The Book of Ebenezer le Page Read online

  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.

  4

  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.

  Horace told me Steve ran a Black Market shop in Town during the Occupation, and his customers was people high up in the States: even a magistrate who used to fine him to please the Germans, and then pay him the fine back in return for a rabbit from under the counter. Anyway, he made a mint of money, but it soon went, for he had a bout of heavy drinking after the Liberation. Horace had a down on Steve. He said he was a Nazi in spirit, and was for the Nazis really. I don’t believe that for a moment. I don’t think Steve was on any side. He was against all sides. He was in with the Police; and made fools of the Police. He had more control over the bad boys than the Police had; and they had to ask him for his help to stop a number from being a nuisance. He never gave the boys away, though. He kept their names to himself, if they obeyed him; if not, he reported them and let the Police do their own dirty work. He was himself in the Town jail a number of times. I never really got to know what for. He said it was for a rest-cure. In my opinion, he thought himself and all grown-up human beings was rotten. He was for children and animals. I am quite, quite s
ure he never did harm to a child; and he looked after a herd of twenty or more wild goats he kept loose on the cliffs at Pleinmont. He was in everlasting trouble with the States who wanted those goats caught and tied up, because they was eating up respectable people’s gardens.

  The day I was having with old Steve I had more or less forgotten the last winter of the Occupation, and by then being hungry and desperate was only a bad dream; but something he told me brought it all back again, and I realised that for some people it had been far more of a nightmare than it had been even for me. He said there was a German woman on Alderney, when he was imprisoned there, who was supposed to be a lady doctor; and, among the foreign prisoners was a French boy who had been extraordinarily brave in the Resistance. She cut off his thing with a pair of garden shears and he went screaming mad and died. I made out I hadn’t heard. It was too horrible. I was thinking of Raymond in his innocence saying ‘God is love. That is true, isn’t it?’ I was glad he was dead, so he would never know such things could happen, or even be thought of. When we got up to go, I said I would pay for the dinners; but Steve wanted to pay for the dinners, and we nearly came to blows. In the end, for the sake of peace, I gave in and let Steve pay. I walked down to the buses with him; and he got on the Pleinmont bus, and I got on the L’Ancresse. That was the last I saw of him. I read letters by him in the paper from time to time in which he was fighting for the rights of his goats. He won most of his battles with the States, because he knew too much about too many people. There are many who must have given a great ‘Ouf!’ of relief, when he breathed his last. He was given a grand funeral in Torteval Church. God rest his soul! as Liza said.

  What really got my goat the last year of the Occupation was being robbed right and left. Some of it was done by German soldiers, or slave-workers who had escaped and was on the prowl; though most of the slave-workers was gone the last year. The worst was a lot of the stealing was done by Guernseymen. I know Dan Ferbrache, Phoebe’s brother, who was a widower and living at Sandy Hook, stole a spade of mine from in my tool-shed; and I believe it was him who took my tomatoes. The spade I have no doubt about, because I saw him digging with it and recognised it as mine: but I couldn’t say anything because I hadn’t burnt my mark on it. He must have had the cheek to pinch it during the day; for I had long since taken to locking everything up at night. But I was a fool. I locked the door at the far end of the greenhouse, but left the key in the lock on the inside; though the other end I locked from the outside and put the key in my pocket. I had been growing sweet-corn that year; but had a few tomato plants for myself at the far end. It was late in the season but there was still a few tomatoes on them; and I treasured those tomatoes, if only to look at. They was only to be picked one at a time. One morning, when I went out, I found somebody had smashed the glass, turned the key in the door, and gone in and got the lot.

  In the house, what food we had was fairly safe. There was a bar across the front door and a bolt on the back; but, even so, every crumb was kept up in the garret where the apples used to be, and the ladder was taken down and locked away in the packing-shed. It was a business going to the cupboard those days. Out of doors, it was hopeless. Turnips, parsnips, carrots went; apples went; beans went; the robbers didn’t even give things time to grow. When the tomatoes went, I was so angry I decided I would do a bit of robbing myself. So one afternoon, by accident on purpose, I went for a walk along the lane gives down on the backs of Timbuctoo and Wallaballoo. I kept my eyes open and got the lie of the land. Against the dividing wall between Timbuctoo and Wallaballoo, Harold had built a lean-to in which to grow a few things for themselves. The Dobrées had left it there and was now making use of it. I saw there was quite a nice crop of late tomatoes in it. Ah good, I thought!

  It say in the Bible ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his man servant, nor his maid servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour’s.’ Well, I coveted my neighbour’s tomatoes and that night, while Tabitha was asleep, I crept out to steal them. It was Providence there was a water-butt handy for me to climb down from the lane into the garden at the back of Wallaballoo; and the lean-to was a good way from the house. I could easily smash a few panes of glass and get in and out before Raoul had time to come out and see what was happening: if he wasn’t too frightened to come at all. I was gripping in my hand one of my mother’s old net-bags I was going to fill. I didn’t hear a voice from heaven saying I mustn’t do it; but I had cocked one leg over the wall and was going to cock the other and jump down on the butt, when I was horror-stricken by the picture in my mind of what I had come to. I leapt back into the lane, as if it was from the edge of the bottomless pit: did a smart right-about turn, and marched back home. There are some things a man must not do.

  I don’t know that starving is such a bad way of dying: at least, so long as you got water to drink. The worst is having just a little to eat, but not enough. If you have nothing for a few days, it hurt at first; but after a while you get weaker and feel like a ghost and don’t care about nothing. I know I got so I didn’t care if it was the Germans won or us. The whole shoot seemed to me nothing but a lot of nonsense nobody would worry about who wasn’t mad; and when you are nearly dying, you stop being mad. That is, while you are awake. It was going to sleep I was afraid of; and I had plenty of time to go to sleep, goodness knows. By three o’clock in the afternoon, even when I had food of a sort, I was so tired I was ready to knock off; and, at that, I had been having to sit down every five minutes. There was only the long evenings to look forward to with no light and no fire; and hours and hours lying on my bed in a sort of half and half state, when I wasn’t awake and wasn’t asleep and a lot of mixed up nonsense was going through my head; then when at last I did fall asleep properly I would have the most horrible dreams I would wake up from in a sweat. I was never able to remember exactly those dreams; but in some roundabout way they always had to do with food. I never dreamt I was eating anything; and the food didn’t have a smell. I wonder if anybody have ever dreamt a smell.

  Tabitha said she slept quite well; and I think it was true. She ought to have been more tired than me, for she worked harder than me. She walked miles a day doing the housework; and often it was her went out and got the shopping. I didn’t even go out to listen to the radio: I found I couldn’t see any more in the dark. Sometimes I worried and thought to myself I wouldn’t live to see the end of it. It wasn’t the thought of dying worried me: it was the thought perhaps after all I had gone through, it would be for nothing. That thought didn’t seem to worry Tabitha. Her mind was at rest. When it was touch and go whether we would be allowed to be brought food by the Red Cross, she didn’t get excited, or hope. ‘We’ll see,’ she said. When I heard the Red Cross ship, the Vega, was in, I got so excited I had to go and see it. I grabbed a walking-stick had belonged to my grandfather, and off I went to Town on my wobbly legs. There was crowds looking at it; though, of course, none of us was allowed to go down the harbour near it. It was an ugly old boat. When I got back home, hobbling along like an old man of ninety, Tabitha laughed. ‘Well, d’you feel you’ve had a good meal now?’ she said. ‘As good as,’ I said.

  Yet it was over those precious Red Cross parcels I quarrelled with Tabitha. I had never quarrelled with her in my life before. I don’t know I can say I quarrelled with her even then, for you couldn’t quarrel with Tabitha, but I said hard and cutting words to her. I hurt my sister. It hurts me now to think of it; but it is one of those things can never be undone. When we got our parcels, I said, ‘Well, they are for you to ration out,’ but there was chocolate in mine as well as in hers. ‘Except for the chocolate,’ I said. ‘I don’t want any.’ It was true. I had never been one for eating chocolate, even when I was a kid. The only sweets I liked was bull’s eyes, twelve a penny; and I knew how much she liked chocolate. She said, ‘I think you ought to have the chocolate for when you are working: mine as well. It is you who do the heavy work.’
I flashed out at her. ‘I am sick and tired of seeing you sacrificing yourself for me!’ I said. She opened her eyes wide in surprise. ‘Ebenezer!’ she said. I said, ‘What do you take me for? A weakling! It is to show me up, you do it; and make me ashamed!’ She said quietly, ‘I don’t sacrifice myself for you, Ebenezer. I am with you. I thought you understood.’ Her lips was trembling and there was tears in her eyes. I said, ‘All right: I’ll eat a piece of chocolate now and then’; and I did so to please her. The next time we got parcels, there was tobacco and cigarettes as well; and she gave me hers, as she didn’t smoke. I let her and didn’t say anything: but she hadn’t forgotten. She never forgot.

  The 9th of May in the year 1945 is the other date in history I will never forget. I didn’t see the first British soldiers come ashore in the morning; but I heard they had come and some more was expected in the afternoon. I desperately wanted to see those. Tabitha said she would like to come with me, but she couldn’t walk so far; and I knew she couldn’t, for she had been getting very tired and feeble the last few weeks. She said I must go; but I wouldn’t go without her. How could I be happy celebrating and her by herself at home? It looked as if we would neither of us go, when Dan Ferbrache turned up and asked us if we would like to go with him in his van. He had managed to hang on to an old nag for his van. I said it was good of him to think of us and how about Olive Le Boutillier? He said the more the merrier. He was already taking old Mrs Renouf from L’Islet. It was a real old-fashioned lot we was in that van: we must have looked as if we was going on a picnic from the Town Hospital.