The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘The history is close enough to touch...’
Antonia Windsor traces the footsteps of the Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society to digest Guernsey’s wartime past
‘I’ve just discovered a diary that an uncle kept during the occupation,” says the lady next to me on the plane when I tell her I’m interested in the history of Guernsey, the Channel Island we are heading for from Gatwick in a little ATR aircraft. “His wife and child were evacuated before the German invasion, so what comes across more than anything is his utter loneliness.”
Speak to anyone from Guernsey about the Second World War and they will have an anecdote to tell you; a story told to them by a grandparent, cousin, friend. A story of bravery, of overcoming hardship, of solidarity. Or a story of betrayal, of subterfuge or of plain tomfoolery.
The facts of German occupation were part of my childhood, having grown up on the neighbouring island of Jersey, which experienced a similar fate and was held under German command for five years between June 1940 and May 1945. My grandfather would tell me stories of how the Germans took over the farmhouse his family lived in and sent them to live in the outhouse, how he spent the night in a hedge with his bicycle after encountering a German soldier beating a local man for being out after curfew and how he made himself a crystal radio set to listen to news of the war but couldn’t share that news with anyone for fear of being “snitched on” (all radios were confiscated at the start of the occupation).
In my teens I was involved in a National Youth Music Theatre production of the musical Once Upon a War, which told of the heartache of sending children off to live abroad and the dreadful term “Gerry Bags” applied to women who slept with the enemy.
I’m going to meet my mother in Guernsey as we want to find out more about our neighbouring island. We both read the The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, which is set in the immediate aftermath of the war and has just been released as a film – and we both found much that was familiar in the tale.
From the window of the little Aurigny plane I can clearly see the concrete fortifications on the cliffs of the south coast as we near landing. These were part of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall against a possible allied invasion. I later learn that the Channel Islands were more heavily fortified than the Normandy coast and contain some of the best preserved Atlantic Wall sites in Europe.
From the airport I head down to the harbour in St Peter Port to meet my mother off the boat. It was here on June 28 1940 that the German bombardment happened. Apparently they mistook the tomato trucks that lined the quay for armoured vehicles and did not realise that the island was demilitarised. As you walk up from the harbour you can clearly see that great hunks of granite are missing from the walls where the shelling hit. There are some commemorative plaques as you walk towards town that hint at the history. One tells of the evacuation of children and adults ahead of the invasion: “Four fifths of the children and altogether almost half of the population of Guernsey were transported to England so that scarcely a family remained undivided.”
We muse that this is why the Potato Peel Pie society in the novel is such a success. All of the characters are lonely and are brought together by this unconventional book club to experience the warmth of human kinship. Another plaque is more sinister, as it is in memory of three Jewish women who were resident on the island when the Germans landed and were deported to Auschwitz in 1942.
It is hard to remain sombre, though, when the spring sunshine is beating down and reflecting off the bobbing yachts in the harbour. St Peter Port is an extremely pretty town, rising up from the harbour in steep slopes, with a high street full of high-end stores and little independent boutiques. We pass the Ship and Crown pub, standing proud on the North Esplanade with steps going up alongside it. “Do you think that’s the Crown Hotel in the book?” my mother asks. She’s probably right. The building seems to date from long before the war.
We are staying at Old Government House Hotel, which has its own wartime history with the building being appropriated as the German “Soldatenheim” – the place soldiers and officers went to kick back and relax. I ask about the Ship and Crown