The Book of Ebenezer le Page (21 page)

His letters made me laugh sometimes. Jim wasn't a good soldier. They hadn't made him a lance-jack as he was in the Militia: he was only a private. They had to put up with him in war-time; but in peace-time they'd have turfed him out. He did his best, but he was always doing something wrong, though he didn't get punished for it. I can't imagine any chap being so rotten as to want to punish Jim. The worst thing he did was once in platoon drill, when the whole regiment was on parade. His platoon had to form fours and take two steps backwards and dress by the right. Jim went through the right movements, but he moved in the wrong direction. He landed out in front all by himself. The sergeant walked slowly around him and examined him from every side, while everybody else was standing to attention in dead silence. ‘Where have you come from?' he asked Jim friendly like, as if he was surprised to see him there and was just curious to know. ‘Guernsey,' said Jim. The sergeant nearly had a stroke. He screeched, ‘Have you ever been in a place and left that place and come back and found that it wasn't?' ‘Aw no, Sergeant,' said Jim, ‘Guernsey is still there.' The sergeant barked like a corgi: ‘GET BACK TO YOUR RANKS!' Jim got back safe to where he was supposed to be; but I bet it was in his own slow way.

I went along to tell Mrs Mahy that I was hearing from Jim. She also heard once a week; but he didn't say much. He wrote to Phoebe, she said; but only about the children. Mrs Mahy was disappointed in me because I had let him go. She said she thought I had more influence. I never understood how she got the idea into her head that I had influence over Jim. Anyhow, it was her dear Gerald she was more worried about now. He was mad to go in the Flying Corps. The French had put up a hangar for sea-planes where the Model Yacht Pond was, along the Castle Walk; and I had seen those boxes with wings wobbling over the harbour. I'd have thought they'd have put any chap off ever wanting to fly. I wouldn't have gone up in one of those things to save my life. The only service I would have liked to have gone into was the Navy, but that was the hardest to get into; and I wouldn't have gone down in a submarine for anybody. My idea of getting about was to walk on the ground, or sail on the sea. I have never wanted to go up in the air, or down under the water.

Raymond heard from Horace. I wondered he had the cheek to write, that Horace, after so many years, but he had cheek enough for anything. It happened I went down to Wallaballoo the very day Raymond got the letter. I had seen in the
Press
that Pauline Frederick was in a picture called
Madame X
at the Lyric, and I thought perhaps Hetty would like to go on the Saturday afternoon. Raymond was in by himself. He said his mother had gone to spend the evening with his Aunt Prissy, and his Uncle Percy was with his father in the office. I thought wonders will never cease. Horace was coming back. When Prissy got the news she hadn't been able to keep it to herself, but had run round to tell Hetty. They had cried over each other and kissed and was now more like turtle-doves than ever. Prissy had sent Percy to make it up with Harold and at the same time there had been a letter from America for Raymond. The two families was as thick as thieves. I wondered for how long.

As a matter of fact, it wasn't as Prissy said, because it wasn't at all certain that Horace was coming back. Raymond took me upstairs and showed me Horace's letter. He still wrote in his small handwriting you could hardly read; and he couldn't spell much better, unless it was the way they spell in America. He had become a real Yank. He was in the American Army; and now that America was in the War, he expected to be shipped over to Europe any day. They was coming over to win the War for us. ‘America isn't going to let the Kaiser get hold of little Guernsey,' he said. I bet he was the only chap in the American Army who knew there was such a place, let alone where it was. I could read between the lines of Horace's letter all right. He wasn't thinking of fighting the Germans and winning the War: he was thinking of wangling a leave in Guernsey, and coming home to be made a fuss of as the conquering hero. ‘Gee, I'll sure be glad to see you, boy!' he ended. Raymond said, ‘It's good, isn't it?' Horace had enclosed his photograph. Raymond took it out of the envelope to show me, as if it was pure gold. Horace was in his dough-boy's uniform and I have to give it to him he was a big fine-looking chap; and he didn't look as if he had a care in the world. Raymond sat looking at that photo. ‘I wish I was Horace,' he said.

My old head is full of tunes. Sometimes of a Sunday evening when I light the lamp and sit down to write my book, for it is mostly Sunday evenings I write my book, not a word of sense will come into my head, but tunes, tunes, tunes. I may remember the words, a few of the words; but they are words I had forgotten, or never knew I'd known. Hymn tunes come back; and I haven't been inside a chapel for fifty years. ‘The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended.' It's a good tune. I hear again, as once I heard, Christine Mahy sing ‘O Love, that will not let me go!' and all the angels of heaven sang in her glorious voice that night; and I hear the heavy tramping of soldiers along the roads and rough voices singing:

and ‘Bollicky Bill, the Sailor.'

Tunes, tunes, tunes: I cannot get them out of my head! This island down the years have been a singing rock. When in my father's day the boys went to war, they was singing:

and when conscription came in the First World War and the English boys came over to make up the number in our Second Battalion, they was singing:

but those tunes cross and get mixed up with other tunes in my head I don't know the words of, for they was in a language I didn't understand and never learnt. They was sung day in, day out, along our streets and down our lanes by our polite visitors from Germany; but the tramping of feet was not of soldiers singing, but of slave-workers of every nation in rags and half-uniforms and caps and clothes I had never seen before, and treated worse than beasts. Among them was the boy I will see to my dying day: more tired, more hurt, than any of the others; but he was proud and I could see his spirit was not broken.

I have lived too long. I have lived through two world wars and been no hero in neither. Two is one too many for any man. Now I sit and wait for the third. I wonder if I will live to see it. I don't believe, I don't believe, I don't believe in what the Great Powers do. Nurse Cavell said ‘Patriotism is not enough'. She was wrong. It is too much! It is enough for us to love and hate our neighbours as ourselves.

When the Germans had to go away after the Occupation and the English boys came over to put us to rights, they was pretty good, the ones I met, anyway; but there was some of the Germans who wasn't so bad, and some of our own people who left a lot to be wished for. I knew people, I had better not write down their names, who only had one complaint against the Germans, and that was that they had houses like the Green Shutters used to be for their soldiers to go to. Well, if you want to have wars, you got to have whores. When it comes to those things, Guernsey is a masterpiece of hypocrisy. After the Liberation, those same people, whose names I have not written down, wanted to shave the heads of all the Guernsey girls who it was known, or thought, had been with German boys. I was against that and let everybody I talked to know it; and I am glad to say they was let alone. They then went out of their way to be as nice as they could to the English boys who had come over; and the game went on as before. I am not sure now they wasn't the only ones who had any sense.

The tunes of nowadays don't come back. In fact, they don't go into my head at all. When I hear the noises from the radios on the beach, or from that abomination of abominations, the T.V., in every house I go to, or from the contraptions in the cafés in Town, I flap my ears over my ear-holes and don't hear. Yet sometimes I say to myself, ‘Ebenezer, be fair! The young got to be young; and you was young once.' I used to like to hear the waltz tunes of the old steam-organ of the merry-go-round on the Albert Pier, and that was music out of a machine, if you like; but no, the young people are different these days. The crowd on the Albert Pier was jolly and noisy and sometimes rough; but they was good-natured. There are some of the young fellows around these days who are cold and vicious. They frighten me. I don't mean they frighten me for what they can do to me; but they frighten me for what is coming to Guernsey and in the world.

Three of the St Sampson's gang had a go at me not long back; but they didn't come off so well. Nocq Road, St Sampson's, was always a rough corner: I had my first fight there. Two of them came from Nocq Road but I thought it was become respectable now. It may have done, for I reckon those boys all came from well-to-do families; and I know the father of the other is a Deputy on the States. They have plenty of money, those sort of boys, and spend a fortune on clothes and big motor-bikes. I didn't know any of them before, even by sight, so I can't think what I can have done for them to want to come and hurt me. Anyhow, I was in the kitchen one evening when I heard the noise of motor-bikes coming round the Chouey. It was as if the world was coming to an end. It isn't often they came as far as that; and, if they do, they don't come any further. Les Moulins is right off the map; and the track to it from the corner of the Chouey is of loose stones, and with deep ruts in the bargain. I heard them come right as far as my front gate, and stop there talking and laughing and planning something: then there was a crash of glass, and the brave boys was on their bikes and going down the road hell for leather. I took the lamp and went outside to see what they had done. They had thrown stones and broken half-a-dozen panes of glass of my greenhouse. I thought all right: you wait, my beauties!

I didn't report it to the Police, as I ought to have done. I let people think it was the wind had done it. I thought to myself they have enjoyed their little game, and when they see the old fool haven't got the guts to do anything about it, they will want to play it again. I sat out every night on a box in the greenhouse with the hose-pipe on my lap ready. It wasn't many nights before they came again. They couldn't have arranged it better, if they had tried, for they stood by their bikes with the lights full on them opposite a hole they had made in the glass, and which was just handy for me to point the hose through. I turned the water on. It caught them with the stones in their hands, but they didn't throw them. They was so surprised they didn't even get out of the way. They danced about; and I drenched them. At last, they got their senses back enough to get on their bikes and scoot, shouting threats of what they was going to do to me next time; but I didn't expect what they did do. I had counted without Neville Falla.

I was indoors again by the fire when there was a knock on my front door. I didn't think it could be one of them, for I hadn't heard any sound of a bike; yet I wondered who on earth it could be. Anybody who know me would come round to the back. I opened the door. It was young Constable Le Page. He is a distant cousin of mine, but I don't know him. ‘I'm sorry to disturb you, Mr Le Page,' he said, very polite, ‘but would you mind coming to the Police Station? There is a matter on which you might help us. I have a car round the corner.' I said, ‘I am always willing to help the Police,' and put on my overcoat and hat and took my stick. He was most kind to help me along the rough track, though I could manage it by myself quite well. When I was sitting by him in his nice little black Police car, he said, ‘What nonsense have you been up to this time, Ebenezer?' ‘I don't know,' I said. ‘Why?' ‘You'll see,' he said.

At the Police Station he pushed me in front of him into the Inspector's office. ‘Mr Le Page has been good enough to come and help us,' he said. Inspector Le Tocq was sitting at his desk; and on three chairs beside him was the three boys, looking like drownded rats. The Inspector stood up and shook hands with me. ‘Thank you for coming, Mr Le Page,' he said. ‘Will you please take a seat?' Constable Le Page put a chair for me and I sat down, while he remained standing behind me. The Inspector sat down. ‘These three gentlemen,' he said, but from the way he said ‘gentlemen' he made it clear he didn't have a very high opinion of them as gentlemen, ‘want to lay a charge against you.' ‘A charge!' I said. ‘Whatever for?' ‘Assault,' he said. ‘Assault?' I said. ‘Why, I haven't assaulted them: I only turned the hose on them.' ‘Well, in law, you know,' he said, ‘that was an action might be considered an assault.' ‘I will do it again,' I said, ‘if they come and break the glass of my greenhouse!' ‘Ah yes, I thought there was something like that about it,' he said, ‘but it is not for you, Mr Le Page, to take the law into your own hands.' I said, ‘Well, you don't do nothing about it, do you?' He said, ‘If you will now lay a charge against them for wilful damage, we might be able to.' ‘I won't do that, ‘I said. ‘If they go to prison, when they come out they will be heroes and martyrs for all the rest of their sort on the island. Besides, they have been punished enough.' I knew what I would have felt like when I was their age to have my good clothes spoilt. ‘In that case,' he said to the boys, ‘I suggest you get out of here, while the going is good.'

I had a good look at the boys then. The two younger ones wouldn't look at me, but looked down at the floor. One was a thick-necked little bully and the other a weed with a loose mouth. They got up and shuffled out. The eldest, who was eighteen or nineteen, was a long lean creature with black hair and very dark-blue deep-set eyes. He didn't look away. He looked at me as straight as I looked at him; and those eyes was as cold as ice. I knew it was him who had thought of coming to the Police. I couldn't help admiring him for his cheek, for it was just what I would have done in his position. He got up slowly to his feet: he was in no hurry to get away. ‘Well, thank you for your help, Inspector,' he said with a sarcastic smile on his handsome face; and strolled out. The Inspector shook his head sadly. ‘That is Neville Falla, son of Deputy Falla,' he said. ‘He is breaking his father's heart.' ‘I don't know the boy,' I said. ‘I wish we didn't,' he said. Constable Le Page then said he would take me home in the car; and the Inspector said as we went, ‘Next time they do it, Mr Le Page, you will report it, won't you?' I said, ‘There won't be a next time.' There haven't been yet.