The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
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 join us in my cart I’d bring a cushion.
Best wishes for your continued health and happiness,
Will Thisbee
From Mrs Clara Saussey to Juliet
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 cookery book of 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 ran 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-ram 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, listening to 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 cursed at me, and it took both Dawsey and Eben to get me away safely.
Eben called the next day to apologise for the Society’s bad manners. He asked me to remember that most of them had come to the meeting straight from a supper of turnip soup (with not even a bone in it to give pith), or parboiled potatoes scorched on an iron—there being no cooking fat to fry them in. He asked me to be tolerant and forgive them.
Well, I won’t do it—they called me bad names. There wasn’t one of them who truly loved literature. Because that’s what my cookery book was—sheer poetry in a pot. 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 ‘s’s in all.
Clara Saussey (Mrs)
From Amelia to Juliet
10th April 1946
My dear Juliet,
I, too, have felt that the war goes on and on. When my son lan died at El Alamein—side by side with Eli’s father,—John—visitors offering their condolences, meaning to comfort me, said, ‘Life goes on.’ What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn’t It’s death that goes on; lan is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and next year and for ever. 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 that, anyway. I like the picture of you standing on 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 clifftops. The Channel is no longer framed in rolls of barbed wire, the view is unbroken by huge VERBOTEN signs. The mines are gone from our beaches, and I can walk when, where, and for as long as I like. If I stand on the cliffs and turn out to face the sea, I don’t see the ugly cement bunkers behind me, or the land naked without its trees. Not even the Germans could ruin the sea. 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 that 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 fanatical 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 railway across 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 loomed over every bay. The Third Reich was to last one thousand years—in concrete.
So, of course, he needed the thousands of slave workers; men and boys were conscripted, some were arrested, and some were just picked up in the street—from cinema queues, cafes, and 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, 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 hardly 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 learnt that their inhuman treatment was the deliberate policy of Himmler. He called his plan Death by Exhaustion, and he implemented it Work them hard, don’t waste valuable food 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 there. They would poke walnuts and apples, sometimes potatoes, through the wire for the Todt workers. There was one 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—Sunday. That was the day when the German Sanitary Engineers emptied all the sewage into the sea through a big pipe. Fish would swarm for the wasteland the Todt workers would stand in that faeces and filth up to their chests—trying to catch the fish in their hands, to eat them.
No flowers or vines can cover 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 it 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 Datosey
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, or hoeing your garden, or cleaning your house, or doing anything a good farmer should be doing. So she went into your yard, and—what did she see? You, lying in your hay-loft, reading a book by Charles Lamb! You were ‘so enraptured with that drunkard’ that you failed to notice her presence. What a blight that woman is. Do you happen to know why? I suspect a malignant fairy at her christening.
Anyway, the picture o
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, eventually 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 has found the E. V. Lucas biography of Charles Lamb. He has decided not to quote you a price, but just to send the book to you at once. He said, ‘A lover of Charles Lamb ought not to have to wait.’
Yours,
Juliet Ashton
From Susan Scott to Sidney
11th April 1946
Dear Sidney,
I’m as tender-hearted as the next girl, but damn it, 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 exhausted him. He was deathly white by eleven, and had a whisky 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 today (it’s four in the afternoon).
In other depressing developments, Harriet Munfries has gone completely berserk; she wants to ‘colour-coordinate’ the entire children’s list Pink and red. I’m not joking. The boy in the postroom (I don’t bother learning their names any more) got drunk and threw away all letters addressed to anyone whose name started with an S. Don’t ask me 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 cosy at Cafe de Paris the other night. Their table was behind the velvet cordon, but from my seat in the slums, I could spy all the telltale signs of romance—he murmuring sweet nothings in her ear, her hand lingering in his beside the cocktail glasses, he touching her shoulder to point out an acquaintance. I considered it my duty (as your devoted employee) to break it up, so I elbowed my way past the cordon to say hello to Juliet She seemed delighted and invited me to join them, but it was apparent from Mark’s smile that he didn’t want company, so I retreated. He’s not a man to cross, that one, with his thin smile, no matter how beautiful his ties are, and it would break my mother’s heart if my lifeless body was found bobbing in the Thames.
In other words, get a wheelchair, get a crutch, get a donkey, but come home now.
Yours,
Susan
From Juliet to Sidney and Piers
12th April 1946
Dear Sidney and Piers,
I’ve been ransacking the libraries of London for background on Guernsey. I even got a ticket to the Reading Room, which shows my devotion to duty—as you know, I’m petrified of the place.
I’ve found out quite a lot Do you remember a wretchedly silly series of books in the 1920s called A-Tramp in Skye…or A-Tramp in Lindisfarrne…or in Sheepholm— or whatever harbour the author happened to sail his yacht into? Well, in 1930 he sailed into St Peter Port, Guernsey, and wrote a book about it (with day trips to Sark, Herm, Alderney and Jersey, where he was mauled by a duck and had to return home).
Tramp’s real name was Cee Cee Meredith. He was an idiot who thought he was a poet, and he was rich enough to sail anywhere, then write about it, then have it privately printed, and then give a copy to any friend who would take it. Cee Cee didn’t trouble himself with dull fact he preferred to scamper off to the nearest moor, beach or flowery field, and go into transports with his Muse. But bless him anyhow; his book, A-Tramp in Guernsey, was just what I needed to get the feel of the island.
Cee Cee went ashore at St Peter Port, leaving his mother, Dorothea, to bob about the adjacent waters, retching in the wheel-house.
In Guernsey, Cee Cee wrote poems to the freesias and the daffodils. Also to the tomatoes. He was agog with admiration for the Guernsey cows and the pedigree bulls, and he composed a little song in honour of their bells (‘Tinkle, tinkle, such a merry sound...’). Beneath the cows, in Cee Gee’s estimation, were ‘the simple folk of the country parishes, who still speak the Norman patois and believe in fairies and witches’. Gee Gee entered into the spirit of the thing and saw a fairy in the gloaming.
After going on about the cottages and hedgerows and the shops, Gee Gee at last reached the sea, or, as he’d have it, ‘The SEA! It is everywhere! The waters: azure, emerald, silver-laced, when they are not as hard and dark as a bag of nails.’ Thank God Tramp had a co-author, Dorothea, who was made of sterner stuff and loathed Guernsey and everything about it. She was in charge of delivering the history of the island: and she was not one to gild the lily:
As to Guernsey’s history—well, least said, soonest mended. The Islands once belonged to the Duchy of Normandy, but when William, Duke of Normandy, became William the Conqueror, he took die Channel Islands and he gave them to England—with special privileges. These privileges were later added to by King John, and added to yet again by Edward III. WHY? What did they do to deserve it’ Absolutely nothing! Later, when that weakling Henry VI managed to lose most of France to the French, the Channel Islands elected to stay a Crown Possession of England, as who would not.
The Channel Islands freely owe their allegiance and love to the English Crown, but heed this, dear reader—THE CROWN CANNOT MAKE THEM DO ANYTHING THEY DO NOT WANT TO DO!
Guernsey’s ruling body, such as it is, is named the States of Deliberation but called the States for short. The real head of everything is the President of the States, who is elected by the STATES, and called the Bailiff In fact, everyone is elected, not appointed by the King. Pray, what is a monarch for, if NOT TO APPOINT PEOPLE TO THINGS?
The Crown’s only representative in this unholy melange is the Lieutenant Governor. While he is welcome to attend the meetings of the States, and may talk, and advise all he wants, he does NOT HAVE A VOTE. At least he is allowed to live in Government House, the only mansion of any note in Guernsey—if you don’t count Sausmarez Manor, which I don’t.
The Crown cannot impose taxes on the Islands—or conscription. Honesty forces me to admit the Islanders don’t need conscription to make them go to war for dear, dear England. They volunteered and made very respectable, even heroic, soldiers and sailors against Napoleon and the Kaiser. But take note—these selfless acts do not make amends for the fact THAT THE CHANNEL ISLANDS PAY NO INCOME TAX TO ENGLAND. NOT ONE SHILLING. IT MAKES ONE WANT TO SPIT!
Those are her kindest words—I will spare you the rest, but you get her drift.
One of you, or better still both of you, write to me. I want to hear how the patient and the nurse are. What does your doctor say about your leg, Sidney—I swear you’ve had time to grow a new one.
xxxxxx,
Juliet
From Dawsey to Juliet
15th April 1946
Dear Miss Ashton,
I don’t know what ails Adelaide Addison. Isola says she is a blight because she likes being a blight—it gives her a sense of destiny. Adelaide did me one good turn though, didn’t she? She told you, better than I could, how much I was enjoying Charles Lamb.
The biography came. I read it quickly—too impatient not to. But I’ll go back and start again—reading more slowly this time, so I can take everything in. I did like what Mr Lucas said about him—he could make any homely and familiar thing into somet
But what I cannot imagine is Charles, coming home from work and finding his mother stabbed to death, his father bleeding and his sister Mary standing over both with a bloody knife. How did he make himself go into the room and take the knife away from her? After the police had taken her off to the madhouse, how did he persuade the Judge to release her to his care and his care alone? He was only twenty-one years old—how did he talk them into it?
He promised to look after Mary for the rest of her life—and, once he put his foot on that road, he never stepped off it It is sad he had to stop writing poetry, which he loved, and had to write criticism and essays, which he did not honour much, to make money.
I think of him working as a clerk at the East India Company, so that he could save money for the day, and it always came, when Mary would go mad again, and he would have to place her in a private home.
And even then he did seem to miss her—they were such friends. Picture them: he had to watch her like a hawk for the awful symptoms, and she could tell when the madness was coming on and could do nothing to stop it—that must have been worst of all. I imagine him sitting there, watching her on the sly, and her sitting there, watching him watching her. How they must have hated the way the other was forced to live.
But doesn’t it seem to you that when Mary was sane there was no one saner—or better company? Charles certainly thought so, and so did all their friends: Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and, above all, Coleridge. On the day Coleridge died they found a note he had scribbled in the book he was reading. It said, ‘Charles and Mary Lamb, dear to my heart, yes, as it were, my heart.’