nurse or doctor to attend his wife when she went into labor in the middle of the night. The husband, aided by “a rather helpless old woman,” was forced to serve as midwife, with disastrous results.
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Would the child have been stillborn under normal peacetime conditions? Quite possibly. However, the Islanders attributed this death and many others to the conditions imposed by their German masters, and these attributions became part of their sense-making process.

This search for an external attribution tied to the conditions of the Occupation can be seen in the death of George Dorey. On November 22, 1941, Rev. Ord was conducting services at Brock Road when he heard the sound of a chair overturning and a thud. When he looked toward the place where Grae had been standing, he saw that she had moved to help someone who seemed to have fallen. George Dorey had simply collapsed in place and was dead before he reached the ground. In letters to his wife, Winnie—some as far back as 1917—George had made clear that he did not expect a long life on account of his heart. Most people knew of his tenuous health, yet still attributed his sudden death to the Occupation. Jack Sauvary pondered whether the Doreys' recent eviction (coupled with the shock of the death of George's father and poor nutrition) might have caused his heart to fail. Rev. Ord believed the strain to have been from the loss of George's car, and his need to use a bicycle to get around. Even Ambrose Robin, who had known George since 1901, when George had slept in the next bed in the Number 13 dormitory of the Oxenford House School, cited the long walk the Doreys had to make that morning from Fort Road to reach the Brock Road Church. Despite George Dorey's chronic illness, Rev. Ord believed that these aggravating circumstances meant “this good man is another Occupation casualty.”
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When Islanders affixed blame for apparently natural deaths on the conditions of the Occupation, they responded as people living “on the inside” of unusual circumstances. They could gauge their own level of tiredness, hunger, and physical strain, and this personal knowledge led them to understand how such factors could turn a serious health concern into a fatal one. Whether reacting to deaths caused by want or by violence, Islanders revealed their sensitivity to the perils caused by the German presence on their soil. They knew, too, that any acts on their part might lead to hostage-taking, executions, or long sentences and possible death in French or German prisons. Some aspects of interpersonal life in Guernsey were potential dampers on the cultivation of resistance: the lack of privacy in communal living, the concern over retaliation against the more vulnerable in the community, and the heightened sense of threat as the death toll rose. Instead of smothering resistance, however, these factors shaped subversive efforts into a covert and rhetorical form.

Other factors of interpersonal life enhanced the likelihood of resistance. For one thing, it was important for Islanders to meet the increasing crisis of food deprivation and to do so in a way that enhanced cooperation rather than competition over scarce resources. Stories of “making do,” of a resourceful people meeting the challenges with cleverness and bravery, comprise many of the memories of those who lived through the Occupation. These stories are the primary focus of many of the published accounts of the period, nonfiction and fiction alike. More important to this study, an assurance of interpersonal support was the first component vital to finding safe spaces for the development of a resistant discourse.

THE SKELETON SOCIETY

Even a cursory reading of the diaries of Occupation challenges the concept that the Channel Islands were a safe and comfortable haven from the rigors of war. Rationing, of course, was immediate, and at first there were long, long queues for the last little luxuries such as cakes or scones.
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But this quickly became far more grim, and the queues that were reported generally constituted a wait in vain: fifty people waiting as one dogfish was being skinned (and not enough, Jack believed, for a quarter of them),
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or women trudging back in the rain from a long wait at the Market with only a head of lettuce in their baskets, their sole acquisition for the weekend.
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One day, Jack came across hundreds of bicycles, a pile six and eight deep, at St. Sampson's Bridge. People had simply jumped from their bicycles, throwing them down wherever they happened to land, to join an endless queue in order to get sixpence worth of egg powder.
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Elizabeth Doig described the “pathetic” sight of women standing in a street where potatoes were being delivered to the Germans, waiting in the hope that they could collect any that fell from the cart.
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And once in a while, these long waits led to short tempers. There was a tussle one day in early 1941 in the fish market, and Mrs. Dredge, the local fishmonger, was slapped in the face with a whiting. There had been a long queue, and Mrs. Dredge simply did not have enough fish available to meet the demand. This shortage was hardly surprising since the Germans had a standing order for a certain quantity of the fish that came in. Bill Warry later estimated that the Germans took 25 percent immediately—more whenever they wished—and all of the best fish (whiting, mackerel, etc.), leaving only whatever was left for the locals.
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Mrs. Dredge had no choice but to take these orders into account and leave the German fish untouched. All that the people standing in line knew was that they had waited a long time, and fish were still apparently available in the shop.
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What seems remarkable is how little actual disorder and panic there was and how people maintained the structure of society when, quite simply, they were “always feeling hungry.”
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Kitty Bachmann observed as early as 1941 that “those who kept their children here must be very worried indeed,” as the bread ration plummeted, the milk was watered down to a blue sheen, and an egg was “more precious than gold.”
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Concern for family members could easily have fueled a desperation leading to widespread lawlessness. Instead, Islanders turned to old solutions such as gleaning in the fields after harvest.
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Children also learned new means to forage for food—and there was some concern that in the odd circumstances under which they were growing up, they could lose their moral values. Rev. Ord described in 1943 how a grower caught several children raiding his flower garden, taking blooms to make into bouquets. The children had learned that they could trade these bouquets to the Germans for bread.
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The fact that children went to such lengths, not for candy or some other superfluous treat but for a basic staple of life, gives some insight into the problem of hunger even before the final year.

Children actually looked better than the adults, simply because they took precedence when it came to food in the average household.
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This did not mean that they were getting adequate nutrition, simply that their relatives sacrificed their own health to guarantee that their children had something to eat. And this was the story across the Island as individuals secretly slipped additional portions of food to those whom they loved. Douglas Ord was very plain-spoken about this issue of secret sacrifice: “I watch G. like a hawk lest she deprive herself of food in my favour.”
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Dorothy Higgs took a comical view of her own weight loss—“I have almost a pre-1914 figure now”—while at the same time fretting, “But I wish Frank would
fatten up a bit.”
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And Kitty Bachmann also was concerned over her husband, Peter, a man of ample proportions (“generously upholstered” as Kitty put it) before the Occupation who was now discovering “bones hitherto concealed.” Probably to ease her mind, Peter claimed that he felt better with the weight loss, but Kitty believed that the weight reduction was too sudden to be healthy.
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