GET CLOSER TO THE FILM’S CHARACTERS

If you’ve fallen in love with the book or film of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society here are five ways to get closer to the story on a visit to the island

The Guernsey characters all live in the southern parish of St Martin in the area of La Bouvée and Calais. Park your car at the Doyle monument, walk a third of a mile back towards the village and you will see La Bouvée signposted on your right. Wander down the lane and you come to a cluster of traditional houses. You can imagine that Elizabeth might have occupied the grand black and white Georgian house at the bottom of the lane, while Dawsey might have lived at La Bouvée Farm, the whitewashed, rundown farmhouse around the corner.

Just past the farmhouse you come to a dirt track across a field called Gypsy Lane. This leads to the area of Calais. Perhaps this was where the characters were stopped for being out after curfew, which led to the formation of the society (they had illegally roasted a pig, and invented the book club as an excuse).

Juliet Ashton, the English writer who goes to Guernsey to learn more about their unconventional literary society, arrives by boat into the harbour at St Peter Port. You can replicate this by sailing from the UK on Condor from Portsmouth or Poole.

Juliet first meets Dawsey as he is mending the roof of the Crown Hotel, now the Ship and Crown pub on the Esplanade.

Dawsey takes Juliet to “a tiny church – every inch of which is a mosaic of broken china and smashed pottery”. This is the exquisite Little Chapel in St Andrew, one of the smallest chapels in the world at just 16ft by 9ft. me to two photographs of fresh-faced Germans in military uniform. “I was told about these soldiers by Richard Heaume, the Guernsey man that runs our Occupation Museum. This one is Fritz Kunz, he worked here at OGH when it was the Soldatenheim, Richard’s in touch with him, he’s in his 90s now and not able to travel. However, this one, Wernel Kruger, will be coming to join us in our Liberation celebrations in May.”

I’m sure Kruger will be surprised by the luxury of the OGH in its current guise as a Red Carnation five-star hotel. Although there are parts of the hotel that have hardly changed since the Forties and he is bound to recognise the lofty ceilings and expansive dimensions of the Regency Room, while the view across to Herm and Jethou won’t have changed.

The next day we head to the Occupation Museum to find out more. It’s a warren of displays about the war situated very near the airport in the parish of Forest. Richard is sat at the front desk and I tell him I’ve seen the pictures of the German soldiers at OGH. I realise that I’ve only ever thought of the occupation from the perspective of islanders and I’m suddenly very keen to get the story from the other side.

I ask if there is a book written by a soldier who was stationed on the island during the war and he spins the display on his desk and pulls out the title Island Destiny. “This is about a German medical orderly who fell in love with, and eventually married, a Sark girl,” Richard says handing me the book. I purchase it immediately and he puts it in a brown paper bag.

I can’t remember the last time I bought a book in this way and the exchange is satisfying – these days my books largely arrive in brown Amazon parcels.

We head into the museum and get lost in the multitude of artefacts and stories contained there.

When we break out into the sunshine it feels as though we have emerged from another world. Down the same country lanes that soldiers once patrolled on bicycles we drive with the radio on, slowing to peruse the “veg in the hedge”

– the little honesty shops farmers set up at the end of their drives

– or to look at horses, pigs or cows nuzzling on the edge of the fields. And sometimes we slow just because the lane is so incredibly narrow there is no other way to drive. The slowness helps us digest the past and brings us gently back to the present.

is in cinemas now