大象传媒

Unfortunately in a way, after about three months it was, the Germans decided they needed our school, so we had to move, and so half of the school went to Torteval School, and the other half went to St Saviours School, and I had to go to St Saviours School. I wasn鈥檛 too happy there, actually, because I was in a class lower than I had been at St Pierre du Bois School, and secondly, I think the teacher, the headmistress didn鈥檛 like me very much.
I always remember the first day there at school; I was given a brand new exercise book, so, eager to give a good impression, I was writing down in my best as the master was giving a dictation, The next day, the book was returned and that page had been torn out. Apparently, all the other children in the class were printing. So, the headmistress came in and she wasn鈥檛 too pleased, she gave me a good telling-off, struck me across the ears a few times, and forced me to go back to printing. However, two months later, and this is the one thing, only one thing I鈥檝e really been grateful to the Germans for, was the fact that they took over St Saviours School, which meant that I could leave!

I then went to Torteval School, where we were packed in like sardines. It鈥檚 a very small school and we were all in rows. If the person against the wall wanted to go to the toilet, everyone had to move out and let him or her out, and go back, and as they returned we all had to move out again!
My mother wasn鈥檛 too happy with the situation there, because I wasn鈥檛 doing an awful lot of work. All we were doing all day long was copying pictures out of a book. We all got very good at it, but it wasn鈥檛 going to be of much benefit to me in later life.

However, fortunately several parents, probably those whose children were in the same position, approached Brother Victor, who was the Director of Les Vauxbelets College to see if he would reopen the school, which he did. So my mother got me there. I always remember January 1942, we had to walk there because the snow was about this high on the roads, and you couldn鈥檛 walk through the airport; we had to walk all the way round. Anyway, there were twelve boys there when I got there and no girls! We got down to the usual type of lessons one would have been accustomed to, like Algebra, Trigonometry, English language, Literature, instead of copying out of books.

There was one interesting thing we used to do at Les Vauxbelets, they used to have a lot of cider apple trees at the Vauxbelets during the Occupation and they used to make cider, I think it鈥檚 the clockmakers who now have that particular building now. There was a large cider press there with a big vat, and the Brothers would crush the grapes. During the lunch hour when all the Brothers were having their lunch, some of us would go with our lunch tins and scoop up some of the cider and drink away. It didn鈥檛 take Brother Victor very long to realise that we were far less attentive in the afternoon than we had been in the morning, so he realised what had happened and he set one of his Brothers on guard duty, as it were. Anyway we did enjoy the cider for a few days!

After the war, my mother sent me to Elizabeth College. Seeing all these boys coming back from England who had probably had a far better education than I鈥檇 had, I was a bit worried that they would be miles ahead of me, and I鈥檇 be struggling. But fortunately at the first end of term report, I was halfway up the class, instead of halfway down. So that was a great relief on my part. I was doing that without chemistry and physics, and Latin, because those were the three subjects that we didn鈥檛 learn during the Occupation, so I was always very weak at those subjects.
FRED GALLIENNE

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