The Book of Ebenezer le Page Page 15

  The Military went so far as to have a Guard on the beach at L’Ancresse Common. I knew because Amos Duquemin was put on guard there during his training. He said it was terribly lonely out there at nights; and once, when he saw somebody come crawling up the beach, he got quite scared. ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ he called out. There was no answer. ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ No answer. When there was no answer the third time, he fired. ‘Baah!’ it went. Amos Duquemin dropped his rifle and ran. He never got it out of his mind. He was talking about it yet, years after the War. ‘That poor old sheep!’ he said. It was the only creature he killed during the War. He was to the Front for years, but didn’t set eyes on a German. He was stationed behind the lines looking after the mules. He was luckier than Jim Machon, who got gassed, and when he came back, was spewing up his guts until he died. Jim Le Poidevin lost a leg. Eddie Le Tissier was killed.

  Raymond wasn’t afraid of going to the War: I’m sure of that. It was other things he was afraid of. I think he was most afraid of doing wrong. He didn’t worry much at first, because he was too young to be called up and may have thought the War would be over before he had to make up his mind. He was learning Greek. Miss Mellish, the Headmistress of the Ladies’ College, was giving him lessons. I asked him if he was learning Greek because he was going to preach to the Greeks. He said no, but the Greek Testament was more like what Jesus said than the English. He wasn’t sure what language Jesus actually preached in: perhaps a dialect of Galilee. ‘Patois, if you like,’ he said. I had always thought the Bible was word for word what Jesus said. Raymond said, ‘It’s hard to know what Jesus really did say, sometimes. He says things that don’t go together.’

  I don’t know why Raymond got so taken up with religion. It wasn’t as if he’d had it rammed down his throat at home. The Martels was Church, but didn’t go. Hetty, of course, was brought up Chapel, and went every Sunday when she was a girl; but she didn’t go any more after she was married. Prissy was the same until the War; but when the Bishop of Winchester came over to Guernsey to preach The Mission of Repentance and Hope, she suddenly became very religious. ‘God have brought the War upon us for our sins,’ she said, ‘and He won’t see to it we win, if we don’t go to church every Sunday and pray for the King and Queen.’ She bought herself a new dress for Sundays, and a new hat for every other week. Of a Sunday evening, when the bells of the Vale Church began to ring, you would see her going along the Braye Road with a Prayer Book in her hand and Percy walking two or three steps behind her. Naturally she had to pass in front of Wallaballoo, and Hetty would be sitting out of sight behind the lace curtains of the bow window, as Prissy well knew, watching her pass and reckoning up the price of everything she had on. ‘She put everything she got on her back, that one,’ said Hetty, ‘like a camel!’

  One evening La Hetty came round when my mother was out to week-night service and poured her troubles all over me. ‘That Prissy only go to church to spite me,’ she said. ‘She know quite well I can’t go, what with Harold and his bald head. He would have to take his hat off and all the people would see I was married to an old man.’ Harold wasn’t an old man, by any means, but he didn’t have much hair. In fact, he didn’t have much hair when she married him. Percy had a fine head of hair to his dying day. ‘I’ve ruined my life!’ Hetty said and began to cry: ‘I can’t go anywhere like other people: I can’t even go to the Pictures.’

  Raymond told me once how, when he was eight or nine, he was taken by his mother and father to Poole’s Myrama at St Julien’s Hall to see the sinking of the Titanic. Jim and me went to see it; and it was wonderful how it was done. It was more like the real thing than the Pictures. Raymond, like other boys, was all excited to go. They sat in good seats near the front. On the wall was a notice LADIES ARE REQUESTED TO REMOVE THEIR HATS. Hetty didn’t take hers off because she thought, if she did, it would look funny for Harold to be sitting with his cap on. A lady sitting behind complained to the programme-seller that she wouldn’t be able to see because of Hetty’s big hat; and the programme-seller came and asked Hetty if she would be so kind as to remove it. Hetty stood up without a word and walked out; and Harold and Raymond had to follow. Raymond didn’t see the sinking of the Titanic after all.

  I said to Hetty, ‘Why don’t Raymond go with you to the Pictures?’ ‘Raymond is ashamed to be seen out with his mother,’ she said. I didn’t believe that for a moment; but then Hetty never did know what Raymond was feeling about anything. He always felt terribly sorry for his mother, but sometimes he was mad with her at the same time. The reason was, if ever he went to Town with her, she would stop and talk to this woman and that woman, and they’d say, ‘Who is this then, your young man?’ and she’d say, ‘Ah but no, it’s my boy Raymond, my only boy!’ and they’d say, ‘Goodness, but haven’t he grown? It was only yesterday he was hiding behind your petticoats!’ ‘I feel about three years old,’ said Raymond.

  There was one thing he was ashamed of his mother for, and that was the way she spoke English. He was everlastingly teasing her for saying ‘tree’ for ‘three’ and ‘true’ for ‘through’ and for not sounding her aitches and all the rest of it. I didn’t like him for that. It was partly Hetty’s own fault, because she had never let him speak in patois, from the days he went to the Misses Cohu’s School. She wanted him to grow up to speak English like the gentry. Well, he did speak good English; but he had a gift for words and I think would have spoken well in any language he set his mind to learn. I didn’t mind him being particular about the words he used himself; but he was fussy about the way other people spoke. I said, ‘It’s what a person say that matter. It isn’t how he say it.’

  I was sorry for Hetty that night she came. ‘Well, I’ll come with you to the Pictures, if you want to go,’ I said. ‘I’d like you to,’ she said, ‘but what will the people say?’ ‘Bother the people!’ I said, ‘I’m a relation, aren’t I?’ ‘Yes, there’s that,’ she said and laughed like a young girl. A Saturday afternoon would be best, she thought. I could meet her in Town outside the Pictures, and we could separate after, and nobody would know. I went with her a few times. When Jim and me used to go to the Pictures, it was to Bartlett’s Flea-pit at the bottom of the Rue des Frères. It had been a second-class roller-skating rink before, and was an itchy sort of place. After you had been sitting for a few minutes you began to notice the people around you was twitching as much as the people on the Pictures. The only Picture I remember seeing there was Pearl White in the Exploits of Elaine left hanging by her teeth from a skyscraper, so as you would go and see what happened to her the next week. Hetty didn’t like that sort of Picture, but Pictures with Mary Pickford in, or Pauline Frederick; so we went to St Julien’s. She would be dolled up to the eyebrows and looked like a jeweller’s shop. She had rings on both hands and bracelets on both arms and a gold chain with a locket round her neck and a long gold chain with a watch in her belt and a brooch on her blouse. It was worth while going with her because she enjoyed herself so much. She sat on the edge of the plush seat with her back as stiff as a poker, and her dumpy little legs hardly reaching to the floor; and would be either laughing or crying all the time. She thought the Pictures was real. Pictures was only pictures to me, and half the time I didn’t know what they was about; and when I did, I didn’t believe it was real: but I liked to sit and listen to the music. The Santangelo’s quartet was good.

  Once when we came out I said she might just as well have tea with me at Le Noury’s; and then who should be sitting at the next table to us but old Mrs Domaille from next door to Les Sablons? ‘Why, if it isn’t years and years since I have seen you, Henriette Le Page!’ she said. ‘Is it that you have a new husband now?’ ‘Ah no, he is the son of my sister Charlotte,’ said Hetty. ‘I would never have thought it,’ said old Mrs Domaille, ‘you don’t look a day older than he do!’ She couldn’t have said anything to please Hetty better. When we got out in the Arcade, she said, ‘Well, now we’re together you might as well come home and have some supper.’ I
said, ‘All right,’ thinking nothing of it. I made a mistake there. I ran into Prissy not long after. ‘I hear you’re going about with my sister that was,’ she said. ‘Well, I will say this for you, Ebenezer Le Page: you know on which side your bread is buttered. When that Raymond go and get himself killed and Harold is dead, she will leave everything to you in her will.’ I didn’t tell Hetty.

  I got into the way of going to Wallaballoo quite often of a Saturday evening, even if we hadn’t been to the Pictures. I had nowhere else to go. I was getting tired of fellows in khaki saying to me in Town ‘Ah, so they haven’t got you yet!’ I always answered, ‘If they want me, they know where to find me. I don’t hide myself away.’ But I felt left out of it. I didn’t keep it a secret from my mother that I was going down to see Hetty; but she didn’t like me going. She wasn’t one for visiting people herself. Anybody could come and see her and was welcome; but I don’t think she had ever been inside either of the two houses, and nor had I until then. ‘It don’t do to come between a husband and wife,’ she said. I wasn’t coming between a husband and wife, she needn’t have been afraid of that; and I would have stopped going sooner, if it hadn’t been for Raymond. He said I was an ‘old heathen’ but for that reason he liked talking to me.

  Harold I hardly ever saw. He worked to all hours of the night by electric light in the carpenter’s shop in the yard. If he happened to be indoors, he would be sitting by the fire in the back kitchen, with his cap on, reading one of Raymond’s books. Raymond used to laugh at the way his father read a book. He began in the middle and read to the end, and then, if he was interested, he read from the beginning to find out how it all started. Raymond would have liked his father to talk with him about the book, say what he thought of the characters and so on; but all he would say was ‘A good yarn,’ or ‘Not a bad yarn,’ or ‘Not much of a yarn.’ Raymond could never have a real talk with his father. Harold knew his job from A to Z, but he hadn’t had much education from books. Raymond was too much educated from books, to my way of thinking. Most of his time in the house he spent in the little room over the door reading. There was nine rooms in that house. The back kitchen was the only room downstairs that was used at all, unless they had visitors; and Harold’s and Hetty’s bedroom and Raymond’s upstairs, and his little room over the front door. The other rooms was cleaned and polished and worshipped by Hetty; and always new things was being bought to put in. Hetty did all the housework herself, because she couldn’t bear to have strangers touching her things. She did even the heavy washing. She said a paid washerwoman didn’t take the trouble to wash the clothes clean because they wasn’t her own.

  Hetty was always complaining she had nobody to talk to. Raymond was either out, or had his head stuck in a book; and she couldn’t talk to Harold. ‘If you look at him sideways, he comes like a lion!’ she said. He was always all right with me. He would say ‘Good-evening!’ and ‘How are you?’ He was never a chap to say much; but the fellows who worked for him swore by him. They said he was as straight as a die and would always see fair play. Hetty herself praised him to me sometimes. ‘After all, there are plenty of women who are worse off than me,’ she’d say. He didn’t drink, he didn’t go after other women, and he gave her everything she wanted. When she wanted the house papered, it was done. If she wanted a new suite of furniture for any room, he’d say ‘Get it, my ducks!’ When she had bought it and wanted him to admire it, he’d say, ‘Are you satisfied? If you’re satisfied, I am.’

  It wasn’t until years later Raymond tried to tell me what it had been like for him living in that house. When he was a small boy he would lie in his cot many a night trembling all over, as if he was in the middle of a storm. Harold would be standing out on the landing in only his night-shirt, shouting and swearing; and Hetty would be lying on the stairs, screaming and crying and saying she wouldn’t go into his room. Raymond didn’t understand then, and thought Harold was going to kill his mother. He would get out of his cot and kneel down on the floor and pray to God that Hetty would run away from Harold and take him with her to England. A storm would be followed by a fine spell, like the weather; but, after a while, he would know another was coming up. For a whole week perhaps, there wouldn’t be a word spoken between his mother and father. It was awful at meal-times. When Raymond was at school and a silent spell was on, he dreaded to come home for his tea. He would come in and say ‘Hullo, Pa!’ and ‘Hullo, Ma!’ and sit at the table with one on his right and one on his left not saying a word to each other; but they would both speak to him. His father would ask him how he’d got on at school that day, and he would say ‘All right’. His mother would ask him who he had seen on the way home, and he would try and think of somebody he had seen. He was careful to answer just the question he was asked. He didn’t want to take sides and tell more to one than to the other. ‘It was hell!’ he said.

  When he showed me his little room the first time, he said, ‘This is my cell. I ought to be a monk.’ I have often thought of that since. If he had lived at the time when there was monks on Lihou Island, I think he would have been happy there and a lot of misery would have been spared to a lot of people. His room was plain enough for a cell. There was a wickerwork armchair with a cushion on it where I used to sit, and a table for his papers and a chair with a leather seat. He used to sit the wrong way round in that chair with his arms over the back, talking to me. He had one picture on the wall: The Light of the World. ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock.’ He had dozens of books on shelves. There was some about religion and some about the history of Guernsey, and stories by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott and others. He didn’t like the stories of Sir Walter Scott himself, but had bought them for his father. He liked the stories of John Oxenham and Hall Caine and Florence Barclay. The Manxman by Hall Caine was on the Pictures, and for once he took his mother; but she didn’t like it because there was an illegitimate baby in it. He also took her to see The Rosary, and that one she liked; but he said it wasn’t like the book.

  He was getting very worried about the War. ‘It can’t be right for a Christian to go to War,’ he said, ‘a Christian has to love his enemies, not go and kill them.’ ‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I don’t go out of my way to make trouble; but if a chap punches me on the nose, I punch him back. When all is said and done, it was the Germans started it. I don’t see how our side can be in the wrong.’ He said, ‘The Christians in England are praying for victory, and the Christians in Germany are praying for victory. God can’t answer both lots of prayers.’ I said, ‘He can give victory to the best side, surely.’ He said, ‘Are you saying all the battles in history have been won by the best side? History is a disgrace!’ I was getting fed up with the argument. ‘I don’t know nothing about the battles in history,’ I said, ‘but I do know when I saw Guernsey beat Jersey in the Muratti, it was the best side won.’ He said, ‘How about when Jersey beat Guernsey?’ ‘Oh, that was just luck!’ I said. ‘There you are, you see!’ he said, ‘The trouble with you is that you don’t take anything seriously.’ ‘Perhaps I don’t,’ I said.

  17

  When Jean Batiste embarked with the First Battalion of the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry, I hoped La Tabby would come home and live with us. My mother asked her to, but she wouldn’t. She said she wanted to stop and look after her house, so that it would always be ready for Jean to come back to at any time. She had her Separation Allowance and a little money they had saved; but that was all. She worked the garden, which didn’t give much; and worked for neighbours, who wasn’t much better off than herself. She earned a little extra that way. My mother did manage to get her to come to Les Moulins Saturdays, though she had to walk all the way; and she would stay until the Sunday night, so that for one day a week, at least, she was well fed. She was a girl who would go to any amount of trouble if somebody else was there, but couldn’t be bothered, if she was on her own.

  I saw nothing of Jim. I caught sight of Phoebe and Eileen in Town once or twice of a Saturday night with
the Sarchets; but no Jim. I was to learn later that he was left at home to mind the baby. I had seen in the Press there was a second son, Eric. Actually, Jim was having his happiest times those Saturday nights. The baby was put to sleep, but Stanley, who was then running about, Jim kept up long after his bed-time. It was the only chance he got of being with his son. I think that was the one thing Phoebe did to him that hurt him most. That fool of a girl didn’t know that in Jim she’d got hold of a wonderful father for her children. Naturally he wanted young Stanley to go and work with him in the garden, even if he was only being a nuisance. She made every excuse: that he’d get dirty, that he’d eat worms, that he’d fall down and hurt himself; and at last came right out with it. ‘Stanley, you are NOT to go out-of-doors with your father!’ Jim could only say ‘Stanley, I would like you to come in the garden with me, please.’ It was the nearest he could get to giving an order. Of course Stanley obeyed his mother.

  I got some of it out of Jim in the end, but even then I daren’t say a word against Phoebe. He didn’t blame her. It was the way she was made. He blamed himself more. He said, ‘She made a sad mistake when she married me. I’m not her sort of bloke really.’ I should jolly well think he wasn’t! Nor was she thinking about what sort of bloke he was when she married him: she was thinking of what she was going to get out of him. There was times when I lost all patience with Jim; yet his faults was good faults. I am glad now I held my peace.

  I went down to the farm again pretty often to get what news I could out of Mrs Mahy; but she was too much the lady to say all she thought. She visited them regularly, but I could tell she didn’t enjoy her visits very much. Eileen was practically living there; and, often, Mrs Ferbrache as well. Mrs Ferbrache, who drank herself to death before long, had a tongue and didn’t care what she said with it. I think Jim’s mother was a bit afraid of Mrs Ferbrache. She said Stanley was a lovely little chap, but took more after the Ferbraches. The new one might turn out to be more like Jim. Jim himself did nothing but work. He was working his own place without help and also helping Mess Le Sauvage again. Mess Le Sauvage said he didn’t know what he would do without Jim and was going behind doors to try for him to be kept out of the Army. Mrs Mahy smiled. ‘Jim takes me aside every time I go and whispers “How is Ebby?” I tell him you always ask after him.’