Mr. LeBrun, a retired postman, told us the most unusual story of all. Some British ships took leave of the fleet in St. Peter Port and sailed a few miles north to St. Sampson’s Harbor. Crowds had gathered there, waiting to see the landing craft crash through the German anti-tank barriers and come up onto the beach. When the bay doors opened, out came not a platoon of uniformed soldiers, but one lone man, got up as a caricature English gent in striped trousers, a morning coat, top hat, furled umbrella, and a copy of yesterday’s Times clasped in his hand.
There was a split-second of silence before the joke sank in, and then the crowd roared—he was mobbed, clapped on the back, kissed, and put up on the shoulders of four men to be marched down the street. Someone screamed, “News—news from London herself,” and snatched the Times out of his hand! Whoever that soldier was, he was brilliant and deserves a medal.
When the rest of the soldiers emerged, they were carrying chocolates, oranges, cigarettes, tea bags to toss to the crowd. Brigadier Snow announced that the cable to England was being repaired, and soon they could be talking to their evacuated children and families in England. The ships also brought in food, tons of it, and medicines, paraffin, animal feed, clothes, cloth, seeds, and shoes!
There must be enough stories to fill three books—it may be a matter of culling. But don’t worry if Juliet sounds nervous from time to time—she should. It’s a daunting task.
I must stop now and get dressed for Juliet’s supper party. Isola is swathed in three shawls and a lace dresser scarf—and I want to do her proud.
Love to you all,
Sidney
From Juliet to Sophie
7th July, 1946
Dear Sophie,
Just a note to tell you Sidney is here and we can stop worrying about him—and his leg. He looks wonderful: tanned, fit, and without a noticeable limp. In fact, we threw his cane in the ocean—I’m sure it’s half-way to France by now.
I had a small supper party for him—cooked by me alone, and edible, too. Will Thisbee gave me The Beginner’s Cook-Book for Girl Guides. It was just the thing; the writer assumes you know nothing about cookery and writes useful hints—“When adding eggs, break the shells first.”
Sidney is having a grand time as Isola’s houseguest. They apparently sat up late talking last night. Isola doesn’t approve of small talk and believes in breaking the ice by stomping on it.
She asked him if we were engaged to be married. If not, why not? It was plain to everyone that we doted on one another.
Sidney told her that indeed he did dote on me; always had, always would, but we both realized we could never marry—he was a homosexual.
Sidney told me that Isola neither gasped, fainted, nor blinked—just gave him her good old fish eye and asked, “And Juliet knows?”
When he told her yes, I had always known, Isola jumped up, swooped down, kissed his forehead, and said, “How nice—just like dear Booker. I’ll not tell a soul; you can rely on me.”
Then she sat back down and began to talk about Oscar Wilde’s plays. Weren’t they a stitch? Sophie, wouldn’t you have loved to be a fly on the wall? I would.
Sidney and I are going shopping now for a hostess gift for Isola. I said she would love a warm, colorful shawl, but he wants to get her a cuckoo clock. Why???
Love,
Juliet
P.S. Mark doesn’t write, he telephones. He rang me up just last week. It was one of those terrible connections that forced us perpetually to interrupt one another and bellow “WHAT?” but I managed to get the gist of the conversation—I should come home and marry him. I politely disagreed. It upset me much less than it would have a month ago.
From Isola to Sidney
8th July, 1946
Dear Sidney,
You are a very nice house guest. I like you. So did Zenobia, else she would not have flown onto your shoulder and cuddled there so long.
I’m glad you like to sit up late and talk. I favor that myself of an evening. I am going to go to the manor now to find the book you told me about. How is it that Juliet and Amelia never made mention of Miss Jane Austen to me?
I hope you will come visit Guernsey again. Did you like Juliet’s soup? Wasn’t it tasty? She will be ready for pie crust and gravy soon—you must go at cooking slowly, else you’ll just make slops.
I was lonesome for company after you left, so I invited Dawsey and Amelia to take tea yesterday. You should have seen how I didn’t utter a word when Amelia said she thought you and Juliet were going to marry. I even nodded and slitted my eyes, like I knew something they didn’t, to throw them off the scent.
I do like my cuckoo clock. How cheery it is! I run in the kitchen to watch it. I am sorry Zenobia bit the little bird’s head off, she has a jealous nature—but Eli said he could carve me another one, as good as new. His little perch still pops out on the hour.
With fondness, your hostess,
Isola Pribby
From Juliet to Sidney
9th July, 1946
Dear Sidney,
I knew it! I knew you’d love Guernsey. The next-best thing to being here myself was having you here—even for such a short visit. I’m happy that you know all my friends now, and they you.
I’m particularly happy you enjoyed Kit’s company so much. I regret to tell you that some of her fondness for you is due to your present, Elspeth the Lisping Bunny. Her admiration for Elspeth has caused her to take up lisping, and I am sorry to say, she is very good at it.
Dawsey just brought Kit home—they have been visiting his new piglet. Kit asked if I was writing to Thidney. When I said yes, she said, “Thay I want him to come back thoon.” Do you thee what I mean about Elspeth?
That made Dawsey smile, which pleased me. I’m afraid you didn’t see the best of Dawsey this weekend; he was extra-quiet at my supper party. Perhaps it was my soup, but I think it more likely that he is preoccupied with Remy. He seems to think that she won’t get better until she comes to Guernsey to recuperate.
I am glad you took my pages home to read. God knows I am at a loss to divine just what exactly is wrong with them—I only know something is.
What on earth did you say to Isola? She stopped in on her way to pick up Pride and Prejudice and to berate me for never telling her about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Why hadn’t she known there were better love stories around? Stories not riddled with ill-adjusted men, anguish, death, and graveyards! What else had we kept from her?
I apologized for such a lapse and said you were perfectly right, Pride and Prejudice was one of the greatest love stories ever written—and she might actually die of suspense before she finished it.
Isola said Zenobia is saddened by your leaving—she’s off her feed. So am I, but I’m so grateful you could come at all.
Love,
Juliet
From Sidney to Juliet
12th July, 1946
Dear Juliet,
I’ve read your chapters several times, and you are right—they won’t do. Strings of anecdotes don’t make a book.
Juliet, your book needs a center. I don’t mean more in-depth interviews. I mean one person’s voice to tell what was happening all around her. As written now, the facts, as interesting as they are, seem like random, scattered shots.
It would hurt like hell to write this letter to you, except for one thing. You already have the core—you just don’t know it yet.
I am talking about Elizabeth McKenna. Didn’t you ever notice how everyone you interviewed sooner or later talked about Elizabeth? Lord, Juliet, who painted Booker’s portrait and saved his life and danced down the street with him? Who thought up the lie about the Literary Society—and then made it happen? Guernsey wasn’t her home, but she adapted to it and to the loss of her freedom. How? She must have missed Ambrose and London, but she never, I gather, whined about it. She went to Ravensbrück for sheltering a slave worker. Look how and why she died.
Juliet, how did a girl, an art student who had never held a job
in her life, turn herself into a nurse, working six days a week in the hospital? She did have dear friends, but in reality she had no one to call her own at first. She fell in love with an enemy officer and lost him; she had a baby alone during war time. It must have been fearful, despite all her good friends. You can only share responsibilities up to a point.
I’m sending back the ms and your letters to me—read them again and see how often Elizabeth is spoken of. Ask yourself why. Talk to Dawsey and Eben. Talk to Isola and Amelia. Talk to Mr. Dilwyn and to anyone else who knew her well.
You live in her house. Look around you at her books, her belongings.
I think you should write your book around Elizabeth. I think Kit would greatly value a story about her mother—it would give her something to hang on to, later. So, either quit altogether—or get to know Elizabeth well.
Think long and hard and tell me if Elizabeth could be the heart of your book.
Love to you and Kit,
Sidney
From Juliet to Sidney
15th July, 1946
Dear Sidney,
I don’t need more time to think about it—the minute I read your letter, I knew you were right. So slow-witted! Here I’ve been, wishing that I had known Elizabeth, missing her as if I had—why did I never once think of writing about her?
I’ll begin tomorrow. I want to talk to Dawsey, Amelia, Eben, and Isola first. I feel that she belongs to them more than the others, and I want their blessing.
Remy wants to come to Guernsey, after all. Dawsey has been writing to her, and I knew he could persuade her to come. He could talk an angel out of Heaven if he chose to speak, which is not often enough to suit me. Remy will stay with Amelia, so I get to keep Kit with me.
Undying love and gratitude,
Juliet
P.S. You don’t suppose Elizabeth kept a diary, do you?
From Juliet to Sidney
17th July, 1946
Dear Sidney,
No diary, but the good news is she did draw while her paper and pencil lasted. I found some sketches stuffed into a large art folio on the bottom shelf of the sitting-room bookcase. Quick line drawings that seem marvelous portraits to me: Isola caught unaware, hitting at something with a wooden spoon; Dawsey digging in a garden; Eben and Amelia with their heads together, talking.
As I sat on the floor, turning them over, Amelia dropped by for a visit. Together we pulled out several large sheets of paper, covered with sketch after sketch of Kit. Kit asleep, Kit on the move, on a lap, being rocked by Amelia, hypnotized by her toes, delighted with her spit bubbles. Maybe every mother looks at her baby that way—with that intense focus—but Elizabeth put it on paper. There was one shaky drawing of a wizened little Kit, made the day after she was born, according to Amelia.
Then I found a sketch of a man with a good, strong, rather broad face; he’s relaxed and appears to be looking over his shoulder, smiling at the artist. I knew at once it was Christian—he and Kit have a cowlick in exactly the same place. Amelia took the paper into her hands; I had never heard her speak of him before and asked if she had liked him.
“Poor boy,” she said. “I was so set against him. It seemed insane to me that Elizabeth had chosen him—an enemy, a German—and I was frightened for her. For the rest of us, too. I thought that she was too trusting, and he would betray her and us—so I told her that I thought she should break off with him. I was very stern with her.
“Elizabeth just stuck out her chin and said nothing. But the next day, he came to visit me. Oh, I was appalled. I opened the door and there was an enormous, uniformed German standing before me. I was sure my house was about to be requisitioned and I began to protest when he thrust forward a bunch of flowers—limp from being clutched. I noticed he was looking very nervous, so I stopped scolding and demanded to know his name.
‘Captain Christian Hellman,’ he said, and blushed like a boy. I was still suspicious—what was he up to?—and asked him the purpose of his visit. He blushed more and said softly, ‘I’ve come to tell you my intentions.’
“‘For my house?’ I snapped.
“‘No. For Elizabeth,’ he said. And that’s what he did—just as if I were the Victorian father and he the suitor. He perched on the edge of a chair in my drawing room and told me that he intended to come back to the Island the moment the war was over, marry Elizabeth, raise freesias, read, and forget about war. By the time he was finished speaking, I was a little in love with him myself.”
Amelia was half in tears, so we put the sketches away and I made her some tea. Then Kit came in with a shattered gull’s egg she wanted to glue together, and we were thankfully distracted.
Yesterday Will Thisbee appeared at my door with a plate of cakes iced with prune whip, so I invited him to tea. He wanted to consult with me about two different women; and which one of the two I’d marry if I were a man, which I wasn’t. (Do you have that straight?)
Miss X has always been a ditherer—she was a ten-month baby and has not improved in any material way since then. When she heard the Germans were coming, she buried her mother’s silver teapot under an elm tree and now can’t remember which tree.
She is digging holes all over the Island, vowing she won’t stop till she finds it. “Such determination,” said Will. “Quite unlike her.” (Will was trying to be subtle, but Miss X is Daphne Post. She has round vacant eyes like a cow’s and is famous for her trembling soprano in the church choir.)
And then there is Miss Y, a local seamstress. When the Germans arrived, they had only packed one Nazi flag. This they needed to hang over their headquarters, but that left them with nothing to run up a flag pole to remind the Islanders they’d been conquered.
They visited Miss Y and ordered her to make a Nazi flag for them. She did—a black, nasty swastika, stitched onto a circle of dingy puce. The surrounding field was not scarlet silk, but babybottom-pink flannel. “So inventive in her spite,” said Will. “So forceful!” (Miss Y is Miss Le Roy, thin as one of her needles, with a lantern jaw and tight-folded lips.)
Which did I think would make the best companion for a man’s nether years, Miss X or Miss Y? I told him that if one had to ask which, it generally meant neither.
He said, “That’s exactly what Dawsey said—those very words. Isola said Miss X would bore me to tears, and Miss Y would nag me to death.
“Thank you, thank you—I shall keep up my search. She is out there somewhere.”
He put on his cap, bowed, and left. Sidney, he may have been polling the entire Island, but I was so flattered to have been included—it made me feel like an Islander instead of an Outlander.
Love,
Juliet
P.S. I was interested to learn that Dawsey has opinions on marriage. I wish I knew more about them.
From Juliet to Sidney
19th July, 1946
Dear Sidney,
Stories of Elizabeth are everywhere—not just among the Society members. Listen to this: Kit and I walked up to the churchyard this afternoon. Kit was off playing among the tombstones, and I was stretched out on Mr. Edwin Mulliss’s tombstone—it’s a table-top one, with four stout legs—when Sam Withers, the cemetery’s ancient groundskeeper, stopped beside me. He said I reminded him of Miss McKenna when she was a young girl. She used to take the sun right there on that very slab—brown as a walnut she’d get.
I sat up straight as an arrow and asked Sam if he had known Elizabeth well.
Sam said, “Well—not as to say real well, but I liked her. She and Eben’s girl, Jane, used to come up here together to that very tombstone. They’d spread a cloth and eat their picnic—right on top of Mr. Mulliss’s dead bones.”
Sam went on about what catbirds those two little girls were, always up to some mischief—they tried to raise a ghost one time and scared the daylights out of the vicar’s wife. Then he looked over at Kit, who’d reached the church gate by then and said, “That’s surely a sweet little girl of hers and Captain Hellman’s.”
I
pounced on that. Had he known Captain Hellman? Had he liked him?
He glared at me and said, “Yes, I did. He was a fine fella, for all he was a German. You’re not going to throw off on Miss McKenna’s little girl because of that, are you?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it!” I said.
He waggled a finger at me. “You’d better not, missy! You’d best learn the truth of certain matters, before you go trying to write any book about the Occupation. I hated the Occupation, too. Makes me mad to think of it. Some of those blighters was purely mean—come right into your house without knocking—push you around. They was the sort to like having the upper hand, never having had it before. But not all of them was like that—not all, by a long shot.”
Christian, according to Sam, was not. Sam liked Christian. He and Elizabeth had come upon Sam in the churchyard once, trying to dig out a grave when the ground was ice-hard and as cold as Sam himself. Christian picked up the shovel and threw his back into it. “He was a strong fella, and he was done as soon as he started,” Sam said. “Told him he could have a job with me anytime, and he laughed.”
The next day, Elizabeth came out with a thermos jug full of hot coffee. Real coffee from real beans Christian had brought to her house. She gave him a warm sweater too that had belonged to Christian.
Sam said, “Truth to tell, as long as the Occupation was to last, I met more than one nice German soldier. You would, you know, seeing some of them as much as every day for five years. Greetings were bound to happen.
“You couldn’t help but feel sorry for some of them—there at the last—stuck here and knowing their folks back home were being bombed to pieces. Didn’t matter then who started it in the first place. Not to me, anyway.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Page 16