大象传媒

My Life in Jersey during the occupation

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I have just been writing my life story when I heard that 大象传媒 might be interested in stories about people whom lived in Jersey during WW2鈥�.this is the part of my life. 鈥�.you might be interested.

Please excuse the bad grammer as this is my first attempt at writing in 68 years.

Reg Langlois

Growing up

In 1940 I was four years old and beginning to understand a lot of what was going on around me. My father was in bed, my mother was very worried and friends and family were calling at all hours. I remember a lot of shouting and arguing from which all I could make out was that we were going to move away somewhere. I later discovered that the friends and family were trying to persuade us to leave the island because the Germans were coming and my father would not have been able to work for them, had he been made to. However Dad had the final word. He said, " We are staying". Mum had
started packing and crying all at once. She just wanted to do what was best for everybody and did not want to go either.

I have no memory of the Germans arriving in the island but I do recall them being here very well. One afternoon we were looking out over the fields from my father's room watching the German soldiers going around doing their exercises. They were running, jumping and crawling about on the muddy ground, leaping over low walls and climbing over high ones, when one of the German soldiers had the bright idea of using a wooden
barrel he had found nearby to help them over a very high wall. It worked well until some twenty odd soldiers had passed over the wall with the help of the barrel but, with only
two or three men to go, the barrel started to collapse, the bottom gave way and the next man trying to get over disappeared inside. We were too far away to see if they were laughing but fortunately they could not see us doubled up with laughter.

Unusual transport

Transport was something to remember. My father's back problem had been improving when he managed to find a very heavy bicycle somewhere. As before the occupation he had always used a car, he must have found this kind of transport very hard work. As we were only permitted to use our tractor for farm work, he made a luxury trailer for my sister and myself to tow us behind his bicycle. The body of the trailer was made from a heavy cabin trunk and the big fat wheels and tyres came off a couple of large wheelbarrows.
One fine day, my father, very proud of his invention, took us in the new trailer for its
maiden journey. Only a couple of miles on its test run we were on the way home when he must have lost concentration for a split second and hit the curb pretty hard. We bounced around like a ball because of the big balloon tyres and turned right over tipping us out onto the hard pavement. Strangely enough I can remember that incident as if it was yesterday.

In 1941, when I was five and my sister three and a half, we were on the move again.We moved to another farm where, this time, the soil was very good. It was well drained and had better shelter from the cold Easterly winds. This was Stirling Castle Farm whose buildings dated from c.1590 - a wonderful place where everything was small, even the only toilet around the corner behind the house. Compared to Sion Hall this was a dolls house and I have many good memories of this farm. The farmhouse is situated halfway up the side of a valley and the land branches away from it. Near the house we had glass frames to bring on young plants and on the larger fields we grew wheat and oats for the cattle and for
making bread. We also kept cows for milking.

Germans everywhere

There were German soldiers everywhere, probably because it was a valley and it gave them plenty of shelter from RAF or USA aircraft flying overhead. Although it was forbidden to collect leaflets off the ground, my mother used to find it satisfying to get them before the Germans did and collect arms full of paper and silver foil. Every time we harvested our crops we had by law to hand over a large amount to the Germans, at least half I think. One day the Germans turned up in the yard with a very heavy wagon drawn by two very large shire-type horses to collect the straw that was due to them. They set about in a
very business like way loading the wagon and the load got higher and higher with a man working by stacking the straw squarely on the top, when suddenly the horses who had been standing very still took fright and suddenly moved, dislodging the man on the top of the load, he must have fallen at least fifteen feet onto the cobbled yard on his head,blood was pouring out all around his head.Without hesitation my mother dashed indoors and got a bowl of water with Dettol and offered to clean the man's head. The officer in charge pushed her out of the way, tipping the bowl at the same time and proceeded to clean the mans head with a news paper. My mother was even more upset when she saw the
damage on the man's head yet she was not allowed to help in any way. The man was taken onto the road and had to wait until the soldiers had finished loading before being taken off for treatment. Throughout the occupation she never forgave the Germans for the treatment they gave to that man.

Being a youngster during the occupation was not as bad as it was for adults. They were always looking around for things on which to survive . People living in the town found it hard. They would come out to the farms to glean after the wheat had been cut in the fields, that is picking the corn by hand off the ground to make bread. I would give them a little hand but my fingers became sore when the freshly cut stalks cut into them as I reached for the corn on the ground.

A German ...my friend

I was playing in the fields one day when a German soldier turned up with a spade to do
some digging. I remember that he gave me a grin and offered me the spade and, when I shook my head, he grinned again. I thought that I had made a friend. He looked about the garden for a while and started walking towards the farmhouse. I followed my new friend and stayed nearby when he started digging on high ground near a pathway close to the house. He must have been there a long time because he had dug a hole as big as a table. It was so deep that, from where I was standing, I couldn't see the bottom.
When I think about it now, he had done a fine job of making a neat hole with straight sides and he had even cleaned up the soil that he had taken from the hole. As my new friend could not speak my language, when I asked him why he had dug the hole he just grinned again and, when he had finished, he shook my hand and went. I never saw him again although I sat near the hole for several days waiting for him to come back.
Fed up I went in doors and told my mother about him. She said that he seemed a nice man. I asked her how she knew and she said that she had been looking through the window all the time whilst he had been digging that hole. (She called it a"dug out"). Nobody came near it for weeks so, bit by bit, I took it over. I dug steps into the sides and put bamboo canes close together on the top to make a roof. Out of bits and pieces, door knobs, nails, tin cans and so on, I could turn that hole into anything
I wanted - a plane, a tank or even a submarine. My new friend had given me the best present I had ever had. I heard my father telling someone once that he reckoned the German had dug that hole near the pathway and close to the house just for me.

Grandpa hiding

I asked my father one day what the noise was coming from in the loft and he said that it was probably a mouse or perhaps a bird that had got caught up there. He went up to take a look and came down saying that he could not see anything
and he was sure that it was not a bird. A few days later I heard the noise again. I thought it was a mouse but I said nothing this time or other times when I heard it. We had a lot of mice around the farm and they did not appear to do any harm. It was only at the end of the occupation that I discovered that Grandpa Hodgetts had spent three weeks up in our loft in the dark. He had been born in Birmingham
in England and, had he been found, he would have been deported to Germany with all the other English people here.

I remember Grandpa Hodgetts cultivating a patch of about thirty perch at the farm. He spent many hours on his plot, as he wanted to be self- sufficient, which was a credit to him. He grew five perch of potatoes and twenty-five perch of tobacco. The family considered he had his priorities right. When Grandpa cultivated the
tobacco crop, he bundled the giant leave together and hung them up in the rafters
around the farm buildings to dry. He then placed them in a homemade press which was only about eighteen inches long and five inches wide. It had a lump of wood on the top of it to squeeze the juice out of the leaves. I can just see grandpa now tightening the screw down bolts every day with loving care. During the ccupation, lighter fuel was non-existent and matches were hard to find so you either had to do without or think up means of igniting your home-grown cigarettes or pipes. Grandpa had a friend in the motor trade who came up with
the idea of using a four-cylinder impulse magneto which, by joining all the leads, produced a longer spark that worked well. Grandpa had the idea of using a tin with a hole in the lid with a piece of window sash cord through it as a wick. The oil in the tin came from many sources such as used engine oil, fish oil, and chicken fat and sometimes all three. I shall never forget the horrible smells of the burning oil and of grandpa's pipe.

War Time Dances

Can you imagine a house with its own ballroom? At Sion Hall that was to be expected. The huge room with a proper dance floor also had a long conservatory leading off it which was filled with geraniums. During the occupation, not only
those who lived nearby, but people from all over the island came to the dances, which were held every two weeks. The music came from either a wind-up gramophone or, better still, a live band, though I do not remember who made up the band. The dances started fairly early in the evening as the dancers would have to be back home before curfew at about nine o'clock Those people living a fair distance from Sion Hall must have had difficulty dodging the German patrols if they left the dances too late. I would sit on the window ledge three stories up, with my legs overhanging the sill, waving to the people going home. It was some time before my parents found out what I was doing, while my sisters were asleep in their beds. We were supposed to have had a young woman looking after us while the dance was on but she must have joined them.

New tyres

I remember the time I painted my bicycle with old paint that I had found in a shed.
I mixed together a little out of each tin I found and it came out a sort of grey-pink.
A couple of weeks later I asked Grandpa Hodgetts, my sign writer grandfather, why the paint on my newly-painted bicycle was still soft and sticky. He said that I should have mixed the paint in the cans before using it and that I must have only used the top of the paint with the linseed oil. He offered to repaint my it but I said, "No thank you. I will wait for it to dry." Grandpa smiled. He knew better.
I can remember my father putting new tyres on my bicycle. They were made of rubber hose pipe which he wrapped around the wheels, threading a length of thick wire through the hose and tightening it with a pair of pliers to keep the tyres on. When I was on my bicycle I could count the number of time the wheel turned because, each time, there was a small bump where there was a join in the hose. Sion Hall had its own electricity plant-110 volts. The family had to be careful not to turn on too many lights at one time to avoid burning out the complete system.
The Lister single cylinder engine had a large and very heavy flywheel and took two men to start it. They would crank up the starting handle into the right position, take a deep breath, shout GO and swing that handle as fast as they could. It did not always start but, when it did, all the lights that been left on would come on as if it was daylight. No one was allowed in that engine room and no one was
allowed to smoke anywhere nearby. When I peeped through the doorway one day, I saw rows of glass tanks with wires going from one to the other. They made strange, fizzing sounds that puzzled me as I could not understand what
was going on. Even the clocks on the walls bore no resemblance to those I saw in our house. What a mad world when you are young!

The fire.

One night we were over at grandpa's house with a few cousins, aunts and uncles having a noisy party, as was usual when we were all together, when there was a loud banging and shouting at the back door. Dad and Grandpa rushed outside, calling over their shoulders: "Get out of the house! The shed is on fire.鈥� Without any hesitation, Grandma Langlois took charge as she did in any emergency, though not usually as worrying as this. We were herded out of the house through the front door and into the garden, where she made sure that we were all together. We could not stay there as huge lumps of burning straw were blowing over the house and over our heads. We had to run across the road and up into the field to get out of danger. The noise coming from the direction of the fire was horrendous. It was difficult to hear anyone speaking.

The smell from that fire was unforgettable and indescribable. We must have sat for some considerable time in that field by the light of the fire, when my father came across the field to tell us we would not be able to go back into the house as there was a danger the sparks could set it alight. We had to go up to Uncle
Jim's farm at Val Poucin, about half a mile away over the brow of the hill.

We spent two or three days with Uncle Jim and Aunt Dorrie who let us do whatever we wanted. We had almost forgotten about the fire at Sion Hall until Dad came up to take us back home. Although it was close to home, we had
not been able to see or smell the fire from Uncle Jim's farm. It was only as we were walked along the yard behind Sion Hall that the smell of the smoke and the heat of the fire made me feel ill. Suddenly, I stopped feeling ill when we were confronted by a German soldier standing about fifty yards from the fire.
He must have been warm from the heat of the dying embers. My father said that he had been there since the day before because he had had instructions from his commander to keep everyone away from the and he was not going to move for anyone. He saluted my father as we passed him. There were water pipes everywhere and, when I was told that the fire engine was coming back to
collect them, I realised what I had missed. "That would have been even more
than exciting than the fire!" Suddenly an enormous explosion from the centre of the damped down fire shook the whole area. It erupted like a volcano with straw, bamboo canes, timber, steam being hurled up into the air. As Dad and I hurried away, someone called out, "the fire engine is on its way back". The fire
ignited itself many times over the following three weeks and I would only have to throw a stone into the ashes for it to ignite again. The German guards only stayed for a week, changing duties twice a day.

On one occasion when the German guard had left, I was on my own near the fire, fascinated by its bluish colour as it spread across the top of the hard crusty charcoal embers, when suddenly a blue flame shot out like a tongue. It began to lick the bottom of one of the railway lines that had been used for supporting the roof of the shed. I watched it for a few minutes and could not believe my eyes.
The upright was falling down and that tongue of fire had cut through the metal. For weeks after the fire had dampened down, family and friends dug large deep holes and buried the burnt out electric motors and tools and anything else that
the Germans might have seen. Luckily the German guard had stayed at his post at all times and had not seen what was lying in the ashes. Had he seen the burnt out motors or the charred carcasses of pigs, he would have reported us and the Langlois family would have been on their way to Germany.

Ours was the biggest farm fire during the occupation. For years after the occupation, my grandfather Langlois would tell his friends how he had lost one million new bamboo canes, hundreds of bales of hay, boats, a car and two
lorries, some owned by others, that were hidden behind the straw and the stacks of bamboos. There were a couple of dozen large electric motors that the Germans would have liked to get their hands on, as well as a load of
tools and tons of nails that were to be used for making tomatoes packing boxes. Hidden in the shed from the Germans was a complete mill for grinding wheat and corn. Thankfully, I was not told about the sixty pigs that had perished in the fire while they were hidden from the Germans in soundproofed pens well-screened from prying eyes.

Another fire

The hotel fire at the Palace Hotel at Mont Millais in 1945 was thought to have been started deliberately by anti-Nazis causing an explosion in the cordite store. It was the worst fire that Jersey saw during the occupation.
I understand German naval students used the hotel. As I returned to school the following afternoon, I heard small explosions and saw soldiers picking up things in the surrounding fields and gardens and putting them in sacks. There were craters all over the area as if there had been an earthquake. To this day I do not know what they were collecting with such urgency.

Oasis

Sion Hall was a wonderful home. It was a fun place,, always open to family and friends with people dropping in all the time. Thinking about it now, it seemed to be an oasis in another world. Germans were everywhere on the
island but I do not remember them coming around our home. Every half mile or so they had built look-out posts, some up trees, some built into walls. There were ammunition dumps and fuel dumps and just about everything you could imagine. The German soldiers used fields as if they owned them, they drove about in tanks, they rode and pulled wagons with horses, they did their manoeuvres but the only time they ever came on to our land was to erect tall steel or concrete posts with thick wire on the tops to prevent enemy aircraft from landing. Grandpa Langlois and my father considered them a hazard when they ploughed the fields so they removed them. They cut the wires, pulled the ten feet or so long posts down and dragged them into deep
trenches that they had made earlier. Sion Hall was a very large building, the type the Germans might well have requisitioned for their own use so I could never understand why they did not.

Our farm was not very active during the last two years of the occupation. I think that we must have just been ticking over, growing small amounts of produce such as wheat, green crops, root crops and sugar beet. Sugar beet was a new crop to the farm. It had many uses and I remember Grandma Langlois drying it in the AGA cooker for making tea as well as bottling it
as a sweet syrup for just about anything that needed sweetening. I did not much care for the sugar beet syrup but preferred her dried carrot tea. Grandma was always busy in the house. She had a large family to look after
as well as people calling in all the time. Although her children, two daughters and four sons, were married, the boys would often go along to Sion Hall to have a meal. One morning I remember the men were sitting around the huge kitchen table finishing their second breakfast of the day and putting the world
to rights, when there was a loud crash. Grandpa had gone over backwards in his chair, banging his head on the wall behind him. Fortunately he had only dented his pride and his sons were all falling about laughing. It was his habit to lean backwards in his chair to relax and talk after his meal and he was a heavily built man, six feet tall and weighing about two hundred and thirty pounds. Grandma had called out to him not to lean back, but it was too late. The day before, without telling him, she had moved the large dresser he used to lean
against to do some decorating.

Collected Uncle Ed from prison

I cannot remember the date but I do remember going to the town prison where Uncle Ed was being held because he had broken the law. He had sold or given an outboard motor to a group of young men so that they could escape
from the island. They were only a short distance from the shore, when the German soldiers had fired on them. They were captured and questioned and, under pressure, they told the Germans where they had obtained the motor.
Whilst in prison the family was allowed to take in food. Grandma Langlois considered that her son needed fattening, so she made sure that he had plenty of food. She made enough pies to feed Uncle Ed and half the prisoners. There were no half measures with Grandma. The horse cart was full to bursting with the Langlois family when we set off to fetch Uncle Ed. It had a wagon style cover over it and Duke and Pineau, our two farm horses, pulled it with ease
along the flat road though they were not too happy when we reached the cobbled road inside the prison. They jumped around a bit but soon settled down when we stopped. With Uncle Ed on board and everyone cheering, the horses
decided that they had had enough of the cobbled roadway between high granite walls and took off at the gallop for home. To onlookers it must have looked like a scene from the gold rush days.
Red Cross-parcels

Towards the end of the occupation the Red Cross sent parcels to Jersey on a ship called the Vega. My father used to take me along with him with Duke the horse and cart to collect the Red Cross parcels for the local shops. They
arrived just in time for the population, many of whom were suffering from malnutrition. The parcels contained mostly tinned goods such as Klim, which was a powdered milk, Maple butter, syrup, prunes and chocolate - food no one had seen for years.

The Radio, 8th May 1945.
I will never forget the day the adults started acting strangely, dancing and calling out to each other. I was playing in the back yard when my father called me indoors to listen to the wireless. "What's a wireless?" I asked. He was indoors by then so I hurried in to join the family. In all the excitement I remember there was a lot of laughing and crying and everyone was hugging each other. My father stood over by the fire place with a strange piece of equipment in his hand that I had
never seen before. It was attached to a dark coloured box-shaped thing on the floor and had wires attached to something I recognized as a battery. Sounds and voices came from it and my father told everyone to be quiet because
Winston Churchill was going to speak. You could have heard a pin drop as Dad said softly "we have waited a long time for this moment ". We heard the British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, say " our dear Channel Islands are also to be freed today." There was silence in the room. It was hard to
believe that the long war and the occupation of our islands were over. When I asked my father where the wireless had come from he explained that it
had been in the sitting room all the time, in a cupboard under the floor next to the fireplace. He went on to tell me that, when the Germans arrived in Jersey at the beginning of the occupation, they requisitioned his brand new Studebaker car but, before they took it away, he had very carefully removed the radio so
that it did not look as if there had ever been one. If they had caught him with a radio he would have been punished or, worse still, sent to Germany. Many detainees were sent to Germany from Jersey and never returned. They died
over there. My father's car was never returned to him but I have a memento - that radio is in my loft.

Infill

Over 67,000 mines were laid around the island, The Organization Todt used up to 6,000 slave workers, mainly Russians and Spanish Republicans. British Intelligence estimated the death rate amongst slave workers to be 40%. 1,200 people British-born islanders were deported to Germany. There were more than 140 attempts by islanders to escape - but it was extremely dangerous. Nine people drowned, 24 were imprisoned, and one was shot on the beach.
The Germans insisted that it was not their responsibility to feed the islanders, whilst Churchill was determined to let the Germans starve - even if this meant that the islanders starved too.

What a day! Liberation Day, 9th May.

The British troops liberated us the day after our neighbouring island Guernsey. It was well worth the wait. We were up very early that day and went out into the yard. My father was already there, cleaning the BSA three-wheeler, and my mother was busy tying red, white and blue material all around it. They told us to hurry and get ready as we were all going on the three-wheeler to see the British troops landing in the island. This was going to be exciting for we had never been on the truck together. My father had always insisted that the three-wheeler could only be used for farm work as we only had a small amount of petrol. He had bolted
a wooden rail around the back of the truck to keep us from falling off and must have worked all night to get ready. It was a fine, sunny day when Grandpa and Grandma Langlois waved us off as we drove out of the yard. We were so proud to have transport to take us to see the arrival of the British troops. To be honest I could not imagine what all the excitement was about until we reached the Longueville road where dozens of people were rushing towards the town and waving to us as we passed. We waved back and would have liked to have given them a lift, but the small three-wheeler could not carry any more. My father passed me the horn with the rubber balloon on the end of it. It made a lovely raspberry sound and we all took it in turns to blow it. As we approached the town, we had to slow right down because of the huge
crowd going towards the Harbour. It was very noisy with people calling out to each other, the music of gramophones coming from the houses, the blowing of our horn and the noises made by our exhaust silencer which had begun to split open.
I do not know how we managed to get through to the area by the Victoria Harbour, but I do remember looking on, fascinated, at the sight of the boats coming out of the water on wheels and driving up the slipway by the life boat station. We spent many hours cheering and watching the soldiers bringing equipment ashore. I had never heard such a cacophony of sound as I did that day from the crowds of people
and the vehicles. We moved to the front of the Pomme d' Or Hotel on the Esplanade where the crowds were at their noisiest. They were calling out to the British troops "throw more sweets" and every so often, as a shower of sweets was thrown into the air and over the crowds, there would be more cheering. The people had not seen sweets for over four years. We had stayed on the front for some time, making as much noise as everyone else, when my father said that we would go down towards First Tower to see the Landing Craft on the beach. As he had left the three-wheeler at the Victoria Harbour, because we would not have been able to drive through the crowds, we walked everywhere. We were almost carried by the crowds going in the same direction.

What a sight

As we walked along the Esplanade in the front of the Grand Hotel, we saw three enormous Landing Craft beached like whales about half way down the beach. There were huge trucks and jeeps parked up on the top of the beach and vehicles, small and large, going to and fro to the Landing Craft. Soldiers and sailors were everywhere. Right down at the water's edge, hundreds of men
in uniform were lining up to go onto the Landing Craft. These were German prisoners who were to be transported to England. By contrast to the cheering crowds we had just left behind on the Esplanade, everyone here was
quiet. You could have heard a pin drop as the people lined up along the sea wall to watch, only the distant sound of the trucks broke the silence.

Reflection

The people sitting along that sea wall might have been thinking about the nightmare they had just experienced for the last four years, about their loved ones, family and friends, from whom they had been separated for those four years or about the member of their family who died at home because he or she was diabetic and unable to receive treatment for it during the occupation.
They might have been thinking of seeing again the sons, the daughters or the husbands who had been called up or who had volunteered to join the services before the war. Some people just sat wondering what was going to happen next.

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