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Mrs Irene Gosset interviewed by John Gaisford and Rosie Mere
Transcribed and edited by John David from audio and video recordings

Thinking back, the most traumatic side of the occupation was, to me, being cut off, not knowing, well, news did filter through, what was going to happen to us, because if the British forces had landed, I very much doubt if many of the civilian population would have survived. There wasn’t one air-raid shelter in the island. It was being cut off and wondering what was happening to our friends on the mainland.
Mmy father had acquired a whats-its-name radio, Crystal radio, the cats whisker, you know, and we listened to it. When I was a child we had one of these old-fashioned gramophones, with a great big his-master’s-voice horn, well it was the base of that that was used to hear, but before that, when I was at the Central Commodities, every morning, one of the ladies in my office used to bring the news from the ´óÏó´«Ã½, it was called GUNS — Guernsey Underground News Service — you’ve probably heard about it, unfortunately they got betrayed and sent to one of the Concentration camps, and one or two of them never came back, but she didn’t tell us where she got it from, I think it was her husband passed it on, and she used to dish out — it was thin, like tissue paper — with the ´óÏó´«Ã½ news on — and I used to fold it up and put it in the lining of my comb case, because we were opposite Grange Lodge where the German Headquarters was, and you never new what they’d stop you for. So I used to take that home, that was before we had the crystal set. the way the news used to get around the Island, there wasn’t anybody that was really going on, not really, but strangely enough, friends of mine who had a shop in town, there was a German who was, I think he was stationed at the Moore’s Hotel that used to go in, and used to ask for the news. They trusted him, too.

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