The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Front.

Most of these slave workers came to the islands in 1942. They were kept in open sheds, dug-out tunnels, in pens, some of them in houses. They were marched all over the island to their work sites: thin to the bone, dressed in ragged trousers with bare skin showing through, often no coats to protect them from the cold. No shoes or boots, their feet tied up in bloody rags. Young lads, fifteen and sixteen, were so weary and starved they could scarcely put one foot in front of another.

Guernsey Islanders would stand by their gates to offer them what little food or warm clothing they could spare. Sometimes the Germans guarding the Todt work columns would let the men break ranks to accept these gifts— other times they would beat them to the ground with rifle butts.

Thousands of those men and boys died here, and I have recently learned that their inhuman treatment was the intended policy of Himmler. He called his plan Death by Exhaustion, and he implemented it. Work them hard, don’t waste valuable foodstuffs on them, and let them die. They could, and would, always be replaced by new slave workers from Europe’s Occupied countries.

Some of the Todt workers were kept down on the Common, behind a wire fence—they were white as ghosts, covered in cement dust; there was only one water standpipe for over a hundred men to wash themselves.

Children sometimes went down to the green to see the Todt workers behind the wire fences. They would poke walnuts and apples, sometimes potatoes, through the wire for them. There was one Todt worker who did not take the food—he came to see the children. He would put his arm through the wire just to hold their faces in his hands, to touch their hair.

The Germans did give the Todt workers one-half day a week off—on Sunday. That was the day when the German Sanitary Engineers emptied all the sewage into the ocean—by way of a big pipe. Fish would swarm for the offal, and the Todt workers would stand in that feces and filth up to their chests—trying to catch the fish in their hands, to eat them.

No flowers or vines can cover over such memories as these, can they?

I have told you the most hateful story of the war. Juliet, Isola thinks you should come and write a book about the German Occupation. She told me she did not have the skill to write such a book herself, but, as dear as Isola is to me, I am terrified she might buy a notebook and begin anyway.

Yours ever,

Amelia Maugery

From Juliet to Dawsey

11th April, 1946

Dear Mr. Adams,

After promising never to write to me again, Adelaide Addison has sent me another letter. It is devoted to all the people and practices she deplores, and you are one of them, along with Charles Lamb.

It seems she called on you to deliver the April issue of the parish magazine—and you were nowhere to be found. Not milking your cow, not hoeing your garden, not washing your house, not doing anything a good farmer should be doing. So she entered your barnyard, and lo—what did she see? You, lying up in your hay-loft, reading a book by Charles Lamb! You were “so enraptured with that drunkard,” you failed to notice her presence.

What a blight that woman is. Do you happen to know why? I lean toward a malignant fairy at her christening.

In any event, the picture of you lolling in the hay, reading Charles Lamb, pleased me very much. It made me recall my own childhood in Suffolk. My father was a farmer there, and I helped out at the farm; though admittedly all I did was jump out of our car, open the gate, close it and jump back in, gather eggs, weed our garden, and flail at the hay when I was in the mood.

I remember lying in our hay-loft reading The Secret Garden with a cowbell beside me. I’d read for an hour and then ring the bell for a glass of lemonade to be brought to me. Mrs. Hutchins, the cook, finally grew weary of this arrangement and told my mother, and that was the end of my cowbell, but not my reading in the hay.

Mr. Hastings found the E. V. Lucas biography of Charles Lamb. He decided not to quote a price to you, but just to send it along to you at once. He said, “A lover of Charles Lamb ought not to have to wait.”

Yours ever,

Juliet Ashton

From Susan Scott to Sidney

11th April, 1946

Dear Sidney,

I’m as tender-hearted as the next girl, but dammit, if you don’t get back here soon, Charlie Stephens is going to have a nervous breakdown. He’s not cut out for work; he’s cut out for handing over large wads of cash and letting you do the work. He actually turned up at the office before ten o’clock yesterday, but the effort annihilated him. He was deathly white by eleven, and had a whiskey at eleven-thirty. At noon, one of the innocent young things handed him a jacket to approve—his eyes bulged with terror and he began that disgusting trick with his ear—he’s going to pull it right off one day. He went home at one, and I haven’t seen him yet today (it’s four in the afternoon).

In other depressing developments, Harriet Munfries has gone completely berserk; she wants to “color- coordinate” the entire children’s list. Pink and red. I kid you not. The boy in the mail-room (I don’t bother learning their names anymore) got drunk and threw away all letters addressed to anyone whose name started with an S. Don’t ask why. Miss Tilley was so impossibly rude to Kendrick that he tried to hit her with her telephone. I can’t say I blame him, but telephones are hard to come by and we can’t afford to lose one. You must sack her the minute you come home.

If you need any further inducement to buy an aeroplane ticket, I can also tell you that I saw Juliet and Mark Reynolds looking very cozy at Cafe de Paris the other night. Their table was behind the velvet cordon, but from my