The Book of Ebenezer le Page Read online

  They was having breakfast at Timbuctoo and going straight from there to the boat; and when I saw them packing their things, I gave them a couple of ormer shells to remember Guernsey by. I gave one to each, and I didn’t think I had chosen one better than the other, but Geoffrey gave the one I had given him to Tony, and Tony gave his to Geoffrey. I said I had a whole basketful they could choose from, if they didn’t like the ones I had picked out; but Geoffrey laughed and said it wasn’t that at all: they exchange everything they have, and even wear each other’s clothes sometimes. I said, ‘That’s all right then.’ When they shook hands and wished me goodbye, Geoffrey said I couldn’t know how much it had meant to them to have a friendly face to come back to every evening, and Tony said I had made their holiday. Ah well, I suppose I could have done worse. I got a nice card from them the next Christmas, and written on it ‘For two ormer shells. From Gib and Tib.’ I was glad to know they was friends yet. I haven’t heard since.

  There was one old couple I liked a lot: a Mr and Mrs Jones from Wales; and I get a letter as well as a card from them every Christmas. They was another pair who didn’t put on airs. I expect Miss Hocart thought they was not quite the right class, and that’s why they was sent to me. He was a coal-miner until lately; and was now on his old-age pension. I imagined a coal-miner to be a big and burly chap; but he was short and wiry and spoke in a high-pitched voice. She was a bustling lively little woman, who talked very quick, and I didn’t always know what she said. They had children and grandchildren they could have spent their holiday with; but she said the old people are not really wanted, and quite right too. Instead they decided to have a second honeymoon. Well, I can say I have never seen any young honeymoon couple be so happy, or enjoy themselves so much. They went somewhere different every day; and in their eyes everything was perfect. They was strict Chapel; and Sundays went to the Capelles for morning and evening service. When I said I was Church but didn’t go, she wagged a finger at me, as if I was one of her grandchildren. They stayed a fortnight; and I would have been glad for them to stay longer.

  Mr Hungerford Smith was a widower; and I am not surprised. The only thing his poor wife could have done of her own free will was to die. He had to have his own way in everything, and he was always right. He was the last visitor I had to stay with me; and when he had gone, I swore I would never have another. He gave me to understand he was a very important person; and he may well have been. I don’t know what the Archbishop of Canterbury looks like; but Mr Hungerford Smith looked what the Archbishop of Canterbury ought to look like, even if he don’t. He sat himself down in my armchair as if he was the Pope and spoke with authority. I didn’t understand exactly what he spoke with authority about, but it had something to do with stocks and shares. He wanted to know all my money business from the year dot. He asked if the house was mine, if there was anything owing on it, if I had any relations I must leave it to, and if I had any investments or money in the bank. I answered him yes, or no, quite truthfully; but he didn’t guess the truth. He thought I was poor. He said he could be of great service to me. He would allow me to sell him my house as it stood, and all ground and outhouses attached thereto; and when he reached the age of retirement, he would have a place in Guernsey to retire to. I said selling wasn’t as simple as that over here. He said he knew the law. I am not going to say how much he offered for my small property; but he must have wanted it bad, because it was thousands. He said until the time came for him to come into residence, I could go on living in it; and pay him a nominal rent. He didn’t say how much.

  I was tempted. It would be a great load off my mind not to have to worry any more about who I was going to leave it to. I could let the greenhouse and the ground; and take things easy for the few years I had left. As it was, I wasn’t doing much. I planted and watered and trimmed the tomatoes, and pottered around outside; but it was young Bill Ogier did the heavy work, and his wife the picking and packing. They might just as well do the lot, and make what they could. If his nibs wanted to live in the house before I died, I could move into a guesthouse and be waited on. I would have enough. I had it on the tip of my tongue to say yes; but when it came to the point and I looked at him, I said, ‘Thank you, but I am not selling. At any price.’ I didn’t want his sort settling on Guernsey.

  12

  I thought of young Lihou. I had kept in the way of going to see how he was getting on; but I had never thought before of leaving him anything. He wasn’t a relation. It hadn’t occurred to me it didn’t have to be a relation. I had cousins; but no next-of-kin. I could go out into the highways and byways and pick on anybody I liked. He had done well for himself and he had worked hard for it. He owned his own bungalow and the last time I had a chat with him he was going to have three hundred feet more of glass put up. He had been very straight with me and offered to let me have back what I had let him have to get started. I told him I had given it: I hadn’t lent it. I have always been firm about that. I either give; or I keep for myself. Lending is having it both ways. I would rather go without than buy a thing on hire-purchase.

  The youngest of his children was just left school. I had seen it in the Press. She had passed high up in her exams at the school at Beaucamps, and was going to be an air-hostess. I couldn’t see what she wanted all that education for to be an air-hostess. I would have thought all she needed was to know how to smile. The two boys was working for their father. I don’t think they was bad boys really, but they was mad about motor-bikes. I had seen the younger one, when he couldn’t have been more than fourteen, riding a big red motor-bike on which he could hardly reach the handlebars. It was no use me telling his father the boy would kill himself, for it was from his father he got the craze. Edith, the wife, said she was sick and tired of her husband’s everlasting motor-bike; and I never went round to see him but I found him down on his knees worshipping it, like a heathen down on his knees worshipping his idol of wood and stone.

  Anyhow, I thought I would go and see him, and make up my mind. He was more to my taste than Mr Hungerford Smith. I found him down on his knees as usual; but this time it was in front of a motor-car. He jumped up when he saw me and was as delighted as a boy to explain to me all the miracles of his new car. I listened but I didn’t understand a word of what he was talking about. As far as I am concerned, cars are wild animals I do my best to keep out of the way of; and I don’t know the difference between one breed and another. I asked him how Edith was, and he said, ‘Aw, she’s all right,’ and went on talking about his car. I don’t expect he would have even bothered to take me in to see her, if she hadn’t called out tea was ready.

  I had never liked Edith much. She was a Keyho from the Vrangue before she married young Lihou and didn’t think much of the Le Pages from Les Sablons. She may have been right at that; for my little grandmother’s family didn’t seem to have come to much. Edith’s modern bungalow was very different from Les Sablons. It wasn’t a sanded stone floor in the kitchen, and a terpid on the hearth. She had a fridge and an electric stove and an electric iron and a hoover; though I do know the old willow pattern china on my grandmother’s dresser was better than the crockery she had bought from Woolworth’s. Now that is a shop I don’t like. It is supposed to be cheap, but when you work it out, it turns out to be dear. I never go in but I come out with a lot of things I didn’t even think of buying. Edith was civil to me, if nothing more; and couldn’t very well help inviting me to stay to tea. Over tea he talked about the improved method of packing tomatoes in trays and having them sorted out and sent off by rote from the Depôt in Bulwer Avenue. He thought it was a good idea. I didn’t. I like to know the man who my crop is going to.

  I chatted and we seemed friendly enough; but it wasn’t like it used to be during the Occupation. In those days we was both up against it together; but now he was getting on in the world, and I was getting ready to get out of it. I asked him about the boys, who was both out. He said the second didn’t like hard work, but was good at keeping the books. Himself,
he wasn’t much better at keeping books than I was; and nowadays, if you got a cow or a greenhouse, you got to employ a clerk to keep the books. After tea he said he would take me along to see the new glass houses he had just had put up. It wasn’t fifty yards along the road; but, if you please, we had to go in the car. He said, ‘What is the use of having a car, if you got to use shanks’ ponies?’ It wasn’t worth the trouble of getting in and out. I said, ‘I reckon legs will die out in Guernsey in a few years; and the future generations will be born with big heads on stumps.’ After I had seen what there was to see, he had the impudence to say he could run me home. ‘I can walk yet, thank you,’ I said. That silly business of the car decided me. He won’t do.

  It was round about the same time I went to see Mrs John Mourant of La Fontenelle. She was Elsie Le Gallez before she married, and a great-niece of my little grandmother; and so, I suppose, a sort of relation of mine. It is true she married so far above us, my mother refused to own her, saying it was not for her to bend the knee to the principalities and powers. Mrs Mourant herself had always known who I was, and would bow and smile when she saw me. She was now a widow and had no children. Her husband, Jurat Mourant, had left her pretty well off; but she had spent a pile of money having the old place at La Fontenelle done up, and now ran it as the Grande Hougue Guest-House. I had heard she gave wonderful food and comfort for what the people paid. In fact, she couldn’t have made anything out of it; and it was mostly old or disabled people she had staying there. It was on the edge of the Common and safe for them to wander down to the beach, if they could. She was also on a committee to do with the Red Cross and had something to do with the St John’s Ambulance, and with the Town Hospital, I believe. Anyhow, she was altogether a good living and a good doing woman.

  I went one afternoon. She made me welcome without asking any questions as to why I had come, and said I ought to have called on her before, and must come again whenever I wanted to. Her guest-house was very different from Dora’s. I could see everything was of the best; and I bet it was all paid for. She had a lounge for those who liked the T.V.; and another for those who didn’t. She said she didn’t care for it herself. The bedrooms was made sound-proof, so the old and sick could sleep in peace. There was a big room downstairs for eating in; and she introduced me to some of the guests who was sitting on the verandah in the sun. I noticed she didn’t make them go out during the day; and she spoke to them more as if they was friends than strangers who was paying to live there. In fact, she was so good and kind to everybody, I began to wonder if perhaps she didn’t like anybody at all really; but only liked being good and kind. I was looking at the decorations in the dining-room. The walls was washed a pale yellow; and painted straight on was pictures of comic bears and giraffes with long necks and woolly sheep and cheeky rabbits. I said they would do lovely for children; but she said it was a mistake to imagine elderly people didn’t like gay things around them.

  A servant brought in trays of tea and cakes for the guests, and a tray especially for us. Afterwards it was a bit awkward; because I kept on looking round, and couldn’t see the place I wanted. In the end I had to ask her where it was. ‘Oh, in the bathroom,’ she said; and showed me the way up the stairs, and the door. I had never in my life seen such a bathroom! The bath was pale green, and the walls and the ceiling and the tiles on the floor was the same colour; and even the mats and towels, and the rug to stand on. The windows was of green ground glass and in the green light it was like being under the sea, as it was in Sloan’s Circus, only more so; and painted on the ceiling and all the walls was pictures of lobsters with great claws going to get hold of you, and enormous spider-crabs crawling after you, and an octopus with his eight legs going to curl around you, and a huge conger with his mouth open going to swallow you, and long-noses coming straight for you full of teeth. I wouldn’t have laid myself down in that bath among those creatures for anything in the world. The nightmares came back to me I used to have when I was hungry during the Occupation and all the creatures I was longing to eat was going to eat me. I couldn’t even do my business. I was out of that bathroom and down those stairs and had shouted a good-bye and thank-you to Mrs Mourant and got half-way across the Common before I dared to look round and make sure I wasn’t being followed. I had clean forgotten what I had gone to see Mrs Mourant for.

  Constable Le Page was another I went to visit. When he came to Les Moulins about those boys, I had thought of him as a possibility, but, for some reason, he had slipped my memory since. The picture of the handsome, sarcastic Neville Falla came into my mind, and so I thought of Constable Le Page again. He was a chap I was surprised was a policeman. When he left school he worked at first for his father, who was a grower at Le Hurel; and I knew he had always been a great boy for Chapel. He taught in the Vale Sunday School, and I had seen his photo in the paper with some other young chaps as having to do with Christian Youth: then I heard he had suddenly married Amy Sebire from Baugy, and joined the Police. It sounded funny to me. As Raymond used to say, a Christian is supposed to forgive the sinner; but surely it is the business of the policeman to catch the criminal and lock him up. I am not saying he is doing wrong, mind you; but I don’t understand how a policeman can be a Christian. He have a different Master.

  It was one summer evening I went along to his place. I found him in his blue policeman’s trousers and shirt-sleeves, washing the outside of the front windows with a syringe and a bucket of water. ‘Hullo, is there more trouble your way?’ he said, when he saw me. His first thought was the boys had been up to their tricks again. ‘I haven’t seen hair or hide of the young rascals since,’ I said. ‘I am surprised at that,’ he said; and sounded disappointed. I said, ‘Have they been up to mischief elsewhere, then?’ ‘Well, not as far as I know,’ he said. ‘Of course, they have lost Neville Falla. He was the real dangerous character.’ ‘Have he gone away, then?’ I said. ‘No, but he chucked the gang,’ he said. ‘He prefers to operate on his own.’ ‘Why, what have he been up to now?’ I said. ‘I don’t know what he has been up to exactly,’ he said, ‘but you can bet your bottom dollar he hasn’t been up to any good.’ Young Falla’s father had died recently and, as his mother was already dead, there was nobody now to keep a hold on him. He was an only child and spoilt, and was spending what his father had left him like water; going around shooting his mouth, and making a mock of everybody. It was my guess those he made a mock of most was good honest Christian boys like Constable Le Page.

  Anyhow, I hadn’t come to see him on police matters; so I asked after his family. He changed his tune at once, and became quite a nice chap. ‘Come in and see my tribe,’ he said; and we went indoors. He introduced me to Amy, his wife, who I hadn’t met before. She just laughed: she couldn’t shake hands. She was up to her neck in kids. She was giving suck to one; and there was three more, who had been got ready to go to bed. The three was all boys: at a guess, about three, five and seven years old, and as much alike as jelly babies, only different sizes; and they was all so exactly like their father they might have come out of the same mould. I said to him, ‘Goodness, couldn’t you have done something different?’ ‘The last is a girl,’ he said. I could see that for myself from the very way her little fingers was curling round trying to get more drink out of her mother; and when she was put down in the cradle, she was just a round lump like her mother. The three boys kissed their mother and father good-night, and shook hands politely with me; then went in their pyjamas up the stairs to bed one behind the other, the eldest first. They won my heart.

  It was a pity supper-time we got into an argument over motor-cars. It was me started it, of course. I said I didn’t understand how it was nowadays, when they are making so many laws you can’t put your right foot in front of your left without asking a policeman, they don’t make a sensible law to keep down the number of motor-cars on the island. There are not roads for so many cars, for one thing; and they are not wide enough in many places; and, if you start widening the roads, it will have to b
e at the expense of somebody’s land: and nobody got enough, as it is. I was quite willing to allow the doctors to have motor-cars; and there have to be ambulances and the fire-brigade; and lorries for hauling, and for carrying the produce to the harbour; but I didn’t see why every Tom, Dick and Harry should be allowed to have a car. I know of some who go to Town every day in their blessed cars, and got further to walk to their offices from where they can park, than if they had walked straight from home.

  He said, ‘What about the people who make a living by selling cars?’ I said, ‘There are many more honest ways of making a living than selling cars. Half of them aren’t paid for, anyway.’ He said it was no good me lamming into him: he didn’t have a car of his own; but he wished he had, and would have as soon as he was made a sergeant and could afford one. ‘You are nobody, if you haven’t got a car,’ he said. I said, ‘Now you have hit the right nail on the head!’ It wasn’t because all those cars was necessary on the island there was so many, but because if Mrs Domaille happen to have a car, then Mrs Nicolle got to have a car, even if the bus to Town stop outside her gate. Where is there to go to in a car in Guernsey? All they can do is drive round and round, one behind the other; and you can go all round the island in an hour. It is mad.