The Book of Ebenezer le Page Read online

  Tabby had hoped Jean would get leave for Christmas, but he didn’t. She spent Christmas with us. She was quiet but happy, and didn’t talk about him much; but we drank his health before we sat down to our Christmas dinner. She had brought a bottle of wine and my mother had some. Jean didn’t see again the little house she was keeping ready for him. It was a telegram first; and then, later on, a letter from his officer. When she got the telegram she came straight to my mother. I was sent the news to work, and Tabby was in the kitchen helping my mother to get the tea when I got home. Thank God I didn’t try to say anything. It was her who came to me and held my head against her breast and said, ‘It’s all right, Ebby: it’s all right.’

  The officer in his letter said fine things about Jean: I think more than he need have done. Jean was only a corporal. Miss Penelope Peele, who was sister of the Rector of the Vale and a great one for comforting the bereaved, came to see Tabitha. My mother told her of the letter from Jean’s officer, and she asked if she might see it; and she read it. ‘Aren’t you proud?’ she said to Tabitha. She was small, my sister; but she had great dignity. Her eyes blazed. ‘I was proud of him before, Miss Peele,’ she said. ‘Have I any the more reason to be proud of him now?’ Miss Peele didn’t come to our house again.

  Tabitha let her house to Philippe Batiste, Jean’s cousin, who had used to help him with the fishing sometimes and now wanted to get married before he was called up. When he came back after the Armistice, she sold it to him outright, furniture and all. She even let him have Jean’s clothes and fishing tackle. The only thing she kept was a guernsey she had knitted for him. She said I could wear it, if I wanted to. I didn’t like to, while she was alive; but I have worn it since. I still have it and it will last longer than me.

  She only stayed with us a few weeks, before she went back to live with the Priaulx. She was well paid and had everything found; but she was more like a young aunt in the family. Jack Priaulx was gone to the War, and it was her really who brought up Annette’s two children. Annette Priaulx made a lot of show of loving her children, but was on committees for this and committees for that, and didn’t have time to take much notice of them. Tabitha made no show, but was steady and always there. They earned great honour for themselves in the Second World War, but I don’t expect anybody will have thought of thanking Tabitha for that. They was a boy and a girl, and she used to bring them along to have tea with us sometimes. I thought then how strange it was that, if Jean hadn’t been killed, she might never had the chance of bringing up children; yet when I saw her with Gervase and Louise, I knew she was made for it.

  I had the surprise of my life when Jim turned up one Saturday evening. It was when I wasn’t going down to Wallaballoo so much, because I was getting fed up having arguments with Raymond. I had been out round the Surtaut and got a few mackerel. It was soon going to be dark and I had turned the boat to come in, when I saw old Jim on the beach. He waved and I waved. I was pleased to see him, but I knew something must be very wrong. The first thing I said was ‘Are the nippers all right?’ ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘they’re fine; only I’m going away Monday. Will you come?’ I said, ‘Where in the name to goodness are you going to?’ He said, ‘I’m going to England and enlist.’ I said, ‘Are you off your head?’

  I thought he must have had a hell of a row with Phoebe. I said, ‘What about Phoebe? You can’t just go and leave her like that.’ ‘She’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘She will have an allowance for herself and for the kids. The Sarchets are going to look after the place. She says she’ll get on just as well without me.’ I said, ‘Have you told your people yet?’ He said, ‘Yes, I’ve just come from there.’ ‘What have they got to say about it?’ I said. ‘My mother wants me to wait until I’m called up,’ he said. ‘I told her I was coming to see you. She said you’d soon stop me.’ ‘I can’t stop you,’ I said, ‘but I’m not coming with you, I’ll tell you that from the start!’ He said, ‘I didn’t think you would.’ ‘What do your father say?’ I said. His father was all for it. He said a young man ought to go and fight for his King and Country. I said, ‘It’s not a question of fighting for your King and Country. When your King and Country want you, they’ll jolly well come and get you! It’s a different matter putting your head in the lion’s mouth.’ I didn’t know what had come over Jim. There was us standing facing each other, as if we was quarrelling. He said, ‘I want to go in the big train again.’ It was too much! I sat down on the stones and burst out laughing.

  He stood looking down at me, as if it was me who was off my head. I scrambled to my feet. The only sensible thing to do was to get the fish out of the boat and take it indoors. ‘Coming in?’ I said. ‘I’ve seen your mother,’ he said. ‘It was her told me you was out fishing.’ ‘How about something to eat?’ I said. ‘I promised I’d have supper with Mum and Dad,’ he said. He had come on his bike: it was against the hedge. I said, ‘Wait a sec then, while I drop these in the wash-house; and I’ll walk back with you part of the way.’ I thought I would try and knock some sense into his wooden head. It was during that walk he told me how it was with him and Phoebe. I wondered if perhaps she was carrying on with one of the Sarchets. There was three brothers, and only one of them was married, and he wasn’t to be trusted. I didn’t like to say as much to Jim, but he guessed what I was thinking. He said Phoebe liked going out with the Sarchets for a laugh and a drink; but that was all. It was different with Eileen. She was sort of half engaged to the youngest. On second thoughts I believed him about Phoebe. She was too mean even to give him that excuse. ‘I want to be with the boy,’ he said. ‘Once a chap’s married he’s alone for the rest of his life.’

  I walked with him right as far as the Gigands, and he wanted me to go in and have supper with them; but I said no. I couldn’t face his mother. I knew I hadn’t done what she hoped. I have blamed myself bitterly since. If only I’d said outright, ‘Phoebe may not care if you are killed, or not: but I do! I care more for you to be alive than for anybody else on earth!’ he might have listened to me. It’s too late now. I didn’t. When I said ‘Good-bye’, he said, ‘I’ll write to you.’ ‘Well, don’t expect much from me,’ I said. I didn’t expect he would write often, for he wasn’t much more of a fist with a pen than I am; but I got a long letter from him every week. I still have them all: pages and pages in his big clumsy handwriting that went down-hill across the paper. I had to write back somehow and bought a dictionary from old Miss Clarke in the States Arcade who sold prayer-books and Bibles, so as to see how to spell the long words: that is, when I wasn’t too lazy to look, or hadn’t lost myself in what I was saying. He didn’t bother with a dictionary sitting on his bed in the barrack-room, I’m sure; but I have been looking at those letters again and only Jim could have made those big curly G’s and E’s and those black full-stops like blots, and written the words he always ended with ‘From your old friend, Jim.’

  He enjoyed going in the big train; though this time it was full of soldiers. He said England was full of soldiers; and he went right across England. He volunteered for a Welsh Regiment; and was glad he did. He liked Wales better than England, he said. It was a more beautiful country. He said there was mountains with roads winding down and around, and valleys with bridges and streams. There was thousands of sheep on the mountains, and miles and miles with very few houses. He didn’t think much of the coast, though. He said it was grey rocks, or greenish and not a patch on Guernsey with its red and brown, and the sea wasn’t so blue, or so green, as ours; nor purple and pink and mauve and all the other beautiful colours it is in places inshore. I think he was homesick away from Guernsey really, and that’s why he wrote so much. He said he liked the Welsh fellows. He liked the Welsh better than the English. They was more natural: they was more like us. They spoke in Welsh to each other, and he could understand some of the words; and they understood some of his, if he spoke in Guernsey French. He said they had no idea where Guernsey was, most of them. Some of them thought it was off Land’s End, and others that it
was in the Mediterranean Sea. He wrote, ‘I wish you was here.’

  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.

  18

  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:

  Madamemoiselle from Armentières

  Hasn’t been fucked for forty years,

  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:

  Good-bye Dolly, I must leave you,

  Though it breaks my heart to go.

  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:

  Good-bye-ee, don’t sigh-ee, don’t cry-ee,

  Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee;

  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 yo
ung; 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!