Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (20 page)

Particularly aggravating to Ambrose Robin was the sight of officers and soldiers strolling about the town with their own dogs unleashed. In the meantime, Robin's dog, Tim, was forced “to remain tethered to me in a country lane. This makes me wild.”
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This anger at an order that had at least some basis in public safety points up the symbolic identification Islanders felt with their pets. Both animals and people were constrained in movement and liberty, and the orders for their own safety, whether leashing pets or forbidding Islanders from entry to mined beaches, were only necessary because of the dangers that the Germans themselves had brought to the Island. The occupied populace connected the fate of their pets to their own change in fortune, to the loss of their contented lives before the Occupation, and to their current position as prisoners in their own land. These mental links were best expressed when Ambrose Robin described his “painful decision to part with another chum,” on the day in April 1942 when he walked Tim across the street to have him destroyed. His sorrow over this “miserable experience” was heightened by his angry certainty that “under normal conditions recovery would have been easy.” Then, too, Tim was not only Robin's “faithful chum,” but was considered “one of the links with the children,” now so far away.
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Food was the greatest issue, for how could starving people, particularly in the final famine year of Occupation, justify feeding a family pet? Dorothy Higgs's two cats and Tim (seemingly a popular canine moniker) each found their own methods to make do. Tinker was a talented mouser, useful for their new rural location, and Tim scrounged for stolen scraps in the neighborhood. Dorothy believed he had good luck at “the Jerries' mess.” But “poor old Bingo often cries almost all day. Gosh it's
beastly
—worse than being hungry yourself.”
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Animals were fed on scraps or inventive concoctions that humans had difficulty stomaching. So, Kitty Bachmann described the pungent and “briny tang” that permeated the whole house as she cooked dinner for their dog Kala. “The poor little blighter is clinging to life, as his present diet of limpets did before we prised them off the rocks.”
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Although some forms of limpets (ormers, for example) are considered delicacies by Islanders, such was not their opinion of the common little limpets that clung to the Guernsey rocks. Generally they were just too smelly and tough for human consumption. This view changed for some as hunger set in, and soon the pet population had some competition for this food source. By February 1941, Jack Sauvary described the beaches on the Front, the local name for a section of the east coast, as cleared of limpets as they became yet another found food for the population. Still, most people gathered them to feed their pets, as did Jack's friend Miss Matthews, who had eight cats and (no surprise) was having difficulty feeding them. Jack, usually understanding of other's foibles, wrote, “There is one remedy?”
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These cats, like most pets, had little chance of survival because they lived on skim milk, limpets, and the bread that came from Miss Matthews's rations. In Jack's estimation, “She has been mad to keep them so long.”
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Many, over the five years, took the last loving step of ending the suffering of starving animals. Gertie Corbin wrote as early as February 1941 of seven neighborhood dogs being destroyed, “including Ranger,” because there simply was no food for them.
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Yet the decision to end a loved pet's life would be hard for all Islanders, especially those with evacuated children. Morale through these years was maintained by a belief that the war would turn, the Occupation would end, and the Islanders' children would return home. Part of the mental fantasy of that longed-for reunion included seeing their children greeted by the pets they left
behind, the family circle restored once again as it was. Taking a pet to be euthanized was tantamount to abandoning this dream and the hope that it represented.

The dangers posed to those perceived as most vulnerable—young girls, the elderly, the Island itself, and even family pets—made the rest of the Islanders conscious of their role as protectors and caretakers. An unwillingness to further aggravate a dangerous situation made caution the watchword even when opposing the unpredictable occupiers in their midst. That these dangers were not chimerical was proven by the increased number of deaths during these years. Death caused either directly by the German forces or indirectly through the living conditions of the Occupation became the ultimate cost paid by some who had remained in Guernsey in 1940. For their families and friends, it was the fundamental tear in the fabric of interpersonal relationships.

THE ULTIMATE LOSS

Trying to achieve an accurate sense of the death rate directly attributable to the Occupation is not easy, but it is important to our understanding of the rending of human ties among Islanders and the impact on their lives. Hazel Knowles Smith does a nice job of trying to ferret out the mortality rate actually caused by the Occupation, a task complicated by the large number of elderly that had remained in Guernsey. Knowles Smith takes the four-year period from the start of 1941 to the end of 1944 and determines that out of a population of roughly 23,000 there were at least 1,810 deaths. There is a clear underlying logic to the choice of this four-year period, because it avoids counting the many deaths of the elderly and seriously ill that occurred during the first six months of Occupation. Some Islanders would have been too ill or frail to evacuate and could, in effect, be considered already dying in June of 1940. Although they might have lingered for a number of months, their deaths could not be attributed to the Occupation with any clarity. Also, during the relatively benign velvet glove period, the change in food rationing, although causing Islanders to lose weight rapidly, would be unlikely to affect the death rate substantially. The disadvantage in using this four-year period is that it obviously does not include the thirty-four dead from the violent air raid that ushered in the Occupation. Nor does it count the many deaths, violent and otherwise, that occurred from January to May of 1945. Knowles Smith mentions that January 1945 accounted for an additional eighty-plus deaths in that month alone.
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Knowles Smith and other historians are wise, however, to take this conservative view of the death rate in Guernsey during the Occupation. In any population of 23,000 to 25,000, there will be a natural rate of mortality, and this rate would likely be heightened by a population with a substantial number of elderly. Yet, the death rate was “consistently higher” during the Occupation than during the years prior to June 1940,
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and this heightened mortality stretched across many demographics, not merely the elderly. Serious illnesses and deaths became major topics for consternation in contemporaneous accounts. In the bleak and bitterly cold winter of 1942, a number of people reported to the hospitals with the symptoms of starvation, only to be too far gone for the doctors to help them. “Why did they not come earlier?” wondered Ord. “Who, they ask, is to look after the others at home?” This was yet another example of the highest value being placed on relationships and the need to care for others. One of the sisters in the hospital ward told the reverend that five patients had “simply
faded out” that week alone because they lacked food, and possibly could not have been saved even had they reported to the hospital promptly.
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In the spring of 1942, Dr. Symons told Winifred Harvey about the increased number of people dying with “the hunger oedoema,” the swelling of the stomach that signaled malnutrition. Winnie saw for herself the terrible toll of starvation that April when she visited the hospital and saw four men dying of malnutrition, one of them apparently a young man whom she knew. In order to have additional fats provided through whole milk, as opposed to rationed skim milk devoid of milk fat, an individual had to appear before the Essential Commodities Committee and give proof of special medical need. Only pregnant women seem to have had an automatic right to these extra fats, and doctors had to choose from among those in the most need and support their case for special treatment.
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Malnutrition was the wedge that opened the way for disease, weakening Islanders and sparking some peculiar spates of nonfatal illness. Jack Sauvary mentioned in May 1942 that over 50 percent in his community of St. Sampson had developed shingles on some part of their body. This painful condition, a recurrence of the chicken-pox virus that attacks nerve endings, was apparently triggered by “poor food,” in Jack's estimation.
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Although vitamin deficiency led to odd mini-epidemics, dysentery during the Occupation was so widespread that it was simply called “the universal complaint.” Even a minor attack could cause weakness that extended days or weeks, with Winifred Harvey describing herself as “dead tired” long after a brief bout.
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A more serious attack like that suffered by Elizabeth Doig led to six days in the Emergency Hospital and two weeks in a nursing home.
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When a particularly widespread wave of dysentery sent many to the hospital in November of 1941, there were numerous operations performed for rupture at the same time. Chances are great that the repeated strain on stomach muscles was caused by dysentery.
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Almost everyone had the “Guernsey Bug,” and its embarrassing nature led to some management through humor. Kitty Bachmann described her family, always “grasping at straws for a chance of merriment, however ribald,” as delighted over the conversation recounted by one “fastidious old lady.” Suffering from the universal complaint, she asked her doctor to “restore her dignity.” The doctor demurred, saying that he had no cure, not even for himself. “O but doctor,” the old woman exclaimed, “it's so odorous!” Needless to say, this became a catchphrase in the Bachmann family, applied happily to any number of situations.
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What is not apparent in this humor is Islanders' knowledge that dysentery was the gateway condition for fatal disease. Even in today's climate of advanced medicine, it remains a devastating killer in much of the world. Existing health problems were aggravated by dysentery, and it proved often to be the tipping point. Peter Bachmann's father never recovered from the dysentery he suffered during the summer of 1941, and it combined with his longstanding diabetes until he simply “wasted away.”
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The poor diet and dysentery were deadly for many, particularly in cases of diphtheria
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and tuberculosis.
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Death played by its own peculiar rules in who succumbed and who survived. So, in the final August of Occupation, Mrs. Godfray, then ninety-three, worked with Jack Sauvary to arrange the burial of her twenty-one-year-old niece who had died from tuberculosis.
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Some Islanders evacuated in 1940 because they were aware of an existing health condition. Some did not but should have. So it was with the Bachmanns' good friend Tom Bennett, who died when his remaining good kidney failed. He simply did not respond to whatever treatment could be cobbled together in Guernsey, and Kitty counted him as one who should have accompanied his wife and children in the
1940 evacuation.
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Yet no one could anticipate the serious illnesses that would develop over the five years of Occupation, many of which could not be handled in Guernsey but might have been treatable in England. More than one family was burdened with watching a family member die, believing that better treatment was tantalizingly near on the other side of the Channel.

Some of the violent deaths of the Occupation occurred simply because of the armed soldiers living amidst the civilian population. Where there are guns and young soldiers, there are bound to be fatal accidents. Gertie Corbin's Uncle Ernie Brouard died in November 1941 because he had the misfortune to have a German officer billeted on him in the bedroom directly above the sitting room. Mr. and Mrs. Brouard were having a quiet evening before their fire, unaware that the officer in his bedroom overhead was cleaning his gun. The gun discharged accidentally, and the bullet penetrated the floor of the bedroom and the ceiling of the room below, killing Mr. Brouard as he sat in his easy chair. The Brouards were not prominent in the Island, but the community rallied around Mrs. Brouard, seeing in her sudden widowhood the same threat that they all faced from armed, billeted men. When Quertier Le Pelley, the Guernsey magistrate presiding over the inquest, absolved the German of all blame, a brief flare of indignation swept the local community.
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The German soldiers also indulged in the habit of discharging their revolvers randomly in celebration of the New Year. The Guernsey populace learned to stay inside on New Year's Eve after an Islander was killed in 1941 by a stray celebratory shot.
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Some of these shootings were not clearly accidental, and sheltering in one's own home did not necessarily provide protection. In January 1942, a man named Fisher watched as half a dozen Germans left his house after an impromptu party. Looking for a place to celebrate, they had earlier “gate-crashed” his house, bringing with them a number of bottles of liquor. As Fisher stood in his own doorway, watching them depart, a revolver bullet killed him. It is unclear from the accounts whether this was another stray bullet shot off in celebration or a deliberate act, perhaps after angry words were exchanged.
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