Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (17 page)

If such a sociable optimist as Jack Sauvary could question the fundamental ties holding people together, then it is a clear indicator of the strains on interpersonal relationships brought by the Occupation. The interpersonal lives of the Guernsey Islanders during the period were integral to the development of rhetorical resistance because the situational constraints of the Occupation molded resistance into a specific form. Insight into Islanders' private living conditions, their concerns to protect certain members of the community, and their heightened sense of threat as the death toll mounted explains their choice of a symbolic resistance utilizing private resources.

This chapter will begin with examining some of these stresses, many of which developed in the enclosed, pressure-cooker atmosphere of new living arrangements. Widespread evictions resulted in a necessity for communal living, while at the same time, the nightly curfew, the lack of transportation, and the absence of evacuated/deported friends and family hindered broader socializing. What resulted was paradoxical in some ways: too much enforced proximity with others interwoven with feelings of isolation and loneliness. Stress over personal living situations often was traded for a more disinterested concern for several key groups considered particularly vulnerable: the young (particularly young girls and women), the elderly, family pets, and Guernsey itself as a physical entity. In a peculiar way, these more abstract worries lifted the Islanders out of their personal anxiety for self, family, and friends, providing an understanding that more was at stake than their own survival. I will also examine the deaths
of Guernsey civilians during this time period, and the impact this ultimate interpersonal loss had on the Islanders' understanding of their situation. Recognizing the concerns that Islanders had for themselves, their families, and friends is important to understanding the unique experience of the Occupation, the nature of information flow, and the form that resistance ultimately took.

I will then discuss the two aspects that needed to be in place for the Guernsey populace before resistance could take place behind their collective mask of deference. Both elements are constructed through communication among members of a subjugated population, generally in those private areas of life away from the surveillance of the dominant. First, Islanders needed to feel supported by their families and neighbors in the basic necessities of life. The creative solutions to daunting shortages form a major aspect of the Occupation narrative, one already recounted in numerous books and articles. I am interested in the sharing of these necessities of life as a form of support and as a means of banding together. A society that degenerates into dog-eat-dog scrapping for survival has no energy to undermine the oppressive system. Knowing that others are willing to sacrifice for us, and that there is concern and support coming from others in similar circumstances frees us to focus our efforts against those in power. It also assures us that our society deserves our best efforts, showing itself to be basically sound even under the worst conditions.

The latter part of this chapter will explore the second aspect preliminary to resistance, the shape of the counter-ideology that was pitted against Nazi dogma during the Occupation. Resisters do not just oppose a dominant ideology; they also need “a counterideology—a negation,” one that provides a common rallying point and shapes the resistant acts that are invented (often spontaneously) by the powerless.
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For rhetorical resistance combined with creative acts of sabotage to flourish, there needs to be a sense of what life
should
be like, a common ideal of freedom and respect. If we know the goals and ideals of those who share our common position, then we can establish the trust that, coupled with support, is the necessary prerequisite to action.

In the case of the Guernsey Occupation, this ideology did not need to be constructed of whole cloth. Instead, the Islanders readily tapped into existing notions of British spirit that had bolstered the war effort since its advent. Through the diarists' exploration of their own feelings about England, it is possible to trace the importance of traditional patriotism to the unity and general mood of the Guernsey populace. It provided a foundation of trust among like-minded Islanders, and strengthening these feelings would be one goal of the evolving resistance. Under the particular conditions of the Occupation, where panopticism was a primary method of German control, Islanders needed “tacit or acknowledged coordination and communication”
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in places safe from surveillance. The familiar images and catch phrases of patriotism served as a shorthand, easily and quickly exchanged under the nose of the occupiers. As the Occupation ground on and conditions became increasingly wearing, the “we can take it” attitude woven through Churchill's speeches and Londoners' response to the Blitz served as a barrier against both despair and numbed acquiescence to German control.

Guernseymen and women felt acutely their position on the fringes of the war, and their inability to do anything substantial for the war effort. At times they could not help but feel abandoned by Britain, and any attention directed their way refreshed their sense of connection to their nation and the war effort. Some of the British “attention” was not without its dangers, and a fascinating aspect of Islander patriotism was their coming to grips with the reality of what is now called “friendly fire.” Finally, this chapter will examine the strongest
tie that Islanders had with Great Britain: their relatives serving in the armed forces and their evacuated families, particularly the children. In a very real sense, the Channel Islanders had their greatest treasure under the temporary custody of Great Britain; this common interest helped to weave the net of trust among Islanders that was prerequisite to acts of resistance. The social lives, interpersonal communication, and deepest beliefs of Islanders are not tangential areas of idle interest, but necessary components to understanding the development of rhetorical resistance.

ALL IN THIS TOGETHER

The Occupation was a hurricane of dislocation that blew friends and family to the four winds through evacuation and deportation, and ripped the remaining Islanders from their homes through evictions. From the very beginning, new living combinations were tried as a means of support, or in an attempt to protect family homes. Kitty and Peter Bachmann “decided to throw in their lot” with the recently married George and Felicia (and briefly Felicia's mother, Allie) to live at La Guelle, the family home left empty by Kitty's parents upon evacuation.
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This would leave Les Dunes (Peter and Kitty's home) open to confiscation, which actually did occur in 1942 when “some vagrant immigrants” (slave labor of the Organization Todt) were installed there.
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Choosing which house to protect was a Morton's Fork decision, a choice between equally bad alternatives. But if only one place could be protected, it made sense to choose the larger and more valuable property. By June of 1941, a bungalow was being prepared for George and Felicia. At that point, both Kitty and Felicia were expecting, and the anticipated disruption of new babies (and one might speculate the natural tensions of two very pregnant women sharing household duties in the same kitchen) made a division into two households reasonable.
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Peter and Kitty's experience stands for the living arrangements made and remade by many throughout the Occupation. In writing her diary/letters in October 1940, the time when George and Felicia still shared La Guelle, Kitty admitted that she was sitting in her mother's old bedroom upstairs, despite the cold penetrating through the windows from a northeasterly gale. The only fire was downstairs in the kitchen, but the “stifling proximity of communal life is not conducive to lucid writing. Snatches of conversation, shufflings, wireless and the like, mingle with my thoughts until my brain feels like a mental stockpot.”
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Even a flexible and even-tempered person, as Kitty undoubtedly was, felt the lack of privacy and autonomy brought on by community life.

Subtle adjustments were tried to ease the strain, such as when Kitty and Felicia mutually agreed to do their own families' breakfasts and suppers. The ostensible reason for this agreement was that it gave them “all more freedom to come and go without being time-bound.” Of course that would be true, but it also allowed the illusion of two wholly individual households occasionally overlapping their lives in the same space.
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Yet, in the common view of the time, the ones to be pitied were not those thrown into too-close contact by the Occupation, but those bereft of their nearest ties. As Dorothy Higgs put it, “It must be terrible for people who are left here with no one.”
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With so many family members and friends gone, with a mercurial and cruel occupier who could deport more for any or no reason, the value of all personal relationships increased.

Kitty Bachmann believed that the most pathetic were those men who had “inveigled wives and children to go without them” and were now left stranded.
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Their primary concern in those mad days of evacuation had been guaranteeing the safety of their families. Many had planned to secure their property/farms/businesses and also depart. But then the curtain lowered. Kitty saw three of these “grass widowers” sitting in the front pews of the church at George and Felicia's hastily arranged marriage on June 29, 1940, an event made all the more poignant because Felicia's aunt had been killed and her brother-in-law gravely injured in the air raid of the day before.
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These newly single men must have been “painfully conscious,” Kitty believed, that they were watching two young people enter the very state that they had “indefinitely relinquished a few hours before.”
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Kitty and Peter adopted several grass widowers, almost like a project, making it a point to invite them over and to spend time with them—especially at Christmas, when they were most likely to feel alone. Kitty wondered how Stan Noel could get along without “Weazle,” his highly competent wife, when Stan admitted that he had never even purchased a pack of cigarettes for himself. And she believed that Harry Marley was experiencing a “prolonged purgatory” without his American wife Martha, now in the United States with family for the duration.
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Some of her contemplation of the loneliness of these men may have been balm for Kitty's concerns about remaining with Peter rather than accompanying their ten-year-old in evacuating to England. This type of social comparison was common, a means to rehearse the rationale for hastily made decisions and to gain comfort that those decisions were correct.

Clearly the odd situation of the Occupation forged new relationships and new forms of socializing. One problem was simply the means of offering hospitality. As food became scarce, a new etiquette developed to handle invitations to tea or dinner, and that was to Bring Your Own Rations. Jack Sauvary, developing into a keen observer of life around him, found it “amusing to see the couples and little families all along the Banques, all carrying their bags.”
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If not bringing individual rations, then a form of potluck was expected where each person was responsible for a dish based on whatever they had available to them.
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As a sidelight to the new social rules of bring and share, it became a mark of privilege to be absolved of the need to provide one's own food. Thus there is a deeper meaning to Ken Lewis's proud comment that “Beattie told Mum today that when I went to her party I did not have to take any food whatsoever.”
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For some, this new etiquette did not seem like hospitality at all, and older Islanders still tried to marshal the resources to occasionally provide a true tea or full meal.

Food took on a new value as an expression of harmony. Months of scrimping and extra self-denial might go into a simple tea, but accepting such invitations held its own difficulties. During the 1942 Christmas season, Ken Lewis's family decided to invite the members of his Auntie Rache's family to tea and to spend a quiet evening. They planned, if possible, to provide some mashed potatoes, beetroot, and (“if we could get it”) the rare treat of a slice of tongue each. The impetus for all this effort was simply that they had been hosted by others, and as Ken put it, “We did not like the idea of having been to all their houses and not returning the compliment.” So, to accept hospitality brought with it the difficult pressure of reciprocity. That same holiday season, Ken's Auntie Rache frankly told Ken's parents that she was not having them over, although she was hosting the rest of the family on New Year's Day. She could not ask them without asking Ken's sister, Eileen, and she could not provide for so many.
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The symbolic act of providing even a simple meal could convey the importance of some relationships over others, forcing difficult choices and risking hurt feelings and division.

Another of the major difficulties in maintaining ties to others was the curfew—always in force, but tightened whenever the Germans wished to punish Islanders in general for some infraction. Therefore, bridge parties and other social events in homes were conducted like middle-school sleepovers. Guests would appear early, armed with toothbrushes, pyjamas, and their own ration of food. Because the evening would barely be under way when the curfew (sometimes as early as eight o'clock) was imposed, guests would simply plan to spend the night.
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