大象传媒

DISCLAIMER:
This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Phil Sealey of the Somerset County Museum Team on behalf of Margaret Lodge and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions

Part I
鈥淢y name is Margaret Lodge and I was living on the island of Jersey with my parents when war was declared. I remember, it must have been 1938 or possibly 1939, before war was declared, walking into our living room where somebody had left the wireless on and hearing, 鈥楽ieg Heil!鈥� 鈥楽ieg Heil!鈥� 鈥楽ieg Heil!鈥� repeated over and over again. Obviously a recording, I should think, from Germany and although I was only ten and completely on my own in the room I do recall thinking that it sounded ominous and that there was something not quite right about it.
At first, of course, the phoney war didn鈥檛 really have much effect at all. What really made a difference was when the Germans started over-running Belgium then turning into France and Paris fell, then of course people started panicking on the Channel Islands. Boats were laid on so that people could leave if they wanted to. This was a decision that people had to make for themselves as to whether they went or not.
My parents decided to stay. I think the major reason, to tell you the truth, was partly that my father鈥檚 job as a master at the boy鈥檚 college was our sole means of support. But also because my parents had invested everything they owned in building a bungalow which they did without a mortgage, and it would have meant walking out, just leaving our home, furniture and everything behind if they had gone.
My brother was ten, I was about eight, but we also had two children living with us whose parents were in the forces in India. Pauline was my age and her brother was about three years older, so there were four children in the family at the time.
When we regrouped at school I can remember that there were only about half the number of children left in school compared with before the evacuation. I think about one hundred and fifty of us stayed behind. Most of the teachers also left there were only two of the original staff that remained on the island, so we found that in September we had very much a scratch staff. Teachers were brought back out of retirement, some in their seventies, and others even in their eighties, I believe some were rather dragooned into teaching. There was a journalist who was persuaded to come and teach English, some others who had to teach subjects they weren鈥檛 really qualified for. There was a Spanish teacher who took us for history for instance, about which she really knew nothing at all, so it was very much a scratch education, apart from maths and French.
The Germans insisted we learnt German in school, our teachers begged us not to be bolshie and refuse to learn it out of misplaced patriotism, they were so afraid the Germans would put their own staff into the school and they didn鈥檛 want that, they preferred to teach us themselves. I do remember the Germans coming round on one occasion and we had to learn how to greet them correctly, grammatically. They came in their long coats, boots, hats and so on, but I can only remember them coming that once. One member of staff, who normally taught Spanish, taught us our German.
The only other things they insisted on were that we gave up our cars, our wirelesses and that we cycled on the right-hand side of the road. We had to changeover, which seemed very strange to begin with. Our car went and our wireless went, and of course there were very strict penalties if you were discovered keeping a wireless, we knew personally people who were deported to concentration camps and didn鈥檛 come back because of that.
The Germans dropped leaflets the day before they landed and we all had to put out the white flag, metaphorically; a sheet, or towels or something, but of course there was really no resistance. We didn鈥檛 have any altercations; Jersey is only a very small island, about eleven [miles] by five [miles]. So they arrived, really before anyone realized they had arrived and I heard first of all from a neighbour who said that at the bottom of our lane, where there was a small crossroads, there was a German soldier stationed. So I immediately took the dog for a walk to see what this creature looked like. And there sure enough he stood looking rather stupid, nobody else in sight, just hanging about in his uniform with his gun slung over his shoulder. I didn鈥檛 take any notice of him really, and he didn鈥檛 take any notice of me.
As far as school was concerned they did commandeer our school premises, took it over as a headquarters for, I think, dealing with all the slave labour that they had, they also put foreign workers in there. We had to be taught in a very small cramped hotel, we had our desks pushed right up against one another, and could only get into our places by walking over the chairs. It really was a squash to manage there at La Coie Hall. But as far as home was concerned life went on; it was rather dull and boring. There was very little entertainment of any sort, the main problem was the shortage of food and also the shortage of things like soap, washing powder, toothpaste and hair shampoo, all practically non-existent.
We were able to import a certain amount from France. We had a very peculiar sort of soap made mainly from sand and clay, very scratchy. It didn鈥檛 lather; you rubbed it on rather like clay and hoped for the best. I don鈥檛 remember having proper hair shampoo or toothpaste, and I certainly ended the war with brown teeth. I think people don鈥檛 realize what deprivation there is if you are short of soap and hot water, it can seem almost worse than being short of food.
We had fuel up to the last part of the war, but it was after France fell, after D-Day, that things became really very tight, we no longer had electricity or gas, none at all. We went all through the last winter with one bicycle lamp fixed up to some kind of dynamo, but it was too dim a light to read by. The bedrooms were pitch black because of the blackout up at the windows, and there was absolutely no heating at all unless you could scrounge a bit of wood from somewhere. But as everybody else was scrounging wood there wasn鈥檛 an awful lot to go round.
What we used to spend our evenings doing was grinding wheat in an old coffee mill. There was no bread ration but a farmer we knew had sown us a field of wheat. He cut it with a scythe, we stooked it, threshed it by hand and then we winnowed it ourselves. We had a sack of this corn and every day, in the evening, we took it in turns to try and grind it in this old hand coffee-grinder so that we had something to make a small loaf with, which we rationed between us. We also ground enough to make porridge for breakfast. It was rather nice bread. Of course, we used all the wheat and the wheat germ as well, and in fact I remember one of my mother鈥檚 main complaints after the war was that the very white bread we now had, she didn鈥檛 think was a patch on the bread we had made during the war. It was complete wholemeal bread and was probably much more full of nutrients than the over-white bread we had just after the war.
The other thing we had was a bit of belly-pork because the farmer we knew used to kill pigs on the quiet. The Germans were supposed to have the lion鈥檚 share of any pigs that were killed, so what he used to do was get in little pigs from way out in the country, smuggle them in, feed them up, kill the older ones and replace them with these new piglets he鈥檇 got so that the numbers tallied. But the pigs never got any bigger or fatter. Then having killed them, behind closed doors in the evening, very humanely and silently, they were scraped and washed, then whisked up to the attic of the farmhouse where they were strung up and opened up - everything was sort of distributed. We never had the good cuts, sometimes we had liver, that sort of thing, so we could make faggots. Occasionally we had half a pig鈥檚 head and used to make the most wonderful brawn, absolutely delicious, that was a real treat. We had belly-pork, potatoes, Jersey potatoes of course, and carrots, and in the evening for tea we had baked potatoes in their jackets, that is what we had everyday never any variation.
Because people didn鈥檛 have proper heating or anything to cook by, the States of Jersey set up communal kitchens, and they authorized the cutting down of trees to fire them with wood, so we had these wood-fired ovens, and everyone took along what they had, liked a tin of potatoes, to be baked. They would fire up the oven at a certain time in the evening, cook your meal for you and then you would go and collect it. My mother also used to bring home some of the hot ashes and put them in the fireplace but it wasn鈥檛 very successful. I can remember that they had a horrible sort of smell that used to smell the house out. They didn鈥檛 hold the heat for very long, I used to wonder whether it was worthwhile bothering! She used to carry them in a tin bucket; fortunately the kitchen was only a few hundred yards from us so she didn鈥檛 have very far to go.
My mother had four children to feed so I鈥檓 afraid she ended the war in bed having starved herself. We didn鈥檛 suffer, the adults suffered more than we did, we simply didn鈥檛 realize how much they were going without in order that we shouldn鈥檛 be damaged by malnutrition.
If you went near the coast you saw the notices 鈥楬alt Minen鈥� so you didn鈥檛 dare go down to the beach. We weren鈥檛 allowed to bathe and we weren鈥檛 allowed to fish of course, in case you used it as a means of escape. One or two people used to fish, they were conscientious objectors who lived on the island. I don鈥檛 know whether they [the Germans] thought they wouldn鈥檛 try to escape and fight. You see the idea was conscientious objectors wouldn鈥檛 take up arms on any side so perhaps they felt they were less likely to defect if they were allowed to go fishing. The fish didn鈥檛 come our way, they went to the Germans, and so we never ate fish at all during the war.
My parents certainly didn鈥檛 have a radio before the fall of France. Once France fell people felt very much safer having wirelesses, in fact the farmer we were friendly with used to make radios with 鈥榗ats whiskers鈥�, he sort of hid them in a pen or something like that. We had the news after the fall of France, towards the end my father actually had a map on the wall with pins showing the Russian advance in the east and the advance of the British and Americans in the west, we saw the gap closing between the two; this was up in broad daylight in our house. Well, there wasn鈥檛 an awful lot they could do to us at that stage. They couldn鈥檛 deport us anywhere, I think they were beginning to worry about their own skins, and were very wary of mistreating us in case the repercussions came on them as soon as they had lost.鈥�

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