Authors: Margaret Leroy
J
une. When Gunther comes to my door one night, I see that something has changed. He must have been drinking heavily. His eyes are too bright, his hands clumsy; a smell of alcohol leaks from his skin. And there’s something in his face, something used-up, defeated.
Usually we go straight upstairs. But in the passage, he pulls me to him, forgetting where we are. His kiss is urgent, as though he wants to hide himself in me: he tastes of drink, his skin is clammy. I’m desperate to get him up to my room. I pull him towards the stairway, worried that he will stumble and that Blanche or Millie will wake.
In my room, I lock the door, turn to face him, afraid. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’
My first thought is for Hermann, his son. I feel a fear that chills me through—that something has happened to Hermann.
He doesn’t answer at once. He pulls off his jacket, his belt. He sits on my bed, takes off his boots, his gestures heavy, slow, a frown deeply carved in his forehead.
‘The Führer has declared war on Russia,’ he says.
His voice is freighted with significance—as though he expects me to grasp at once all the many things that flow from that. But I don’t know the meaning of this news—for the war, or for him, or for me.
He moves his hand across his face—uncertainly, as though his own features are unfamiliar to him. He looks up at me then, that unnatural glittery brightness in his eyes.
‘We had hoped it would be over soon.’ His voice a little slurred. ‘But what happens now? I don’t know … Max says we will lose the war now.’
‘Max says that?’ I’m amazed.
‘Max says what the hell he likes. Max believes in no one. Max has never believed that those in charge know what they are doing,’ he says.
‘But why—why does this mean that Germany will lose the war?’ I say.
‘The war in Europe goes well for us,’ he says. As though he’s unaware of the abyss between us, when he says this. ‘It is the act of a madman to open another front in the East. And Russia … He shakes his head, as though there are no words that can express what he means. ‘Russia has defeated many armies,’ he says.
‘Oh,’ I say.
To me all this seems so far away—another planet. Russia to me is fabulous, violent—almost savage, remote: the Tsar and his family slaughtered; Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky; the gorgeous coloured cupolas of St Basil’s in Red Square. I think as so often how little I know about the wider world.
‘They say you cannot imagine the vastness of it,’ he says. He moves his hand vaguely—as though helpless to suggest that
vastness. ‘Cornfields and then more cornfields—on and on, to the horizon—and then more cornfields beyond that. And forests, endless forests and swamps. And Russia’s armies are limitless … And in Russia, they have winter …’
I tell myself I should be glad, because Max has said that the Germans will lose the war. This should make me hopeful. But Gunther’s news has filled me with dread, and I don’t know what this means.
PART IV:
SEPTEMBER 1941-NOVEMBER 1942
I
n September, Millie starts school at St Peter’s up in the parish square. She wears her blue Viyella dress that has tucks around the bodice, which I will let out as she grows, and her pigtails are tied with red ribbon. Her bar shoes used to belong to Blanche, but I’ve polished them till they look new.
The playground is full of children, the ones who are starting today pressed up against their mothers, the older ones milling around, playing marbles or hopscotch or jacks. Some girls are doing handstands against the wall of the school, their full skirts billowing out like the petals of over-blown flowers. I remember how Blanche cried and protested when first she went to school, how she was terrified of the playground, not wanting to let go of me, so I had to peel her fingers like sticking plasters from my hands; but Millie just looks back at me briefly and then walks boldly forward, stepping out into the stream of her future in the shiny bar shoes.
The house feels different without her. Even when she was quiet I always knew she was there, as though the air were charged by her vivid, purposeful presence. I keep busy; I get through my
tasks much quicker than I did when she was at home. I scrub my kitchen till it gleams, I pick the last of my runner beans, I bottle the plums from my plum tree. They’re good fruit for bottling—Victorias: they keep their rich rose colour even when they’re cooked, and all day my kitchen is fragrant with their winey, opulent scent. I’m pleased with what I’ve achieved; but I miss her.
At home time, I wait outside the school with all the other mothers. I know a few of these women from when Blanche started at school, though that was ten years ago now—some of them have big families, or a gap between children, like me. There’s Susan Gallienne, tall and slender and stylish: she has a classy pallor and her hair is cleverly waved. There’s Vera Hill, who runs her household with army-camp precision: a bracing scent of carbolic soap hangs about her. There’s Gladys Le Tis-sier, who has six children, and an air of being always slightly distracted—as though everything happens too quickly, and things race past and she struggles after them, calling for them to wait for her. We greet one another, tell our news, promise that we’ll meet up.
The school doors open; the children spill out. Millie comes running up to me, flushed, rather dazed by all the newness of everything. One of her ribbons has come undone and is flying out like a little flag as she runs. I bend to hug her. She smells of school—of wax crayons, chalk dust, apples. The smell fills me with nostalgia—for best friends and playground conspiracies, for skipping games and whispered secrets and fingers smudged with ink—all the school things.
‘Sweetheart. Did you have a nice day?’
She nods vigorously.
‘I
was good,’ she tells me. ‘But Simon had to stand in the corner. Miss Delaney made him. He put a wriggly worm down Annie Gallienne’s blouse.’
‘Simon Duquemin?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Simon Duquemin.’ She rolls the name around her mouth, as though it tastes especially good, like a stolen caramel. ‘Simon is
seven.’
As if this were a major achievement, and worthy of respect.
The next day, as we walk home from school, she talks about Simon again.
‘Simon got the slipper,’ she tells me.
I remember Blanche talking about the slipper: it’s not really a slipper at all, but an old plimsoll that Miss Delaney keeps in the drawer of her desk. She beats the children with it if they’re very badly behaved. All the children are afraid of it.
‘But, Millie, it’s only the second day of term. I thought you’d all still be on your best behaviour …’
‘He had to bend over the desk,’ she says. ‘He said it didn’t hurt him, but I think it did. I think he was trying not to cry.’
The countryside is mellowing with September, autumn’s gold gloss on everything. The first bright leaves are falling, and rustling on the tarmac. They sound like stealthy footsteps in the quiet of the lane.
‘So what did Simon do—to deserve the slipper?’ I ask.
‘He was very naughty,’ she tells me. ‘He was sitting behind Maisie Guerin, and he stuck the end of Maisie’s pigtail in his bottle of ink.’ Again, there’s that thread of respect in her voice. ‘Mummy, I want to play with Simon.’
This worries me: Simon Duquemin sounds a little wild. But Millie is insistent.
So the next morning, I speak to Ruthie Duquemin, his mother, as we wait in the playground. I only know her by sight. She’s a pale, rather anxious woman, with a mist of fair hair round her head, and eyes of a startling clear green, like the hart’s tongue fern in the hedgebank.
‘I was wondering—would Simon like to come and play with Millie after school?’
Her smile is spacious and kind.
‘Yes, I know he’d love to,’ she says. ‘He seems very taken with Millie.’
Simon knocks at our door. He has white arms blotched with freckles, his mother’s exuberant hair, and a suspicious expression. He peers past me into the passageway.
‘I’ve come for her,’ he says.
Millie has changed out of her school clothes into her oldest frock. She takes an old satchel of Blanche’s: I’ve put a jam jar in it, with string tied round it for fishing, and an apple to eat. As I say goodbye, it’s as though her feet won’t keep still: she hops from one foot to the other like a dancer. Her eyes are sunlight-on-water.
‘Don’t go too far. And be sure to come back before dark … My words fall into silence. They’re over the lane already, and through the orchard and into the wood, their clear voices trailing like bright streamers behind them.
I tidy my kitchen. I stack up the Kilner jars full of plums on the larder floor. It’s good to see all that abundance, the heavy glass jars that are filled with rose-red fruit. I wash my kitchen floor, though really it doesn’t need it. As the tree-shadows
lengthen and reach like grasping hands across the lane, anxiety creeps up on me and I long to have her safe home with me. It’s the first time she’s ever played out.
But well before tea-time, Simon brings Millie back to our door, and heads off up the lane to his house. Millie bursts into the living room, where I am doing the darning and Blanche is brushing her hair. Millie is muddy, dishevelled, pink with happiness. She smells of bracken and sunlight.
‘Simon climbed to the top of a tree,’ she says.
‘Boys are such show-offs,’ says Blanche, pausing in her hair-brushing. She’s counting the strokes, bent forward, her bright blonde hair hanging down; each day she tries to do a hundred strokes before bed.
‘Well, I hope he didn’t expect you to climb up there, as well,’ I say to Millie.
‘He was looking for an old woodpigeon’s nest,’ she tells me. ‘I was meant to catch him if he fell out. And then we made a den in the wood. We were hiding from bombs. The bombs killed everyone but they didn’t hit us … And then we were
soldiers,’
she says.
She shoots a pretend gun at Blanche.
‘Honestly, Millie. Girls don’t shoot. You ought to know that,’ says Blanche.
She straightens, swings her hair back over her head. She looks at herself in the over-mantel mirror, posing a little. Light shimmers on the river of her hair.
‘Simon really likes me,’ says Millie, boastful. ‘Simon says I’m really not like a girl at all.’ As though this is the highest praise.
After that, Simon plays with Millie most days after school.
One evening, she comes home tense and breathless and thrilled.
‘We made an army camp in Mr Mahy’s barn,’ she says.
Peter Mahy’s barn is just beyond my orchard, on the track through the fields that I took when I went to Les Brehauts. He doesn’t keep it well. He scarcely ever goes to it: he stores his old farm machinery there now he can’t get the spare parts. There’s a rickety stair to the hayloft, where the children could climb and fall through.
‘You must be very careful when you play there. You mustn’t play on the tractor. And you mustn’t go in the hayloft,’ I say.
‘We were
very
careful, Mummy.’
‘You’re all out of breath,’ I tell her.
‘That’s because we got chased,’ she says.
‘Chased,
Millie? Who chased you?’
‘Mr Mahy’s dog,’ she says. ‘His dog is very nasty. We went back past the farmhouse and he chased us up the lane.’
I know the dog—he’s a big Alsatian, rather bad-tempered. This worries me.
‘What were you doing, to make him chase you?’ I say.
‘Simon threw a stone at him.’
‘No, Millie. That’s a very bad thing to do.’
‘Simon isn’t bad. It was a very little stone.’
‘He shouldn’t have done that,’ I say.
‘It was little as a leaf,’ she says. ‘It was really, really tiny. Like this …’
She holds her finger and thumb together: between them, just the smallest sliver of air.
‘I don’t care how little it was,’ I say.
I feel a niggle of doubt: there’s a streak of wildness in Simon, something that just doesn’t care what adults tell him to do. I worry what he could lead her into.
‘You must never do that again, either of you,’ I tell her.
?
didn’t do anything. I promise, Mummy,’ she says.
W
ith Millie at school, I have a little more freedom—though I don’t like leaving Evelyn on her own for very long.
One afternoon in November, I cycle up to town. I buy bread and meat and onion sets, and change my library book. I manage to find a few balls of knitting wool for Evelyn, and I buy some powdered carravita from Carr’s in the arcade; it’s made from seaweed and you can use it as a gelling agent.
The Press
had a recipe for a jam that you can make from turnips; it didn’t sound very inviting, but I thought I would give it a try.
As I cycle homeward up the hill, I pass Acacia Villa, where Nathan Isaacs used to live—where I’d sometimes come to music evenings, before he went on the boat. I remember those evenings—a little opulent claret to drink, a fine fire burning in the grate; playing Beethoven’s Spring Sonata for violin and piano. He especially loved Beethoven. He was a wonderful violinist—a much better musician than me; and there’s something about the violin—the silken flow of it, the way it soars and sings—that can make the piano seem a little pedestrian. I wonder how Nathan is now. He said his cousin’s house in Highgate was rather full
of relatives: I hope it isn’t too boisterous for him; I hope he has a room where he can play his violin. The villa always looked elegant, a shiny lion brass door-knocker on the green-painted front door, the front lawn sleek, with flower borders. But it’s grown shabby, run-down, without him. The flowerbeds are a tangle of docks and dying blonde grasses; and the brown-paper heads on the hydrangeas rustle and lisp in the wind. The salt air pushes my hair from my face, and a sudden sadness clutches at me for the way the world is changing, so much torn, uncared-for, destroyed.
As I pass the front door, two men come out. I can tell they’re not island people. They’re thin, and their clothes are ragged, and they’re speaking a language that’s strange to me—not German, which I recognise now. They look rather desolate and lost, their shadows falling in front of them, jagged and thin as winter branches. I can tell that they’re shivering. Today you need a good woollen coat, with the wind that whips off the sea. It’s unnerving, to hear this unknown language on our island. I wonder who they are, why they’re here, in this place so far from their home.
The light thickens so early now: it’s getting dark already. Seagulls cry. Winter is coming.
That night, when Gunther is with me, when we lie together in the peace of my bed, I ask about the men I saw.
‘There were some people in St Peter Port. In a house called Acacia Villa, where I used to visit, before … you know, before all this … They were foreign—not island people. Not German. They looked really thin and they didn’t have warm enough clothes …’
Something tenses in him when I say that; I see a little hardening in the muscles round his mouth.
‘The Führer wants to fortify these islands,’ he tells me, carefully. ‘He is very proud of his conquest. The fortifications are nothing to do with us.’
‘What d’you mean, they’re nothing to do with you?’
‘It’s a different organisation—the Organisation Todt. They’re bringing workers in to build defences around the islands.’
‘Bringing them in from where?’ I think of the language I didn’t recognise.
‘Holland, Belgium, some of them. Some are from Poland and Russia. They’re prisoners of war or volunteers. Some are building camps to live in … Don’t worry about it,’ he tells me, smoothing my hair from my face. ‘Let’s leave the war outside. Let it be just you and me here …’
But later, in the darkness, he abruptly starts awake. His sudden movement wakes me too. He trembles, and the trembling passes into my body. He must have been stalked by some fear in his sleep, some night terror. I’ve blown my candles out, but the moonlight leaks through my curtains and falls on his face, on his eyes. He stares at me, yet looking through me, as though he doesn’t see me. The sweat on his forehead gleams in the chalky light of the moon. He frightens me.
I stroke his arm, trying to bring him back to the present.
‘Gunther. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Everything’s all right. This is Vivienne. My darling, you’re here with me, remember?’
He stares.
‘Gunther …’
His face shifts.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Oh. Vivienne.’
He rubs his hand over his face, becomes himself again. I wonder what he saw in his dream. But he doesn’t tell me, and I don’t ask.
I walk home from Angie’s through the darkening evening. The sepia air is still, no wind—a thing that rarely happens on Guernsey; a single brown leaf traces out slow spirals as it falls. The world feels empty, hollow, and the shadows are purple as damsons. A sadness seems to come on the countryside with the fall of the dusk. Above the pale earth and the black trees the sky is the dark blue of ashes.
I move through the intricate long shadows of the poplars in the hedgebank, past the land that belongs to the Renoufs. I see that Joseph Renouf has put a scarecrow up in his field, that stands in a pool of damson shadow. It’s cleverly constructed, made of scraps of wood and twigs, and dressed in tattered cast-offs. My footsteps are loud and echoey in the silence of the lane. There’s a cold smell of night coming.
I walk on. But something about the sight disturbs me—something that doesn’t make sense. A shiver of leaves behind me makes me suddenly turn. Fear fingers the back of my neck: the scarecrow has moved to a different place in the field. All the little hairs stand up on my skin. I can see the scarecrow’s face now—I see that he is a man. I don’t know who he is, or what he can be doing there, in the empty sepia dusk in Joseph Renouf’s field. I worry that he will see me: I worry he might be dangerous; but he seems quite unaware of me. He is utterly intent on something he has in his hand that looks like an old cabbage stalk. As I watch he thrusts it against his face, gnawing furiously at it.
I wonder what can have happened—that a man has been reduced to this, to eating a thrown-out cabbage stalk. Has he escaped from a locked ward somewhere? Has he lost his mind?
Before I turn the corner, I look behind me again: but the tattered man has vanished, as though he had never been there. As though I conjured him up from some dark place inside me.
The nights are drawing in, and Millie and Simon can’t play out after school. Sometimes she goes up to his house, and sometimes he comes down to ours.
When they’re playing together around the house, it’s all too much for Evelyn.
‘My head hurts. Such a racket,’ she says. ‘So many comings and goings.’
I tell them to be quieter, but my warnings just slide off them.
Evelyn overhears them singing in German …’
Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’:
they’ve been learning German Christmas carols at school. She raps her knitting needle on the arm of her chair.
‘Stop that at once,’ she says.
Millie flushes.
‘Sorry, Grandma.’
For myself, I think it’s good that they’re learning German: we may face a long future of Occupation, and if they can speak the language they will be better prepared. Though I’d never say that to Evelyn.
‘Evelyn—they learnt it from Miss Delaney. It doesn’t mean anything,’ I tell her.
‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong,’ says Evelyn. ‘Of course it means something. The Hun may have come to Guernsey, but we’re not letting him into our house …’
I turn from her, my face hot.
I send them to play in the small back attic, where they can’t be heard. Evelyn settles back to her knitting. I don’t see the children again till I call up the stair for Simon, to tell him it’s time to go home.
‘Did you have a good time, sweetheart?’ I ask Millie, after he’s gone.
She nods vigorously.
‘Simon was a varou,’ she says. ‘He had fur and very big teeth.’
I ask her to repeat this—I don’t recognise the word.
‘A
varou,
Mummy.
You
know.
You
know what a varou is.’
‘No, I don’t.’
She gives me a dubious look, as though she can’t believe my ignorance.
‘A varou looks like a man—except by the light of the moon. Then …’
She puts back her head and gives a shivery wolf-howl. ‘Oh. A
werewolf,’
I say. ‘Yes, of course. The varou bit me. Look.’ She holds out her arm, rather proudly. I can see the fading white toothmarks. I’m appalled.
‘Millie—you shouldn’t let Simon
bite
you.’ ‘Don’t worry, Mummy. There wasn’t any blood.’ ‘I should hope not.’
‘Anyway—it was just a game. It was only pretend. He isn’t one really,’ she says.
‘No—well, of course not.’
‘But shall I tell you a secret, Mummy?’
I nod.
She pulls my face down close to hers and whispers in my ear.
‘Simon knows where there’s a real varou,’ she says. ‘Millie—werewolves aren’t real. Not
ever.’
She ignores me.
‘This
varou is real,’ she says. ‘The varou I’m talking about.’ Her mouth is very close to me: I feel her moth-breath on my face. Her whispery voice is dramatic, intense. ‘He prowls down the lane that leads from St Pierre du Bois to Torteval. He has a barrow full of parsnips that he pushes along. And he likes to eat bad children.’
There’s a thread of fear in her voice.
‘Oh. And how does Simon know this exactly?’
‘His big brother told him,’ she says. ‘It’s really true, Mummy.’
‘No, sweetheart. It’s just a story.’
She shakes her head, emphatically.
‘Simon’s big brother knows lots of things,’ she tells me. ‘Simon’s big brother made a biplane from cartridge paper and glue. It can really fly. Simon showed me …’
I feel angry with Simon, and Simon’s big brother, for frightening Millie like this.
Johnnie comes to see me, with a jar of apple chutney from Gwen, and a bag of spinach, just picked. We sit at my kitchen table and drink some mint tea I’ve made. He’s never said anything more about the swastika scheme, but there’s an uneasiness between us now, and this saddens me. There’s something
reserved in his eyes; and small awkward gaps in the conversation—a sense that there are treacherous places that we have to tiptoe around: hidden channels of dark water.
To fill in one of the silences, I ask him about the men I saw at Nathan’s house.
‘They’ll be workmen from Holland and Belgium, the ones you saw,’ he tells me. ‘They’re bringing lots of workers in from the continent. Hitler’s building a ring of concrete all ‘round the island,’ he says.
It’s as Gunther told me; and I ask what I couldn’t ask Gunther.
‘But
why,
Johnnie? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like they really expect the RAF to attack; but nobody thinks that’s going to happen. Nobody thinks that Churchill is bothered about us at all. We’re just a little island …’
Johnnie shrugs.
‘Well, that’s what they’re doing,’ he says. ‘That seems to be Hitler’s plan. Those workmen you saw in St Peter Port—they don’t get treated so badly, they get a bit of a wage.’
I think of the men I saw—how thin they were, how the salt wind made them shiver.
‘They looked as though they were treated quite badly enough,’ I tell him. ‘They looked as though they didn’t eat.’
He shakes his head. There are little lines between his eyes, precise as if cut with a blade.
‘It’s worse in the work camps—far worse. You know—like the camp they’ve been building up on the hill near the cliffs. Up above Les Tielles.’
I remember how Gunther said that the workers were building camps to live in.
‘I didn’t know,’ I tell him. ‘I never go that way.’ ‘The men are there to fortify the clifftop. The camp up there is a brutal place. They scarcely feed them at all.’
I remember the man I glimpsed in the dusk in Joseph Renouf’s field.
‘I saw a man in a field,’ I say. ‘He was very thin. I think he was eating a cabbage stalk. I thought he was just a scarecrow, till he moved and I saw his face.’
‘He was probably from the camp,’ says Johnnie. ‘Those men are really wretched. They’re from Poland or Russia, most of them. They’re like slaves, the people who work there, treated like slaves. Worse than slaves. They beat them … A shadow crosses his face. ‘I’ve seen a man hanged from a tree there. The body was hanging for days.’
A shudder goes through me. I don’t say anything.
‘There are Algerians too, and gypsies. You should go and see for yourself, Auntie. You ought to know what’s happening here on our island,’ he says.
‘Yes. I probably should …’
But I’m only saying that because it’s what Johnnie expects me to say. The thought of going to the camp appals me. I think—What good would it possibly do to go and see for myself? It’s all too big for me. I can’t change it, none of us can, it’s all beyond us, we can’t stop it from happening … Yet my reluctance still shames me. I know that it’s a weakness, that I feel this.
‘No man should be treated like that,’ says Johnnie. ‘You hear things, don’t you? Things people say—that they must be there because they’ve committed some terrible crime. Florrie Gallienne at church was saying that. But what could any man
possibly do, to deserve such punishment? We’re looking into it, me and Piers. We’re going to do what we can do … The mention of Piers unnerves me.
‘Johnnie—what can you possibly do? It’s this great war machine—you can’t stop any of it.’ He ignores me.
‘In Jersey they’ve started already. They’re setting up a network to help some of the workers escape,’ he tells me. ‘Safe houses and so on.’
This seems extraordinary to me.
‘But where would they go to?’ I ask him. ‘None of us can escape. There’s no getting out of these islands … We’re all just stuck here now …’
‘They live as islanders,’ he tells me.
‘Until when? Until the war is over?’
‘Until we win,’ he says.
January. Stormy weather. Up on the hill at Les Ruettes, the windows are crusted with salt, though you’re still a mile from the sea there. It’s a struggle to keep my house warm enough: there’s a wind like a knife that cuts through closed windows and doors. We all have chilblains.
I wait with all the other mothers in the playground. Everyone looks a little more shabby, a little more darned. The wind rattles the ivy leaves on the wall of the school behind us.