The Guernsey Saga Box Set

by Diana Bachmann

  It did. She loved it, and so did the dogs. In calmer seas they would love to swim out with her, but they did not enjoy being rolled in the breakers, so while she waded out into the surf, Troilus and Cressida paddled in the marbled backwash, pouncing triumphantly on pieces of vraic torn from the sea bed. As she sped into the shallows on her stomach the dogs would hurl themselves on her, licking her face and prancing around till she waded out again. Sometimes she would mis-time her leap forward with the curling breaker, and find herself upended, rolled over and over, gasping for breath until she was released to fight for her footing against the undertow. It was desperately exhilarating, so absorbing one never got cold however freezing the wind, and anyway the water was always so warm in September.

  Sue was fighting to maintain some degree of modesty as she dragged on her clothes under a towel held together in her teeth, when her cousin’s voice shouted, “Hi there! What’s it like in?” She grabbed the towel with one hand and yanked her trousers up to her waist with the other. “Sybil! Gordon! You must go in, it’s gorgeous. Very warm.” She zipped up and dropped the towel. “What’s the time?” She fished her watch out of her pocket. “Oh hell! I was in for nearly an hour and Bobbie will be home wondering where on earth I am. Would you like to pop in for a cup of tea after your dip?”

  “We’d love to. See you later.”

  Bobbie was watching television and didn’t seem to have noticed her absence. And the phone was ringing.

  “Hallo?”

  “Mum?” It was Stephanie.

  “Hallo, darling. How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “Where are you. Back at college yet?”

  “No, I’m at Margaret’s in London.”

  “What date do you go back?”

  “That’s what I’m ringing about. I’ve decided not to go back.”

  Sue gasped.

  “Mum? Are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, aren’t you going to say something?”

  What does she want me to say? “What are you going to do instead?”

  “I’ve got a job as a waitress, at the moment. A bunch of us have all made the same decision and we are going off to Wales next month to rent a house for the winter and do some painting.”

  “But what will you live on?”

  “We’ll grow most of our own food and some of us will have jobs.”

  “Listen, darling. Why don’t you come home for two or three weeks . . .”

  “No!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’ll spend the whole time trying to talk me out of it.”

  True.

  “I’ve made up my mind. This is what I want to do. We are all artists. Some are sculptors, some potters and others are musicians. We all get on so well together and are so very happy. I want you to be pleased for me.”

  “I might be if I knew more about it. When did you say you going?”

  “Soon. I’ll send you our address as soon as we arrive. I must go now. This is costing a bomb.”

  “All right, darling. Write soon.”

  There was a brief pause, then Stephanie said, “I do love you, Mum.”

  Sue tried to swallow the lump in her throat. It was the first time Stephanie had said that for years. “And I love you too, very much.”

  “Bye for now.”

  “Look after yourself.”

  The line went dead.

  “Why are you crying, Mummy?” Bobbie asked.

  Sue had no idea how long she had sat there with the buzzing receiver in her hand. “I’m not crying. I went for a long swim in the breakers and got a lot of salt in my eyes.”

  “Oh. I see. What time is tea?”

  Chapter Five – Attitudes

  Coralie had persuaded her stepfather to put up the funds for her to open a flower shop in St Peter Port. Situated up Mill Street in the old quarter of the town, it was unlikely to attract much passing trade other than tourists, but collected a small clique of faithful clientele, sufficient for the venture to break even by the middle of its second year.

  Coralie herself could only be described as drab. Her shapeless skirts and dresses were of pale, Liberty printed cottons in summer, and donkey-brown and mulberry wools for winter. She seldom bothered to wear make-up to add colour to her face and her straight, mousey hair was cut short, without shape or style. Yet she was a nice girl. In her shy, quiet way she went about her work creating beautifully artistic arrangements with both fresh and dried flowers, painted imaginative flowerpots and plant stands and sold several macramé pot holders which she worked at home as a hobby in the evenings. In her solemn way she appeared to be perfectly happy and fulfilled, though her stepfather frequently remarked that the money involved in the shop could be earning a far better return if invested elsewhere.

  Edward Heath’s government was not flourishing. The death and destruction wrought by the IRA in Northern Ireland had spread to the British mainland and the fact that, despite the Government’s failure to settle the problem there or the currently growing disruption caused by militant union workers in industry, the Prime Minister elected to skipper his yacht Morning Cloud in the Admiral’s Cup, climaxing with the 605-mile Fastnet Race, did little to help his popularity rating in the country.

  Even Richard, yachting’s most ardent enthusiast, condemned him. “The man has to be an idiot if he imagines his team’s success will improve his standing in public opinion! Just to contemplate going off on a jolly at a time like this, when people are being blown to pieces on the streets and industry is being throttled by picketing violence, has to be an act of crass stupidity.” Which for the mildly spoken and easy-going Richard, was quite a statement.

  Guernsey was wallowing in a property boom: a property magnet with a British passport and a foreign name, had taken the island market by storm, was traversing each parish from end to end offering phenomenal and irresistible sums for hotels, guest houses and private homes and then reselling them before the ink had dried. Prices soared overnight creating a mini-boom in trade economy.

  Coralie was happy, busy supplying plants and flower arrangements to newly wealthy homes and offices, so much so that she needed to take on an assistant to mind the shop while she was out on her rounds.

  Debbie had had modestly successful tennis tours in 1970 and 1971, but was feeling very deflated by both the bad sportsmanship amongst some of the the players, their coaches and supporters, and by some of the adverse criticism of her game.

  “Why bother what this man Beechy says about your service, dear?” Sue counselled as she kneaded dough on a floured board on the kitchen table. “He is of no importance whatsoever to anyone but the players in his own stable.”

  “But he is one of the top coaches . . .”

  “Trying to undermine your confidence in favour of his own girls.”

  “Oh, Mummy! Do you think a man of his standing would play such a rotten trick!”

  “You think I’m inventing nasty thoughts about him, I suppose. Just to make you feel better.” Sue shook her head. Really, one did dig holes for oneself when bringing up children. One spent the first ten or fifteen years of the children’s lives trying to convince them that there were no such things as nasty Bogeymen, and the next ten or fifteen years warning them against them.

  “I don’t think I will ever be strong enough, mentally, to be classified as a seriously good player.”

  “Debbie! That is so negative.”

  “No. Just realistic. There has always been such profound sense of fair play in our family. What Granpa calls good sportsmanship. You know how he often says things like ‘better to be a good loser than a bad winner’, and ‘the game’s the thing’, and so on. Well, honestly, Mum, that attitude doesn’t exist on the tour. You can hear your opponent’s coach or parents hissing at you to ‘miss it!’ and actually laughing if you have a double fault. Players are not supposed to receive any help or advice during matches, yet it is happening all the time. When you go on court you discover
you are not playing against a single person, you are taking on their entire team.”

  Sue scratched her head. “How disgusting! That’s cheating! And you’ve had to put up with that for how long?”

  “Two seasons.”

  “Why haven’t you ever said anything about it before?”

  Debbie shrugged and gave a wry smile. “Because I thought I would sound unsporting. You always warned us not to whine when we were losing, or make excuses.”

  “I suppose bringing paid professionals into the game has changed it from a sport into a business,” Sue reflected sadly.

  “The players were certainly divided into the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. Some of the more successful ones were staying in smart hotels and driving round in jazzy cars while the rest of us were riding borrowed bikes to and from our digs. Except for Justin, of course.”

  “And which do you reckon came first: the success or the money?”

  Debbie pondered that one for a bit. “At the risk of sounding bitchy, I’d say the money. Mind you, a player put on tour by backers has to work his or her butt off. Practice morning noon and night with coaches shouting the odds. Justin coaches me and sometimes gets cross, but nothing like some of those others. Mum?” she waited till Sue looked up at her. “Will you mind very much, me giving it up? I do enjoy being a strong club player and hope to go on playing for the island for a few years, but I don’t think I can face trying to take it any further than that.” Debbie hated even thinking it, let alone saying it; but the snide comments and back-biting on the circuit were too painful and demoralising to bear.

  Visualising the necks of her daughter’s persecutors, Sue twisted off chunks of dough, kneaded and shaped them and dumped them into bread tins. “What do you plan to do instead? Tennis has been your whole life for so long.”

  “Coralie has offered me a job working for her in the flower shop. That’s what I’d like to do, but I said I’d talk to you, first.” With her forefinger, Debbie pressed three indentations into each lump of dough.

  “You really want to do that?” Sue paused to peer closely at her younger daughter’s expression.

  Debbie nodded, biting a fingernail. “Just until we get married.”

  Sue said nothing. She put the six bread tins on a tray and carried them away to the airing cupboard to rise. There was nothing she could say: certainly she couldn’t speak the thoughts going on in her mind. Thoughts, feelings, that Justin was playing Debbie along in a dead-end relationship. She longed to relay the sound of warning bells in her brain, confide her thoughts and feelings on the subject to this gentle, vulnerable child, but she knew that far from helping, she would simply be creating distance between herself and Debbie. “The flower shop sounds like a lovely idea, darling. And if something else more interesting crops up at a later date, there is nothing to say you couldn’t make a move. Coralie seems a nice girl: do you get on with her?”

  “Oh yes, she’s a sweetie. Terribly kind and thoughtful. I find it hard to believe she has a sister like Amanda!” Debbie kissed Sue’s cheek. “I’ll go and give her a call to say I’ll take the job.”

  When she had gone, Sue flicked on the electric kettle and flopped on to the kitchen stool, crisis temporarily averted. The relationship between a mother and daughter had the potential for great confidence and intimacy, yet seemed so fragile. Unlike the relationship with one’s sons who tended always to hold one at a distance. Normally the females of any species including cats, dogs and horses, were much more affectionate and loving. Yet look how her relationship with Stephanie had collapsed! Hopelessly. And she still didn’t have a clue why.

  She warmed the teapot and measured in the leaves before the kettle switched itself off, poured and waited, thinking back to the strained relationship she had had with her own mother, Sarah.

  Over the years she had developed a guilt complex about it, starting in Denbigh during the war when, with no photographic reminders, she had forgotten what her parents looked like. She knew she missed them, longed to return to them, to be one of the family again, daily loved by and loving the people around her.

  The guilt was magnified dramatically when, after five long years, the great day of reunion dawned . . . and she had felt nothing! Armed with a man-sized handkerchief for the emotion of their meeting, she had carried her battered suitcase along the dockside towards two vaguely familiar strangers: her tall, handsome father now gaunt and grey, her beautiful mother prematurely aged and shrunk. The fact that these people, however changed from the pre-war photographs of them all sent to her after Liberation Day, were the parents she had longed to see again, made her drop the suitcase and rush impulsively to hug and kiss them, hang on to them, reclaim them as her long-lost family. But there was no deep-seated stirring, no special sense of loving. Just a blank. As though Sarah was a distant aunt, Daddy an old family friend.

  So what was the matter with her? Had she become some cold, unnatural freak? True, Mummy hadn’t helped, trying to boss her around, treat her like the ten-year-old she had been when she was evacuated from the island with her school, just days before the Germans had landed. As a streetwise fifteen-year-old, oh how she had resented that. But it had been no excuse for the vacuum in her soul, her lack of feeling, particularly for her mother. She had hoped that maybe, after a few months or even a year, the fractured relationship would heal, but when it did not, so the guilt grew. Thank God a new kind of loving had developed between them a year or so before Mummy died.

  Sue suddenly remembered the tea, poured herself a cup and took a biscuit out of the tin.

  The guilt had remained until quite recently when, after visiting Stephanie in her commune in Wales – a heart-wrenching experience – she had boarded a train in Rhyl bound for Euston, London, and found herself sitting opposite a plump, middle-aged woman whose face seemed very vaguely familiar. She had glanced at her several times and found the woman staring at her.

  “Suzanne Gaudion?” the woman said, suddenly.

  Sue stared back, memory stirred. “Angele Phillips?”

  The old, wartime schoolfriends had both laughed, shaken hands and asked a thousand questions.

  “Where do you live?”

  “What happened to you when you left school?”

  “Have you a husband? Children?”

  Sue told her story, briefly, leaving out the gory details.

  Angele’s tale followed. Then she added that she had had a wonderful billet throughout the war with a couple who treated her like their own daughter. The heartache at parting after the Liberation of the island was only matched by the total void that had existed between her and her real parents after their reunion. She had born a painfully strained and guilt-ridden relationship with the latter until leaving school, going to England for training and then being free to return to North Wales to take a job near her dear foster-parents in Denbigh. She had married a Welsh boy, raised a family, and lived in Wales ever since. And now, still feeling guilty for failing to maintain a love for her real parents, she was hurrying back to Guernsey for her father’s funeral.

  The train journey to London had taken over five hours. Five hours of open-hearted confessions and memories which, for them both, swept away a twenty-six year long burden of guilt.

  Sue poured another cup of tea. Yes, mother and daughter relationships were very fragile, so easily broken. And while praying she wrong, she had a quite frightening feeling that the bouncey, bubbly, loving and super-sensitive Debbie was going to need to have their relationship intact in the not too distant future.

  *

  “She’s a real peach, Richard!”

  “How is she rigged, ketch?”

  “No, sloop. She’ll need some of the rigging replacing, mind, but that shouldn’t be a problem,” Billy enthused.

  “I thought you said she’d only be a hull. How come if she’s needing so little, she’s going so cheap?” Richard emerged up the companionway sticking his head and shoulders through the hatch of a battered-looking Westerly.

 
“The galley’s a bit of a mess, all the charts are missing and she’ll need to have radar installed.” Billy took a packet of Silk Cut out of his breast pocket, offered one to Richard who shook his head, and lit up. “She should have all new cushion covers and curtains in the cabins and saloon, too. Freshen her up.”

  “And you are absolutely sure the hull is sound?”

  “Guaranteed. Though she could do with a coat of antifouling.”

  “Well, let’s see what Uncle George and my father think about it.”

  *

  There were two visits Sue had wanted to make in England in the summer of 1972: one, with Stephen, to see the Tutankhamen Exhibition in London, and the other to Stephanie in Wales again. It was decide that she should see her daughter first and Stephen would join her at the Strand Palace on her return to London. The choice of gifts for Stephanie was not difficult: food and money. Packets of dried fruits, soups and cake mixes seemed to be both manageable as luggage and could easily be stored by Stephanie. Sue wondered about clothes, but couldn’t make up her mind what sort. New ones would seem a waste of time and money in the commune setting, yet her own cast-offs, which should fit the girl, would be laughably out of place.

  The widower father of a London art student called Griffith Evans had died in 1970, leaving his very rundown and dilapidated farm in Wales to his only child. Friendly with Marcus and Tony, Griffith was equally cheesed off with the demands of his degree course and was keen to drop out of university. And so the group had moved into the farm with great determination and enthusiasm for healthy living and self-sufficiency, agreeing to pool their funds and resources. Unfortunately, neither had lasted very long – only the stubborn determination ‘to make it work’ remained, along with a reluctance to return to a “bourgeois” lifestyle and nine-to-five jobs. Artists are not particularly practical people: they make pots and pictures and “interesting” collages, but when it comes to repairing a broken window or hole in the roof they often prove exceptionally inept. When the members of the group had not been involved in “creative” works, the girls had been obliged to learn manual skills while the boys strummed their guitars and composed love songs.