Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (27 page)

When Peter finally broke the news that evening, it was as though all the claustrophobia of being confined to Guernsey came in on Kitty at once. Despite the curfew, she had to get out of the four walls of the house and into the field across the way, just to be able to breathe. For days afterward she experienced the same “wild ideas” that others had on receiving bad news through the unreliable grapevine of the Red Cross messages. Perhaps it was simply a rumor, a misunderstanding by the person who had expressed sorrow to the Girauds. Perhaps, with so few words allowed to compose a Red Cross message, everyone was misinterpreting the message itself. There was no means for immediate confirmation, and a family message with firsthand information might be months in coming. As it turned out, a message from Kitty's mother came only two weeks later, ending Kitty's hopes for a different outcome but also allowing her to grieve fully. To sharpen the pain, messages from Kitty to her sister were still en route to the family. And Kitty actually hoped that messages from Audrey might be on their slow path to Guernsey, “painful but treasured souvenirs.”
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In lieu of actual contact with evacuated families and friends, the Islanders substituted a rich fantasy life of dreams and imaginative projection. Kitty still met her daughter Diana in dreams, “frisking along the Esplanade with Kala bounding ahead.” The war was over and Diana was home for good. Running to her and hugging her tight, Kitty asked if she had missed them, but Diana assured her that she had not had time.
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Such almost nightly dreams held a “wonderland of reunion” for Kitty where she could be with her family, although there was always the “crude awakening” to the reality of their absence.
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When messages came steadily from Diana at the time of her twelfth birthday in mid-1942, they imagined a new “adult tone” to her writing, mining each brief message for a greater sense of their child growing up at such a distance.
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Yet, for a relationship developed largely in imagination, it would be difficult to top the fantasy love affair that Ken Lewis conducted with Brenda Parker,
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a girl of his age who had evacuated before the Occupation commenced. The special nature of this one particular girl becomes clear very early on in Ken's diary. In November 1940 a broadcast from England mentioned that all the evacuated intermediate boys and girls were safe and away from the bombing of the Blitz. Ken's response to the news (“This meant that [Brenda Parker] was safe”) cannot help but raise a smile as it makes unmistakable the special nature of this one particular evacuee.
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Apparently, Ken had never acted on his schoolboy crush while Brenda was still in Guernsey, though he seemed aware of the details of her life, making note of her birthday in the spring and the June anniversary of her leaving Guernsey for England.
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And now, through
a new closeness with Brenda's mother, who must have found his willingness to run errands and endless interest in her daughter's welfare both charming and transparent, Ken obtained Brenda's address and sent messages of his own to her.

Then came May 26, 1942—one of those days when the angels seemed to smile on Ken Lewis. Ever devout, he had “prayed continually” for a reply from Brenda to his message, and without warning his prayers were answered. There it was, in Brenda's own handwriting no less, and only just over two months in transit: “Well. Shorthand typist. Delighted received your news. Always thinking of everyone at home. Glad contact parents, writing them frequently. Keep smiling. Love to all, [Brenda].” On his way home to dinner the next day, Ken stopped in triumph to see Mrs. Parker and share Brenda's message with her family. It was the first that they had in Brenda's own hand, the touch that verified the authenticity of the message, as it seemed to bring Brenda closer to them. Several days later, Auntie Ede added a pleasurable extra fillip by telling Ken that Mrs. Parker had been “so overjoyed to see Brenda's handwriting that she could have cried with joy.”
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Ken's prayers often seemed to tend toward Brenda, and his great petition was to receive a message (and, could he even dare to hope for a photograph?) before his twenty-first birthday. He considered his prayer at least partially answered when a message came on the 4th of February in 1943. A simple message, filled with cheerful chat (such as about Ken's use of Brenda's old bicycle to ride to chapel), this letter actually came at a time that threatened Ken's entire link to Brenda. Only days later, Ken stopped by the Parkers' on his way to work to say goodbye to both of them as they left in the deportation of the English-born to Germany. And as they left, much of the easy connection to Brenda and extra information about her life went with them. Still, the personal messages came back and forth, carefully mined for any clues as to Brenda's location and work conditions. When she wrote that she was “always eating pasties,” and the “Spring flowers are out, climate like home,” Ken knew she was in Cornwall, just across the Channel and so very close.
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There were many bumps in the road for this ephemeral, and likely one-way, relationship. Ken knew that Brenda had passed her physical and joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in May of 1942.
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By December, word was coming through from some of her relations that Brenda “looked very smart” in her uniform. Such news made Ken wistful (“I only wish I could be in Uniform in England”), though he stoutly maintained his certainty that doing his “share over here to keep things going” had its own value in the war effort.
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Still, the greatest obstacle to this affair of the imagination was that Ken was a flesh-and-blood young man and there were young women his age in Guernsey. Occasionally they would flit across Ken's mind, but always filtered through the unattainable standard of Brenda.

In 1943, Ken's heart appeared to be ripe for the picking by Vera Lloyd,
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a girl at work who served as a secretary for the States. Soon after he first really started thinking about Vera and the pleasant walks home they took together, Ken was thrown into “a quandry,” and one that caused him to do “some hard thinking.” He started to wonder if all this thought and effort to make contact with Brenda was worthwhile. After all, she was thrown into the wider world of the war effort, surrounded undoubtedly by young soldiers, and “as she is good looking they must have been attracted to her.” She answered Ken's messages and always mentioned that she longed for a reunion, but maybe she would look down on Ken, not in uniform and so much a part of the world of her past.

Ken pondered two conflicting idioms that have always puzzled long-distance lovers: would absence make the heart grow fonder, or would it be a case of out of sight, out of mind? “On
the other hand I have discovered that [Vera] is a very nice girl and seems to like my company.” But was it right to shift affections to a girl who was so different in nature to himself, especially when these differences were apparent to Ken from the beginning? Vera liked to go out to dances, freely mixed with all sorts of people, and was not shy about mentioning other boys that she talked with regularly. During a slack week at work, Ken and Vera talked to while away the time, and many interesting stories were related. Vera described a time when she had been drunk and, upon being taken home to her parents, covered the fact by saying that she had fainted. Ken appeared quite ready to accept her account that she had simply lacked willpower and followed the crowd that one time. She claimed that the incident was “a lesson to her and that she would never drink again.”
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How could such a party-loving girl compete for dutiful and moral Ken when compared to Brenda, absolved of every flaw by time and distance? Then again, how could a phantom like Brenda compete with a girl like Vera, who was warm, alive, and (most important of all) actually there?

For hopeful lovers, for parents and their evacuated children, and for all of the many families and friends divided from each other by Occupation, reunion was uppermost in their minds for five years. The fate of their loved ones in the British armed forces and sheltering on the mainland was bound up in the fate of Britain as a whole. Proud of their British identity and unique history before the war, the Islanders developed a new sense of what patriotism meant during Occupation, and what they could accomplish with their limited resources and in their marginal position. This was a vital revelation for any chance of resistance, or any hope that they could be of use in the war effort. They had to come to grips with the concept that their task was survival, that they served a purpose by holding their own land for Britain, preventing its destruction, and returning it, and themselves, whole and intact as possible at war's end.

But, with that said, Islanders also started to develop a sense of worthwhile risk, a belief in forms of resistance that were necessary to maintain their spirits and their separation from their German occupiers. They developed the resources to bolster those worn by deprivations, and the trust needed to act in ways counter to the ideology that their Nazi masters wished to impose upon them. As they honed a common perception of support and trust, Guernseymen and women reached for their first inkling of control over specific Islanders, particularly those in positions of trust and those who appeared to be complicit with the enemy. This control would be exercised through discursive means, and through the gradual development of a complicated structure of subversion.

In many ways, a resistance of some kind was inevitable for Guernsey. There is no sign in the diaries or elsewhere that Islanders shared in the Nazi ideology. Even the known collaborators and fraternizers appear to have been motivated by a desire for financial/resources benefits or the need for entertainment/love/sex. With a lack of ideological agreement, what functioned in the relationship between occupier and occupied was the imposition of raw power. As Michael Huspek simply puts it, “Where there is power there is resistance.”
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Huspek argues for the intimate relationship between power and resistance, claiming that power itself brings resistance into being by necessity. Resistance then emerges as the “other” to the power that created it, serving as a limitation on that power and a means of determining the boundaries beyond which power cannot go.
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There is, in other words, a natural desire for liberty and self-determination that develops when power is imposed upon us. It is such a compelling feeling that only intense threat coupled with ongoing surveillance, of such a type as was found in this panoptical Occupation, can serve to drive it underground.
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The problem for the more controversial descriptions of the
Occupation has been in mistaking a necessarily covert and sheltered form of resistance with a weakness of underlying determination. Instead, resistance without the means to express itself fully can smolder for a long period and only burst out occasionally in small flames. It would be a mistake to underestimate the intensity of the heat of such a fire, or its ability for general conflagration under the right circumstances. The military power of the Third Reich, its determination to control the occupied populace, and its imposition of extensive surveillance to further those efforts set up the ideal situation to trigger “a reaction that may lie in wait.”
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The next three chapters will outline the shape of that reaction and the rhetorical resistance that emerged in the Guernsey Occupation.

CHAPTER THREE

Reaching for Control

I
T WAS
E
ASTER
S
UNDAY IN
1941,
AND AS
R
EVEREND
O
RD LEFT CHURCH ON HIS WAY
home after services, he found himself with an uncomfortable escort. A German submarine was currently in the St. Peter Port harbor, and some of the men from its crew happened to be heading in the same direction as Rev. Ord for part of his journey. Ord could guess where the “filthy wretches” came from simply by their unwashed faces and the state of their uniforms. As they all reached the steep road leading up Monument Hill, the men apparently decided to have a little fun at the expense of this British reverend gentleman whom they had now encountered. The Germans fell in on both sides of Ord and entertained themselves with some rude comments at his expense. Ord walked in silence for some time, allowing this little comedy to proceed, before he spoke in their language himself and had the pleasure of watching the German faces fall. He later speculated as to the German soldiers' reaction: “Had this cleric understood what they had been saying about him?”

As this “little cavalcade” passed some of the Guernsey passersby, Ord could observe the sympathy on people's faces and their deep concern to see him flanked by German soldiers. It dawned on him that news would quickly travel all over Guernsey that Reverend Ord was under arrest! Sure enough, later in the day a phone call came to his home anxiously seeking confirmation that he had been detained, and Ord had the pleasure of answering the telephone personally to put the caller's mind at ease. But what, he pondered, would his wife, Grae, have thought had she been alone and answered the call herself?
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On that Easter Sunday, Ord was able to experience himself as the subject of the extensive network of rumors that served as one counterpoint to official German-controlled information. It is an exploration of such shadow methods of communication that will compose this chapter and serve as a first foray into understanding the hidden transcript of the Guernsey Occupation. Now that we have a rough outline of the events and shifting character of the first four years of Occupation, a sense of the panoptical style of German control, and a feel for the support and trust that the majority of the Guernsey population carved out for themselves, it may be possible to understand the rhetorical nature of resistance in its many forms. Those outside of the experience of Occupation (particularly when writing decades after the events) have had difficulty acknowledging and appreciating this resistance for one very good reason: outsiders, just like the Germans in authority, were never intended as the audience for these acts. One clear aspect of other studies of subordinated people is the specificity of intended audience for the hidden transcript. It is only meant as communication to “those in the know,” that is, to those sharing a position of powerlessness, and therefore it has “to costume itself and speak more warily” in the presence of the powerful.
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