Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (25 page)

Islanders were beginning to appreciate the very real dangers of a downturn in mood. Ambrose Robin, so intimately concerned with the welfare of the community in his work with the States, saw weariness with the Occupation as part of a larger public-health issue: “Depression, lack of food and fuel knock people right out when they fall ill.”
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The deeper concern was that mental depression might well prove fatal as people increasingly despaired of an end to the Occupation and a reunion with family. By June of 1943, there was a spell when reportedly there was one suicide a week.
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Suicides had increased beginning quite early in the Occupation, and the reports are sprinkled briefly throughout the contemporaneous accounts: Nicholas Edward Hotton, a seventy-four-year-old who hanged himself in his coach house in December 1940;
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a friend of Bill Warry who hanged himself in January 1943;
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Sidney N. West (“Buskin”), a reporter for the
Star
who committed suicide in April 1941.
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West's death was most likely on Rev. Ord's mind when he wrote that same April, “The death is announced of a man whose loneliness was greater than he could bear.”
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Just as with other Guernsey deaths during these years, instances of depression or suicide cannot all be attributed to conditions of the Occupation. It is difficult to know why Ralph, Ken Lewis's friend, went through a spell of being noticeably quiet, seemingly detached, and uninterested in any of his usual pursuits. Ken did not quite know how to handle this new situation, but found himself having to work at conversation with his friend so they did not just lapse into silence.
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Young men on the cusp between adolescence and adulthood are often subject to intense mood swings, and Ralph's sudden pensiveness, though of concern to his mother and Ken, might have been little more than typical of his age. But when, only months before Liberation, Ken's Uncle Arthur was found drowned in the Bathing Places, the family seemed shocked but not completely surprised. He had acted strangely lately and had just been in the hospital for an operation. But, other than his misery over a lack of tobacco,
his depression and suicide might have had any number of causes not directly tied to the Occupation. It is impossible to know what was in his mind, and whether, had he stuck it out until May, the improved diet, not to mention the sudden joy and new prospects of Liberation, might have made any difference.
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At other times, the link of a suicide to the Occupation seemed inescapable to contemporaneous writers. One case mentioned by more than one diarist was that of Edward Roussel, who drowned himself in the family well on a July Sunday in 1941. He had been cared for at Vauquiedor Hospital since the advent of the Occupation and had only been released for three weeks at the time that he took his life. One of his sons had stayed home to watch his father while the rest of the family went to chapel, but Roussel managed to slip away and fling himself down the well.
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The coinciding of his hospitalization with the start of Occupation seems to indicate a link with his depression, and that is certainly the way Jack Sauvary saw it. Uncle Ned came to see his brother-in-law, seeking a little nip of “O be Joyful” that Jack generously provided. Jack and Ned discussed the Roussel case, with Jack expressing his relief that he did not experience that suicidal level of depression. For his own part, Uncle Ned was not surprised at the uptick in suicides, because the small amount of spirits that he was cadging from Jack was his own way of fighting depression.

Jack seems to have been the go-to source to raise the spirits (literally) of the elderly. Much later in the Occupation, he mentioned taking a little of “the necessary” to old Miss Lihou, because that was the “only thing that keeps her up.”
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Others had their own ways of coping with depression and the difficult living conditions that lacked a certain end. For some Islanders, even the church that had always sustained them ceased to be a comfort. Ambrose Robin, generally very involved in the Methodist church, found that by the middle of the Occupation his “old attraction for church and church services” was “withering.” He was unsure whether this feeling was “right or wrong,” but it certainly seemed shared by others, especially in the colder months. One February Sunday in 1943, he counted the entire afternoon congregation at Brock Road to be forty-four, with only nine men in attendance. Despite a good sermon by Rev. Ord, it was “very cold in church—a miserable place.”
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With the lack of body fat in the congregants and the inadequate heat in the churches, this inability to withstand a full service seems reasonable, although the length of the service appears to have been a matter of perception. On February 13, 1944, Robin described the afternoon sermon by Rev. Ord as “very long and uninteresting,” while Rev. Ord noted in his own diary on that date, “Because of the cold I make the services as brief as possible.”
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Ken Lewis was quite distressed when his father declared near the end of the Occupation that he had lost all interest in going to chapel. “We had never heard him speak in this manner before,” wrote Ken. “I think a shortage of tobacco makes him like that.”
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So, while the church served for many as a point of unity and hope, it only became another drag on the emotions of some whose spiritual resources were at low ebb.

Thus, a universal need existed for Islanders to raise their spirits, even if the effort was patently artificial. Jack repeatedly sounded a note of determination to overcome every trial, giving himself and others little pep talks along the way. Was a friend worried about the German destruction of the Island? She cannot do anything about it, “so why worry.” It was best to “just let things take their course…just to live is all we can expect.”
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Were the Germans turning the confiscated houses into derelict ruins? Well, Jack just refused to “bother about mine…what's the use of bothering as long as we get through with our skins?”
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Was his garden such a waste that it almost made Mrs. Rowe cry, leaving her at a loss to understand
how Jack still smiled? “Crying and worrying won't make it any better,” he told her.
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This was Jack's nature. He was generally sunny at heart, although the past few years since his wife's death had brought little cheer. Even when confessing to his diary about having “the humps,” he covered his melancholy for the sake of others in an attempt to bolster their ability to see the Occupation through. Jack firmly believed that “while people can keep their spirits up they prolong their lives.”
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The majority of Guernseymen and women adopted the “smiling through” attitude that had long been presented to them as the proper British approach to adversity. Although Winnie Harvey referred to being uplifted in difficulty by “the Americanism, ‘I can take it!’” most Islanders proudly characterized this as a British trait.
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The concept of the stiff upper lip long predated the war, but new versions of it served as the rallying perspective of Londoners bombed out in the Blitz. As Islanders followed news of the destruction in the capital city, they were proud that “England is wonderful and sticking it well.”
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Soon, this became an ongoing theme, where a particular hardship or looming problem would be mentioned, but accompanied by a description of civilian cheerfulness and the hopeful appendage of “We can stick it!”
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Such verbal affirmations served also to reinforce the Islanders' natural identification with Britain.

Far more interesting was Guernsey's initial foray into a resistance tactic that would develop throughout the Occupation, one that could be described as a form of “subversive affirmation and over-identification.”
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“Subversive affirmation” is actually a term recently coined to describe very specific resistance tactics developed in socialist Eastern Europe during the 1980s in politics and arts. Key to this method is what appears to be an affirmation of the very beliefs, identities, and culture of those in power. The discourses of the powerless, whether verbal or nonverbal, apparently support the controlling forces, even to the point of overidentification with their agenda. Some of the more amusing examples of this tactic could be found in the Polish Orange Alternative activities. When an official Day of the Police and Security Service was declared in 1987 to honor the police “doing their duty with a smile,” youth of the Orange Alternative relentlessly “showered” police and their patrol cars with flowers, trying as often as possible to hug these symbols of oppressive power and thank them for their service.
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What is important is to differentiate this tactic not just from covert criticism but also from irony. For Guernsey, resistance by subversive affirmation was a simple matter of the cheerful smile. One of the primary themes early in the diarists' writing was the perception that the Guernsey populace was “very cheery,” and, as Winnie put it, “the frightfulness has quite failed thus far.”
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So many people mention the confident mien and happy faces of Guernseymen at this time that it was undoubtedly true that special efforts were being made to show a game face when out in public. It started slowly, because in the early days, Kitty tells us, there were “very few sunny faces in the streets and byways, as though all gaiety had dried up at its source.”
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Soon, however, a strong “esprit de corps” developed as those walking among the Germans in town sought some level of comfort from each other:

Words are not necessary to convey the unity of spirit in the nod, wink and smile exchanged behind the German uniform as they pass between us. In this fashion we greet and are greeted by all and sundry, as though a lifetime of detached recognition has ripened overnight into a mature friendship.
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Jack was also taken with the ability of the people on Victoria Avenue, so recently evicted from their homes, who would “brighten up, laugh and whistle, and find the humorous side,”
or those who queued up at the Market with precious little to buy, yet could “laugh and joke about it.” This was, in Jack's estimation, a manifestation of “the spirit that built England.”
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Yet, over time, an element of conscious subversion filtered into this display of a cheerful countenance. Smiling acquiescence to German orders, however repugnant, seemed to flummox the occupiers. While fellow civilians could read this bright, rather than sardonic, smile as displaying, in Ambrose Robin's words, “a strong feeling of hope reflected in the minds and faces of our population,” the Germans had more difficulty with their interpretation.
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How could one punish those who followed orders with facial expressions reflecting a compliant spirit and possibly even agreement with German actions? The subtlety of double meaning seemed to be beyond most German observers, and Rev. Ord often reported on Islanders who reveled in their ability to keep the Germans guessing. When the food supply was so dangerously low in the final year, a girl at the bread depot said to Ord, “Well, it's bad, but we mustn't let
THEM
see how hard hit we are!”
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Many of the Germans were incapable of penetrating the guise of subversive affirmation, and in Ord's opinion, “German psychology is at fault. They just do not understand us, and it has often been said that the British are mad.”
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Even the Germans who caught on to this approach were helpless to do anything about it. One day in May 1943, Ord was out visiting around the Bailiff's Cross area and paused to talk to some men who were conducting repairs on a water main. Because the men worked in essential maintenance, they often had contact with Germans, some of whom had expressed irritation with the cheerful smiles on Guernsey faces. One of the workmen characterized the attitude of those Germans who understood what the smiles meant as, “We'll take them bloomin' grins off your faces one of these ‘ere days!” And, to Ord's delight, the workman went on to say that he expected the coming years to be a bit thin, “But we can always tighten our belts and grin a bit ‘arder, Sir, can't we?” Ord saw this determination as a sign that “the spirit is sound as the garrison will one day find,” a belief that behind the acquiescent smiles lay a determined resistance that could be tapped if the opportunity arose.
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Despite the symbolic defiance of the impenetrable smile, and some pleasure it provided in confusing the occupiers, the Islanders felt acutely their forced acquiescence to enemy demands. It was appalling to many in time of war to become “a sadly unmilitant body, waiting in the wings like actors without a rôle.”
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Still, this was a frustration they would have to master if they wanted to control overt defiance, channeling it into forms that served some actual purpose and would not result in the deportation of all civilians. Alderney had already been cleared of civilians and turned into a slave labor camp. The same fate could as easily befall Guernsey, and the Islanders had to come quickly to a realization of their purpose in the war.