Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (59 page)

On Tuesday, December 5, Winnie reported that there was nothing on the Market stalls but sacking, and she left to push her empty pram up the hill to home “feeling rather frightened.” As her friend Marie Louise said of the Germans, “We are at the mercy of their stomachs,” and it seemed likely that slow starvation would be the end result. This grim future could not help but affect the usual stoic positivism so notable throughout the Occupation. There had been times of depression before, but now women could be seen standing in the Market, with their empty baskets and prams, simply crying.
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The black market appears to have dried up for the most part, and Elizabeth Doig, who made no excuses about her need to rely on this underground trade at times, worried that for those like herself, it would be hard to “eke out our supplies.”
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But if the black market was moribund, other bad players in Guernsey carried on undeterred by the obvious state of emergency, much to the anger of the average person. Rumor went around that some of the local women standing in endless queues for the few vegetables available were actually shopping for German soldiers.
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This belief was probably based on recognizing women in the lines who were known fraternizers. There were similar beliefs, also likely tied to known collaborators, that some people in Guernsey were cooking meals for the Germans even under this starvation situation.
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A notice from the Bailiff appeared in the newspaper on November 11 stating that the Germans had allowed him to read a radio message to the International Red Cross in Geneva, and that the message, according to the Germans, had been dispatched.
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But could anyone trust that this was actually so? It was not until an announcement was made through the BBC that Guernsey believed that help was truly coming their way and the wait for the supply ship began in earnest. Because many anticipated that the ship would arrive by Christmas, the rumors started to fly at mid-December: the ship had left Portugal, she would dock in three days, she had been spotted off the Casquets, she was close to St. Martin's Point, she was near Les Hanois Lighthouse.

And right in the middle of all these various sightings of “a fleet of ghost ships” came news from the BBC that the ship was due to leave for the Channel Islands next week. “Alas!” Kitty commented, “those taunting mirages have besotted their starving and gullible victims.”
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Christmas passed, a hungry holiday for most. Many now believed the ship to have been recalled, if she had existed in the first place. Then, as Dorothy Higgs was walking down the road on the 27th she came across an old Guernseywoman who said, “Don't get excited! But I have
seen
her—
seen
her with my own eyes!” It was all Dorothy could do to resist crying, simply to see this woman's relief and to think how much it would mean to all in the Islands. And this time it was no illusion, but the SS
Vega
that steamed into harbor at 6:15 in the morning.
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Men and women cycled and walked from all across the Island simply to see the ship in her harbor berth, cheering at the least provocation as they watched from their barricaded position at some distance.
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Distributing the parcels was not an instantaneous task. On Saturday, December 30, many lorries could be seen going by, filled with packing cases containing the Canadian and New Zealand parcels as they were being taken to retailers. Registered customers were then to pick up their parcels the next day, meanwhile tantalized by the lists of their contents that were being circulated.

Rev. Ord actually expected a modest turnout at church services on Sunday, believing that the temptation to fetch the parcels would be too much for almost everyone. He found instead that his congregation came “with more thankful hearts to worship than ever they had done,” having gone already to secure their parcel, or planning to do so straight from church. As he came home later with his own parcel, slowly pushing his bicycle up the steep incline of Victoria Road, he came upon an old man he knew, a “mere skeleton,” carrying his own parcel with tears coursing down his cheeks: “Oh Reverend Ord, Oh Sir!
THIS
is the most wonderfully generous gift. How can we be thankful enough?”
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Any reader of the contemporaneous accounts cannot help but be struck by all the loving recitations describing the contents of the parcels by their enraptured recipients. The Ords received the Canadian version, and there appear to have been some differences between the contents of the parcels, such as coffee instead of tea in some, or extra cheese in others. There was protein in the form of tins of sardines, salmon, corned beef, and beef or pork sausage. There were dried raisins and prunes and much-desired marmalade or apple and peach jam (Dorothy claimed that “nothing will ever be so perfect as that first taste” of marmalade). Some needed fats came in the form of butter, cheese, and 5 oz. of chocolate. A large packet of hard biscuits (“something hard to get our teeth into after all the vegetable mush,” enthused Ord), and staples such as sugar, salt, pepper, tea, and coffee rounded out the parcels. Dorothy wanted to carry her parcel with her around the house, like a child with a favorite toy. And Peter-John Bachmann was told that Diana sent him the parcel, allowing her to play the role of Santa Claus. And this was the universal reaction: a Christmas miracle had occurred a few days late, but for the Guernsey people only just in time.
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The coming of the
Vega
and the Red Cross parcels is always told as a beautiful story of rescue, which it is at its heart. However it is important not to view the arrival of these desperately needed supplies as ending the food crisis in Guernsey. It was during this time following the arrival of the parcels that Dorothy Higgs's “little gnome of a gardener” died of malnutrition.
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Ord, in his wry way, also confirmed such deaths in January when he described an old woman who stopped him on the street: “There's a fine young man I knows of, Sir, as used to sweep the roads ‘ereabouts. ‘E's just gone an' died of starvation…‘E was goin’ to be married very soon—nice young man, only 65—but they've took ‘is life through starvin’ of ‘im.”
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The
Vega
would come seven times to the Island, and it is difficult to know how many would have died of malnutrition without the parcels—or from other causes, since she also brought medical supplies.

But what the
Vega
brought on the one hand was often matched by denials of food by the Germans. When the ship came on February 1, there were double parcels but no flour, and bread gave out February 13, the Germans reneging on promises to provide a 2 lb. loaf a week. Winnie described how she would “eke out” her supply of Canadian biscuits by soaking them in water so that they swelled, and allotting herself one a day for breakfast. By evening, Winnie was exhausted simply from lack of food and found that she could not sleep at night. Most people could only manage to find food for one meal a day, far too little sustenance for a working man. At this point, the butter ration stopped and the milk was cut back severely, even for the children, who Winnie described as “so thin and white-faced.”
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As late as May 4, with Liberation on the horizon, the
Vega
arrived for the seventh and final time and was a welcome sight, for there were no green vegetables in the Market. Winnie would go out and gather stinging nettles from the fields and boil them as spinach or to use as a soup.
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So, the parcels definitely saved lives and provided not just a dietary but an emotional
lift, as when white flour in March provided loaves of bread unlike any the Islanders had seen in years. Still, the threat of starvation did not magically end with the first arrival of the
Vega
, and during the winter months, the gnawing hunger was aggravated by the terrible cold. It was a notably brutal winter, and Bill Warry described weeks of snow, sleet, and frost.
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His entry for January 11 was telling: “Snowstorm today, & half gale easterly winds, little, or no fires, and hungry as hunters, and the cubboards [
sic
] empty, or nearly so & nearly everyone suffering from chilblains.”
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Gas ended before Christmas, followed by limited hours of electricity until that, too, was at an end. There was no coal and no wood fuel provided, so fires were a matter of whatever one could scrounge.
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And scrounge was the proper word. The Warrys burned their daughter's old books to keep warm, much as their friends were burning furniture for the same purpose.
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Those who had wooden gates on their land or in front of their houses had to lift them from their hinges and store them overnight in the house. If they didn't, they ran the distinct risk that they would awaken to find them stolen in the night.
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Many people were driven to bed by the numbing cold.
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Bert and Dell Williams seemed to spend the majority of the winter sick, and they turned in early each night, since with the fire out, “bed is the only place.”
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Both of them suffered ongoing stomach pains from the diet, and it must have been particularly wearing for the newly pregnant Dell. Even when Bert stayed home with a cold at one point in February, he spent the time outside cutting up a stump in the garden for wood to keep the fire going.
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And, of course, without heat how could the Islanders' rations be cooked?

This problem led to the solution of bakehouses to prepare the rations brought to that location, a plan that worked well for some Islanders and not so well for others. Many seem to have memories of taking the bean jar—a traditional Guernsey recipe, but obviously with lesser ingredients during the Occupation—to the bakehouses. The jar was tied with a label bearing the owner's name, covered up with brown paper, and then carried in a bucket to the bakery for cooking overnight.
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Winifred Harvey and Annette tried the solution offered by the communal stew. They had to give up seven pounds of potatoes, any meat or macaroni ration (if such existed), and half of their vegetable ration. At first, they found the stew quite tasty, especially the broth, and it had potatoes and bones in it along with macaroni. By the time the communal kitchens closed due to a lack of potatoes and roots, Winnie and Annette had already quit theirs. It had not been long before the stew was “nothing but water with a tablespoonful of minced swede at the bottom.”
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Although not the perfect solution for everyone, the bakehouses are emblematic of the many improvised adjustments and solutions designed to meet the deteriorating conditions of the final year. Like one of the old horse-drawn wagons that filled in for cars and buses during the Occupation, the Guernsey population lurched unsteadily through the winter and spring of 1945. Depleted physically by hunger and cold, but buoyed by the encouraging war news that they heard through their illegal wireless sets, the Islanders waited for the liberation that seemed so slow in coming.

PRISONERS TOGETHER

In this final year, Guernseymen and women had a last opportunity to read the Germans in their midst, and a greatly increased need to do so. Soon after the D-Day invasion, that
astute observer of human nature Rev. Ord found much that was amusing in the German attitude. He had reports from those forced to work with the Germans on a daily basis that their tendency toward autocratic display was draining away, to the point that one particularly “hectoring” minor officer now “almost grovelled to the civilians.” Even among the common soldiers in the garrison, there seemed fewer who were “boastfully self-confident, a few sleepwalkers excepted.” Particularly those who had to deal with civilians on a daily basis seemed to be more careful with their attitude, sometimes turning a “blind eye” to certain violations of regulations in an attempt at ingratiation. It was often the ones most likely to “lord it over” the average citizen that were more inclined to “sidle up obsequiously” to them now. This was satisfying to the common person, but also provided a new source of information at times. Some Germans were even willing to share what news they had about the war, confirming the damage of the bombings in Berlin and Frankfurt.
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It was a matter of the Germans slowly feeling their own isolation and realizing that they too were prisoners in the Island, although ostensibly still the captors of the civilian population.
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Always adept readers of the occupiers in their midst, Islanders now watched the Germans' so-called higher culture and discipline slowly implode in various ways. In July, after the failed attempt on Hitler's life in Operation Valkyrie, all the Wehrmacht were forced to take a loyalty oath to Hitler, and the Nazi “stretch” was demanded universally, much to the delight of Islanders when they watched it performed in the streets. At times, some of the troops were not good at hiding their contempt for this “gymnastic feat,” and some had difficulty keeping a straight face, even to the point that some laughed or try to “dodge out of the way” and avoid it entirely. This appeared to some observers as a “notable revelation of mentality” and made clear that no ceremony could increase a sense of loyalty.
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