The Book of Ebenezer le Page (52 page)

Julia worked in the Post Office at St Sampson's; and one evening on the way home from work she came into Les Moulins looking very grim. She had come across a letter in the Post Office which she had stolen, and brought for me to see. It was addressed to the Herr Kommandant at the German Officers' Club at Castle Carey. I knew the writing. I knew that thin, mean, spidery handwriting; and Julia had recognised it too. I said, ‘I am opening this.' She said, ‘That is what I brought it to you for.' He hadn't written much. I have it yet. He didn't give his address, I noticed; nor his name. ‘Dear Herr Kommandant,' he wrote. ‘It may interest you to know that radio parties are being held nightly at Beaulieu, Route Militaire, Vale, in contravention of current regulations.' He signed it ‘A friend of law and order.' I didn't know the people who lived at Beaulieu, but it might just as well have been the Hamelins, or anybody. I said to Julia, ‘I will go and see Mr Dobrée in the near future, and have a few kind words with him.' She said, ‘You couldn't do better.'

I went the next afternoon. My luck was in. I walked up the drive and round the back of Wallaballoo and found Master Raoul sitting in a deck-chair on the lawn in the sun, reading a book. He was wearing a clean white open-neck shirt and a new pair of grey flannel trousers. I wondered where he got them from; and how. He said, ‘Hullo, Mr Le Page,' and put down the book he was reading. I said, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Dobrée. I have come from the German Kommandant in answer to a letter you have written to him about the people who live at Beaulieu.' He looked at me like a frightened rabbit with his popping eyes and didn't know what to say. ‘In my humble opinion, Mr Dobrée,' I said, ‘a man like you is worse than Hitler. Hitler is mad and bad; but what he is doing he think is for the good of his people. I don't know if you got people somewhere; but I do know you got none on Guernsey.' His mother came to the back door and called out, ‘What is it, dear?' ‘Nothing, nothing, darling,' he said; and she went indoors again. ‘Stand up!' I said. ‘I am going to knock you down.' He stood up, the fool! He was years younger than me, and much bigger. ‘Be reasonable, Mr Le Page,' he said. ‘Try to understand my point of view.' I understood his point of view all right: he wanted the best of both sides. I knocked him down. ‘Stand up!' I said. I was going to knock him down three times: that would be enough; but he didn't stand up again. He crawled on his hands and knees across the lawn and up the back steps and indoors. I spat and walked away. I haven't spoken to him from that day to this.

If anything, I went more often to listen to the radio at the Hamelins. For some reason, I wanted to feel there was other people in the world, besides us shut up in Guernsey. One night when I was creeping home along the hedge the other side of the road to Rocque Balan, somebody passed like a ghost on the grass. It was a very dark night, and he couldn't have seen me against the hedge; but I could make out the shape of his head and shoulders against the sky, and knew it was the boy. I had no idea where he was living. I knew a lot of German prisoners lived at Paradise, and it was said terrible things happened there; but it may be he was living in another house that way, perhaps a hundred or more sleeping on the bare boards. My first thought was he had run away, and it was to us he was running. I thought, we will hide him in the packing-shed, and he can come in the house at night; but I don't think now he was coming to us. It was not in his character to make himself a burden on other people, though God knows he would have been welcome! I know now it was not from being a slave-worker he was running away, but from worse.

The next minute I heard the footsteps of somebody else; and it was somebody who was not afraid of being heard. I knew him by his legs and his walk like a jockey, though I couldn't see his face. I know he didn't have a hat on. I have the idea he didn't have a belt either, and the collar of his tunic was unbuttoned; but I don't know how I can have seen. He caught up with the boy just by Rocque Balan, and put a hand on him. I saw the boy lean against the rock. It was from weakness: he was so tired. The guard spoke to him; but I didn't understand what he said. He didn't sound as if he was speaking rough, though, but begging almost. I wondered if he was being kind to the boy after all, and trying to make him see reason and go back quietly. He wasn't armed, I don't think, for I saw both his hands on the boy. ‘Nein! Nein! Nein!' I heard the boy cry out. I knew then.

I was across that road. I can't take any credit for it; for it happened without me thinking. The guard was not expecting me, and was taken completely by surprise. My fist caught him sideways on his ear, and he fell. I don't think the boy looked round; or even knew. I think he just thought the guard was finished, and that was that. I saw him pull up his rags of trousers, and drift over the common towards the sea. The guard moved at my feet. It was a miracle I saw a piece of rock was loose: it was a boulder really. It was more of a miracle I had the strength to lift it. I lifted it above my head and crashed it down on his. I heard the bones crack.

I felt nothing. The boy was gone down to the beach. It was no good to follow him: to try and save him now. I knew what he would do. He would walk in his lonely proud way down over the shingle and on to the sand, and on and on until he came to the edge of the sea; and the sea is shallow there and you have to walk a long long way before you are over your height: but he would walk it. The shame was too great for him to live. It is strange he have never come to me in dreams, but only in memory; and I remember him always as he was when he passed our gate, and laughed to Tabitha. The other I have dreamt of often. It is always the same dream of his cracked head and the blood. The strange thing is I always see him with his hair short and sticking up like the bristles of a brush, yet I never saw him by daylight with his hat off to know what sort of hair he got. I have never told a soul, and I heard nothing about it. It is only in dreams it come back, and I feel horror, but I don't feel sorry: even in my dreams.

I committed one other act of violence during the Occupation, and that on an innocent creature; but I cannot say I am sorry for that either. I got into the way of dodging the chap on patrol and going down on La Petite Grève now and then at nights to pick a few limpets, if I could; but the Germans had skinned the rocks and, I heard, lived on limpet soup until they was sick of it. By then, they was nearly as hungry as we was; and one couldn't help feeling sorry for them. In the paper, they blamed our side for the shortage of food: they said ships coming from France with food was bombed by orders of Churchill. I don't know. Anyway, it wasn't to try for limpets, or ormers, I went down on La Petite Grève the night I am thinking of. I don't know what I hoped to find: a few lady crabs crawling about perhaps.

It was half tide and I climbed on to the rock Tabitha and me used to call the flat rock. The sea was half around it, and I knew at the deep end it went in and made a sort of cave. I was hardly thinking of what I was doing, and, more from force of habit than anything, I lowered my arm in the water and began to feel around underneath. I can feel yet the shock I got. There was an enormous creature curled up under there. I grabbed it as best I could, and pulled it out. It was a conger; and a whopper! Now if there is one fighting fish in the sea, it is the conger. He will fight for his life until he is absolutely dead. There wasn't a boulder handy; but I fought with that old conger and he fought with me, until I got him so I could bash his head on the flat rock; and then he stopped wriggling and struggling in my arms. The patrol from round the Chouey passed along the top grinding on his bike, and I was terrified he might hear the noise and stop. That conger was mine! I think I would have killed anybody who tried to take it away from me. I was nearly crying: I was so weak and excited. I wanted to run indoors like a kid and say ‘Look! Look what I've caught!' but I held myself back. I knew the chap would go religiously right as far as La Jaonneuse where the barbed wire began, before turning; and, meanwhile I was up and across the road and round the house. Tabitha was in the kitchen doing some mending by one candle, as usual. I went in as if it was nothing out of the ordinary: just something that happened every day. ‘I caught this conger, by the way,' I said. It was the only time I saw my sister break down during the Occupation. She came and put a hand round my neck and her head on my shoulder and sobbed; and was stroking the long conger with her other hand.

We put it in the copper for the night, and made sure the back-door was locked, then sat up late planning what we would do with it. She said, and I agreed with her, young Lihou must have a piece; and the next day I gave him a good length of the tail end. The thick part I said we would keep for ourselves; but Tabitha insisted we must invite Olive Le Boutillier and the two children to come and have it with us. It had to be in the evening when Jean and Julia was home from work; so that night we had evening dinner like the gentry. Olive Le Boutillier said it wasn't really right for them to come and eat our food, as young Jean was getting German rations which he shared with his family; but I said, ‘This is not on the rations: it is a gift of God.' Tabitha even managed to make some sort of stuffing for it, and we had it stuffed and baked, and with baked potatoes; and two candles on the table to celebrate. There was some left over for us next day, and we had some boiled; and conger soup for a week. In fact, I got sick of conger soup and haven't liked it since.

It can't have been many years ago when I was in the States Offices one Friday morning getting my pay, and in walks Steve Picquet and starts shouting to the girl in the desk. He did some work for the States: I don't know what; but I bet, whatever it was, he was diddling them. It was my girl in the desk and she didn't take offence, but smiled and said, ‘How goes it, Steve?' and counted out the money in his hand and closed it and patted it. He grinned like an old Tom cat. I knew the famous Steve Picquet to nod to, and had spoken to him a few times; but I hadn't seen him since before the Occupation, though I had read some of his comic pieces in the
Star
, which he wrote under the name of Westerner. In his younger days, he was the greatest boxer I have ever seen. He was only light to middle weight, but quick as lightning on the attack. He wasn't so good on the defence, perhaps, but he could take punishment. The last time I had seen him box was in the Stoneworkers' Hall at St Sampson's, and he had with him a gang of young lads he was training. He was a hero to the boys; and there was some likely young boxers among them. That night he himself took on some tough young quarrymen; but he always got in first, and no chap really had a chance of getting near him. I remember the St John's Ambulance chaps was there to pick up the pieces. He was an amateur only, and didn't make anything out of it; but somehow I always got the feeling he wasn't boxing for fun, but for some reason of his own I couldn't fathom. I don't know yet why he was so fierce.

In those days he was a smart looking chap, and dressed smart; but when I met him in the States Offices that morning, he looked like Robinson Crusoe. I knew he was living with four or five dogs in a German bunker he called Onmeown, built in a hole in the rock under Les Vardes at Pleinmont. He was wearing an airman's helmet he got from a German he found drowned, and a torn jacket and sea-boots and a pair of trousers made from an old Army blanket; and he was carrying a sack on his back to take home his week's provisions. I walked back along the Esplanade with him, and he went into the Picket House to sell some tickets for the Spastic Pools to the bus-drivers. He had a lot of irons in the fire, had Steve. He didn't seem to want me to leave him, for, though he lived on his own in the last place to live in on Guernsey and was called ‘the hermit' by the visitors, he was hungry for company: so I hung on and went with him to the shop in Fountain Street where he got his groceries, and to the stall in the market where he got his meat. It was mostly bones for the dogs, I noticed. On the way, he bawled out to this person and that, especially those who he knew would rather he didn't; and he had a voice like a fog-horn. Those properly dressed and important people tried their best to get away with a polite ‘Good-morning, Steve', but the children, when they saw him, came running to say ‘Hullo!' and his wicked old face would wrinkle up in a smile you couldn't help liking him for, and his wild mad eyes would go quite soft and gentle. He asked me if I would have some grub with him; and I said I would. After Tabitha was gone and I was on my own, I usually got a meal in Town on Fridays; so as not to have the trouble of getting one for myself at home.

We had dinner in that place in the corner of the States Arcade by the meat market, and went upstairs. I noticed he had to go up lop-sided, and had one hand badly broken. I said, ‘Is anything wrong, Steve?' He said, ‘Those bastards on Alderney!' I didn't know he had been on Alderney during the Occupation; and I don't yet know what for. Steve was a mystery man. He wasn't a Guernseyman. His family was Jersey, though I think he was a distant relation of the Priaulx; but he was born in New Zealand, so he said, and sent to Winchester Public School. He was later a physical training instructor in the Army in India and a schoolmaster, and goodness knows what else. He told me he had been married when he was young and his wife ran off; but I am not sure that was true. He may have only said it to me because he had heard I was one for the women. He admitted he had had little to do with women in his life; and I never heard of him being interested in a woman in Guernsey, though he was friends with a woman now and again who could be of help to him. He was shifty in a way, was Steve; yet he wasn't afraid to let important people know what he knew about them; but when it came down to hard facts about himself, there was no knowing what Steve Picquet had done or hadn't done in his time. He said one thing one day and another another, and you didn't know what to believe; and you couldn't believe a word other people said about him either.