大象传媒

On May 8th we went to school as usual but by lunchtime the teacher told us we could all go home early because it was liberation. We were going to be liberated the next day, and that the war was over. But as a child it worried me, I was confused because we never went home early. But we started walking, and then we really got frightened because the bells started ringing, and we鈥檇 never heard the church bells being rung before. During the Occupation they weren鈥檛 rung, and we could hear St Peter鈥檚 Church and St Saviours, and we could hear the bells ringing. When we passed St Saviours Church, five or six of us all walked in, and there was quite a few people, but I don鈥檛 remember their names. Quite a few people were in church praying, obviously thanking God for the war being over.

We walked up to the front altar, turned round and came up by the side chapel and walked out again. Nobody told us anything, nobody asked us what we were doing; people were just praying. We walked in and we walked out, and made our way, and when we got to the bottom of Les Piques I met my father, and that was unusual because he never met us from school. But he was talking to the neighbours, and really that was how the news had got around. A few people would have had, may have had radios, or would have had knowledge of it, but on the whole in the country the people wouldn鈥檛. So if you got the news, you went to tell your neighbours, and that was exactly what he was doing. He was telling other people to make sure that they knew the news. I remember him talking for quite a long time, and I was getting fed up; I wanted to go home. But we walked back home.
MARGARET LE CRAS

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