Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (4 page)

Secret war diaries kept in Guernsey provide new insights into resistance as practiced under Occupation. Generally, personal diaries meet Jennifer Sinor's criteria for “ordinary writing,” writing that is “typically unseen and ignored” and generally considered “discardable.”
⁵²
What lifts these diaries out of the ordinary is the narrative they have to tell about extraordinary events.
⁵³
The reader has been introduced to some of the diarists who will guide us through their experiences during the years of Occupation. The premier diary, over a thousand typed pages in length, was kept by a Methodist minister, the Reverend R. Douglas Ord.
⁵⁴
Ord was based at Brock Road Church from 1938 to 1948 and, as his diary entries reveal, was an intellectual of piercing insight. Having spent substantial time as a prisoner of war during World War I, Ord was the only minister in the Island who spoke German. He flatly refused to serve as an official interpreter for the Germans, but his facility with the language would be a skill he brought to bear in a variety of interventions on behalf of the Guernsey population. As this study will show, he became a point of contact for certain anti-Party Germans, and his ability to manipulate information for productive ends is one of the more interesting stories of the Guernsey Occupation.

Juxtaposed against the intellectual sophistication of Rev. Ord is the fresh perspective of Ken Lewis. Just eighteen at the start of the Occupation, Ken is wide-eyed and frank about all that he encounters, and records his experiences in three substantial volumes without any hint of self-editing. Thus, we are treated to a boy's fascination with the soldiers newly in his midst, his calf-love (even his prayers and dreams) for a young woman who evacuated before the Occupation, and his heartfelt concerns that the great adventure of the war was passing him by. Ken's unselfconscious ethics and concern for others come through clearly, and because he goes to work for the States of Guernsey as a clerk for Louis Guillemette, Sherwill's secretary, he provides a window into the thinking at the highest level of Guernsey government.

Ambrose Collas Robin, a fifty-three-year-old man at the start of the Occupation and blind in his right eye, in some ways overlaps Rev. Ord and Ken Lewis. Like both of them, he was part of the Methodist “set” of an island where one can still go and stand on the rock, or visit the Assembly Rooms, where John Wesley preached. Like Ken Lewis, Ambrose Robin also worked for the States, being deeply involved with gathering statistics concerning the health of the community, and ultimately being put in charge of the Oddfellows Friendly Societies.
⁵⁵

Quite a different perspective is provided by Herbert Williams in his entertaining, frank, and substantial diary. Bert comes late to starting a diary, beginning his entries in January 1942. At the beginning of his journal, he records his memories of being a special constable, serving at the airport during the raid and the subsequent Occupation. A reader gets the sense right away that Bert is an everyman, bouncing around from situation to situation. His is a dark, sarcastic view of others who might be out for an advantage, and he has little use for authority—enjoying the process of indicating whenever the emperor has no clothes. Although his is a wealth of negative commentary, occasionally appending a series of dramatic question marks to his entries to show his skepticism of others, he ultimately comes across as soft-hearted and likable. To Bert's great disgust, German authorities dismissed him as a constable, declaring him to be too short. Even though he finally settled in as an electrician for the Lyric Theatre, his great love was his avocation as a bandleader. Thus, Bert Williams gives us much in the way of conventional-wisdom commentary, a revealing view of Occupation tensions and joys within his circle of family and friends, and a backstage view of the Occupation.
⁵⁶

Like Bert Williams, William Arthur Warry had a unique perspective to offer as a diarist. Bill Warry ran a shop in the Guernsey Arcade in St. Peter Port and lived with his wife in rooms over the shop. Therefore, he was in a position to see the impact of Occupation on the shops and markets in the middle of Guernsey's largest town. Bill appears to have started his diary mainly as a scrapbook, wherein he affixed articles cut out from the German-controlled local paper. He began by writing brief commentary around these articles, but soon the commentary took over, and the scrapbook became a diary with the pictures and articles taking second place to Bill's observations of life in the center of town.
⁵⁷

Located north of St. Peter Port in the neighboring St. Sampson's Parish, Jack Sauvary was sixty-four when the Occupation commenced. His diary reflects the variety of views one would expect from a longtime builder, grower, douzenier (parish representative), and churchwarden. More than broadness of experience, Jack's writings have the wistful tone of a man deeply missing his wife, who died in 1939. With so much of his family evacuated, there is a lonely feel to his entries despite his many deep relationships with friends and remaining family. In his diary, the reader encounters the attachment to nature and the rhythm of life in an island of breathtaking beauty and physical isolation. At age seventy-nine, Arthur Mauger also provides the perspective of an old Guernsey grower living on the far side of the Island from the harbor of St. Peter Port. He is a bit of a romantic for a farmer, marking weddings by drawing a heart in the margins, and over/underlining deaths with a Victorian black banding.

Although many of the secret diaries from the Occupation years were kept by men, women also took the risk to record their views on daily life. One of the finest of all the diaries was kept by Winifred Harvey, a woman born in Guernsey in 1888 (making her fifty-two at the advent of the Occupation). A product of the Ladies College in Guernsey, a school run according to the plan for women's education advocated by the reformers Miss Buss and Miss Beale,
⁵⁸
Winnie Harvey was intensely active in public service. She was the classic “old girl” of the college, serving on its board of governors and raising money on its behalf. But Winnie's great love was Guiding—the Girl Guides, or in her case, the Island Guides, being the original of the Girl Scout movement in the United States.

The diaries of Dorothy Higgs and K. M. (Kitty) Bachmann are in a different format from those of Winifred Harvey or the male diarists. Dorothy Higgs wrote a series of letters to her sister Phyllis in England, and, because there was no way to send them, tucked them aside as a diary for her sister to read in anticipation that the Island would one day be free of German control. Kitty Bachmann did much the same thing, with her journal arranged as if it were a series of letters to her mother, who had evacuated to England. Both Dorothy and Kitty were women in their prime during the Occupation, and the sense of direct address provided by the letter format of their diaries make them particularly compelling reading. Dorothy was of a problem-solving mentality, and her account is laced with her new avocation raising animals and devising makeshift recipes using substitute ingredients, culinary inventions so popular that she shared them in a column for the Guernsey paper.
⁵⁹
Kitty was a young mother, longing for her firstborn, Diana, evacuated to England, and reveling in her new son, Peter-John, born during the Occupation.
⁶⁰

Elizabeth Doig, a widow who stayed in Guernsey for the sake of her brother, represents older women, who composed a substantial part of the Occupation population. Of enough economic standing that she had a maid at the beginning of the Occupation, Elizabeth had her four-story home confiscated by the Germans during the first year. From then on, she bounced
around in her living conditions, recording the stresses of continual moves, isolation, and various health concerns. Finally, I will also make brief references to the diary of Gertie Corbin, a middle-aged woman I began to think of as the Angel of Death for her emphasis on tragic deaths and injuries. Her pithy asides give a sense of the dry humor that became a primary psychological buffer against despair during this time.
⁶¹

Because, during the Occupation, certain key events stood out like signposts across the unfolding five years, the diarists are often commenting upon the same public occurrences. Since diaries are a private expression of inner contemplation, each event is filtered through the perception of the diarist and is affected by such factors as age, gender, social/economic factors, and closeness to the event. Metaphorically, I think of the diarists' entries on common public events as resembling photographs taken by a number of individuals on the same tour through a foreign country. Most will choose to photograph major landmarks, and there will be similarities among the photographs. Yet, the angle of the shot, the people chosen for inclusion, any number of other factors of the photographer's taste and personality will be unique. Examining all of the photos taken of the same landmark together will give the viewer a new overall perspective of the place. Yet, each photographer will also take pictures that are not replicated anywhere else: photographs of friends and family, little moments that tell the real story of the journey for that individual. Perhaps it is these wholly individual pictures (like some wholly personal diary entries) that have the most important truth to tell.

To extend this metaphor just a bit farther, most of us are not avid photographers on a daily basis; it takes something unusual—a major trip, a new child, a Christmas holiday—to trigger our desire to record what is happening. Most of the writers whose diaries I will examine here had never kept a regular diary before. Arthur Mauger seems to be an exception in a group mostly new to keeping a diary. His diary was the apparent habit of many years of keeping a farm record, with his account of the Occupation starting in the middle of ledger book 21. Although he had kept a brief diary for many years, his entries during the Occupation took on greater length, detail, and apparent importance to him. I will discuss later the importance of the sense-making process as it applies to much of the discourse of the Occupation, including these diary entries.

More specifically, in describing the impetus to record in diaries, Alex Aronson speaks of the “inner need to save the momentary impact of experience from oblivion.”
⁶²
Such an act takes on its greatest meaning during wartime, for the “illusion of stability and permanence” provided by recording daily events is most valued when the diarist is in “greater need of a shelter from the viciousness and malice of the world.”
⁶³
Still, most pictures taken on a vacation tour are only shared among close friends and family. Most people believe, and rightly so, that others will be easily bored with the minutiae of our own experiences. The same could be said of these private diaries; they were not intended for public consumption, but as a later aid to the memory of the writer (or for the entertainment of family and friends).

The immediacy and intermingling of the mundane with the important, as well as the simple beauty of the diary process, is captured well by Kitty Bachmann. On Sunday, May 10, 1942, she wrote:

A day of much-needed steady rain, Peter [her husband] is reading by the fire, which he glimpses behind the ever-lasting washing, while the Cherub [their infant son] sleeps in his room, allowing me to relax and add a few lines to this spasmodic journal…As I write, two Germans are leading their horses to the stalls in the garden garage, Lily is aimlessly chewing the cud in the field, and the rain pursues its steady course down the window-panes. Not an exhilarating prospect as we await news of the Spring Offensive. Perhaps Winston will be more optimistic tonight.
⁶⁴

As actual letters became impossible, Kitty's “one-way conversation”
⁶⁵
via her diary/letters became the only illusion of contact she had with a daughter growing up without her. Thus, Kitty berates herself for “every day that I allow to pass without adding something to this diary. Somehow, this task I have set myself, has forged a precious link with you all.”
⁶⁶

Many of the other diarists also acknowledge a potential reader, some in almost as specific a manner as Kitty Bachmann or Dorothy Higgs. When disappointed that messages could not come through from his children, Jack Sauvary ended one entry, “Good night, Darlings. I hope you are all safe.”
⁶⁷
At other times, he questioned or spoke to family directly, but simultaneously acknowledged that their answer would come at some distant time: “Do you all agree? I think you will.” And occasionally he seemed to question the purpose of his writing by pondering, “I don't know if this news will interest you to read, but it will give you some idea how we fared during the Occupation.”
⁶⁸

The ideal reader in Elizabeth Doig's mind only became apparent in a 1944 entry, upon her hearing from Scotland about the deaths of close friends: “I had so looked forward to seeing them again & giving them my experiences on this Island during these years of occupation & I always imagined the Prov. [Provost] & Hugh Menzies reading this diary of mine with great interest.”
⁶⁹
Yet, most of the diarists kept their journal for themselves, as a spur to memory in later years. Later in the Occupation, Kitty Bachmann expressed a darker reason for being glad that she kept an account. In the horrifying swirl of bombings that followed D-Day, she feared that the Island “could be reduced to a heap of rubble.” In the event that she and her husband would not be alive to welcome the evacuees home, “I again pray that you will discover this book in its secret place, so that love's labour will not have been lost.”
⁷⁰