by Caroline Lea
The first time she said it, Claudine cried. But after months and months with no word, she started to say it too. Then she started to hope that it was true, because if he had forgotten them, it meant he was still alive.
On the beach with Gregor, she tried to forget the war and play games or tell stories. But the war seeped into everything, like the salt from the sea, like the gossip from people’s mouths. War changed the colour and texture of everything, even the games of children.
Gregor was often quiet or sad and didn’t seem to want to join in when she made up stories about people fighting battles or running and hiding from bombs.
Once, she asked him, ‘Why are you here? In Jersey?’
‘We are making a good world for all people.’
‘But what about the people who are hurt? In London, people are dying. And in Germany too. I heard it on the news.’
He turned to her, his expression wretched. ‘You should not have radio. Do not talk of this. It can bring trouble.’
She felt a small stab of the terror that had first engulfed her upon meeting him: a German soldier, with his gun. But then she blinked and he was Gregor again. Kind Gregor who gave her toys and shared his food with her, even though doing those things might get him into trouble.
‘Is it rotten being a German soldier?’
‘Sometimes, liebchen.’ He kissed the top of her head, and then he stared out at the sea.
Claudine looked at the sharp planes of his German face, made sharper by hunger. Neither of them said anything. She noticed that the skin on his poor arm was redder than usual, and a little swollen. He had bruises on his neck and face: one made a scribbled circle around his eye. Smudges of blood under his skin: brown and yellowish. Old.
She took a breath to ask him: What happened to your face? But then she remembered how she used to feel a hot, sickening shame if anyone at school was nosy about the bruises she sometimes had on her legs and back, after Maman had been having one of her black weeks. So she simply sat with him, reached out, took his ruined stump of a hand. They watched the shifting, rumpled surface of the sea, wrinkling under the fingers of the wind.
When he was happy, Gregor taught Claudine German, which was very helpful at school. Soon she was the best in the class.
But the other children, faces twisted with spite, started calling her a Jerry-Bag, which was a nasty name for a Jèrriais woman who had a German boyfriend, or sometimes lots of German boyfriends. Another word for traitor.
Claudine tried not to mind, when they shouted it, but the words cut deep, the sharp voices, the spiked anger. Jerry-Bag! Jerry-Bag!
She called them Dreksau, and then hid behind the big oak tree in the schoolyard so that no one would see her tears.
She tried to explain. ‘Gregor isn’t like a proper soldier; he’s kind—he’s a good sort. I hate the Germans too, but Gregor isn’t completely German. Not absolutely.’
But the children just laughed and shouted, Jerry-Bag! Jerry-Bag!
Someone must have told Maman about Gregor, because one day, when Claudine came home, Maman’s eyes were hard.
‘I don’t want you going on the beach by yourself anymore,’ she said.
Claudine’s stomach jumped. She told Maman about Gregor being different.
Maman said, ‘But he’s still German. He’s still the enemy. You’re too young to understand.’
Nothing would change her mind or the sad, disappointed downwards tug at the corners of her mouth. In the end, Claudine cried and put her head in Maman’s lap, which smelt of the warm fug of potato peelings and ersatz tobacco.
Claudine waited until she hoped Maman had forgotten about Gregor and then she went back to playing with him, just as before, except she hurried home sooner, her chest like a squeezed balloon. She was also more careful about not being seen. The war had made tattletales of everybody.
At night, they listened to more news. The London Underground had been bombed and there was a 120-foot crater in the ground. Claudine tried to picture it but all she could see was the gaping mouth of a grey-and-black monster, crunching down on buildings, trains, people. She had nightmares and woke lathered in sweat.
Sometimes, when a nightmare roused her early, she crept out alone in the velvet hour of the morning, when everything was clean and blank and the patrols were mostly asleep or too bleary-eyed to notice a lone girl. She’d slip through the long grass towards the beach, where she sat on the sand, running the cold shingle through her fingers and staring at the sea. Black and grey too in the dawn gloom, like the flattened innards of the bombed city must be. When the tide went out, it left the mud and rocks covered in seaweed. No soldiers. No Jèrriais. Nothing but the roots of the sea.
OUT fishing, Maurice’s main fear was the patrols. If they caught him sneaking out on his boat, it would be the finish for him.
He found ways to quell the fear and quash the risk: it wasn’t so hard, learning the times of patrol switchover and memorising which soldiers were liable to fall asleep and which ones came on the job half cut or with a hangover.
Wednesdays were simple enough because the night patrol always knocked off early and went to sit on St Ouen’s beach, smoking cigarettes they’d stolen or bought on the black market. Sundays were the worst: the changeover of duty was right near where Maurice liked to keep the boat moored because of the gentle tides and the straight route out to sea, with no worry about the biting reefs.
But he couldn’t risk leaving the boat there with so many of the Germans about, so every Saturday night he’d moor the boat half a mile north of the usual spot, hoping the jaws of the rocks wouldn’t catch the bottom of the boat. It meant a hell of a time climbing in and out of the boat: if the tide was up then he had to swim the last stretch, holding the sack (heavy with his catch) between his teeth, the sensation of creaking hessian making his nerves jangle.
He was still anxious about Marthe, of course, but his fear faded: how happy she was with Edith and what good care she took of his wife. By the time new year had been and gone, Marthe even seemed to have a bit more flesh on her tiny bones, despite the rationing. Her cheeks had plumped. Sometimes, Maurice could look at her from the corner of his eye and see the girl he’d married.
But then Marthe would twitch or moan, and Maurice would lose her all over again; he would feel a strange sort of aching in his chest. Not anger or sadness—more akin to that moment of being startled from a beautiful dream.
It was a relief to escape from it all and meet with the French fishermen. They were a rough sort, down to the last man, with scars from God knows what—Maurice never wanted to ask. They were different to how they’d been a few years back, though. War changed everything and the French smiled at him more now. They liked him because he was doing the same as them: sneaking around on his boat every night to bring back fish so his friends and family didn’t starve to death.
In war, your enemy’s enemy becomes your friend.
By early 1941, they had settled into a pattern. Once a month, when the moon was down, they all sailed out to the little islands just south of Jersey called Les Minquiers. Big rocks with a few broken-down houses—no one lived there year-round, but people used to camp out there for the odd night, before the war. Of course, they were a dangerous place to stay too long—the Germans had wind of them as a hiding place for escapees and checked them often.
But, provided it seemed safe, Maurice and the Frenchmen arrived near midnight. Sometimes they’d simply crouch in the boats and talk. Other times, if there were no patrols and there was enough cloud cover, they would scramble on to those rocks and sit awhile, drinking and smoking and talking.
They only talked about the Germans on days when the French had brought along a bottle of brandy—black-market stuff that burned when Maurice swallowed. Sometimes, one of the handier Frenchmen might make a little fire with some dried twigs and a flint. He would always make sure it was low down in a sunken hole in the rocks, so the flames couldn’t be seen.
Maurice was rarely close enough
to feel the warmth in his bones, but the colour was a fine thing. Glimmer of orange hope in the darkness. Simply watching the faces of the Frenchmen in the glow took the chill from his own skin. It carried him back to nights in front of the fire when he was a boy. He could smell the sea water and fish stink coming from his papa’s clothes as they dried. A dreadful, bitter stench, really, and it stuck in his nostrils for days afterwards, but now it seemed the smell of warmth and safety and faraway peace.
The French were full of tales about the Germans. Maurice never knew what to believe; hard to know how far a man can be trusted to tell the truth, especially a fisherman.
But the Frenchmen hooted and rolled about laughing with much of what they said. They had a story about a drunken German soldier in France who had thought he was back in Leipzig with his own woman. He had climbed into bed with a Frenchman’s wife while she was asleep. When the Frenchman came home from his meeting with the Resistance, he found his wife curled up next to a drunken German soldier. He shot them both.
The fishermen loved the story and they told it again and again until Maurice could have recited it word for word. He chuckled along with them. But something in the story plagued him. Before the war, Maurice couldn’t have imagined an anger so consuming that it could turn an ordinary man into a murderer, but now he conjured the feeling with little effort.
The fishermen sniggered about the Commandant in Jersey, said they knew all about him—his face and stomach so bloated that they called him pleine lune. They said that he never stood for long at the top of a hill because he couldn’t stop himself from rolling down to the bottom. That they could have used him as a buoy for mooring their boat but it would make the boat impossible to hide.
The jokes went on and on. Maurice laughed along with them: mocking the monster stole a little of his power, for a moment at least. The Frenchmen said the Commandant had syphilis and he’d caught it from his horse. Maurice laughed loudest at this but they all stopped to stare at him in surprise and said, ‘Non, non! C’est vrai, c’est vrai!’ And then they all guffawed again and he didn’t know if it was because the Commandant had caught syphilis from his horse, or because Maurice had believed them.
They also told other tales. Stories about women raped and murdered. Pregnant women—their stomachs split open and their babes burned before their eyes. Shops and businesses looted by the invading army, or torched—the shopkeepers screaming as they cooked. But when Maurice, heavy-hearted, asked them if any of these things had happened to them or to their wives, or their friends, they looked away and didn’t reply.
When Maurice really pressed them, everything they said, all those terrible things, had happened to a friend of a friend in La Rochelle, or a neighbour’s second cousin in Montmartre. Or it was only a story they had heard, probably not true.
Because the Germans couldn’t truly be that evil, could they?
It was impossible in this new, shifting world called Occupation—a sort of stasis of enforced peace amid a war—to know whom to trust. But the stories made Maurice fret for Marthe all the same. The Germans hadn’t hurt anyone in Jersey. Not really. Not irreparably. But it only took one soldier who thought too much of himself, or one Jerseyman to say something foolish. Or someone with a chip on their shoulder—and goodness knows there were enough of those about.
Often, Maurice left those meetings on the rocks feeling worse than he had before, and not only because of the terrible hangovers. His peace was gone. Those moments of emptiness when he dragged the nets in and all he thought about was putting one hand in front of the other and hauling till his back and shoulders burned and then counting the catch and throwing back any tiddlers with a blessing for the sea… Gone, all gone. All he could think of was Marthe and what would happen if a soldier found her alone.
The fish fetched a good price on the black market, which Clement Hacquoil was running now he was out of hospital. Maurice could take his catch into his shop and they might trade: fish for meat. Or he could exchange for shoes or ersatz coffee. Clement hadn’t been too happy to trade with Maurice, until he dropped Edith’s name. Once Maurice said it was for Edith, the butcher would give him anything he wanted, as long as his wife wasn’t listening in.
Maurice tried not to gape at Hacquoil’s face. Eight months after the bombings and he still looked like a squid that had been left too long in the sun. Candle Nose the children called him. Some of the adults too, though you’d think they would know better. His movements were still odd—jerky and awkward. From the pain, Edith said. She thought it might ease with time. Then again, it might not.
They’d found the war tricky, the Hacquoils. Before, they’d had half the island at their beck and call. Partly because of the butcher’s shop and the good meat that people wanted for their children’s bellies. But, in the main, it was Joan. She collected people’s secrets, hoarded them like those underground truffles rich folk would pay a fortune for. Then she dug them up, waved them around in the light: Look at what I’ve discovered. How much is it worth? Sometimes she used her knowledge to lord it over people, or turn them against each other at just the right time. Sometimes, they provided leverage to gain extra support—a few more votes for a friend who wanted to be a Senator or a Deputy. Sometimes she sat with that knowledge for years, enjoying having folk creeping around after her. A spider, just waiting.
But since the Germans had arrived, she’d been running the shop by herself and she’d lost some of her sway. Rumour had it, no sooner was Clement out of hospital than she was pushing him into black-market trading. She still collected secrets, where she could, from Jèrriais and Germans alike, by all accounts.
For his own part, Maurice stayed well away from her; he tried to earn favours from people, rather than grabbing and squeezing for them. He gave fish to this person and that: the grocer, a few policemen, the harbour-master. Sometimes he exchanged for just a scrap of meat or a few potatoes. Not a fair trade, but oftentimes he’d found it could be useful to have someone thinking they might owe you something one day. In the meantime, food bought people’s silence.
Besides, it gave him some satisfaction to give some extra food to Edith and Marthe and Claudine. Just watching them eat gave him a glow.
Sometimes the girl wouldn’t take the fish, though. She smiled and said, ‘I’m full up, thank you.’
It had to be rubbish, of course—no one had been full for the longest time.
One day, Maurice said to her, ‘Come, don’t be a fool, child. There’s no shame in taking the fish. Your maman will thank you for it.’
She smiled. ‘We have plenty of food.’
‘Well, then, I’ll have to throw them away.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘I suppose I can take them then.’
He had just cooked up a bream to share with Marthe, fried it with some wild garlic and the little scraping of butter from his ration.
‘Well, if you’re full up, you won’t be wanting any bream?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘It’s a big fish and there’s plenty to go around.’
‘But I’m really, truly not hungry today.’
He was flaking the white fish flesh from the bones ready for Marthe, but he set down the knife and fork and frowned. ‘You’re pulling my leg.’
‘No, I’m not hungry.’
‘But…how?’ The rations were mostly vegetables and that wasn’t enough to feed a growing child.
She smiled again and looked down at her shoes. ‘I’ve a friend.’
‘If it’s Clement Hacquoil then you tell him that any extra meat is to come Edith’s way too.’
‘Not Monsieur Hacquoil. A better friend than that.’ She was twisting her hair around her finger and smiling.
‘Who is it then?’ He went back to deboning the fish; no time to spare for children’s games.
‘His name is Gregor.’
His jaw dropped. ‘That’s a German name.’
‘Yes, he’s a soldier. But he is very kind and good, and he gives me extra food when he can
spare it.’
Disbelief. Then anger. Maurice clenched his fists around the cutlery.
‘A soldier? A German soldier is your friend? You foolish child.’
His knife slipped and a piece of fish shot off the plate and slapped wetly on to the floor. He cursed through gritted teeth.
‘You foolish, foolish child.’
Claudine’s face crumpled. ‘I’m not foolish. He’s my best friend.’
Maurice sighed. He stopped with the fish, washed his hands and sat down next to her. But his voice was still hard, lined with controlled rage.
‘You’re not my child to be ordering about. But honest to God, Claudine, my love, a German soldier? You know better than that. Why can’t you find some nice friends your own age? Good Jèrriais children?’
‘Because they all hate me. They call me a Jerry-Bag.’ Her eyes filled with tears.
He took her hand. ‘Now you listen to me. They won’t hate you. And they won’t call you a Jerry-Bag if you stop spending time with this soldier. He’s the enemy. It’s common sense, Claudine. You must see that?’
The girl’s lip trembled, but she nodded.
Maurice felt a stab of fear for her: she was such a strange and lonely little creature and it was plain to see that she thought highly of this soldier and truly believed he was different. But she didn’t know—and why should she, child that she was—what devils men can be, especially Germans. And she couldn’t see herself from the outside, how vulnerable she was and how a soldier could easily hurt a sweet and trusting child.
Silent tears shuddered down her cheeks; he clasped her in a quick, hard embrace.
‘There now, it’s all for the best. You’ll see.’
But even as he held her, his thoughts turned to Marthe and of the risk Claudine’s blind innocence brought for all of them.
He opened his mouth to ask Claudine if she’d mentioned anything about Marthe to this soldier but then forced himself to think clearly: the girl wouldn’t be such a fool, surely? This war was making him believe the worst of everyone.
