Tell me, Miss Ashton, what are your views on the matter? Isola thinks you should come to visit Guernsey, and if you do, you could ride in my cart with us. I’d bring a cushion.
Best wishes for your continued health and happiness.
8th April, 1946
Dear Miss Ashton,
I’ve heard about you. I once belonged to that Literary Society, though I’ll wager none of them ever told you about me. I didn’t read from any book by a dead writer, no. I read from a work I wrote myself—my book of cookery recipes. I venture to say my book caused more tears and sorrow than anything Charles Dickens ever wrote.
I chose to read about the correct way to roast a suckling pig. Butter its little body, I said. Let the juices run down and cause the fire to sizzle. The way I read it, you could smell the pig roasting, hear its flesh crackle. I spoke of my five-layer cakes—using a dozen eggs—my spun-sugar sweets, chocolate-rum balls, sponge cakes with pots of cream. Cakes made with good white flour—not that cracked grain and bird-seed stuff we were using at the time.
Well, miss, my audience couldn’t stand it. They was pushed over the edge, hearing of my tasty recipes. Isola Pribby, that never had a manner to call her own, she cried out I was tormenting her and she was going to hex my saucepans. Will Thisbee said I would burn like my cherries jubilee. Then Thompson Stubbins swore at me, and it took both Dawsey and Eben to get me away safely.
Eben called the next day to apologize for the Society’s bad manners. He asked me to remember that most of them had come to the meeting directly from a supper of turnip soup (with nary a bone in it to give pith), or parboiled potatoes scorched on a hot iron—there being no cooking fat to fry them up in. He asked me to be tolerant and forgive them.
Well, I’ll not do it—they called me bad names. There wasn’t a one of them who truly loved literature. Because that’s what my cookery book was—sheer poetry in a pan. I believe they was made so bored, what with the curfew and other nasty Nazi laws, they only wanted an excuse to get out of an evening, and reading is what they chose.
I want the truth of them told in your story. They’d never have touched a book, but for the OCCUPATION. I stand by what I say, and you can quote me direct.
My name is—Clara S-A-U-S-S-E-Y. Three esses, in all.
10th April, 1946
My dear Juliet,
I, too, have felt that the war goes on and on. When my son, Ian, died at El Alamein—side by side with Eli’s father, John—visitors offering their condolences, thinking to comfort me, said “Life goes on.” What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn’t. It’s death that goes on; Ian is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and next year and forever. There’s no end to that. But perhaps there will be an end to the sorrow of it. Sorrow has rushed over the world like the waters of the Deluge, and it will take time to recede. But already, there are small islands of—hope? Happiness? Something like them, at any rate. I like the picture of youstanding upon your chair to catch a glimpse of the sun, averting your eyes from the mounds of rubble.
My greatest pleasure has been in resuming my evening walks along the cliff tops. The Channel is no longer framed in rolls of barbed wire, the view is unbroken by huge
This summer, gorse will begin to grow around the fortifications, and by next year, perhaps vines will creep over them. I hope they are soon covered. For all I can look away, I will never be able to forget how they were made.
The Todt workers built them. I know you have heard of Germany’s slave workers in camps on the continent, but did you know that Hitler sent over sixteen thousand of them here, to the Channel Islands?
Hitler was fanatic about fortifying these islands—England was never to get them back! His generals called it Island Madness. He ordered large-gun emplacements, anti-tank walls on the beaches, hundreds of bunkers and batteries, arms and bomb depots, miles and miles of underground tunnels, a huge underground hospital, and a railroad to cross the island to carry materials. The coastal fortifications were absurd—the Channel Isles were better fortified than the Atlantic Wall built against an Allied invasion. The installations jutted out over every bay. The Third Reich was to last one thousand years—in concrete.
So, of course, he needed thousands of slave workers; men and boys were conscripted, some were arrested, and some were just picked up off the streets—out of cinema queues, from cafes, from the country lanes and fields of any German Occupied territory. There were even political prisoners from the Spanish Civil War. The Russian prisoners of war were treated the worst, perhaps because of their victory over the Germans on the Russian 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,
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
