Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (18 page)

Some of these odd sleeping arrangements had the potential for misunderstandings. On August 10, 1942, Bert Williams reported on a two-month feud under way between his Mother, his sister Ivy, and his girlfriend Adele (who was often called Dell). Dell had not been in the Williams home since June 9, 1942, and Bert's family refused even to speak to Dell in the narrow streets of Guernsey, an awkward situation if ever there was one. Bert was having trouble figuring out why Dell was now “an outcast” and his family seemed to “hate the sight of the girl.” He speculated that the trouble started on the Saturday before June 9, when his small band went up to Mr. Kramer's house to give a concert. With a curfew on and most likely a good time being had by all, they all “got stuck for the night.” Dell, who had come along, stayed at Mr. Kramer's house with Joyce Turguson. The “boys” and Bert stayed at Villa De Rocque. “There was nothing wrong in that I am sure,” wrote Bert primly. Communal living, especially with family, brought with it many watchful eyes and more than enough judgmental opinions. “But with all that,” Bert stated, “I am sticking to the girl whatever happens.”
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And Bert was as good as his word. Almost exactly a year later, Bert practically crowed about the “red letter day in the Williams family,” when he “led Miss Adele Sauvarin to the altar.” All seems to have been long forgiven, for Bert could happily state that “Mum and Ivy were 100%, in fact it was a good day from start to finish.”
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If upheaval served as an enabler for romance, it also brought a new closeness between family members with little previous contact. At Elizabeth College, where he had gone to receive some Red Cross messages, Jack Sauvary ran into his niece Mary Sauvary in March 1941. She was his brother Willie's fifth child and the only one left of her family in the Island. Although she had stopped by to see Jack once when he was out, they appear not to have had ongoing contact up to this point. This chance meeting, brought about because Mary was working at the Red Cross bureau, was the beginning of a very close relationship.

Jack and Mary seemed to delight in each other's company, and just as she became a substitute for Jack's children, he became a surrogate father for her. So, Mary brought Jack Red Cross messages and went with him to put flowers on his wife's grave (exploring the cemetery for other relatives' graves, which they forked and weeded). Jack took great pleasure in scaring up whatever tidbits he could to give Mary an occasional “nice tea,” sending her off with little gifts of eggs or whatever was available.
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The artifact of this newly close relationship is a charming picture taken on January 15, 1943, when Jack served as proxy for Mary's father and gave his young niece away in marriage. There is Mary, a pretty young woman in a blouse of French georgette covered in small forget-me-nots to match her bridesmaids' dresses (which Jack described as so thin he could have “put the lot in my pocket”), and a practical blue coat, suit, and hat. She towers a foot above her diminutive, smiling uncle, who appears proud if a bit drawn and thin.
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This is the dominant story of Islander relationships during the Occupation: a new closeness and interpersonal combinations that might not have occurred under other conditions. One surprise of this study is how little indication exists of “environmental spoiling.”
Environmental spoiling, a term coined by Ebbeson, Kyos, and Konecni, refers to the stress engendered when people live in close proximity, often against their will.
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It is a familiar concept to anyone forced to continue sharing living quarters with an uncongenial freshman roommate, or snowed in for a week with soon-to-be-former friends. I fully expected to find such strains in the tightened living quarters of the Occupation, aggravated by little food and by fear of the occupying forces. Such expectations, combined with the day-by-day revelations inherent in reading diaries, led to some amusing results. Bert Williams haughtily recorded on January 2, 1945: “Dell had a fit of temper, we are not on speaking terms.” The reason for her foul mood came to light with his entry six days later, proudly relating Dell's trip to the Essential Commodities Committee to register herself as an expectant mother: “It seems that we are going to have an increase in the family next July.”
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Dell appears to be one whose pregnancy was marked by hormonal mood shifts, for Bert writes later, “Dell is in a raging temper, she often gets like this lately.”
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It would not be an easy pregnancy, coming as it did during the final year's starvation and bitter cold, but these temper flares were natural and temporary rather than indications of environmental spoiling or relational disintegration.

However, when things went south in relationships, they did so with a vengeance. Sometimes the loss of ready access to alcohol or tobacco, whether a true addiction or merely a pleasurable habit, added to the environmental strain on relationships.
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Once relationships frayed, the tools for retaliation were readily available for those angry and heedless enough to use them. Ambrose Robin told of a family he sardonically called “the [Robinson] family of Saints.”
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Clive Robinson, it seems, had a sack of flour that was vanishing at a suspicious rate, so he called in the police to investigate. The guilty party turned out to be his sister Edna, and Clive was in the midst of having her called up before the magistrate. Before this could happen, Edna wrote to the commandant to report Clive for keeping a hidden wireless set. On her information, the German police came by and caught him listening to the nine o'clock news. At the time of Robin's writing, Clive was awaiting trial before a German court.
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It is difficult to imagine relationships marked by such betrayals—mutual in the Robinson case—as recoverable when the war ended.

Knowledge of resistant actions could serve, in rare instances, as opportunity for personal retaliation. But more often, the need for privacy coupled with illegal activities to put extra strain on relationships. Throughout the Occupation, Ken Lewis is at everyone's beck and call to run errands; he is the one to remember to place flowers on his grandmother's grave; he is anguished when he cannot explain away the moral failings of others. Even when Ken and Ralph “dodge” a fellow their age, Dan Mahy, rather than have him walk around with them after chapel (mainly because Ken wanted to show Ralph his new wireless set), Ken felt “sorry for Dan and somehow all the evening I had a guilty conscience of having dodged him.”
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Ken is, in many ways, a pure soul. It is therefore a bit of a relief to see the preternaturally sweet-tempered and accommodating Ken have his brief moment of rebellion.

During the last April before Liberation, an argument occurred between Ken and his parents because Ken did not come in to be sociable when his Uncle Cliff dropped in unannounced. As Ken put it, “he always comes when we prefer to be on our own,” and this time he appeared when Ken was listening to the family's hidden wireless. Considering how fast the news was changing with the war reaching its end, it is hard to fault Ken's preference. So, Ken remained where he was and only appeared when Uncle Cliff was in the process of leaving. Yet, this little show of defiant self-interest was short-lived, for “Mum was upset and Dad had a pain in his stomach” brought on by the resulting argument. “Therefore,” a chastened Ken
concluded, “I must try to put up with him coming.”
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An eighteen-year-old in 1940, Ken was now a young man of twenty-three. Living in close confinement with parents—frozen in time as adolescents in many ways—could not have been easy for many of the young people coming of age during the Occupation.

CRYSTALLIZED CONCERNS

Another interpersonal factor that would direct resistance toward a covert form concerned fear that overt resistance would harm a populace already at considerable risk. Anxiety was a constant companion during the Occupation—for oneself, of course, but much more acutely for one's family and friends. But there emerges in contemporaneous accounts a companion to this personal concern, and that was apprehension for those people and things deemed particularly vulnerable to the occupying forces. In an atmosphere already heavy with a sense of peril, resistance may have increased the threat to those dependent on their fellow Islanders for protection, particularly young women and the elderly. Foremost among these worries would be young women, whether unmarried or separated from their husbands due to the war. In the best of circumstances, the influx of young military men might be reason for concern, as can be seen in the British description of American soldiers stationed in England: “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” Because the occupiers were enemy soldiers, there was apparently an underlying fear that women might be considered spoils of war, much like the other resources of the Island.

This anxiety for young women was not misplaced, if one can believe a statement of witness given to the Guernsey Island Police on September 1, 1940, and now held in the Imperial War Museum archives. Wilma Bishop
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was a nineteen-year-old woman, married since 1939 to a Guernseyman serving with the British forces. Home for a short leave right before the initial air raid, her husband was stranded in the Island and immediately interned as a prisoner of war in Castle Cornet. Wilma was informed that she could visit her husband if she could obtain a permit, so she went to the Royal Hotel, where she approached several German soldiers standing around. When told what she wanted, the men referred Wilma to a tall soldier in uniform with fair hair and a red face. When told that Wilma needed a permit to visit her husband, he said (in good English), “I will get one for you if you come this way.” Leading her down the corridor and up a flight of stairs, he took her along a passage to a door to one of the hotel rooms, which he opened, pushing her inside. Holding her down on the bed, he tore off her knickers, dropped his trousers and—still pinning her hands behind her—he unbuttoned his tunic with his free hand. “If you scream,” he said, “I'll shoot you.” He raped her, then put on his uniform and left. Wilma straightened her clothing as best she could, and on going downstairs, she came across a Guernsey police constable whom she knew and told him what happened. The police constable informed Dr. Maass, who told Wilma, “I'm very sorry, I'll try and find the man who did it,” and she heard him say to the constable, “We cannot let this go on in the Island.”

When she visited her husband, Wilma also told him of the attack and, under his advice, she saw their family doctor. Six weeks later, she knew that she was pregnant. All of this was traumatic enough, although the most interesting aspect of the case is the report filed by Inspector Sculpher of the Island Police on the third of September. Dr. W. B. Fox had reported
the incident to Inspector Sculpher on August 31, believing that this pregnancy, following as it did a sexual assault, was justification for an abortion (which Dr. Fox was willing to perform). Sculpher “differed from [the doctor] on that point,” and it is clear that the inspector did not believe Wilma's account. Although Sculpher admits that Wilma reported the rape immediately to P. C. Tardif and that Dr. Fox examined her at that time, he decided that “her story of the procedure [the rape] is not convincing.”

When the Inspector took Wilma back to the Royal Hotel, she could not positively identify the room where the rape occurred, although Mr. Mentha, the manager of the hotel, also confirmed the complaint being made immediately following the incident. Sculpher believed that he never would have learned of the rape if not for the pregnancy, and that finding the soldier should have been “a comparatively simple matter.” Sculpher put forth his own theory that the pregnancy was the result of Wilma's relations with her husband before he was detained, and her desire for an abortion was simply an economic matter, since, in conversation with him, Wilma mentioned that she could not afford this new child. These documents are a window not just into the dangers women faced from the occupying forces, but into the skepticism most women encountered in reporting rape. It is difficult to know how many similar incidents occurred throughout the Occupation and how many children resulted from sexual assault.
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What is interesting in the contemporaneous accounts is the oblique way that this topic was approached, especially considering that concern over sexual assault was inescapable. Rev. Ord focuses on instances where young women stood up for themselves despite teasing and baiting from German soldiers. In February of 1941, Ord happened to be in a tobacconist's shop when he saw a young female assistant attempting to deal with “two swaggering officers.” One officer picked up some trifling item, asking how much it was. When told the price, the officer teasingly said, “That's far too much,” at which the girl tossed her head and “with thinly-disguised contempt” replied, “It's the price. I can't alter it.” Ord believed that the officers could not see the “danger signals” in her flushed face and black eyes that “looked daggers,” which was probably a good thing. “I greatly admired her pluck,” wrote Ord, but the officers could easily have turned the girl in for disrespectful communication with the German forces.
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Maybe it was a youthful belief in their own invincibility, but some young girls seemed to lack common sense. Two servant girls were caught signaling with a bicycle lamp from the top floors of Ivy Gates, the Sherbrookes' house. When questioned, the girls claimed to be signaling to the Tommies, and told the Germans that they were meeting the Tommy parachutists in Cambridge Park to give them food and water. When the full story emerged, it turns out that this fifteen- and sixteen-year-old were signaling to no one; they merely sent the signals, and a message to the Germans to watch that particular house, as a “leg-pull.” One girl appears to have skipped off with an apology, although the other girl was sent to prison in Jersey.
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Perhaps had these girls read Wilma Bishop's account, they would not have so blithely put themselves in the hands of the Germans.