Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (63 page)

As it became apparent that some Islanders would never return from deportation, it was also natural to question whether their leaders had done all they possibly could to protect the people. These immediate feelings slowly cooled over time into a shared belief that, given the circumstances, the States had acted with practicality and largely to good effect. Although Frank Falla believed that the resisters in Guernsey had never been properly acknowledged or compensated for their suffering under the Germans, and raised these issues in the late 1960s, he too defended many of the decisions made by the Island leaders under duress. So, over the decades, Islanders settled into a sense of their common experience and common efforts under Occupation, and they rebuilt the fortunes of Guernsey while relishing the stories of this strange and eventful period.
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As already discussed, various attacks on this common understanding have been made since the 1990s, challenges based on the official transcript of Occupation documents. In an odd way this battle, though in a new generation, points up the singularity of the Occupation years, and the disconnect experienced by Islanders in conveying their experience to outsiders. Those who went through the Occupation in Guernsey knew that their perspective was unique, and this became the basis of numerous jokes at the time. The isolation was certain, the Islanders kidded each other, to have an effect on their minds. Her son's doctor told Kitty that he was sure that he was no longer “
compos mentis
.” He believed that when evacuated friends and family returned, they would “take one look at us, shrug their shoulders and sigh: ‘I suppose it must be the Occupation.’”
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Part of the Islanders' perspective could be summed up in the new traits that they expected to retain even once freedom and plenty returned. Many believed that they would never leave food on their plates again, or that they would “never throw things away”
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after the Occupation was behind them. But these were little things. Dorothy Higgs was particularly eloquent on the larger issues that might divide those in Guernsey during these years from mainlanders and those who evacuated. She believed that when the war was at an end, there would be a “gap of ignorance that, perhaps, will never be bridged.” Islanders had not experienced the time spent in air-raid shelters, the opportunity to engage in war work, the camaraderie of a whole nation united behind a single cause. Would they be able to bridge that sense of being remote from all these experiences? Or would they be “like foreigners, who know the language and grammar, but none of the idiom of these years”?
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Then again, the ignorance would cut
both ways, and how could they ever convey what it was like to live amidst their captors and to spend their time focused on the necessities of survival?

Dorothy had a dream around the time of the D-day invasion that showed the subconscious depth of her concerns. She dreamed that she was in an “English restaurant where everyone knew everyone else.” She felt very out of things because she only knew a few people and had recently just returned from the “oubliette”—a small room or dungeon where a person is locked away, forgotten, and left to go mad. Then someone asked her what work she was engaged in and she was instantly embarrassed. How could she tell these people that she had only been “playing with goats and rabbits for four years”? So, with the cleverness that comes to us in dreams, Dorothy replied that she had been “investigating the life history of fleas and lice.”
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As charmingly bizarre as Dorothy's dream was, it is a fair summary of Islander concerns as the war ended. Would they be treated as outsiders, as noncontributors to the war effort, despite the number of troops they had supplied and their role in helping to preserve their small corner of Britain? They had been locked away in their Island oubliette and perhaps forgotten; would they now be embraced and made to feel part of the British whole? Could anyone else relate to the experiences of their five years, to the makeshift recipes and amateur animal husbandry that spelled the difference between malnutrition and survival, to the small concerns and the acts of rhetorical resistance that were so important to Islander spirits?

The Islanders did find some tensions with returning family and friends. It can be imagined that young people returning to the Island after five years in the larger space of the mainland would find it cramped and narrow. Many of them left as children, but they now were coming back as teenagers, and settling into family life could not have been easy. Some would not stay, having in effect lost their home and family to the change in themselves while forced to be away for so long. And it seems that there were some sharp exchanges with returning friends to the effect that those who left had cut and run, and those who stayed had not helped to win the war.
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Some of the less-measured mainland British attacks of the last few years, seeking to paint Channel Islanders with a broad brush as collaborators, come across as an echo of these earlier disputes.

I asked Alf Williams if, after the war, he felt closer to those who had shared his experience of Occupation. He thought only briefly and then said, “You mustn't ask me that because I'm afraid I can forget a lot quick and talk to anybody. I could forget that and carry on…half our youth we lost in the war.” Alf's response brings up an interesting issue not always considered. We tend to think in terms of two different perspectives on the Occupation, of adults who evacuated versus adults who stayed, ignoring age as a primary variation. Just to open a new way to look at the blending of Islanders after the war, let us consider the experience of one of the many Le Page families in Guernsey. This was a family of five children, the youngest, Victor, being born on the day that the older children evacuated. This new brother explains quite well why the parents planned to stay for the near term. Although they fully expected to join their evacuated children later on, the Occupation started and the family was separated for the duration. The oldest son, Howard, who was fifteen at the time, evacuated with Elizabeth College, and the twelve-year-old sister, Marion, left with the Girls Intermediate. The third son, Bill, was nine years old and he also assembled to evacuate with the Hautes Capelles school. However, after waiting all day, Bill's school was rescheduled for the next day at 3
P.M.
, and the children were sent home for the night. It was just too much for Bill, and he “broke down” at home that night, his parents agreeing that he could stay with them in Guernsey.

Thus, Bill shared the Occupation with his parents, his brand new brother, and his little sister, Maud, three-and-a-half when the Germans came. When asked the same questions about what stood out for them, the three surviving children (Bill, Maud, and Marion) quite naturally have divergent answers. Bill, who was at a perfect age for forming memories, strongly remembers the five Germans billeted on the family, the time when an airplane flew low at night and the response was anti-aircraft fire (“the finest firework display ever seen”), and the train lines run across the Island—with attendant destruction of property—by the Germans in an Island that had never seen a train. And he remembers the hunger, influential enough that still today he feels that he must clean his plate and hates to see anything going to waste.

Maud, only eight-and-a-half when the Occupation ended, also remembers the billeted Germans, but she mainly recalls that the ordinary soldiers were kind to her, most likely because they missed their own families. She remembers that the golf links nearby was used by the Germans for storage, and that the children were allowed to wander around the area. But her memory of the railway line cutting through the Island is harrowing. On one particular day she saw men “dressed like tramps” working under the charge of a German. Now she knows that they were the Organization Todt, but what she remembers was watching the men and having one turn toward her. He had no nose, “just the holes in the face.” It is little wonder that she was horrified, never went near the rail line again, and still retains the moment as a “flashbulb memory” of the Occupation.

Now think how radically different was Marion's experience as an evacuee. The connection to Guernsey was broken almost immediately when she only had time to receive one letter from her mother in the ten days after evacuation and before the Germans invaded and closed the communicative link. From then on, communication was a matter of 25-word messages every six months or so, with only an opportunity to find out that the family was well. Marion remembers that it was 1943 before she found out in one message that her new brother had been named Victor. It might be expected that she would see Howard, evacuated at the same time. But she only saw him once during the early months, and Howard would go on to join the military. She would not see him until after the war, when he was “de-mobbed” from the army and returned to Guernsey, together with his new wife. Marion had some stability, because although the evacuated Guernsey schoolchildren were billeted all around the town, the school was given their own three rooms in a primary school and stayed together with their teachers throughout their school years. As a group they participated in various war work projects, collecting money door-to-door for the Red Cross, weaving camouflage nets, and washing dishes at a local hospital.

During 1941, when Marion was staying at her first billet, a German plane came over and dropped two bombs on the village. Two rows of houses were destroyed on the main road, but had the bombs been released a second earlier, it would have been Marion's house that was hit. She would carry with her through life the distinct memory of the devastation that had come so close to her. Marion, too, had a difficult adjustment upon returning to Guernsey in 1945. She had finished school in 1944 and had been working at the Girl Guide Training House in the New Forest. Her life was now in England, and she anticipated returning there after a prolonged visit with family in Guernsey. But somehow, she settled in and stayed on in the Island despite her shyness, which made the adjustment back to Guernsey life that much more difficult.

In the Le Page children, we see the broad experience of the youth of Guernsey during the Occupation.
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Their perceptions of the experience would vary according to age, and for
many of the younger ones, the postwar period would meld seamlessly into what went before. However, the change was greatest for the older children who went away in 1940. Some, like Howard, who returned to live in Guernsey, came back as married veterans. Others, like Marion, felt like strangers—at least at first—disconnected from those they had left behind years ago. The Islanders did not just lose their young men that they gave to the war effort, many of whom would never come home. They lost the natural connection that they had with much of the young generation forced to spend their formative years away from Guernsey. The reverberations of the Occupation were not just psychological but also physical, and this impact was felt more in the children who remained in Guernsey throughout the war years. There have been some fascinating recent studies on the later health effects for those children who suffered through the extended period of food restriction in the Channel Islands. Studies conducted right after the war, and another study in 2002 showed that there were significant reductions in weight, height, and body mass index (BMI) short-term during the Occupation, and a significant long-term reduction in height. A more recent study revealed that average growth rates for Jersey schoolchildren, under the same food restrictions as Guernsey, were significantly lower than children in mainland Britain during the same period.
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There would be other ripple effects from the Occupation for those who were children and teenagers during that time. Menstruation for women coming of age during the Occupation in Guernsey was delayed by a full twelve months for girls born in 1930. Much like the studies on height, the impact of lower weight on the start of menstruation is not a surprise, and duplicates the modern understanding that eating disorders may have a similar effect, as may high levels of exercise. One recent study examined the breast-cancer rates for women who had experienced this delayed menarche due to Occupation conditions. Although the researchers were seeking some protective benefit, they found that the delay in menarche had the opposite effect and was associated with an increased risk of breast cancer.
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Perhaps, however, the restricted diet and lower weight would be protective for Islanders' hearts in later years? A recent study showed this not to be the case, and found that those who were children, adolescents, and young adults during the Occupation developed a significantly higher level of cardiovascular disease, and experienced more than twice the admissions to hospital for CVD than the cohort of Guernsey Islanders of the same ages who had evacuated to the mainland. The researchers concluded that this result was unlikely to be due to stress, because those who evacuated had the stress of adaptation to a new environment, and many experienced the additional trauma of air raids. The result appears to have mainly been influenced by food deprivation during the Occupation period.
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I mention these studies because they show that the Occupation was not simply a five-year experience, but one that had impact for years to come on those who lived through it. It is also clear that the Occupation deserves examination from a number of fields and is a resource not just for historians, archeologists, and rhetoricians but also for those who wish to study the effect of restricted diet on a community. But what of our diarists? What were their postwar experiences? Most of the diarists went on to lead full and peaceful lives in Guernsey, so much so that they leave the public record and much less is known of their subsequent lives.