The Book of Ebenezer le Page Read online

  When Raymond introduced me, he said, ‘This is Ebenezer, my wicked uncle.’ She shook hands with me and looked at me and smiled. ‘He doesn’t look very wicked, she said, ‘mischievous, perhaps.’ She herself had a twinkle in those blue eyes. After tea, Raymond left us together, while he helped his mother wash up. Harold had been given his tea in the kitchen, where he could keep his cap on. He wasn’t allowed to meet Miss Bingley. She began by telling me she had lost a very dear brother during the War, but her mother wouldn’t believe he was dead, though the War Office said he was. It was for that reason the mother had not come to Guernsey. She would not leave their house in London, in case he came home while she was away. I said I could understand that.

  She said, ‘I expect you will have known Raymond a long time.’ ‘Since before he was born,’ I said. ‘The night my grandmother died I saw him kicking. It was then I knew the story about being found under a gooseberry bush was a pack of lies.’ I had no sooner said it than I could have bitten my tongue off. It wasn’t at all the sort of thing to say to a lady; but she only laughed. ‘How old were you then?’ she said. ‘Nine or ten,’ I said. ‘I am his cousin, not his uncle.’ She said, ‘My father says he is in grave danger of becoming a heretic.’ I didn’t know quite what a heretic was, but I didn’t think it was anything good. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that!’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘He also says if I had lived in the Middle Ages I would have been burnt at the stake. My father is a darling!’ She then told me she was going on a mission to the women of Turkey. ‘Why on earth to the women of Turkey?’ I said. ‘What have they done?’ Oh it wasn’t because of anything they had done: it was because they was downtrodden she was going. She had a call to liberate the Turkish women from the tyranny of their men. Well, I ask you? As if any Guernseyman can believe women are downtrodden! ‘A man is master in his own house, surely,’ I said. ‘It say so in the Bible.’ I was trying for all I was worth to make her see sense when Raymond came back. ‘You were quite right about your wicked uncle,’ she said to him. ‘He is an old Turk!’ ‘I am glad you have found him out,’ said Raymond. I wish to God she had left the women of Turkey to fight their own battles and married Raymond instead.

  The next time he came over he was wearing his collar back to front. It is true most of the time I saw him he was in sports coat and flannels; but the collar made a difference. I felt I had to mind my p’s and q’s. He didn’t like it himself, and kept tugging at it. ‘I feel like a dog on a lead,’ he said. Then he corrected himself. ‘I mustn’t be ashamed of it,’ he said. It’s funny how the boy who wasn’t ashamed to kneel down and say his prayers in the barrack-room was ashamed to wear the sign of his profession. It was years later he said to me, ‘There shouldn’t be any outward sign to separate one person from another; they are separated enough by nature as it is’; but I think he already had some such mad ideas in his head.

  He had been found a chapel in England to go to; or rather, a church. The Church people call the Wesleyan’s place of worship a chapel; but the Chapel people call their chapel a church. He didn’t have to start until October, so he was going to have a nice long holiday. He said he had been to preach a sermon in the chapel he was going to, and they had been satisfied and accepted him. He wasn’t happy about it. He had been no good. ‘I might just as well have been a gramophone,’ he said. He had thought of the right things to say, and it was what they expected to hear; so they decided he would do. He was going to be the youngest of three ministers in charge of that chapel, and was going to live in the same house as the other two. The wife of the one who was married was going to be housekeeper for the three. It wasn’t in London, but some way outside, and was the place where Henry Ford made his motor-cars. Raymond said it was nothing but rows and rows of hundreds and hundreds of houses all the same, and like rabbit-hutches. The one where the ministers was going to live was a corner house, and bigger than the others in the row; but it was so badly built you could hear everything that went on next door on either side. I thought I would go mad if I had to live there.

  The congregation was made up of people who worked in the Ford factory. Raymond had been over it, and said it was his idea of hell. They had to spend the whole of their working hours doing the same thing over and over again; perhaps fitting a bolt, or turning a screw: click-click, click-click, click-click all day long. They went to chapel in the same spirit; and he couldn’t blame them. There was a good organ and a big choir and an orchestra, so they would come to chapel instead of going to the Pictures; but, as far as the religion went, it had to be all cut and dried. The chapel was a barn of a place, bigger than the old Ebenezer Chapel in Town: and he had to shout at the top of his voice, as if he was giving orders on the Fort Field. ‘It’s a circus,’ he said.

  I don’t expect any young fellow going into the Ministry nowadays would understand how Raymond felt. He would take the circus for granted. I know my cousin, the Reverend David Livingstone Le Page, would be only too glad of the chance of shouting the Gospel of Jesus Christ through a megaphone to a football crowd. Raymond was of another generation. The factory horrified him. He didn’t know worse things had happened on Guernsey and was going to happen in the days to come. In my grandfather’s day, small boys of ten was made to sit in the corners up the high tower of the cracking machine and pick out any stones with flaws in from the trays as they passed down on the belt. The boys got stone-dust in their lungs, and was most of them dead by fifteen or sixteen. Raymond said Ford’s had an ambulance waiting and an operating theatre open and nurses and doctors ready, in case there was an accident; and there was a cemetery out the back to bury those who died. At least, they looked after their work people.

  I wish I could write down the story of this island as I have known it and lived through it for the best part of a century. I don’t think I have changed much; but I think everybody else have. The young people of today don’t know and can’t imagine the difference between living on Guernsey as it was and living on Guernsey as it is now. There is a great gulf fixed between the present generation and mine. I wish I could bridge it; but it is too much to hope. The only ones who might feel as I do are either dead, or old people who, like me, are not very clear in the head and don’t always remember right.

  Mind you, I am not one of those who say living on Guernsey in the good old days was a bed of roses. I think living in this world is hell on earth for most of us most of the time, it don’t matter when or where we are born; but the way we used to live over here, I mean in the country parts, was more or less as it had been for many hundreds of years; and it was real. The way people live over here now is not real: at least, it is not real to me. The people are not real. When I go out, and that isn’t often, I see strange faces everywhere around me and I know at a glance they don’t belong; or, if I see a boy and think goodness, that is young Torode I was at the Vale School with, he don’t know me; and then I realise he must be the grandson, or the great-grandson of the boy Torode I knew. It is an island of ghosts and strangers.

  The best thing for me to do is stop at home. There are so many cars on the roads, you risk your life every time you put your nose out; and, as for the boys on motor-bikes, they have no business to be allowed at all. There are no country parts any more, neither. Guernsey is a factory for the manufacture of tourists now. It is true we still export tomatoes; but that is arranged for us by a Board with enough rules and regulations to sink a ship. They are talking about having another Board for flowers and I suppose they will get it in the end. For years now it haven’t been possible to get milk from a cow. It have to go to the factory at St Martin’s and get separated and mixed up again, but not as the cow gave it. The thin stuff they let you have they got the cheek to call Guernsey milk. It isn’t the Guernsey milk that was two out of three parts cream I used to fetch from the Roussels of the Grand Fort. As for Guernsey meat and Guernsey butter, it is so dear it break my heart to have to buy it; but I won’t eat no other. Where are the sheep? Where are the fowls? Where are the pi
gs? As far as I know, I am the only one round here who have pigs in his pigsty. I like to hear them, if nothing else. They make me feel at home. The cats are coming along; though most of them was put to sleep or eaten, during the Occupation. I haven’t got one.

  The Occupation was the end of Guernsey as our fathers and our forefathers knew it. I don’t mean it was the Germans who destroyed it. The Occupation brought out the best and the worst in all of us; but we was Guernsey people yet, and our spirit was not broken. It is the English Occupation since have broken it. I doubt if half the people living on this island now was born here; or even have relations who was born here. They are people who think they can live here on the cheap and get out of paying their higher taxes in their own country. They come over here and live grand and are made a fuss of because they are English, when they wouldn’t be taken no notice of the other side. Ah well, that is Guernsey now. When I think what have happened to our island, I could sit down on the ground and cry.

  It wasn’t so long ago young Fraser came to see me. He is a reporter for the Star newspaper. It isn’t quite so genteel as the Press and sometimes allow a joke to be printed, and even a sly dig at the States. Master Fraser was very polite. He is only about twenty-four. He wasn’t hatched when Guernsey was alive. He said he hoped I would allow him to interview me as a ‘senior resident’ so that he might learn my ‘reaction to modern Guernsey’. I was interested to learn I was a senior resident. Myself, I thought I was an old man and a Guernseyman to boot. Anyhow, I let him have my ‘reaction to modern Guernsey’. When I had done, he was sitting shrivelled up in his chair, as if he was on the hot seat. ‘Aren’t you being rather revolutionary, Mr Le Page?’ he said. I said, ‘God made this island with a good climate and a good soil, especially suited for the growing of fruit and vegetables and flowers, and for the breeding of two kinds of creatures: Guernsey cows and Guernsey people. I would have thought those was the two breeds the States would first and foremost want to preserve. As it is, they are the two breeds there is no room for. Our best boys are going to Australia by the hundred every year, and there is a shortage of pasture for the few cows are left.’ He said, ‘I am afraid you ignore the overall economic situation.’ I don’t know nothing about the overall economic situation! He didn’t print a word I said.

  8

  It was no wonder poor Raymond came a cropper when he had to preach to his own people. Guernsey people are funny people to have to deal with, if you happen to be a Guernseyman yourself. They know too much about each other. When he was asked to take the service for the Harvest Festival at Birdo Mission, it meant everybody in the congregation would know who he was and where he come from and who his parents and his grandparents and all his relations back to Adam. If he had been an Englishman, they might have listened respectfully and taken what he said for gospel; but they wasn’t going to sit mum under Raymond Martel of Wallaballoo. It wasn’t they didn’t listen. They was spellbound. It was afterwards, when they came to think it over, the trouble began. It was the only sermon he preached on Guernsey; and the last sermon he was to preach anywhere.

  When he told me he was going to do it, he laughed and said, ‘The Lord hath delivered them into my hands.’ I have wondered since whether he didn’t engineer the whole thing to get out of what he had let himself in for on the other side. Raymond was deep. When years later he thought he was being persecuted by everybody and lived with me at Les Moulins, he talked of many things over the fire, and I asked him if he was sincere that night. He said, ‘A human being is an insincere animal, my boy.’ By then he was talking to me as if I was the young one. ‘I was sincere in the thoughts of my heart,’ he said. ‘I was not sincere in the thoughts of my head. I let those people think I believed in things I did not believe in, or they wouldn’t have let me say what I felt.’

  I had no intention of going to hear him. As I have said before, I don’t like people who preach. They put themselves on a pedestal and make out what they say is according to the Will of God and what anybody else think different is of the Devil. I like a chap who say straight out what he think at the moment, and don’t care a bugger if he is right or wrong. It was quite by chance I ran into Hetty at her gate when I was passing one evening. She complained she couldn’t go and hear Raymond preach because of Harold’s bald head; and, if she went by herself, the people would talk. I, like a fool, said I would go with her. Of course, I had no idea Christine Mahy was going to be in the choir and sing the solo. The service was at six and I said I would call at the house for her at a quarter-past five, so as we would have plenty of time to get there. I knew Hetty couldn’t walk very fast.

  As a matter of fact, I was to the house at five and, judge of my surprise, when I walked in and found my Cousin Mary Ann talking to Harold in the kitchen. Hetty was upstairs dressing and Raymond was already gone to put up the numbers of the hymns and, I rather think, to have a few quiet minutes to himself. My Cousin Mary Ann looked quite bright for her in a flowered frock. Hetty, who was behindhand with everything in the excitement of dressing up to go to Chapel, was delighted to have somebody to get the supper ready for when she got back. When we left, my Cousin Mary Ann had put on an apron and was going to light the fire in the front room.

  It was nearly half-past five before I managed to get Hetty out of the house. She had to change out of the hat she was wearing and then, after a lot of examining of herself in the looking-glass, change back into the one she had taken off. I hadn’t realised how wheezy she was getting, and heavy on her poor legs; and I only managed to get her to the Mission just as the service was going to begin. The place was packed. They hadn’t come to hear Raymond, only because it was the Harvest Festival; but I noticed Mr Dorey, my boss, was there and Mr Fred Johns from the Vale Avenue, both trustees of St Sampson’s Chapel; and Albert Nicolle, who was a real old Bible-puncher, and the Minister from Ebenezer Chapel in Town, who was the Superintendent of the Circuit. I thought those must have come to see how their new young minister was shaping out. At first glance, I didn’t think we would get a seat; but one of the Noyons, who was showing people to their places, had his pew reserved by the door and said we could sit there, and him and his brother would sit on the steps. The door was being left open for air.

  The inside of the little Mission was as good as the Flower Show in the Market Halls. The gas was lit, though it was light outside yet, and there was flowers everywhere of every shape and size and colour beautifully arranged, and ferns hanging from the gas-brackets. There was offerings of fruit and great marrows and pumpkins around the Communion Table, and long loaves of bread on the window-sills and sheaves of corn against the pulpit. I noticed there was tomatoes on the ledge against the pipes of the organ, and was afraid they might roll off from the vibration; but they didn’t. Reg Underwood was playing Handel’s Largo when we walked in. When we put our heads down for a minute, the way you do when you sit in Chapel, I whispered to Hetty, ‘Are you all right now?’ ‘That girl!’ she said. She had seen Christine Mahy in the choir.

  Christine was in the Capelles Chapel choir as a rule, unless she was invited to some other chapel to sing; so Raymond must have invited her especially. She was dressed like nobody else. Christine liked to say of herself ‘I am a simple soul.’ She was in a plain white dress with a tight bodice and a full skirt, and wore over it a pale grey silk cloak lined with blue. She had no hat on, to speak of. For a moment, I thought she had dared to come in chapel without a hat; but then I saw she had a small, round white cap on the very top of her pale yellow hair. She was a simple soul. She might have been the Virgin Mary in person.

  Hetty half got to her feet and I thought she was going to walk out, as she had done from the sinking of the Titanic; but just then Raymond came in from the vestry and she sat down again. He didn’t look to me at all nervous. I know if I had been going to hold forth to all those people, I would have been shivering in my shoes. He walked up the steps to the pulpit and sat with his head bent; then he found the place in the hymn-book and stood up to announce the fir
st hymn. I thought how much he looked the young minister. He was wearing black, tight for him, I thought; but it made him look very slim and very young. His white cuffs was showing, and he had a white handkerchief in his breast pocket. His hair was neatly parted on one side; and brushed down flat, as far as it could be. There was something about his face set him apart from the rest of us; and I thought perhaps after all, up there in the pulpit he was in the right place. The first hymn was ‘We plough the fields and scatter’. It was the right hymn for the occasion, and I suppose everybody sang it without thinking what it meant. I know I did. I noticed Raymond didn’t sing; but now I come to think of it, I never heard him sing or whistle. Christine sang, but she was careful not to be heard above the others. Her turn was coming. She was another who knew what she was doing.

  I hadn’t been in Chapel for years: not since I had been with Jim, when we was doing the rounds. It was the prayers got my goat. In Church you know what is coming, and for how long; but some of the ministers in Chapel would pray and pray and pray, and really be preaching God a sermon while they was praying. Jim and me would look at each other and wink, and long to be able to sit up and straighten our backs and stretch our legs. I don’t know if Raymond had remembered, but I had probably told him at some time or another. Anyhow, for the first prayer he only asked us to say the Lord’s Prayer with him, and the second was the shortest I have ever heard in Chapel. For the Lesson, he read the Parable of the Sower. I thought what a good speaking voice he had. He spoke the English well; yet not quite like an Englishman. He was of those who for generations it had been more natural to speak French. His voice had more in it than an Englishman’s. There was nothing missing. It had all the colours of the rainbow in it, from dark to light.