The Book of Ebenezer le Page (30 page)

Jim Le Poidevin was the last of the three Jims; and lived for many years after Jim Machon died. He wasn't as big as my Jim, but slim and well-built when he was a young chap; and, before he went to France, used to go to dances a lot. He was engaged to Etienne de la Mare from the Vauquiédor and, when she heard what had happened to him, she said she would marry him if he had lost both legs; but he hadn't been back a week before the engagement was broken off. It was him did it. He was blamed by many people and he let them blame him, but I think he did right. He told me that once, when she was all soft and loving, he said to her brutally ‘How are you going to like having a stump in your bed?' and he saw the look of disgust pass across her face, before she could say ‘Darling, it don't make any difference.' ‘I wouldn't put any girl through that,' he said to me. I don't know what happened to her in the end. I know she went round with Gerald Mahy for a time. Young Gerald came back as cocky as ever and went to work again in the Old Bank. He was waiting for his commission in the Flying Corps when the Armistice came. He was disappointed the War didn't go on longer.

Jim Le Poidevin could have got an artificial leg and pottered about at home. His people was growers and quite well-to-do; but he said he didn't want to be dependent on them for the rest of his life. He made up his mind he would learn a trade and decided to be a cobbler. Clarrie Bellot from by the Tin Church, who was a sapper in France all through the War and came back without a scratch, taught him for nothing: which is just the sort of thing Clarrie would do, though it might mean less business for him. I'm glad to say it didn't, because he was such a steady chap and so much liked he always got more work than he could do. Jim Le Poidevin had a small pension and the Government bought him a machine; and he got a wooden hut built for himself at Port Soif, before you get to Gran'-Rock. It was only two rooms: one where he slept and cooked his food and ate; and the other was his workshop. He lived there on his own for years, winter and summer. I took him all our boots and shoes to mend. He had plenty of friends. It didn't matter when you went in the shop there was some fellow yarning with him, while he was doing his work. As the years passed he got fattish and broad in the beam and a bit of an old woman. He got to know everything there was to know about everybody. When the Germans came and it was every man for himself, he suffered more than most, and the last year of the Occupation, nearly starved. A few weeks after the Liberation he was found dead in his bed.

Monsieur Le Boutillier's house got built at last. Harold and Percy and a couple of chaps was on it for months, on and off. It wasn't a bad little house, come to that, but not to be compared to Les Moulins. They wasn't building solid houses then, like in my grandfather's time; and it cost over a thousand. It was stone under the plaster, but not the good blue granite; and while the gables was left white, the front was daubed a pale yellow colour. I didn't like the colour myself. It was a two-storey house with three windows upstairs and a window each side of the door down. Percy got his way and put on fancy chimney-pots; but the first rough night one blew down and broke some of the slates, as I knew would happen. I watched the goings-on. It was stout chimney-stacks was needed for our windy corner: as those who built Les Moulins knew. The new house was the other side of the gully, thank goodness, and with the gable towards us. That was as it should be. Monsieur Le Boutillier was a Jerseyman. I couldn't imagine what that girl Ozanne from the Friquet, who I had always thought was a sensible girl, could have been thinking about to marry a Jerseyman; but she met him when she went over one year for the Battle of Flowers. They hadn't been married long, and was living with her people at the Friquet while the house was being built.

I made up my mind I would start off as I meant to go on, and let that Jerseyman know we wasn't going to be running in and out of each other's houses. He had to pass our front gate to get to L'Islet, and seemed quite ready to stop and have a chat. I was civil and passed the time of day; but no more. I wasn't going to let him know my business. I didn't want to know his. He got three vergées of ground and was going to grow potatoes and outdoor tomatoes, so he thought; but he soon found out his mistake. His potatoes didn't do too bad, but this wasn't Jersey. There where it faces south it is easier to grow tomatoes out of doors. He was now living facing north and learnt he would have to grow tomatoes under glass, if they was going to be early enough to make any price. He had to have a greenhouse put up.

To crown it all, he was a Roman Catholic. I would see him pass our gate early every Sunday morning on his way to the Catholic Church at Delancey. It was before breakfast. Those who went to Church or Chapel didn't go at such an ungodly hour. Mind you, it didn't worry me what church he went to. He could go to any church he liked, or none, as far as I was concerned: but it was too much for my mother. She believed the Roman Catholic Church was the Whore of Babylon. I don't think she spoke a single word to Monsieur Le Boutillier all the time she knew him. When she died, he came across and offered his sympathy and I thanked him. I didn't invite him to the funeral.

Mind you, I am not saying I am proud of the way I treated Monsieur Le Boutillier when he came to live at La Corbière. When the time of the testing came and the Germans was all around us, it was Monsieur Le Boutillier who was a better and a truer friend to me than many a Guernseyman I could name. I honour the memory of Jean Le Boutillier. His son and daughter-in-law live at La Corbière now with their family, and there isn't a day passes but one of the young ones come across to see if I am all right. I don't blame my mother so much. She had her religion to consider. I have no such excuse. One live and learn.

I was beginning to get really worried about my mother. She had always been a big woman, but now she was having to let out her clothes and her face was getting puffy. It hurt me to see her dragging her great weight about the house. One evening I came in from work and found she hadn't washed up the dishes from dinner; and I knew then there must be something very wrong. I said she ought to see the doctor. She said, ‘The doctor can't do nothing.' ‘He might,' I said. She said, ‘It is the will of God.' Whenever my mother said ‘Ch'est la volonté de Dieu,' I knew it was no use me arguing. I have often wondered about my mother's religion: how different it was from Tabitha's. Tabitha went to Church with the Priaulx and to Service with my mother sometimes; but I am not sure she had a religion really. She had faith. I don't know in what, or how. She suffered in her life, yet I doubt if she was ever truly unhappy. She seemed to know that underneath everything was good. I wish I could think the same.

Anyhow, whether it was the will of God, or not the will of God, I went to Dr de Jersey at the Albion Terrace and asked him to come and see my mother. He wanted to know what was the matter with her and, from what I said, he thought it was the dropsy. If so, there wasn't much he could do; but he would come and examine her, he said. When I got back I was wondering if I ought to tell her where I had been, as I knew she would want to wash herself all over before he came; but I was no sooner inside the door than she said, ‘The doctor, when is he coming, him?' If my mother wasn't a witch, what was she? I was gone to work when he came; but she looked better for it, I thought. She said he was a kind man. He had told her what she ought to eat and not eat, and was going to get ready some pills and some medicine for her to take. I went to the surgery and got the pills and the medicine, and put them on the dresser; but I didn't see them again. I found them after the funeral at the back of the top shelf on the cupboard, where we kept a bottle of brandy in case of sickness, and they hadn't been unwrapped from the paper. I didn't do no good by going to the doctor.

At last she got it was so hard for her to walk, she couldn't go to Service with the Brethren. It was the one thing she always looked forward to. There was several of the Brethren had motor-cars, but not one of them thought of fetching her from the house and bringing her home. Those people was as hard to each other as the Lord was to them. I was very angry about that. I reckon it is up to us to treat each other better than the Lord do, and teach Him a lesson. I thought the least I could do was to give up my job and work at home, and help my mother all I could. She had been used to dig the potatoes like a man, and fill and carry the bucket from the well, but now it was as much as she could do to stand by the fire and cook.

I explained to Mr Dorey and he understood. He said he was sorry to lose me and would be glad to have me back at any time. Myself, I wasn't altogether sorry to become my own master, though I knew it meant I wasn't going to be so well off. However, I thought I would have a new end built on to my greenhouse and, what with doing more fishing, I would manage to keep going somehow. I gave the work on the greenhouse to Harold, and he made a good job of it. Also I paid him on the dot and he was delighted. He had bills owing to him all over the place. The new end he built was lower than the rest, but of wider span. It was his idea; and I have had some very good crops in it, and ripe early. I cut down the hedge was supposed to be my boundary and let Harold take in a yard or two of the land at the top of the gully. If it belonged to an old lady in Torteval, she must have died without heirs; for nobody have ever said a word.

I didn't know that then, of course; and so as to make it look natural, I had a low wall built where I decided my land was going to end. I left a few feet between the wall and the greenhouse, and dug to the ground so as it would look as if it had always been in use. Harold left the wall for Percy to build. I had already had to stop Percy from painting the gable-end of my greenhouse blue. He built the wall as I wanted it; but while the cement on top was wet, he fished out some stones from among the rubble in the gully, chipped off the edges, and stuck them up all along like spikes. I suppose he thought it was ornamental, but I thought it was a silly idea myself. Anybody could jump over the wall, anyway. It was those blessed stones was my undoing.

By then my poor old mother was on her last legs; or rather, she was hardly on her legs at all. I had to help her even to go to the back, and from her chair by the fire to her bed. Besides, she was very low in spirit. I was glad for Prissy, or anybody else to come and talk to her, and give her an interest, if not cheer her up. Prissy always managed to find out all the private business of her visitors, and she enjoyed spreading it around with her quick tongue, beginning with us. It could do no harm her telling it to my mother, for, in that case, it would go no further. My mother knew what Prissy was and often said ‘I don't wonder the people round here call my sister The Guernsey Evening Press.' That year Prissy had two fresh visitors who was staying the whole summer. They was very good class, she said; but she couldn't quite make them out at first. However, she soon got to the bottom of the mystery. They was a mother and a son; but no father. The mother had lost her husband and, without saying so, let it be understood he had been killed in the War; but Prissy managed to screw out the truth of the matter, which was the woman had lost her husband because he had left her before they had been married a month. She was now headmistress of a special school in England for children who was born without fathers. The son was just out of college and very clever, Prissy said. I didn't understand Prissy properly, as my mother told it to me anyhow, and I doubt if Prissy herself knew what she was talking about, but from what I could make out the son was going to be a professor and was only interested in old things. I thought she meant old buildings, or perhaps old furniture. I didn't know then there was people in the world who gave up their whole lives to studying old stones.

Prissy said she would send him for a walk round our way and then I could tell him what I knew of old things in Guernsey. I said he could come if he wanted to and I would tell him anything I knew, so long as he didn't stop me working. He came. He found me working on my new patch of ground between the end of the greenhouse and the wall. ‘May I introduce myself?' he said. ‘I am Dudley Waine with an “e”.' I couldn't see the ‘e' mattered all that much, but I said I was Ebenezer Le Page and was glad to meet him, and would shake hands, only my hand was too dirty. I was sorry for him. There was something missing. It was missing from his voice. I could well believe he was born without a father. He was about Raymond's age, perhaps a year or two older, but was plump and had a round baby face and big spectacles; and he seemed always to be looking for something he couldn't find. I said I didn't think I could help him much: but if he was interested in old buildings, he ought to go inside the Vale Church. He said it was only a few centuries old and he wasn't interested. I said, ‘St Sampson's Church is old. It was built in A.D. 1111.' It is the only date I know of churches. He wasn't interested in St Sampson's Church either. It was ‘comparatively recent'. He was only interested in ‘pre-Christian remains'. I said there was a Druid's Altar on L'Ancresse Common; but it was overgrown with brambles, and had railings all round. They was bent in places and you could push your way in; but all the dogs in the parish made their mess in it, as well as human beings on the day of the races. There was another something of the sort I knew of on the way to Birdo at Le Dehus; but you had to ask for the key from next door to go in, and I had never bothered. Also, a few years before the War they uncovered some stones at L'Islet was supposed to be a prehistorical burial-ground or something; but anybody could have arranged those.

I was saying all this to try my best and be helpful, when all of a sudden he clapped his hands to his brow as if he had seen a vision, and was staring through his spectacles at the stones on the top of my wall. ‘It is not possible!' he said. ‘Where have those come from?' I said the builder got them out of the gully: I didn't think to say Percy had chipped pieces off to make them look ornamental. Dudley Waine was down the gully like a dog after a rabbit: but he couldn't find any more; only the raw material, he said.