Amelia was half in tears, so we put the sketches away and I made her some tea. Then Kit came in with a shattered gull’s egg she wanted to glue together, and we were thankfully distracted.
Yesterday Will Thisbee appeared at my door with a plate of cakes iced with prune whip, so I invited him to tea. He wanted to consult with me about two different women; and which one of the two I’d marry if I were a man, which I wasn’t. (Do you have that straight?)
Miss X has always been a ditherer—she was a ten-month baby and has not improved in any material way since then. When she heard the Germans were coming, she buried her mother’s silver teapot under an elm tree and now can’t remember which tree.
She is digging holes all over the Island, vowing she won’t stop till she finds it. “Such determination,” said Will. “Quite unlike her.” (Will was trying to be subtle, but Miss X is Daphne Post. She has round vacant eyes like a cow’s and is famous for her trembling soprano in the church choir.)
And then there is Miss Y, a local seamstress. When the Germans arrived, they had only packed one Nazi flag. This they needed to hang over their headquarters, but that left them with nothing to run up a flag pole to remind the Islanders they’d been conquered.
They visited Miss Y and ordered her to make a Nazi flag for them. She did—a black, nasty swastika, stitched onto a circle of dingy puce. The surrounding field was not scarlet silk, but babybottom-pink flannel. “So inventive in her spite,” said Will. “So forceful!” (Miss Y is Miss Le Roy, thin as one of her needles, with a lantern jaw and tight- folded lips.)
Which did I think would make the best companion for a man’s nether years, Miss X or Miss Y? I told him that if one had to ask which, it generally meant neither.
He said, “That’s exactly what Dawsey said—those very words. Isola said Miss X would bore me to tears, and Miss Y would nag me to death.
“Thank you, thank you—I shall keep up my search.
He put on his cap, bowed, and left. Sidney, he may have been polling the entire Island, but I was so flattered to have been included—it made me feel like an Islander instead of an Outlander.
Love,
Juliet
P.S. I was interested to learn that Dawsey has opinions on marriage. I wish I knew more about them.
From Juliet to Sidney
19th July, 1946
Dear Sidney,
Stories of Elizabeth are everywhere—not just among the Society members. Listen to this: Kit and I walked up to the churchyard this afternoon. Kit was off playing among the tombstones, and I was stretched out on Mr. Edwin Mulliss’s tombstone—it’s a table-top one, with four stout legs—when Sam Withers, the cemetery’s ancient groundskeeper, stopped beside me. He said I reminded him of Miss McKenna when she was a young girl. She used to take the sun right there on that very slab—brown as a walnut she’d get.
I sat up straight as an arrow and asked Sam if he had known Elizabeth well.
Sam said, “Well—not as to say real well, but I liked her. She and Eben’s girl, Jane, used to come up here together to that very tombstone. They’d spread a cloth and eat their picnic—right on top of Mr. Mulliss’s dead bones.”
Sam went on about what catbirds those two little girls were, always up to some mischief—they tried to raise a ghost one time and scared the daylights out of the vicar’s wife. Then he looked over at Kit, who’d reached the church gate by then and said, “That’s surely a sweet little girl of hers and Captain Hellman’s.”
I pounced on that. Had he known Captain Hellman? Had he liked him?
He glared at me and said, “Yes, I did. He was a fine fella, for all he was a German. You’re not going to throw off on Miss McKenna’s little girl because of that, are you?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it!” I said.
He waggled a finger at me. “You’d better not, missy! You’d best learn the truth of certain matters, before you go trying to write any book about the Occupation. I hated the Occupation, too. Makes me mad to think of it. Some of those blighters was purely mean—come right into your house without knocking—push you around. They was the sort to like having the upper hand, never having had it before. But not all of them was like that—not all, by a long shot.”
Christian, according to Sam, was not. Sam liked Christian. He and Elizabeth had come upon Sam in the churchyard once, trying to dig out a grave when the ground was ice-hard and as cold as Sam himself. Christian picked up the shovel and threw his back into it. “He was a strong fella, and he was done as soon as he started,” Sam said. “Told him he could have a job with me anytime, and he laughed.”
The next day, Elizabeth came out with a thermos jug full of hot coffee. Real coffee from real beans Christian had brought to her house. She gave him a warm sweater too that had belonged to Christian.
Sam said, “Truth to tell, as long as the Occupation was to last, I met more than one nice German soldier. You would, you know, seeing some of them as much as every day for five years. Greetings were bound to happen.
“You couldn’t help but feel sorry for some of them—there at the last—stuck here and knowing their folks back home were being bombed to pieces. Didn’t matter then who started it in the first place. Not to me, anyway.
“Why, there’d be soldiers riding guard in the back of potato lorries going to the army’s mess hall—children would follow them, hoping potatoes would fall off into the street. Soldiers would look straight ahead, grim-like, and then flick potatoes off the pile—on purpose.
“They did the same thing with oranges. Same with lumps of coal—my, those were precious when we didn’t have no fuel left. There was many such incidents. Just ask Mrs. Godfray about her boy. He had the pneumonia and
