The Book of Ebenezer le Page (56 page)

According to her, misery of one sort or another was everybody's lot; and there was nothing you could do about it: except put up with it. Sometimes I thought she was more amused than anything by the way things turned out bad for everybody she knew; and if she had come across anybody who was really happy, she would have been downright miserable. I even wondered if that was perhaps why she hadn't come to see Tabitha towards the end. I could understand her. I was very much the same sort of old prowler as she was; but I am always wondering and asking questions to myself. I am not satisfied to let things be. She remembered the details of everything exactly as it happened: nothing added and nothing left out; and she knew the life-stories of dozens of people. In fact, she was a walking Greffe, my Cousin Mary Ann: only instead of it being written down in the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages, and in the Livres de Perchage, it was alive and kicking in her head. If it hadn't been for what she told me, I would never have been able to piece together the story of Harold and Hetty and the others, even as badly as I have done.

I have noticed mothers don't always get on with their daughters, just as fathers don't always get on with their sons. I don't think my Cousin Mary Ann got on very well with Dora. ‘She do what she want, that one,' she said. ‘She always have. She ought to have been a man.' She liked Nora better. Nora was a gad-about; and for a time was barmaid in the Crown. I wondered if I had seen her, because I had been in there a few times. My Cousin Mary Ann said when she was earning, she wasn't stingy, and paid for her keep and more. She was at home now while waiting to be married; but he didn't seem to be in a hurry and she ought to have been married long ago. Of course it was Eugene who was the most thought of: he had always looked after his mother. Nora helped in the house, hoping to learn something about how to look after a husband, when the time came. Eugene worked the greenhouse and the garden, and kept the house in trim; and, even when he was courting, it was his mother came first. The girl was given to understand if she married him, she would have to marry his mother as well.

Of the three, it was Dora I was most curious about. I am funny that way. If anybody starts running somebody else down, I at once feel I am on the side of the person who is being run down; or, at least, I have to find out for myself. It wasn't often Dora went to see her mother, but once when she did and heard I had taken to going there, she said, ‘You're much too old now, my mother, to have a young man, you know.' ‘The cheek!' said my Cousin Mary Ann, when she told me. I asked where it was exactly Dora lived. It was in an old farmhouse at Le Carrefour, and you got to it up a turning off the Portinfer Road. I was quite open with my Cousin Mary Ann and said I would go and see Dora for myself one day. ‘I hope you do,' she said, ‘and then you will see what I have had to put up with.'

As it happened, I couldn't have chosen a worse day to go. It was the Thursday before Whitsun and she was expecting visitors over the Whitsun holiday. She knew who I was and asked me in. The place was upside-down but she found me a corner to sit. Peter Domaille, the husband, came in for a minute, but there was so many jobs she wanted him to get on with, he only said ‘Good-afternoon' and went out again. He looked a very worried man. My Cousin Mary Ann was right when she said Dora wasn't the pretty one. She had a big plain face and broad shoulders and looked as strong as an ox. She wasn't at all like Eugene Le Canu; or much like my Cousin Mary Ann either. She didn't have my Cousin Mary Ann's nice old ugly face. Having children is a lottery and you never know what you are going to draw out. Perhaps it is as well I got none.

Peter Domaille had been a farmer in a small way when she married him; but it goes without saying the farm didn't pay. That is another thing I have never understood. If you come to think of it, everything you got to have to live on come out of the ground to begin with, or grow on it, or come from the animals who live on it, or from the creatures in the sea: but in Guernsey those are the very things don't pay, and you got to work hardest at to make enough to live on; and, even then, in many cases, only with the help of the States. If you want to rake in easy money, you only got to sell trash to the visitors in Town: Guernsey this and Guernsey that: things got nothing to do with Guernsey except the word ‘Guernsey' on, and I wouldn't have in my house at any price.

Peter Domaille gave up farming when Dora got the idea of running a guest-house. The stables was made into little rooms she called ‘châlets' and the visitors was going to have to sleep in stalls like the cows. As for themselves, she said Peter and her and the girl, who was to school yet, would have to sleep in the shed for the summer. The rooms in the house was for the married couples. Most of the ground had been sold for building, and such as was left was only to grow vegetables to feed the guests: but most of the food, of course, would have to be brought over from the other side. The visitors are supposed to bring money to the island; but the food they eat have to be brought over by air, or by sea, at goodness knows what expense. It is beyond me. As Eddie Le Tissier said the night I started a fight in the Caves de Bordeaux, there have never been enough of everything on this island to feed the inhabitants. How about now with thousands and thousands extra coming over every year? They talk of the German Occupation!

The house was freshly done up inside, and the furniture was a lot of new stuff didn't look as if it would last anybody's lifetime. Dora said it wasn't paid for yet. ‘What I want to meet is a rich uncle,' she said. ‘I expect you got thousands in the bank.' I said, ‘I haven't got a penny in the bank.' She couldn't get me out of the house quick enough then; but I wasn't in a hurry and kept her talking and, when I wished her good-bye, said I would call and see her again. I went at the end of September. When she came to the door, I invited myself in and sat down. ‘Well, how have you been getting on?' I said. Oh, she had had a wonderful season! She could have taken twice as many, if she had had the room; and most of them was coming again the next year. She was now under the doctor for a nervous breakdown, but never mind: she would get over it. She was going for a holiday to Bournemouth to look at the shops; and then would come back refreshed and get ready for the next season.

‘Tourism' is a holy word these days: though it is a word I didn't learn at school, and have only heard of late years. I know full well to say anything against it on this island is as if you wanted to ruin the island you was born on; but I really and truly believe any place which sell its soul to Tourism is a whore of a place, and put everything on for show and sell it for pleasure, even the gifts God gave it. I met one chap who didn't like Tourism any more than I did, and he worked for it; but he wasn't a Guernseyman. He didn't know how it hurt. It was the tourists themselves he couldn't stand. He said they might be all right at home when they had their noses to the grindstone; but when they was on holiday, they thought the world was made only for them. He came over a number of years running and never missed coming to see me. He said I was the only person he knew on the island who wasn't caught up in the racket. I am talking now of years after the time I was going round visiting my Cousin Mary Ann and her children. By then the disease had really taken hold.

I thought he was a nice chap for an Englishman, he made me laugh; but it turned out he wasn't an Englishman. He was Irish. He said the Irish are like the Guernsey: they all love old Ireland, but will go and live anywhere else in the world, if they get a chance. He liked being in Guernsey himself. He said it was quite like home. Certainly he knew more about the history of the island than I do; and what he didn't know he made up. The first time I saw him, he was coming along by Les Amarreurs with a crowd of tourists following him like a flock of sheep. I listened to his patter. He pointed out the martello tower on our side and the martello tower across the bay on Rousse, and said they was martello towers. I would have thought anybody could see they was martello towers without having to be told. Somebody said the walls was thick, and somebody else said the windows was narrow, and a woman asked what they was built for. He said, ‘For shooting bows and arrows.' Well, I could have told him that was wrong. The martello towers was put up for the Guernsey people to get in out of the way of the Grand Saracen. If the poor visitors believe half they are told by the bus-drivers and others, they must go away with some very funny ideas about the history of Guernsey.

He worked for a hotel at St Martin's; and his job was to look after people who came over in parties. He said they was the sort who preferred having a guide, philosopher and friend going round with them, rather than go round and look at things for themselves. He felt like the old woman who lived in a shoe. They came over for a week or a fortnight, and he had to keep them amused every day and all day long. He arranged games for them on the sand; and had to watch out if any went in for a swim they didn't drown themselves. He took them for walks along the cliffs and, as they would insist on going where there was no paths, he had to watch out they didn't get stuck half-way down a precipice and him have to send out an S.O.S. for Mr Blanchford and
The Flying Christine
. I thought of me and Monsieur Le Boutillier's pig. The fellow had all my sympathy. When he took them on coach tours to places of interest, as he had done that day, and let them loose to please themselves, he had to be careful not to lose any, or there would have to be a police search. I was sitting in the sun in my back garden and watched him gather his family around him like a brood of chicks. ‘Now you can all go and play with the Druid's Altar,' he said. My ancient monument isn't a Druid's Altar nowadays: it is a Dolmen; but I didn't bother to put him right. ‘All be back in the coach in half an hour!' he shouted. ‘All of you; and when I say all of you, I mean ALL of you! THE COACH WILL NOT WAIT!' They rambled off in twos and threes. He sat on the low wall of my garden by the path in the shade of the apple-tree and wiped the sweat from his brow. It was a scorching hot day. ‘If you want to know human nature at its lowest and its worst,' he said to me, ‘get to know it when it is on holiday.' ‘Go on, go on, that is lovely!' I said. ‘Say some more!'

‘I will bet you anything you like one of those won't be back in time,' he said. ‘There she goes, the darling! She ought to be kept on a lead.' She was an old woman with rats' tails of hair and a hat like a pancake and holding an umbrella in her clenched fist. It must have been for self-defence because there wasn't a cloud in the sky. He went on talking and when I looked round she had disappeared. I couldn't think where on earth she could have got to. She had vanished into thin air. The others was wandering away; some of them up the hill and some down on the beach. I noticed not one of them had gone to look at the ancient monument, for all the work I had put in keeping it tidy.

Anyhow, he let out his troubles; and could he talk? He said the worst day of his week was the day he took his party to Sark. He really had to keep a close eye on them that day, for there was a number of danger spots and he didn't want a serious accident. Actually, I think he was very patient and very kind, in spite of what he said; and he was a charming fellow with a mop of dark curly hair and blue eyes and a happy laugh: but he swore by the end of a day in Sark, he would willingly have pushed the whole tribe over the Coupée. The only time he really liked them was on the Saturday morning when he went down to the White Rock to wish them good-bye. Unfortunately, it was more than made up for by the awful time in the afternoon when he went to the boat to meet the next week's consignment. He would stand on the new jetty by the sheds and watch the passengers come down the gang-way; and when he saw one who looked a particularly unholy terror, he would say to himself ‘I bet she is for me!' and she was. Generally speaking, the men wasn't so bad, he said; but now and again you got one who thought he was a big noise, and he was more obstreperous than all the women put together.

The most to be dreaded was widows on the loose. Once her husband is dead, a woman gets a new lease of life, he said: and she knows all the tricks. Middle-aged married couples was easy: the husband did what he was told, or she had to keep watch on him. In either case, the woman had her hands full. The lonely hearts was a bloody nuisance. Paddy was funny about the lonely hearts. Anything in trousers was in danger of having them pulled off. The hardest part of his job was to remain more or less virtuous, and yet not hurt anybody's feelings. After all, they had paid for their holiday; and he was being paid to see they had a good time. There was lonely hearts male, too, but not so many, perhaps one a week. Paddy found the lonely hearts male came in useful to unload some of his lonely hearts female on; but it was hard lines on the poor chap, as usually he wasn't interested in lonely hearts female: he was more interested in the waiter. Paddy enjoyed himself watching the game.

He said everybody goes up a class when they come over to Guernsey for a holiday. The girl who works in a newspaper shop in England drinks her tea with her little finger crooked like a duchess. It is pathetic really, he said. The class of visitors he had to do with wasn't those who stay at Old Government House. They had saved a whole year for their precious holiday and wanted to feel they was gentry with money to spend for a week. They was willing to blue the lot and have nothing left when they got home except debts on the never-never. Some had spent a week in Jersey before coming to Guernsey; and, from what Paddy had heard, they really do know how to rook the visitors over there. ‘It has been reduced to a fine art,' he said. Guernsey wasn't as good at it yet; but they was learning.

When his people began to drift back, he counted them, and there was one missing. Old Mrs Mackintosh. Had anybody seen her? Nobody had seen her. ‘If she isn't sitting in the coach, we'll go without her,' he said. I didn't see how she could be sitting in the coach or we would have been sure to see her pass. He said good-bye and hoped he would see me again. I watched him lead his flock back to the coach. I heard it tooting and so knew old Mrs M. wasn't in it. It kept on and on loud enough to wake the dead. At last I heard it start. I was standing outside my back door and worrying rather if she had really gone and done what the old pig had wanted to do: when up she arose from behind the pigsty where she had been sitting in the sun all the time, listening to every word was being said. ‘I'm here! I'm here!' she screamed. ‘Wait for me, wait for me! Oh don't, don't, don't leave me behind!' and ran full pelt down the path after the coach, and she could run, the old thing, waving her umbrella. The coach was half-way to Grand Havre by then, but the fool of a coach-driver waited; though I expect it was Paddy who was looking round and saw her, and told him to stop. I would like to have heard what the others said when she got in.