The Book of Ebenezer le Page Read online

  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.

  It’s the visitors in the summer nearly drive me crazy these days. La Petite Grève used to be a quiet little bay nobody knew of; but now they have discovered it. They lie about on the sand in droves and sprawl on the rocks; and I have to step over their naked bodies to get to my boat. When they go back to their hotels, or guest-houses, in the evening, they leave behind bottles and paper-bags strewn all over the beach; although there are wire-baskets there all the summer for them to put their rubbish in. I only wish I could stuff them into those wire-baskets. To make matters worse, in the gully is the new prehistorical burial-ground I look after for the States. It was there long before the Germans came; but it is only these last years the States have decided it is an Ancient Monument.

  The visitors want to know all about it. It is mentioned in the book they have in their hands and from which they read out what they are supposed to look at. I tell them I don’t know nothing about it. How should I? I only keep it clean and tidy. They seem to think I was alive in those times. They look at me as if I was an ancient monument. Yet they can’t even say my name right. They call me Mister Lee Page in English; or they go all French and call me Monsieur Le Page. I explain to them patiently that my name is Le Page: Le in French and Page like the page of a book. They don’t know nothing, those people!

  Mind you, they like talking to me. They say it is nice to meet and talk to a real native. They mean a Guernseyman. Well, I’m not a Jerseyman, am I? Sometimes the Devil get into me and I make out I can’t speak a word of English. I speak to them in Guernsey French and tell them exactly what I think of them. They don’t understand a word I say; but they know I am not being very polite. Other times I just look at them with my mouth open and make noises, as if I was an imbecile: the same as I used to do with the Germans. They like that. It is what they expect a native to be. Then I think to myself ah well, they can’t help it, the poor creatures; and am as nice as pie and tell them funny stories. After all, it’s for the good of the island.

  The trouble is they can’t see a Guernsey joke. For instance, there was two young couples I took quite a fancy to. I could see they wasn’t the sort to leave paper on the beach, because they wasn’t carrying radios about. I took them out in my boat and invited them back to tea after. The girls was delighted with my old Guernsey kitchen. The fellows wanted to pay me for the tea, but I wouldn’t let them. It was me invited them to come in: they hadn’t invited themselves. A Guernseyman don’t charge to his friends: he want to give to his friends. I suppose they thought I was poor. If the truth was known, I could have bought them all up lock, stock, and barrel twenty times, if I’d wanted to.

  One of the girls said, ‘Aren’t you lonely in the winter, living here all by yourself?’ ‘I’m used to being on my own,’ I said. One of the chaps said, ‘Why don’t you have a dog to keep you company?’ ‘It would die,’ I said. ‘Or a cat,’ said one of the girls. ‘I don’t like cats,’ I said. ‘They are bad.’ I told them about Mirouse, the cat my mother used to have. He was a beautiful big black cat with a white shirt-front; but he was a robber. In the end, in spite of my mother, my father said he would have to go. He would drown him. So one night he tied a brick around his neck and threw him in the Vale Pond. ‘Now there will be some food left in the cupboard when I come home from work tomorrow,’ said my father; but he was wrong there. The next morning when he looked out of the bedroom window, there was Mirouse! He had drunk all the water and was sitting on the brick.

  The fellows sort of
smiled in that kind way the English have, as if they was sorry for the poor old man who thought that was funny. One of the girls, who had been getting ready to laugh to please me, laughed before I got to the end of the story; so I knew she hadn’t seen the joke. The other stuck out her chest and put on a face like a schoolmistress and said, ‘I think your father was a very cruel man, Mister Lee Page. I hope you have not grown up like him.’ No: it’s no use! It don’t do to make jokes with the English. They are serious people. I have learnt my lesson.

  I like it better here in the winter when the visitors have gone. It is quiet then. Tonight the sea is pounding away on the rocks of La Petite Grève and the spray is dashing against my windows and the wind is whistling round the chimney and the fire burning blue in the grate. I am in the warm and, as old Jim would say, as snug as a bug in a rug. I could be out visiting this person or that, if I wanted to. They all make a fuss of me when I arrive, and shoo the cat off the armchair for me to sit in; but they are not really interested in anything I have to say. It is not that I want to say much; but I like to sit in a corner and listen to people talking, and put in my spoke now and then. Nowadays people don’t talk among themselves around the fire like they used to. As soon as I’ve sat down and been made comfortable, it’s ‘Sh! it’s Maigret!’ or ‘It’s Eamon Andrews!’ and I have to sit in the half-dark and look at the horrible T.V.; and you can’t put your spoke in against the T.V.

  That is how it is I come to be writing this book. I got to say what I think to somebody: if only to myself. I don’t expect anybody will ever read what I have written; but at the back of my mind I always have the hope perhaps some day somebody will. I bought a big thick book from the Press Office in Smith Street, though I didn’t think at the time I would ever be able to fill it; but I am already getting near the end and haven’t written the half of what I have to say. I’ll have to buy another the next time I go to Town. Tonight the tunes have got in the way. I’m looking forward to beginning a new chapter. I like to start on a clean page and forget all the mistakes I have made before.

  19

  I can’t say I was really surprised when Hetty came round and said Raymond was gone in the Army. He was following the example of Horace. Hetty herself was half worried and half proud. ‘That Prissy won’t be able to say now it is Horace who is winning the War,’ she said. Raymond hadn’t been called up: he’d volunteered. ‘He is not one of those who wait to be fetched,’ said Hetty. I was out of favour with Hetty. Raymond himself didn’t come and tell me. In his case, I think he was ashamed after all his arguments with me about what a Christian ought not to do. He had been in the Army over a month before he came round to let me see how he looked in his uniform. I didn’t bring up the subject of what a Christian ought not to do; but he did say, when he was speaking of Miss Mellish, ‘The Reverend Noel Mellish, her brother, has won the V.C., and he is a Christian.’

  I was astonished at the change in Raymond. Until then nobody would have noticed he was a well-built boy. Except on Sundays, when he wore a well-made blue serge suit, he used to go around in baggy grey flannel trousers and a loose sports coat that fitted where it touched. Now he began to take a pride in his clothes, and Hetty complained that he was for ever cleaning and pressing his old khaki. The tunic he was issued with he had taken in by Bertie Cox on the Bridge, until it fitted him like a glove; and he bought himself a pair of Fox’s puttees for going out and polished his belt until it shone like mahogany, and I bet he was never pulled up for having dirty buttons. It was amazing what a smart soldier he made.

  Also he got on well at the Fort: which was the last thing I would have expected. It happened when his lot went down the Soldier’s Bay for bathing parade, he turned out to be the best swimmer; and at some sports they held on the Fort Field, he turned out to be the best runner. The P.T. Sergeant spotted him and put him forward to become a P.T. Instructor. I found it hard to imagine Raymond, who had never played a game in his life, becoming a physical training instructor at Fort George; but there it was. He wasn’t allowed to finish his training to go to France; but was sent to England on a Physical Training Course and passed out First Class. Hetty was broken-hearted when he had to go, but I said to her, ‘He’s better off at Gosport than in the trenches.’ He was a lance-jack when he went; and when he came back was made a full corporal. I couldn’t help wondering how the quiet Raymond was going to get on when he found himself having to give orders to rough chaps from Birmingham and other big cities in England, of who there was more now in the Battalion than Guernseys.

  When he came to see me again, I hardly knew him. The hard grind he had gone through at Gosport had made a man of him. He looked so athletic and trim in a new uniform with his two stripes up, he could easily have been mistaken for a Regular; yet he had none of the swagger some chaps put on. He didn’t have much to say for himself. I had to ask him how he was getting on: drilling grown men, many older and bigger than himself. ‘Oh fine, thanks,’ he said. ‘I enjoy it.’ ‘How about the roughs from Brummagen?’ I said. ‘They’re all good chaps,’ he said, as if it was a lot of angels he was drilling. I got more out of Archie Mauger, who I used to have a chat with sometimes. He was the son of the Tom Mauger who Harold built a house for and who was the son of old Tom Mauger my father worked for. Archie had been lucky like Raymond and sent away on a course; only in his case it was to Hayling Island for musketry and he came back a Musketry Instructor. He said Raymond was the most popular N.C.O. in the Battalion. It began the very first night he joined up. He knelt down by his bed in the barrack-room and said his prayers. According to the Chapel preachers, a boy who did that would be laughed at and persecuted, but have his reward in heaven. It wasn’t what happened to Raymond: he had his reward on earth. The fellows respected him for it. ‘It takes some doing,’ Archie Mauger said and laughed. ‘I change my religion twice every Sunday morning. At nine o’clock when it’s Church of England Parade in the gym, I’m a Wesleyan and stop in the barrack-room and polish up. At half-past ten when the Wesleyans fall in for Ebenezer Chapel, I’m Church of England and get on my bike and go home. They don’t have a roll-call for Instructors.’ Archie Mauger was a clever boy and went to the University of Bristol after the War and got a B. Sc. and became a Science Master in England; but he didn’t have Raymond’s guts.

  He was fair about him, though. ‘Raymond Martel is a chap apart,’ he said. ‘He ought really to be an officer.’ I saw what he meant, but I didn’t think being an officer got much to do with it. Raymond was better than the rest of us, I truly believe; and for all that he was a Chapel boy, it wasn’t in a way that made you not like him. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink, he didn’t swear, he didn’t talk smut; but he didn’t go about with a long face finding fault with those who did. The dirt didn’t touch him: he didn’t notice it. He was like a chap lit up. The roughest fellows would fight among themselves as to who would get into his squad to be drilled. It wasn’t he let them off light. Archie Mauger didn’t understand it. He said, ‘If I’m popular at all, it’s only because I’m cushy and lose my squads on the ramparts and let them have a smoke.’ Raymond put his through their paces as hard as anybody; but he was in sympathy with them, and would never strain a chap further than he could go. He was enjoying himself and they enjoyed themselves with him. They called him ‘Corp’ to his face, but ‘Our Raymond’ behind his back. When I think now of Raymond’s sad story and of his terrible end, I am glad that for the year or so he spent in the Army he was happy.

  He didn’t make any special friends, but would bring a couple of chaps home for dinner most Sundays. The English boys had no homes they could go to like the Guernsey boys. They was glad to be given a good meal in a comfortable room; and Hetty who, like my mother, was never without a thing during the War, gave them meals the like of which they had never had before. Raymond invited me down a few times and it seemed a happy home those Sundays. I had to laugh at the way poor Hetty tried to speak the proper English and put in aitches all over the place. She sounded as if she was a h
orse with the asthma. Harold liked talking to the English boys and getting their opinions on things; and sometimes Percy looked in. By then, Prissy and Hetty wasn’t speaking, of course; but, according to Hetty, it was all on Prissy’s side. ‘Well, she know where I live by now,’ she said. ‘She can come and see me any time she want to. The back door is never locked.’ Percy, for once, was being stubborn and keeping in with Harold. Prissy couldn’t say much, because Harold was giving him work to do. There wasn’t much doing during the War for a monumental builder; and those who was dying didn’t have tombstones in St Sampson’s Cemetery.

  There was one thing the English boys did do for Guernsey. They spread the pox. The Green Shutters had been closed down; so what else could you expect? I was lucky. The worst I got was the crabs and I got rid of those with blue ointment. I don’t remember the girls I went with those years, except for Blanche de Lainé. I don’t think that was her real name; she wasn’t Guernsey. She sold chocolates and showed the people to their seats in the balcony at St Julien’s. I’d noticed her when I was there with Hetty; and she’d noticed me. One week there was a picture showing called The Birth of a Nation. Hetty only liked love stories; so that Saturday I went to the matinée by myself. I didn’t understand the picture really. I was sitting at the end of the back row by the gangway; and Blanche was standing against the door while the picture was showing. ‘You’re not with your mother this week,’ she said to me. ‘That wasn’t my mother,’ I said, ‘that was my aunt.’ ‘Oh, I thought you were a good boy and brought your mother to the Pictures,’ she said. ‘I’m not all that good,’ I said. ‘I wondered,’ she said.