My World of Islands

by Leslie Thomas

  From distant misty history, the Isle of Man has had its own Parliament, Tynwald, which makes independent laws and levies taxes. The Manx language flickers and there is hope of its revival. Some street signs and direction posts are in Manx and English, often erected above or alongside a standing-stone dating back to pre-history. These relics are so numerous that they stand casually about attracting (from the locals anyway) as little attention as a post box.

  The north of the island, towards the Point of Ayre, becomes, surprisingly, a flat plain after the glens and uplands of the middle island. I remember going up there one day and discovering the wreck of a ship made of concrete. She was one of a number cast like that – to save steel – during World War I. She certainly looked the most permanent shipwreck I have ever seen, although it is possible that she has since been blown up or dismantled with pneumatic drills.

  In the south is marvellous green scenery. Sweet hills patterned with some trees and pastoral valleys. At the end of the island are Castletown, Port St Mary and Port Erin, little folded places of stone, shingle and sand. When the tide is out the wide beaches, flat and shiny, seem to mirror the sky. Cregneish village, a collection of cottages and a lovely small church with an open belfry, is down there too on the way to Spanish Head and the offshore island, the Calf of Man.

  Spanish Head is reputed to be the place where a galleon of the scattered Spanish Armada finally came to grief, after an escape that took her from the western English Channel right around the head of Scotland and almost back to where she began. The Manx cat, which has no tail, is said to be the descendant of the cats that climbed ashore from the rigging to the cliffs.

  I wanted to see the Calf of Man again because I could not recall how it was shaped. It was much broader than I had thought, green plateaued, lying close inshore across the fretful Calf Sound. It is uninhabited except for bird wardens and the coastguard who with the seabirds and wild creatures keeps it as their safe, protected home.

  The heyday of the traditional North of England holiday on the Isle of Man is, they say, gone. At one time the steamers used to come to Douglas loaded with workers who had earned a holiday by the sea from the cotton, steel and coal towns, but now the numbers have diminished.

  Douglas retains its tall, elegant appearance around one of the finest bays in Britain; its buildings haughty, its horse-trams still clopping along the promenade. The red funnels of the ferries stand out against the grey-green of the headland.

  I walked along the sea edge and tried to imagine myself back in that golden August when the war was ended. It is for that reason that I will always love this island. I was happy there once. Even if she did say I had a face like a crow.

  ISLE OF MAN situated between latitudes 53°3’–54°25’N and longitude 4°18’–4’47’W; area 227 sq. m (572 sq. km); population approx. 64,000; Britain

  The English Channel Islands

  A Family of the Sea

  They are fragments of France which fell into the sea to be gathered up by England

  VICTOR HUGO

  It was early afternoon when the storm arrived. The morning had been too bright, too brittle, a sure portent for bad weather, with the off-lying islands clear as cut-outs against the flat sky. Deep clouds moved in, pushing the sun aside; the wind began to sneak around the streets, like a man shiftily whistling from the corner of his mouth. The sea ruffled; then came thickening rain. By two o’clock it was like ten in the evening. Gulls turned up in the port in apprehensive hundreds; the coastguards had long issued timely warnings.

  Then the storm rushed up the English Channel like a ruffian, barging and banging, whooping around the harbour houses, whirling the cowls of chimney pots. The wind was drubbing doors; I could hardly see from my window for the onslaught of the rain. It was a wonderful day to be on an island.

  The window faced St Peter Port Harbour in Guernsey. I sat for an hour and watched the show. The fortress at the anchorage entrance was half blotted out. Was it rocking in the wind? Moored boats cringed. Sometimes a gull would try to fly but was flung like a rag and soon returned to the sensible sheltering beneath the wall. Outlying rocks were frothing with foam like a fleet trying to voyage on a violent sea. The other islands, Herm, Jethou and Sark had vanished. Perhaps they had even been washed away.

  It was a Saturday. Shoppers reported being toppled by the wind in the stony streets of St Peter Port; a surprised man was lifted from his horse. At an island football match the game was abandoned because the referee complained he was soaked to the skin and the ball kept blowing away.

  By night-time the worst – or the best, depending on your sense of the dramatic and how sheltered you were – was over. The wind fell to sulky gusts, the rain went to France or somewhere, only the sea sounded louder and that was because the other noises had quit. Later even the waves diminished, the sky cleared and a blameless moon came out. It was as though nothing untoward had ever happened.

  They lie in the crook of the arm of France, this little company of islands. Britain, to whom (with one exception) they belong, is many miles over the sea. France is so near people joke in Alderney that you can smell the cooking when the wind is right. When the Queen is toasted by the islanders there is added the appellation, ‘Duke of Normandy’.

  I lived in the Channel Islands for a year and they have been dear to me. I have thought of them as a family – Jersey and Guernsey, the larger pair, as father and mother, the older children, Alderney, Sark and Herm; a gaggle of toddlers, Brechou, Lihou, Burhou, Jethou, with the infant islands, Les Ecréhous, Les Minquiers and Les Casquets. To the south of Jersey lies their demure French cousin, so shy as to be almost unknown, the Isle of Chausey.

  The proximity of the archipelago to the Cherbourg Peninsula, with Britain out of view over the northern horizon, means their possession by the English crown could have only come about by some sheer carelessness on the part of the French or some extreme cleverness on the part of the British.

  That the roots of these swept scraps of land are still very much in their Norman origins can be seen today in the ancient laws, the names of districts and streets and, less now, in the language of the insular people. Breton-French is spoken in the green hinterland of Jersey although, curiously, the English-speaking Jerseyman has an accent that is not far off the sound of Dutch-South African – a linguistic conundrum. In Guernsey the voices are quite different, as are the islands, and the patois is a sort of Norman-French. With the sharp rivalry and sharper vernacular that is common to most neighbouring islands throughout the world, the Guernseyman refers to his Jersey neighbours as ‘crapauds’ – toads. In turn the Jerseyman calls the man of Guernsey a donkey.

  As is the way with collections of islands, each one of the Channel Islands is distinct in character, topography and atmosphere from the others in the group. Having lived among them I now gaze down from an aircraft passing south and see them sitting in their private blue sea, each a small solitary, tight place, living its life away from the others and, not infrequently, from the world at large. When I lived in Jersey a ship cut the submarine cable that carried the telephone and telex cables to England. For four days we were as isolated as it was possible to be in these technical times. The only people who appeared worried were the offshore financial houses (Jersey being, among other things, a tax haven) who, cut off from figures, averages, percentages had their clerks queueing night-long for every available aircraft seat.

  One windy winter I lived with my family in a stone farmhouse on Jersey. All the visitors had gone home to their cities and the place was left to its inhabitants, the sea and the weather. There were thrilling January days when gales would hoot through the modest valleys, when the long beaches would be rolled by great waves; when the sky was wild. Then there were other days, even at that remote time of the year, when yellow sunshine would clothe the islands and we would spend the day on the beach among the rocks, the sand and the periwinkles.

  Jersey is the most pastoral of the islands. It has farms and folding fields and you c
an be inland, away from the sea for a while. Its face is turned south, towards the sun, so that it does not have to rely on great shining acres of glasshouses that make Guernsey, on the approach by air, appear like a place of lakes or ice-floes. Jersey’s mild air encourages the gardener, the botanist and the arborist.

  When the Civil War broke out in England Jersey stood by the King and Guernsey became an outpost of Cromwell’s Round-heads; the two islands were at war. Even today the silver mace given to Jersey by a grateful and restored Charles II is brought out and displayed at ceremonial times. The island sheltered the fugitive King in Elizabeth Castle between the little port of St Aubin and the capital, St Helier. Today the pile still stands beyond the tides, marooned when the sea comes in. When Charles was restored to the throne he made his silver token of gratitude to the loyal Jerseymen, sportingly pardoned the people of Guernsey, and gave George de Carteret, Jersey’s bailiff and the Governor of the former island, a tract of land, 8,000 square miles of it, in the new colonies of Virginia. It is called New Jersey.

  Today in the churchyard at St Helier are buried two opposing commanders who fought the last battle ever to take place on British soil. One is Philippe Charles Félix Macquart, Baron de Rullecourt, who invaded the island with a French force in the early days of 1781, and the other Major Francis Peirson, the British officer who, after his superior commander had cravenly surrendered, decided to ignore the order, attacked the invaders and defeated them. Both commanders were killed in the skirmish and now rest in neighbouring tombs. The battle is also commemorated on Jersey banknotes and stamps, and in the name of a pub in the centre of St Helier.

  It was 160 years before Jersey was next invaded. This time there was no battle. After a preliminary bombing attack a lone, German aircraft landed (at the pilot’s own initiative) at the newly opened airport – out stepped Luftwaffe Lieutenant Richard Kern who was taken to a telephone box where he telephoned the bailiff and ordered the island’s surrender. There followed four years of privation not only for the inhabitants but, eventually, for the isolated garrison as well. The islands were not liberated until the rest of Europe was free, in May 1945, when Nazi Germany had surrendered. They were bypassed by the D-Day forces. Months passed while Paris, Brussels and Copenhagen were freed, and the little British islands remained prisoners. The stories of those days still abound in the Channel Islands but, for me, the whole extraordinary episode was brought into focus by some copies of the Guernsey Star published in 1940 which I bought for a couple of pounds at an auction in Jersey.

  The newspapers, sere and brittle now, show, as few things can, the plight of the poor islanders during those hopeless days. A German-inspired communiqué about Allied shipping losses leads what little news is presented, alongside a much longer item about a man who stole someone’s bicycle. There were messages, passed through the Red Cross, from relatives in England, a recipe for swede soup, and – intriguingly – alongside an advertisement for a German film at the cinema, one for a Hollywood musical. America had not then entered World War II.

  There was little underground resistance in the Channel Islands. They are so confined that anyone causing trouble would have had difficulty in hiding and such adventures as cutting telephone wires irritated and inconvenienced the local populace as much as the Germans. A handful of tragic Jews were sent away to a nameless fate. Another group of people were ordered to St Helier Harbour one morning with, ominously, only the personal possessions they could carry. Nothing happened. The boat that was supposed to come from St Malo to fetch them failed to appear and they were sent home for another night of agonizing. The following day the boat did turn up and the pathetic group were shipped to France and thence by slow train to Germany. They spent the rest of the war in a not uncomfortable camp, a German castle where, among other things, they formed an orchestra. I was shown the programme of one of their concerts. As the war drew to its close they were guarded by ancient and infirm German soldiers to whom they gave shelter during Allied air raids. At the end of hostilities they were carried immediately back to their island homes.

  Strange things happened to many people. Signor Valli, for many years the dignified headwaiter of the Hotel l’Horizon in Jersey, having lived in Britain for much of his life, was nevertheless told by the Germans to return to his Italian homeland to join the army. ‘I made all the excuses I could think about,’ he said. ‘But eventually they said I had to go and with another Italian I was shipped across to St Malo and given a rail ticket and enough money to get to Lyons where we were instructed to report to the Italian consul. It took us days to get there because the French railways were in a bad state and were being bombed. Eventually we arrived and went to the consul which was jammed with people. After a whole day a woman assistant told us to go to a hotel and gave us money to pay our bill and for food. We returned to the office the next day and the same thing happened and this went on for several days until eventually the lady took us out into the street where she waylaid some German officers who were going to lunch. She asked them to sign some papers, which they did. Then she gave the documents and rail tickets to us and said, “Go on back to Jersey.” We did, gladly.’

  Alderney was an out-and-out slave labour camp with uncounted numbers of prisoners from Eastern Europe and elsewhere dying cruel deaths. Outside its small airfield today is a sundial which has an inscription, ‘Do as the sundial does – count the bright hours only.’ Despite the philosophy, and the amiable character of the island’s inhabitants, most of whom live in St Anne, the most delightful town in the Channel Islands, the past still broods over Alderney in the shape of great concrete blockhouses and bunkers, so strong they can never be removed and which all the climbing wisteria and honeysuckle cannot disguise. A great pity.

  Herm, the low, pretty island lying to the east of Guernsey, had a strange war. Throughout most of the occupation its only inhabitants were the caretaker and his wife. They were instructed to look after the island for the owner Lord Perry and that is exactly what they did. The Germans in the main respected their function although they did stage a mock invasion on the famous Shell Beach, an exercise filmed and shown in Berlin as representing the invasion of Britain itself.

  But undoubtedly one of the oddest results of the German occupation is to be seen on the island of Sark today in the person of its recent Constable, Herr Werner Rang, who first arrived there as part of its German garrison. He is a round-faced, easily smiling man whose friends from Germany joke that he now speaks his native language with a Sark accent. Apart from his responsibility for keeping law and order on the tiny island he and his wife Phyllis keep a guest house and have a jewellery shop. ‘I was a medical sergeant here in Sark,’ relates Werner. ‘And since there was no civilian doctor on the island I used to do what I could when people were sick. One day I was called to Phyllis’s house because she had the ’flu. My first words to her were, “I want to take your temperature.”’

  When the war was done Werner was shipped to England and spent the next three years in a prisoner-of-war camp. He remembered Sark with affection and he and Phyllis began to correspond. When he was released he forsook Germany and returned to Sark. He and Phyllis married and they had a family and now have five grandchildren. He showed me his silver and ebony mace, his symbol of office (he has no uniform). ‘When Her Majesty the Queen came to Sark,’ he said smiling, ‘I had to present her with this mace and she handed it back to me. It was the proudest moment of my life.’

  Victor Hugo lived in the Channel Islands having been banished from France with others for criticizing Napoleon III – Napoleon the Little as he was derisively called. After settling first in Jersey, where he was seen, a black encloaked figure, looking out over the sea like a man haunted, he was then banished a second time for the same reason. He and other exiles published a pamphlet which attacked the French ruler and furthermore libelled Queen Victoria for her support of the regime in Paris. Hugo, who never wrote or spoke a word of English, was expelled from Jersey.

  He was, however,
welcomed in Guernsey in 1855 where he lived until 1870. His house in the rue de Hauteville in St Peter Port can be visited today. It is literally heavy with memories – his books, his awesome four-poster bed, the bulky furniture and drapes, the wooden crucifix upon the wall, a screen said to have been the handiwork of Madame de Pompadour herself. In the ornate dining-room is the oak chair he kept reserved for the Great Unknown Guest. A chain across it prevented any other person sitting there.

  Hugo wore the sadness of his exile as heavy as his cloak. He wandered through the islands, taking many local scenes for his novels. He wrote Les Misérables there and on Sark he found the inspiration for The Toilers of the Sea. His heart, however, was forever in France. The windows of his study, built on the roof of his house, looked towards his beloved, lost, homeland. Today a French flag flies above the house where he lived.

  I first went into the marketplace in St Helier, Jersey, just before Christmas in the year I lived on the island. Among all the fruit and holly and Christmas flowers I saw at once a stout sight, a Victorian post box, and into it went my Christmas cards. The first post boxes erected in the British Isles appeared in Jersey, designed by Anthony Trollope, a post officer surveyor before he took to writing. It stands as a cheerful and ever-used memorial.

  In the churchyard at St Saviour’s is another memorial, more beautiful and poignant – a bust of the actress Lillie Langtry, the lovely Jersey Lily. She was born only a few steps away, the daughter of the Dean of Jersey, the Reverend William Corbet Le Breton.