When the Sky Fell Apart

by Caroline Lea

  ‘On fire? Clement Hacquoil?’

  ‘Yes. He looked like raw meat where he was burnt. You could see under his skin. All bones and blood, like in his butcher’s shop. I didn’t know people’s bodies looked like raw animals inside.’

  Maurice took a moment to realise she was waiting for a response. ‘Dreadful,’ he said. ‘So Clement’s in the hospital now?’

  ‘Yes. Some other people died too, I think. Everyone kept telling me to run along. They said the Germans had bombed the harbour. The whole army will be here any day. And they have guns. Real guns for killing people.’

  The girl’s eyes were wide and her voice trembled a little with the horror of it but her words were bleak and merciless.

  ‘Do you think the Germans will kill us all in our beds? Or bomb us again?’

  Poor Clement. It was unimaginable. He’d seen him just the day before. Bought some chicken livers from him, for a good price too.

  ‘No, of course not,’ he said.

  Claudine shrugged and started to twist her hair around her finger, again and again.

  ‘Everyone else thinks so. And they all say women have to be very careful because the German men are like animals. I hope they aren’t. I hope nobody else is killed.’

  Her eyes shone with sudden tears.

  Maurice flapped his hand towards her, unsure how to comfort her. He tried to make his voice calm.

  ‘Now then, no one is going to kill us. Who’s been filling your head with this rot?’

  ‘It’s not rot, it’s the truth. Maman says so.’

  ‘Does she? And what about your papa? What does he say?’

  ‘Very little. Maman does most of the talking. He does a great deal of sitting. And he reads the newspaper. It’s a sad state of affairs. Everyone says so. He’s going to fight in the war, though. Will you go?’

  Her gaze was brilliant and direct—with a child’s intuition, she seemed to understand everything and yet nothing at all.

  ‘No, I, ah—I have my wife to care for. She’s…sickly.’

  They carried on filling in the holes together. By the time they were finished, it was nearly nightfall and a wet coldness was creeping in across the sea.

  Maurice turned to go back home, but the girl, to his horror, began to wade out into the water.

  ‘You’re not swimming now, surely?’ he called. ‘You should be getting home.’

  She didn’t turn around but carried on walking. ‘Maman says I’ve to bring home something for dinner, so I’m digging up cockles with my toes.’

  ‘That’s ludicrous! Go home, would you?’

  But she refused. In the end, the only way to persuade her to come out of the blasted water was by offering her some of his oysters. She came galloping out of the sea then, grinning and chattering beside him all the way up the hill.

  Again, Maurice found himself wondering if all children carried this strange mixture of ignorance and intelligence.

  The house was dark when they reached it and Maurice felt the familiar clutch of panic that always gripped him when he’d left Marthe alone.

  He stopped outside the door. ‘Just wait here, will you?’ Then he opened it a little and squeezed though the gap.

  Marthe lay where he had left her, eyes closed, breathing evenly. Maurice pressed his lips against her forehead, then picked her up and cradled her in his arms. The destruction he’d seen today had left him queasy: if the Germans would happily drop bombs on innocent fishermen and set the butcher on fire, what would that mean for him? For poor Marthe, who couldn’t protect herself?

  Suddenly he heard a voice: ‘What is wrong with her?’

  It was the girl, standing in his doorway and staring at Marthe.

  Maurice jumped. ‘Bloody hell, child! You scared the life out of me.’

  It had been so long since he’d let anyone see Marthe that he’d forgotten how she must look, with her thin arms and legs and her slack face.

  Claudine took a step forward. ‘Is she—?’

  Marthe began to groan and suddenly Maurice couldn’t stand it: the shock on the girl’s face, the horror in her eyes.

  So he snapped, ‘Wait here!’ and settled Marthe in the bedroom before ushering the girl out of the house and down the path to fetch her damned oysters.

  As they walked, Claudine prattled next to him: What was wrong with his wife? Why couldn’t she walk? How long had she been poorly?

  ‘Does it worry you,’ she asked, ‘that the Germans will hurt her?’

  He stopped walking. It was like being underwater—the silence. It filled the space between them so there was no room for words. It stole the breath from him, the helpless rage at the thought of them hurting his harmless, defenceless wife.

  ‘I shan’t let them. They shan’t lay a finger on her. I can promise you that.’

  His voice sounded hard, flat, like someone else’s.

  Claudine nodded. She looked very young, very small. Too young and too small to be on an island that was about to be invaded.

  Poor child.

  He made his voice bright and kind. ‘You must run along home. So, how many do you need?’

  He dug around in the hole where he stored the oysters and pulled a net from the water.

  Her face fell. ‘But…oughtn’t you throw oyster nets back into the sea? They belong to the French fishermen.’

  He grinned at her. ‘Yes, they do. Finest French oysters.’

  THE mood in the hospital ricocheted between despair and hysteria.

  Carter tried to remain calm, at least on the outside: no sense in pointless panic. But it was a challenge when the evidence of the Germans’ brutality lay within the chill walls of the building, moaning, writhing, dying.

  Carter sat by Clement Hacquoil’s bedside whenever possible. Despite the cold, he insisted the patient remain uncovered. His wounds had to be kept meticulously clean and clear of any layers, save the thinnest of gauze dressings, otherwise infection would set in. Septicaemia and death would follow.

  The poor chap shivered and moaned. The nurses who had to undertake his day-to-day care pleaded with Carter to allow him one blanket. Only one. He overheard one of the nurses calling him a callous so-and-so, but his ultimate concern was always for the patient’s survival. Very little to be gained by making the man more comfortable and killing him in the process.

  Carter tried to ignore the nurses’ glares, tried to remember that they were in a hell of a state about the Germans arriving—panicking about the merits of last-minute escape attempts. Some of them, he knew, were terrified about the possibility of becoming the victims of the sort of barbaric acts that had been perpetrated against women across the rest of Europe.

  Carter himself tried to remain level-headed: he remembered his father’s lectures on surviving the trenches in the Great War: ‘Tim, you must know that the only thing a panicking man earns is a bullet in his head.’

  And while in some ways Carter’s peaceful and nurturing career choice had perhaps been a way of avoiding the violent bravado that Father brandished like some sort of war decoration, he could see no gain in succumbing to the rising heat of hysteria that sparked with every mention of the German forces: fear only made bullies more powerful, after all.

  Besides, the locals were relying on him to be calm, even as the island was groaning under the weight of speculation. Every shop and pub full of whispering huddles, all with the same mood of revulsion, terror and excitement. In a place where the most shocking news was usually the theft of a prize milker, the pending invasion caused wild-eyed panic in many quarters, despite Carter’s attempts to quell it.

  The initial call for evacuation had been issued two weeks earlier, when the German forces reached Cherbourg in France and it became clear that Hitler had set his sights on the Channel Islands. Over half the island signed up, many of the hospital staff included, even as Carter pleaded with them to stay.

  In the end, to Carter’s relief, shame at leaving and loyalty to the island that had birthed them meant that far fewer le
ft—some 6500 people, and most of these were children or men of military age, keen to fight.

  Many saw the act of leaving as an impossibility. Something about the island, its sun-spangled beaches and wind-nibbled cliffs—it had moulded them, as surely as seismic shifts in the earth’s surface had carved the island from barren rock a hundred millennia ago. These people were a part of the landscape and the leaving of it seemed, for many of them, to represent a sort of rending.

  But still, the dread bubbled as the threat of invasion grew.

  A case in point occurred on the day after the bombings. At five o’clock that morning, three small aeroplanes had flown low over the island. Fearing another attack, the farmers milking their cows had run for cover. However, the aeroplanes did not deliver bombs but pieces of paper, relaying a clear message:

  Surrender, or be annihilated.

  Carter had learnt of all this at the hospital. He had been writing prescriptions and could hear the waiting area heaving with angry islanders—the overspill of bodies had surged into the corridor. It was mostly women, each in possession of an inordinate number of children. Everyone seemed to be crying.

  Carter clapped his hands for attention. But the noise went unheard. He tried raising his voice and calling for hush—to no avail. In the end, he was reduced to bellowing: ‘For God’s sake! Will you all hold your tongues and let’s have some quiet! There are patients sleeping on the wards. What the devil is going on here?’

  In the resulting silence, every pair of eyes in the room turned to glare at him.

  ‘Ladies, forgive me, please,’ he stammered. ‘But this behaviour is hardly helpful. What is the cause of all this upset?’

  The woman closest to him, with arms like thighs and broken thread veins across her cheeks, thrust a paper in front of his face.

  He blinked. ‘What is—?’

  The women all spoke up at once: ‘We need shelter.’

  ‘Sanctuary, isn’t it, Doctor?’

  ‘Walls like these could be hit by a bomb and you’d barely notice.’

  He held up his hands and quelled the first quiver of fear in his gut by reminding himself of the sensation of the ruler slapping down on his palms if his hands had ever trembled as a boy.

  Father’s bellow: Men don’t feel fear, Tim.

  Thinking of Father reminded Carter of why he could never return to England.

  He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and kept his voice level.

  ‘But if we are to surrender then we’ve nothing to fear from bombs. Your own homes will be as safe as within these walls. More comfortable too, I might add. We like to discourage our patients from outstaying their welcome.’

  No one smiled at his joke.

  ‘It’s all very well for you to have a laugh at our expense, Doctor,’ said a scowling, thin-lipped woman. ‘It’s us womenfolk will have to be watching ourselves. I’ll be finding my grand-maman’s high-collared dresses out of the attic, and no mistake.’

  ‘I’m sure you have nothing to dread. We mustn’t let the terror overwhelm—’

  This was clearly the wrong thing to say. The women all shouted out at once:

  ‘Who are you to tell us what to dread?’

  ‘There have been women raped in France!’

  ‘Would you be as calm if you feared for your own daughter, Doctor, for her modesty?’

  ‘He hasn’t children, Joan, remember?’

  ‘No wife either. Lives by himself.’

  ‘Does he now?’

  ‘How strange…’

  There was a pause in the tirade as they all turned to consider him. From their shared expression, he was found sadly wanting.

  The woman with the mottled red cheeks spoke up again.

  ‘In any case, we need shelter, Doctor. So we’ve come here because that’s your job, isn’t it? To help people? And now you are trying to throw us out. To heaven knows what. And with the children too. Now let us through!’

  Then the crowd grew ugly. The women started to shove their way past the nurses, who had gathered to block the way to the wards. The nurses tried to stand their ground but were quickly swamped and disappeared from sight behind the wall of angry flesh. A high-pitched wailing underscored the whole debacle, as more and more of the children began to cry.

  Suddenly there was a deafening shout: ‘Stop that! Now!’

  Carter jumped. It was one of the ward sisters, Madame Huelin—she stood behind the crowd, hands on her hips and thunder on her face to make even the broadest and stoutest of the farmers’ wives quail. There was silence, apart from the sobbing of a few of the younger children.

  Sister Huelin spoke calmly and clearly, but there was no questioning her tone.

  ‘Now, listen to me. It’s dreadfully frightening, and it’s clear that you need somewhere to shelter, but you cannot stay in the main hospital building. You may use the hospital basement for a short time, if it will make you feel safer. It is clean and secure and will provide plenty of space for you and the children. So if you’ll just follow Nurse Le Sueur, she’ll show you the way.’

  After they had flocked out, Carter took a shaky breath and smiled at Sister Huelin.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She gave him a measuring look—she thought him a bumbling fool, he could see that. He would have liked to explain how it felt to be an alien in the midst of a community where everyone had rubbed shoulders for generations.

  And now, with the threat of the Germans’ invasion, he was yet another type of stranger to them. Another foreigner, of questionable nature: they seemed to doubt that he had the same passions and fears as them, saw the world through the same eyes, felt it with the same trembling hands. He had a duty to remain calm but because of it, they thought him cold and inhuman. War had made him into, if not an enemy, then an outsider. But he knew Sister Huelin would never understand this if he tried to explain.

  ‘Well,’ she finally said, ‘they’ll feel safe down there. Although they’ve nothing to fear from bombs—we’ll be surrendering, I’m sure.’

  Carter rubbed his hands over his chin: a fine stippling of stubble when he was usually meticulous about appearances.

  ‘I believe you’re right,’ he said. ‘But what else can we do without English support?’

  ‘Ghastly business. Doctor, shouldn’t you have evacuated by now? You may still have time to be on that last boat from La Rocque. It leaves this morning.’

  ‘I thought that was a clandestine affair?’

  She laughed and for a moment he felt something like friendliness, a shared understanding. But then her gaze settled back into the cold, appraising look he was so accustomed to seeing in the eyes of the locals.

  ‘Nothing much stays hushed up on this island.’ She used the kindly tone one might employ with a slow-witted child. ‘You should know that by now. You’d best hurry if you’re after a spot. It’s that boat for you, or else heaven knows how long of living with the Bosche. I know what I’d choose, if I could.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you go, then?’

  She blinked, stony-faced. ‘I’m no rat, Doctor. I’m Jèrriais, born and bred. This is my home. I couldn’t leave it any more than I could abandon my own bones.’

  Carter felt a confusing tug of incomprehension and grief. He couldn’t imagine that sort of savage attachment to another place, or even to another person—the one memory of heat and warmth and love he had (other than for his poor dead mother) he had pushed firmly down until it might as well have happened to somebody else.

  EDITH lost count of the people crammed onto the little pier. Whole families clustered around one suitcase, which was all they could take with them. It was going to be a hot day, very little in the way of a breeze. It made for foul tempers all around, but at least those who were sailing would have a flat crossing.

  She’d brought along some ginger root just in case. Expensive imported stuff, but Edith had always tried to only charge what people could afford to pay. For some, with a gaggle of six children and with all their worldly belon
gings stuffed into one small burlap sack, that was precious little. Still, she wouldn’t stand for seeing children going off to sea without something to stop the sickness. No way of telling whom it would strike, either. Sometimes fishermen’s children were the worst.

  She handed out most of her supply. Hung on to a few pieces the size of her thumb in case any woman with a babe in her belly should need a ginger tea to settle the sickness.

  Most were thankful. Of course, a few turned up their noses and made the sign against evil behind their backs when they thought she wasn’t watching.

  It made her chuckle to imagine that some folk thought she had the devil’s magic in her fingers. She didn’t put stock in that mumbo jumbo. Lovely stories for children, to be sure, and the Bible was ever so good if she couldn’t sleep of a night, but that was about the measure of it for her. She’d rather trust in Mother Nature than put faith in a god who was supposed to have happily killed off hordes of his own children, not forgetting his only son.

  It was noted that she wasn’t at church of a Sunday—she heard folks twittering about it. Still, those who wanted her help came to find her; the rest of them could do as they pleased.

  She had some cod liver oil with her too, and a little St John’s Wort, which she gave to those who looked especially glum. Some of the men were leaving to join the army on the mainland. It wasn’t so many years ago that Jèrriais men had first swapped their pitchforks and fishing lines for guns and grenades and skipped off to fight the Germans in France. Half of them had stayed there for good.

  Frank.

  There was a compression within her chest whenever she thought of him, even after all these years. She remembered clinging around his neck; the shining gold on her new wedding band; the sour-wool smell of his uniform; the way her tears had stood like jewels on the stiff cloth, until he’d brushed them off, then turned to leave.