Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (26 page)

First, they had to acknowledge that they were in no position to help the war effort. “If in England,” Jack lamented, “we could have done war work and helped the cause,” but now they were “in camp and able to do nothing.”
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Their removal from a direct role in securing Britain's survival was the great regret for all who stayed by choice or by chance in Guernsey. Elizabeth Doig could claim in 1942 that everyone she knew was “weary of the isolation” and regretted staying: “How very much help we would have been able to give Britain in her hour of need.”
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While they clung to the hope that they were “too small and unimportant” to benefit the enemy,
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Dorothy Higgs worried that they were “just stagnating in a backwater.”
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Though the hope was often expressed that Guernsey would one day be key in the invasion, and they would take their proper place on the frontlines, Islanders came to accept a less heroic role and to seek some value in it.

Coming to grips with this reality was most difficult for young men like Ken Lewis who came of age while the Occupation wore on. What seemed exciting when the Nazis first arrived yielded over time to Ken's concerns over their “seemingly uselessness in this island.” Ken was pulled between “I would like to be doing my bit for the war effort” and the more philosophical “Someone had to stop behind…What is to be will be…All this may be for our good, time alone will tell.”
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The grand adventure that war seems to be to young men (until they experience it) was passing Ken by, and he knew it.

Over time, Guernsey redefined its role as a player in a game of endurance, a war of attrition as opposed to action. Kitty defined quite well her understanding of the Island's purpose in the larger conflict:

Our war effort seems to consist of holding down a couple of German Divisions and, by our presence here, to prevent the R.A.F. blasting Guernsey to pieces in order to annihilate our enemies. We remain tethered here with a sizeable slice of the German Army, all fellow-prisoners, they in exile and we in isolation.
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In an odd way, they were holding a piece of ground in the war, preventing its destruction in any way they could and lessening its value as a resource of the enemy.

Once it became apparent that Guernsey would not serve as a staging ground for an imminent invasion of England, the cost to the enemy of maintaining German operations so far from home gradually became apparent to the Islanders. Resources expended fortifying Guernsey against Allied action were resources denied to the rest of the German war effort. The Occupation had saddled Germany with a civilian population to tend, and tied down German forces to defend this relatively useless, from a strategic standpoint, territory. Kitty found it “comforting…to be indirectly useful to the War Effort even in a microscopic way, and in a fuller sense to be the preservers of our Beloved Guernsey.”
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This was a vital realization, and one that would structure Guernsey self-understanding and actions. Just as Britain was fighting to protect and maintain her land and way of life, Guernsey would do the same, although by different means, with different numbers, and under far different circumstances. It might be “easier to feel heroic and uplifted when one is at the heart of things,”
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as Guernseymen and women felt during even violent RAF raids, but their destiny would lie down a quieter if equally determined path.

DON'T KNOW WHERE, DON'T KNOW WHEN

The strongest tie to Britain and the continuous reminder of the Islanders' isolation was that unavoidable empty space once filled by their evacuated children. Daily they were met with reminders of this absence by the quiet streets and the silent playgrounds and bathing pools. True, there were children who remained, whose parents could not part from them, but the vast majority of homes had desolate children's rooms and empty chairs at the dinner table. Kitty described the sudden change that summer of 1940 this way: “Guernsey is almost childless as though a modern Pied Piper has enticed all the children away.”
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Early tasks, such as collecting Diana's schoolbooks, took Kitty to Elizabeth College, where the memories of evacuation were still raw. She walked the quiet halls, seeing in her mind's eye the “phantom” figures
of children rushing past, and hearing the echo of their singing and laughter. As she went down the school drive, she could see again “the streams of parents bringing their children like lambs to the slaughter, to be deposited and labelled for transport.”
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Most Islanders were slow to realize the length of time that they would be separated from their children, and this delay served as a psychological buffer against despair. During evacuation, Jack had gone to wish his second daughter, Kit, “many happy returns” for her birthday, but she already “had flown,” answering a call to help with the evacuated school. The decision to leave had been an agonizing one for Kit, but both she and her father considered her work an opportunity to help the war effort. So, Jack went to town one Saturday in August to buy her gifts of lavender water and French talcum powder to save for their reunion. “I often wonder,” he mused, “if you will ever get them.”
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But why would any sensible person foresee a five-year separation? The Bachmanns certainly did not. Peter liked to tease Kitty with what she considered “such inanities” as predictions that Diana would have finished school and entered a job by the time the war ended. “Our ten year old!” Kitty wrote in 1940. “I refuse to believe it.”
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Diana would be fifteen before they saw her again.

With the many restrictions and delays of Red Cross messages, Kitty and the other Islanders lived in a world where they could agree, “all is conjecture” when it came to the fate of their loved ones in Britain.
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The void, which should have held solid information about their children, was rapidly filled by a steady supply of worry, particularly over the Blitz. Ambrose Robin called the poor communication with the British mainland the “biggest bugbear” of the Occupation, far outstripping the lack of food, clothing, soap, and other necessities.
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Because information came in short bursts spaced many months apart, trying to picture the current lives of their evacuated families was like reading under strobe lights. Robin received in December 1941 a message from his daughter Marie dated August 14th, telling him that his son David had sat for his library exams.
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Yet Robin had already received news of David leaving college before the close of the school year. What did that imply?
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By the next August (1942) there came the anticipated news that David was serving in the military, although his earlier message telling them so had been altered by censors from “serving” to “working.” So, even when news came through, there was little guarantee that the message remained unaltered. “More food,” Robin maintained, “for murky thoughts.”
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Part of the problem for Islanders lay in the bizarre rules controlling the receiving and sending of Red Cross messages, a form of communication instituted quite early in the Occupation and the only means of contact with evacuated family and friends. At first, Islanders could not initiate a message, even when they had a known recipient's address in England. No method existed for finding their relatives, who could be spread all over the British mainland. Therefore, those in Guernsey could only reply once someone in Britain sent a message to them, leaving the power to make first contact in the hands of others. It is easy to imagine the consternation and self-doubt that could occur as time passed and no attempt at contact was forthcoming from family. Therefore, when in April 1941 the news came that messages could be sent from Guernsey to relatives in England who had not yet made contact, Ken Lewis came across a queue stretching all the way across the Elizabeth College playground. Over eight hundred messages were sent on that day alone.
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Messages, and their response, were paid for by those on the mainland. Once a message came, Guernseymen and women had to reply to it on the spot, a situation not exactly conducive to intelligent response. The one compensation was that Islanders had 25-word limits for their response, while those in mainland Britain were initially restricted to 10. This need for
spur-of-the-moment creative writing resulted in some unintentionally comical messages. Rev. Ord, excited over the news of the arrival of a new grand-nephew, drafted as his first response, “Thrilled by news.
TRY AGAIN
!” At least, Ord wrote, the censor “took it I meant thrilled by getting a Red Cross Message!”
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Dorothy Higgs, like others, seems to have adjusted to these rules by preparing 25-word messages months in advance—doubtlessly updating them over time—just in case she heard from a particular family member.
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The messages from Guernsey back to England went through in a somewhat timely fashion compared to those making their way from England to the Channel Islands. Sacks of mail were held up in Granville, France, on their way to the Islands and allowed to sit out in the rain until the letters within were rotten and unreadable.
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Reportedly, at least one batch of mail was left lying under meat and had to be destroyed.
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The Germans could not be bothered tending to items of no importance to their war effort; transporting supplies, building materials, and troops to the Island took precedence over messages to ease the minds of the occupied. More space would be available to transport messages leaving Guernsey, explaining the uneven and frustrating call and response of communication between evacuees and their relatives still in Guernsey.

Ambrose Robin, with his usual precision, tried to keep track of personal messages starting with the date they left England, their receipt and acknowledgment in Guernsey, the date when the acknowledgment reached England, and finally when news of that receipt reached Guernsey. Charting out the messages from Marie in 1941, he came up with an average of 13⅞ weeks from England to Guernsey, 12½ weeks from Guernsey to England, and 18 weeks return message from England back to Guernsey. Thus, a simple three-part round of a single message (initiation of message exchange, acknowledgment and response, receipt of response, and return message) took nine to ten months.
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And that was just it: the fact that Red Cross messages, the one connection to their families, often came to a halt or were just “dribbling through”
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caused concern for even the most strong-minded. When others received messages from family and the Ords did not, the reverend admitted that “the silence makes us wonder if our people have survived the Blitz.”
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While Peter Bachmann read in bed each night, Kitty lay awake beside him, far too preoccupied with her thoughts of absent loved ones to sleep. Instead, she listened to the incessant droning of the German surveillance plane that all had dubbed “Minnie the Moocher,” making the nightly round of Island reconnaissance. Each of Kitty's absent family members had a place in her “maze of thoughts,” although Diana held the top place in this endless “labyrinth of conjecture.”
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The gravest news could be held up for many months or possibly never delivered at all. In September 1941, the Robins tried to send news of Uncle Phil's death to Marie through a reply to an evacuated friend's message. Yet, in mid-March 1942, they received a reply to their monthly message of August 1941, reading in part, “Delighted fourth message…Going Vic's home Christmas. Hope Uncle Phil better.”
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So, at the time of this message dated the 6th of December 1941, news of Phil's death in September had not reached his evacuated family. Even when in contact, the delays in transmission led to some eerie results and bolstered an overall fear that Islanders were praying for and worrying over relatives who were long dead. Perhaps it was a presentiment of pain to come that led Kitty Bachmann to write about her sister on July 27, 1942: “Audrey's third Birthday in exile…I have to persuade myself that Pam's allusion to her condition was not a gentle warning of impending disaster. It is unthinkable!”
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Kitty Bachmann's sister Audrey had evacuated with the rest of the family, a wise choice considering her chronic heart problems. Because she did not dwell on her own health, it was easy to lose sight of what the family all knew: that Audrey's life would be a short one. But even with this past knowledge and Kitty's little flash of insight on July 27, it was still a shock to learn just days later that Audrey had been dead for two months. The Giraud family had received a message from England that included an expression of sorrow at Audrey's sudden death. Peter received the news through a friend on a Wednesday evening and, needing to verify that the news was accurate before telling Kitty, he left the house to visit the Girauds and see the message for himself. He constructed a story of seeing a business associate before the man left for Jersey in the morning, and left the house only fifteen minutes before curfew. Unaware of the actual purpose of Peter's mission, Kitty worried that he would be caught on the streets after curfew and held in prison. Peter made it back home without incident, but still kept the knowledge of Audrey's death to himself until after a long-planned outing on Thursday (which Kitty enjoyed “in blessed oblivion” of the blow to come).