大象传媒

Part II
鈥淭he ordinary Germans were very, very badly off towards the end of the war, this was partly because there were two factions, those who really realized the war was over and would like to have just sort of given up, and the sort of fervent Nazis who were determined to hold out and therefore kept back the rations, because they thought they might need them if they were going to continue the fight. So the ordinary German soldier was very short. They would dig out raw potatoes from the fields, collect apples, all-sorts, to try and get something to eat, and I think that once our Red Cross parcels had arrived, which they did in the early part of 45, they were actually worse off than we were. It does say something for the Germans that they never interfered with our Red Cross parcels. We all got them, they was absolutely amazing. I remember sausages, tins of sausages, most wonderful meaty sausages embedded in pork fat, we were so short of fat it was wonderful to have it. I mean, nowadays you just scrape it off and throw it away. It went into pastry and on bread, all-sorts.
Peter Cook, the boy whose parents were in India, was deported in 1941. There was a knock at the door one day about eight o鈥檆lock in the morning and the German said, 鈥淧eter Cook lives here?鈥� 鈥淵es.鈥� 鈥淗e is to be down at the docks with one suitcase by twelve o鈥檆lock this morning and he is going to be deported to Germany.鈥� He was about fifteen or sixteen. We had to pack up something for him with as much food and one thing or another as we could; he went off and spent the rest of the war, not in a concentration camp, but in an internment camp. I think there were 2,000 altogether from the Channel Islands who were deported. It seemed a very random choice, in fact, my father鈥檚 head of department went from the college but my father wasn鈥檛 deported. They weren鈥檛 sort of mistreated, it wasn鈥檛 an extermination camp, and they all survived all right, but of course they were very deprived and short of food. I can remember Peter writing to us, asking please send some toilet paper, they hadn鈥檛 got that, and please send some sugar. We did what we could; he was able to write to us on a form every so often. I think they did what they could there to continue their education; the older men who went taught the younger ones. So my mother only had the three of us for the majority of the time, but that was a struggle enough.
Mind you we had an awful lot of fun, because we made our own fun. We had a big gang of us who used to meet in the country every weekend. We used to cycle up, about seventeen of us in all. Kate鈥檚 mother was a widow and lived with her mother, who was also widow, known as Gran; they were very, very long suffering. They lived in this big Regency house, with a little bit of a farm at the back, which was getting more and more dilapidated as time went on. We used to have our own sitting room there with wicker chairs and we used to collect wood to light a fire, we all took up our own tea and sandwiches.
We used to play hockey on roller-skates in the winter a lot of the time; there was no traffic on the road only the milk lorry; so up and down, up and down we skated. In the summer we would roam the countryside or we would play tin-pot monkey, you know, kicking the tin out of the circle and chasing one another. Sometimes the boys made carts and went down the hill, whizzing round the bend at the bottom, we used to spread earth so they could skid round better. We鈥檇 dam the streams, climb trees and we used to put on shows and invite all and sundry to come and see them. How we had the nerve I don鈥檛 know. People came to see us put on these shows, how they got there I don鈥檛 know because there were no cars, but they turned up and dutifully sat through it all. The boys had to crawl behind the sofa and stuff hankies in their mouths because they thought it was so hilarious. We鈥檇 dress up in our mothers鈥� evening dresses, sing duets and play the piano. It was an absolute hoot you know without intending to be.
We used to run our own magazine as well. We used to produce that with a monthly serial all about the boys in the gang, the boys used to avidly read it to see what they鈥檇 be up to next. We would twist people鈥檚 arms to get copy. We used to get people like our English mistress to write us a short story, or P猫re Ray, from the Society of Jesus, who wrote us a sonnet in French. We used to make up things like crossword puzzles and we also used to illustrate it by hand all the way through. I don鈥檛 know what happened to my copies, they got distributed over the years, various people borrowed them, and I鈥檝e completely lost all of them now. We used to have quite a lot of fun.
If we had a dance we used to sleep overnight, because there was a curfew at nine o鈥檆lock, the boys were in one attic, the girls in another. At Kate鈥檚 house the drawing room was opened up, the only time we were allow in there, and the music provided by a wind-up gramophone. My mother made me a dress out of an old velvet curtain for my first dance and she bought me a pair of brown lace-ups from the Exchange and Mart; she took a pair of my father鈥檚 and got a pair of these brown shoes, that鈥檚 the only pair of shoes I can remember having as new in the five years of war, they were not at all fashionable. Pauline and I used to share that dress and take it in turns to wear it on special occasions.
We ended the war, Pauline and I, in our winceyette pyjamas that we鈥檇 had when we were eleven. By the time we were sixteen-and-a-half we had a gap of six inches in between the top and the bottom, the ribbing round our wrists was up to our elbows and that around our ankles up to our knees! We were still in the same pyjamas.
Sometimes people gave my mother clothes for us and she cut them down and botched them. She did cut down a brown coat of hers for me, one of these l930s coats that just fastened with one button. She had to cut the bottom off to make it short enough and use the cut off material to make a belt. I do remember her being given a very bright, white dress with great big red splodgy flowers on, which she altered for me. Gran, up at Kate鈥檚, who was almost blind and wore great big bottle lenses, grabbed hold of me one day on the stairs and said, 鈥楰ate, what on earth are you wearing?鈥� She didn鈥檛 know me from her own granddaughter. But I was so desperate for anything new to wear that even this outrageous dress, cut down from somebody鈥檚 cast offs, I thought, well it鈥檚 something different, so I wore it.
My poor father ended the war with about one pair of shoes left; all his others were swapped. Fortunately, once we鈥檇 stopped growing it wasn鈥檛 so bad and we just had to manage with one pair. They did try making shoes out of wood, with wooden soles out of beech I think, but the trouble was they have no give in them; so all the pull was on the straps on the top, which kept pulling out of the soles and breaking. They really weren鈥檛 very successful or comfortable.
As I say, we did have a lot of fun as well; you have to make your fun. We lived in a beautiful island and we had our bikes, although we couldn鈥檛 go to the beach, at least we could cycle round the lanes if we wanted to, and I always enjoyed going to school, I liked school.
I think we were extremely lucky that we were the age we were, eleven to sixteen-and-a-half, we were just liberated in time to do our O-levels, we were a year late, but apart from that it didn鈥檛 really affect our education too badly. It meant we were able to go on, my best friend and I; we both went on to university after the war. The German occupation didn鈥檛 impinge on the adult part of our lives. I think the people who felt that they had wasted five years of their lives were much more likely to be people who were about eighteen or nineteen or in their early twenties.
I remember great excitement when we were liberated, we all just went down to the harbour, saw the ships riding out there and, of course, the forces landing, everybody was trying to shake their hands, kiss them and throw flowers. The Germans were marched out, very different from when they marched in, they were shabby and half starved. Although we were always very patriotic, and even to this day I don鈥檛 like to hear German spoken very much, and although we never doubted we would win the war in the end, we couldn鈥檛 help feeling sorry for the ordinary German soldiers caught up in it, very different from the Nazis. The ordinary German soldier probably didn鈥檛 particularly want to fight any more than anybody else did.
I think the children had the best of it. I think that as far as the adults were concerned it was probably a very different experience for them, because they not only had the deprivation and the worry, but they had the awful, sort of, boredom of it, day after day after day, very little to lighten the situation, it must have been real drudgery for them. My father, who was forty when the war broke out, had just managed to buy his first car, second-hand at eighty pounds, and then almost as soon as he had got it he had to give it up and go back to his bicycle. I thought that after having waited all those years for a car it was very hard that he had to give it up so soon. Every morning I can remember him eking out the butter by warming it and beating in the top of the milk to make it go further, and every time you spread it all the milk, the whey, came out on your bread. I can remember doing that every single morning of the war, trying to make the butter ration spread a bit further.
One advantage though was that we did have Jersey milk, which was something that was very useful, I used to milk every evening and bring back a pint of milk. It used to take me about twenty minutes to milk the cow, to get a pint of milk, it was real rich Jersey milk. What food we did have was certainly very organic and wholesome even if it was plain and rather boring.
The only thing about parties and dances was how disappointing the food was. It tended to be 鈥榙oorsteps鈥� [thick sandwiches] filled with things like mashed butter beans with a bit of curry powder in it; anything to give flavour, it was terribly funny really, no butter, just plain bread and mashed butter beans. It was a bit hard going even if you were hungry. I can remember being a bit disappointed with the eats at parties I went to, but we were lucky to get anything.鈥�

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