The Book of Ebenezer le Page (54 page)

Well, the nobs from England came over and the laws was changed and the States brought up-to-date and the affairs of the island put on a sound business footing; so they said. It was certainly a great chance for some people. I could name more than a few who had hardly a penny to bless themselves with before the War, but by the end of the Occupation was rich men with thousands of German marks they had made by serving the Germans at the expense of the Guernsey people, and which they could now change into good English pounds at a more than fair rate of exchange. There was a rush and a scramble, and those people was the very ones to be made Chairman of this Committee and Chairman of that Committee; while the honest Guernseyman, who was nearly broke, didn't get a look in. Ah well, that is all forgotten now; and perhaps it is just as well. The King and Queen came over. They drove around the island and Tabitha and me went to see them pass on the Bridge. By then Tabitha had a new grey dress, and we both had decent shoes. The Queen was quite different from the other one I saw. She smiled and bowed all around and gave herself to everybody with both arms. The King looked more serious than his father and when I stood on the edge of the kerb and shouted ‘Wharro, George!' he didn't look round. He didn't know it was me.

Gervase and Louise came over on a visit to their father that summer, and both came to Les Moulins to see Tabitha. By then they had written to her direct to say they was well and was coming over; and for weeks she was making preparations. Jack Priaulx, the father, was a broken man. He hadn't found it easy to knuckle under to the Germans, and when his wife died he lost heart. She didn't die because of hardship under the Occupation, but from some growth in her inside. She was taken to the hospital and operated on by candle-light. It was said the operation was a success; but she died. While she was yet alive they had been allowed to keep on at Le Courtil à Bas, though they had three or four German officers billetted on them most of the time; but once Ann was dead, Jack had to shift out of the farmhouse and live at Le Courtil du Milieu, a small cottage of his he had only used for stores. More Germans moved into Le Courtil à Bas. It is true they was of the better sort, and didn't pull the place to pieces; but he was little more than a labourer, and had a gun emplacement in his front garden. Every time that gun went off against the British aeroplane passing overhead, he thought it might be Gervase in it.

When he moved back into his old house after the Liberation, Tabitha went along to see how he was, and he asked her to go and live there for good as his housekeeper. She refused the offer. She didn't say it was because she didn't want to leave me, and I am glad she didn't; because she did leave me. The reason she refused was because Jack had once asked her to marry him. She said it was all right for her to live there, while his wife was alive; but she didn't think it would be right to live in the same house with him now he was a widower. I didn't know Jack Priaulx, except to nod to and pass the time of day; but I like to think of him waving the Muratti Cup on the boat going out of St Helier's Harbour, and the Jersey crapauds on the quay shouting ‘Guernsey donkeys! Guernsey donkeys!'

Louise brought her young man with her. He had been a Petty Officer in the Navy, but wasn't at all the sort of chap you would imagine to be a sailor; yet when the ship he was on was torpedoed by the German submarine, he had done something at great risk to himself, the details of which was not made known, that saved his Commander; and the ship got back to port half sinking, but with no lives lost. He was given the O.B.E. for it; but there was no swank about him. Louise had grown into a big jolly tomboy of a girl, and she was more the one you'd have thought would win the O.B.E.; but she had only worked for the W.R.E.N.S. ashore. They was both out of the Navy now, and going to get married and live in England. His father owned a big drapery business in Wolverhampton, and he was going to manage it. Gervase I didn't take to at all. He had been a squadron-leader and dropped loads of bombs on Germany, and got an arm burnt in a dog-fight over the North Sea. He was going to stay in the Air Force and train others. I had nothing against him: he was one of those who had helped to free us, as Tabitha said; but he had gone very posh and used a lot of words I didn't understand and had a moustache the like of which I had never seen, except on Terence de Freis.

They was very nice to Tabitha in words; but there was something missing. They saw a little old grey-haired Guernsey woman and couldn't know how much she was feeling. If I know my sister, she had prayed silently in her heart every night of the War for them to come back home safe and sound. She didn't make a great fuss of them, for she wasn't the sort to do so; and they may have thought she didn't care much. She didn't complain to me either, when they was gone; but she did say, ‘It is natural for the young to forget.' The one I really liked of the three was Tim Moffatt, the Petty Officer; and I left Gervase and Louise with Tabitha and took him for a stroll to have a look at the fortifications the Germans had put up. I couldn't get him to talk about what he had done in the Navy: he was more interested in how we had managed to live under the Occupation. ‘I would rather it had been you than me,' he said. I said, ‘Well, I don't know: we wasn't in much danger.' He said, ‘Yes, but it is hard to be the same again, if you go through an experience other people don't have.' Gervase didn't have much to say about the Occupation. When Tabitha said for five years we had hardly ever gone more than a mile from Les Moulins, he said, ‘Fantastic!' She didn't see either of them again. Gervase came over for a few days when his father died; but that was a year after Tabitha. He had written me a letter of sympathy from England, which I answered; but he didn't come to see me.

I couldn't bring myself to believe Tabitha really wasn't well. She had always been like me in that she had never had a day of real illness in her life. When I got more and better food, I soon got my strength back; but Tabitha wouldn't eat much, even when there was plenty. She had never had a big appetite, so I didn't worry at first; but I really did get worried when one day my Cousin Mary Ann turned up and asked if there was anything she could do. It goes to show how little I had gone out I hadn't seen my Cousin Mary Ann once throughout the Occupation and she only lived at the Robergerie and was trudging along the roads and lanes as much as before, if not more. The moment I saw her on my doorstep, I knew it was a bad sign. I sent her for the doctor. He was a new, young doctor, but I think he was clever. Tabitha let him examine her, and I waited to hear what he had to say. He said, ‘Mrs Batiste is suffering, like many others on this island, from post-occupationitis. It is nothing a doctor can do much about. I will give her a tonic; and she must rest and eat well.' He sent the bill and I paid it. She didn't take the tonic.

I didn't want my Cousin Mary Ann coming to the house. I thought if I could get her to keep away, perhaps Tabitha would get better; but Tabitha said she liked my Cousin Mary Ann to come and wanted her there to talk to. They became very friendly, those two women. They had at least one thing in common which, I think, is rare among women: they both loved their husbands. I left them to it. I worked hard and had a number of young chaps working for me on and off; but none of them stayed long. They didn't seem to be able to make up their minds what they wanted to stick to. I think I can say I did all I could for Tabitha; but it was another bad sign she let me do things for her. She had never as much as let me cook a meal for myself until then. She didn't stay in bed at first but, in the summer, sat on the rocks in the sun and, when winter came, sat by the fire; but I could see she was getting weaker every day. She wasn't in pain. I tried to make her eat every food I could think of she might fancy. I made her some chicken soup she liked, and I thumped ormers and cooked them my mother's way; but she only nibbled. My Cousin Mary Ann kept on coming two or three times a week, and every Sunday.

One Sunday afternoon Tabitha had gone to lie down in her room and I was left with my Cousin Mary Ann in the kitchen. I was feeling very miserable. I said, ‘I am going to get that doctor again for Tabitha.' ‘For why, then?' she said. ‘She is happy.' I looked at my Cousin Mary Ann; and for the first time I noticed what wonderful knowing eyes she had in her ugly face. I thought to myself she is not ugly really. She said, ‘Tabitha is happier now than she have been for a very long time. I wish I could be as happy as she is; but it is not for me.' I began to take an interest in my Cousin Mary Ann for her own sake then; and I asked her how her children was getting on. She said the eldest was married and the second was going to be and the boy was at home. She also told me Harold and Mrs Crewe was fighting it out as to who would live the longer. She hoped Uncle Harold would win. I hadn't given a thought to Harold during the Occupation; except I had seen his name in Horace's book. Now he was alive enough yet to know Mrs Crewe was waiting for him to die and, in his stubborn way he was determined to outlive her. I wondered if he might leave what little he had left to Raymond's boy in England. He knew Raymond was gone because Gwen had been to tell him his son was dead. All he said was, ‘I had no son.'

Mrs Crewe got meaner and meaner as she got older. My Cousin Mary Ann walked all the way to the Can'-du-Ré time and again during the Occupation and, though she didn't say as much, I gathered it was more often her who took things from her garden, than Mrs Crewe who gave her anything. It was to see Harold she went. He was bad with bronchitis every winter; and Mrs Crewe would say ‘This time you must say good-bye to your uncle. I don't expect you will see him again. I thought I was going to lose him last winter. I know, I know I will lose him this!' Then she would break down and cry. ‘What am I going to do without him? What am I going to do without him? He is such a good old man!' Harold would be sitting by the empty grate looking like a grumpy bear with an empty pipe in his mouth. After Horace was gone, he couldn't get tobacco even on the Black Market.

After the Liberation Mrs Crewe kept on being as mingy as before with the food; and wouldn't let Harold buy any new clothes. ‘It is his grave-clothes he must be thinking about now,' she said. He wasn't allowed to get out of his bed, except to do his business in a commode. He had nothing to wear. I don't think he had anything to wear in bed either. He died that winter. My Cousin Mary Ann said there was nothing to bury him in, but Mrs Crewe's niece was married to Phil Randall, who used to play for the Rangers, and he still had an old football shirt; so Harold was put in his coffin in that. Harold would have turned over in his grave if he had known he was buried in a red and white football shirt. He was all for the North.

My Cousin Mary Ann surprised me. She got really upset as I had never seen her before because Mrs Crewe wouldn't have Harold buried with Hetty in the grave he had bought in the cemetery of St Sampson's. I had my doubts what Hetty would have felt about it; and was all for letting sleeping dogs lie: but no, my Cousin Mary Ann insisted it was my duty, as the surviving head of the family of the Le Pages from Les Sablons, to go and lay down the law to Mrs Crewe and see to it Hetty got her rights. I went. I wished to God after I hadn't! When I said what I had come for, Mrs Crewe went for me like a lion. I was only a man: how could I be head of a family? Was I so ignorant I hadn't heard of Women's Rights? ‘My second husband is going to be buried with my first husband in the Foulon Cemetery,' she said, ‘and when it is God's good will I go to my rest, I will lie in the same grave with my two husbands under me.' Well, she didn't have long to wait. She died in a few months and was buried in the Foulon Cemetery on top of her two husbands. It was her rights, I suppose.

I can't say I felt very sorry for Harold. He had made his bed and, like the rest of us, he had to lie on it. If it comes to that, I reckon Mrs Crewe earnt her few months without him. He was a hard man. My Cousin Mary Ann said he wasn't hard: he was only treated hard; but she always had a soft spot for Uncle Harold. The truth is I was feeling too sorry for myself to feel sorry for anybody else. I saw myself being left alone again. It was impossible to feel sorry for Tabitha. She was weak and tired; but she didn't try and do things she couldn't do, and so make herself miserable. She would get up for a couple of hours a day, but passed a lot of her time lying down. I brought the green-bed from the wash-house into the kitchen, so as she could lie on it by the fire, if she wanted a change from her room. I got the doctor to see her again, in spite of my Cousin Mary Ann; but all he said was she must be kept warm. The days when she stayed in bed all day, I lit a fire in the bedroom.

Olive Le Boutillier came across every day to see if there was anything she could do; and Julia came in most evenings. They both spent Christmas with us, and young Jean Le Boutillier brought his girl. Tabitha got up that day and ate a little of the dinner. It wasn't a very jolly Christmas, considering it was the first for five years we had been able to have what we wanted; but Olive Le Boutillier had just heard for sure her husband was not coming back. She wouldn't have kept Christmas at all, if it hadn't been she wanted to cook a dinner for Tabitha and me. My Cousin Mary Ann had hers with her family, and only came a few times in the New Year. I said to her then I wished she would keep on coming, but she said, ‘Tabitha have no need of me now.' She was going to do things for Ada Domaille, who was crippled with arthritis and could only move about her room by holding on to the furniture.

I sat by my sister's side for many hours. Sometimes I held her hand, and she let me; but I knew it was her comforting me, and not me comforting her. She knew exactly what I was feeling, the same as my mother used to. I couldn't deceive her. One day she said, ‘Now you mustn't worry about yourself, Ebenezer: you are going to be all right.' I didn't hold her hand again. As time went on, she seemed to get younger. When she lay with her grey hair in pig-tails tied with a ribbon on the pillow, her face looked like a young girl's. I think the last months she had forgotten the Occupation and everything had happened to her since Jean died. She spoke only of Jean. Sometimes she would laugh to herself. I would say ‘What are you laughing at now?' She would say ‘It is something I can't tell you.' Once she did tell me. ‘I was the only girl Jean ever went with,' she said. ‘He was shy at first; but he soon got over it.' She remembered things I thought she had forgotten years ago. ‘Remember the Sunday you turned up with Jim for tea, and we had spider crab?' she said. ‘Of course I remember,' I said. ‘Jean liked Jim,' she said, ‘I liked Jim too. I had always liked Jim. If it hadn't been for Jean, who knows?'