Islands: A page turning story of love, secrets and regrets

by Gwyn GB

  In the south is the busy built up harbour and town of St Helier, tipped with the magnificent outcrop of Elizabeth Castle and skirted by a long curving sandy bay stretching all the way to St Aubin Fort. This is her island. Small, yes, but upon it a wealth of varying landscape. Layer upon layer of history has been foisted upon it. The ancient burial chambers, the Dolmens, which once littered the island. Some now gone completely, some broken and smashed but others like the mound at Hougue Bie positively steeped in the generations that have made their mark upon it. From the first Pagan worshippers of the sun, who toiled to move giant lumps of granite to build it, the Medieval Catholics who added the ancient chapel above and most recently the scar of German occupation gouged into its side by wartime slave workers.

  Of course there are more recent superficial things to have altered the island, like the human planning abhorrence that is the Le Squez social housing flats, blighting the landscape all around them. They rise up from the St Clement plateau - symbols of grey concrete ignorance. An attempt to help society, to house people who need homes, but at a price which offends the eye and does little to offer its residents a home that makes the most of their environment. Margaret can never forget the words of a teacher who worked at a school near the estate. Her pupils were in the reception year, around about Sophie’s age, and she told her how some of them only ever went to the beach when they were on school outings. A beach which is just a few hundred yards from their doorsteps, a ready-made playground and garden, and yet their parents don’t take the time to show it to them. For someone like Margaret who positively revels in the joy of taking her children to the beach most days of the year, whatever the weather, it’s an anathema - a travesty for childhood. What more though this revelation from Haut de la Garenne, what more a travesty can there be than this?

  The conversation in the kitchen has moved on, Carol is quizzing Katherine about her life in London. It’s quite interesting for Margaret to just listen, get an outsider’s perspective.

  ‘So where do you live?’ Carol starts by asking Katherine.

  ‘Not far from Tottenham Court Road.’

  ‘Ooh that’s busy isn’t it?’ Carol replies, ‘Don’t you get sick of all the traffic? It would do my head in.’

  Katherine smiles wryly, ‘Well, I think you just get used to it, I don’t really notice it to be honest.’

  Carol is quick to come back with more questions. ‘So why have you come now, in March? You should have come back in the summer when you can go on the beach and enjoy some sunshine.’

  ‘I’m not really here as a tourist...’ Katherine hesitates, Margaret is purposely not looking, but she’s sure she feels her sister’s eyes on her. ‘I came to see my family and sort out a few things.’

  Perhaps Carol senses the tension in the air for she switches tack, turning the conversation to talk about Sophie. Katherine makes her excuses and goes upstairs.

  When Carol leaves shortly afterward Margaret is glad of the peace; so many things are whirring around her head. She sits quietly in her kitchen - her place - and tries to figure out just how she is feeling about everything.

  This time of year isn’t depressing for Margaret, although of course weather has a lot to do with it, a month of cold hard rain can make anyone feel fed up. Already the fields around them are coming alive, bringing the promise of warm sunshine just around the corner.

  It starts in the early hours of the morning, before the office commuters have gobbled their cereals and organised their children for the school run, usually around the time Margaret is waking up. In the darkness she will hear the big powerful engines flat out coming down the road, the clang of trailers bouncing along; and see the orange flashing lights that sit on top of the cab warning anybody out at that time of the morning that a wide vehicle is heading their way. Where all the tractors suddenly appear from has always been a mystery to her because the roads are suddenly full of them, and if you don’t see one you’ll certainly not fail to notice where they’ve been from the muddy tyre tracks they leave behind.

  The tractors bring trailers full of wooden trays stacked high and carrying the valuable Royal Jersey seed potatoes, all sitting neatly like little princes waiting to put their purple and white root buds into the soil to grow. Other tractors will take the portable blue toilets around from field to field for the workers who arrive and leave in dirty minibuses. Seasonal migrants from Eastern Europe mostly, who spend the day with their backs bent double placing each potato into its allotted bed by hand. The planting field will be filled with the colour and the noise of them for a couple of hours and then they’ll move on. Behind them a smaller team will begin to unroll the huge polythene sheeting which will bathe the entire field in a silvery shimmer and defend the fledgling potatoes until the weather warms and they thanklessly tear and split their plastic protection, breaking out to freedom and sunshine.

  By now, fields all around the island lie shimmering in their spring overcoats, mirroring the flinty white sky as though panels of cloud have fallen to the ground and now lie there. The planting season marks Margaret’s new year, the start of things to come, only this year even that has failed to raise her spirits. The potato fields are irrelevant frivolities, costume jewellery on an island which appears to have turned ugly and unpleasant, in the face of the revelations from Haut de la Garenne.

  This introspective searching causes Margaret to feel her age and mortality. She once wandered through the streets of Jersey as a small child looking up at looming adults who cooed and smiled down at her, until she grew to their height and gained children of her own to lead around by the hand. Everywhere she goes on the island she sees familiar faces: someone she went to school with, an old family friend, another mother from one of the children’s schools. Lately though she also sees familiarities where there are none. Faces she thinks she recognises, only to realise they instead merely contain characteristics of somebody she used to know. Somebody who was part of her world but has since died. Another flake of human life shed and come to rest on Jersey’s shores.

  Margaret wonders what their parents would have thought of the stories coming out of Haut de la Garenne. She tries to see her father in her mind, but these days it seems to always be the same short clip - a snatch of his voice, a flicker of his presence. No matter how hard she tries to hold onto him time is slowly erasing him. Not his love or her love for him, but his physical memory. It’s cruel enough that loved ones get taken away but even a clear memory is denied her and she’s left with just fuzzy feelings and vague recollections of days spent together.

  There are times when Margaret wonders if her father’s spirit and her memories of him stay away because of the secret she now carries - her mother’s secret. Yet somehow she never feels he stopped loving them despite it. A couple of years ago she had a dream in which her father was as real to her as Robert was when she woke up next to him. She’d hugged her father; he’d talked to her. She’d seen him as clear as day and the feeling of comfort and love from that dream lingered long after she’d woken up. It’s been times like that she’s glanced twice at the church and its graveyard. Margaret’s had little time for religion and its cruel God, but sometimes she’s wondered if maybe there is something in it. Did her father come to comfort her, or was it simply the chemicals in her mind reaching into the depths of her memory banks and taking old film, splicing it and creating a new storyline?

  She knows their father would have been horrified by the current news. She remembers enough of him to realise he had been an honourable man, with the best interests of his patients and others in the forefront of everything he did. In the national media they talk about a ‘closed society’ in Jersey, about an island where the establishment rules. Margaret wonders what they mean by establishment. Do they mean the traditions and foundations of their society or the men and women who currently, but temporarily govern it? She is starting to question what price they’ve paid for their lifestyle, for the low crime rate and wonderful schools, for the fact that if somebody has t
heir car scratched the police still issue an appeal for witnesses and it makes the Jersey Evening Post. Isn’t all that a product of Jersey’s traditional society? Its Honorary Police system? Its sense of community? Or has she been completely blind to another parallel universe, one where the vast majority are hoodwinked by an evil minority ruling with subversive subtlety, taking what they want from those around them like leeches?

  Who was the young child the papers say was murdered at the children’s home? What was their name? Where did they come from? How many more little bodies will they find? Try as she might Margaret cannot see the Jersey being portrayed in the newspaper articles. She scans faces in the street, a subconscious cowboy movie trait searching for the black hat that will give the bad person away. She doesn’t see it, of course, life isn’t that simple. Colours aren’t on the outside they are hidden away in people’s hearts.

  She’s even found herself studying her children’s faces when the story is mentioned on radio or TV. Thankfully there have been no adverse reactions from them, no flicker of a buried memory related to the revelations. Like everyone else she knows Margaret hopes that anybody who committed crimes like these is caught, that they receive a fitting punishment for the tormented lives they’ve left behind. Also like others she’s been hurt by the tarring everyone in Jersey has got from the brush of the tabloids and television reporters who scenting a flaw in the image of the island, have gone for the jugular.

  The newspapers and radio brought this unwanted news into Margaret’s kitchen. Her kitchen which has soaked up her family life as it has done for generations before theirs. It’s been a warm safe womb around her. From the chip in the stone floor by the door, to the pictures created by the children stuck on a board by the fridge; and the huge granite lintel above the range which has been cloaked in the steam and aroma of thousands of dinners. If, as they say, the fabric of a building soaks up the energy around it then the lintel must contain a very happy, fat ghost. Now this evil from Haut de la Garenne has gained access to her sanctuary and worms into Margaret with its disturbing threat of more disclosures to come.

  All through this time the only voice she listens to and believes is that of the investigating police officer. He will hopefully uncover the truth. She knows whatever she’s feeling is nothing compared to what the victims have gone through, and must be going through now as they recount the trauma of their childhoods; but nonetheless it has affected everyone. It’s turned Margaret’s mood black - dejected. When people question everything you have believed and lived with your whole life there can be no other outcome.

  35

  March 5th 2008 – Margaret

  What would old Vi from across the road have made of all the Haut de la Garenne news? She always seems to have been there in their lives, old, a widow longer than she’d been married. She lived in the cottage just across the road. Nowadays she is still across the road from them, only a little further down, lying in the double plot she’d reserved when her Jack died all those decades ago. Not for her the freshly landscaped newcomers’ section at the top of the graveyard, where in January and February it seems every week the boards go up and a new resting hole is dug. Vi probably would have enjoyed the company of the mourners. At times big groups of all ages crowd around to say goodbye to their loved one. On other days just a handful of sombre elegiac faces stand by the grave, talking over their memories, dressed in their smartest black clothing; the women’s heels click-clacking down the path to where the hearse and cars await.

  Vi always wanted to know all the gossip. There wasn’t much that went on in the Parish which she hadn’t heard. It was Vi who’d told Margaret her mother’s secret; a secret only she had known. There are days when Margaret despises the old woman for her honesty. Why couldn’t she have taken it with her, left things as they seemingly were?

  Old Vi let go her secret one day when Margaret went round with a plate of dinner for her. She was virtually bedridden and failing fast. Her skin hung off her bones as life ebbed away. She shared her knowledge in the little bedroom with faded rose pink curtains, the one at the front of the house where the new couple have placed cream blinds. Margaret received the news amid the smell of a decaying body and damp house; the aroma of her homemade cooking - which sat on the old woman’s lap - mingling with the scent of impending death. She’d stared at Vi’s blue and white bony fingers holding onto the plate which came from a service her family has used since she was a child. The gravy congealing in a brown pool around the roast potato, its sticky substance holding fast to the bright green peas she knows Vi enjoys.

  Just before she leaves Vi grips her arm with an energy Margaret hadn’t thought she’d be capable of. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t want you to find out one day when I’m gone, and think ill of your mother. What she did, she did to protect your dad and you.’

  When Margaret returned home, back to her family sitting around the kitchen table enjoying their lunch, she’d been unable to eat. The smell of her own food kept the shock of Vi’s words vivid in her mind, and eventually she’d excused herself and been sick.

  Margaret never saw Vi again. The dilemma of whether to avoid her for fear of further secrets coming out, or check to see if she was all right, wasn’t there for long. Two days later the Health Visitor arrived to find Vi stiff in her bed, Margaret’s plate of half eaten roast dinner by her side. She’d passed on her burden and was free to go.

  That had been nearly four years ago. Margaret never mentioned it to anyone, not even Robert. She couldn’t bring herself to speak it aloud. Speaking it would have changed everything, given the shadow permanence in her life. Instead she pretended she’d never heard it, that it wasn’t true, just a bad dream to gradually be forgotten. Only secrets like that, a secret which runs to the very core of your being, those kind of secrets aren’t so easily forgotten.

  36

  March 5TH 2008, Jersey – Katherine

  Perhaps the talk of Haut de la Garenne and its consequences makes Margaret get things into perspective, but when Katherine comes down a little later she finds her sister more relaxed than she has been since her arrival.

  ‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ Margaret asks her, smiling warmly.

  ‘Yes thanks, I will,’ Katherine replies, ‘Is there anything I can do to help with dinner?’

  ‘No, no you’re fine,’ Margaret answers, ‘it’s all under control.’

  Katherine sits down at the kitchen table with her glass.

  ‘I’m sorry for having a go at you the other night. I went a bit over the top. Too much vino I think,’ Margaret begins. She is at the sink peeling potatoes and has her back to her sister. ‘But it’s just... it’s just I missed having you around all these years. I was angry at you, angry that you left us all: me, John, mum… and you just didn’t seem to care.’

  Katherine looks at her sister’s shoulders and sighs. ‘I know, and I’m sorry too. I did care though,’ replies Katherine, ‘honestly I did – and I still do, it’s just...’

  Margaret turns round from the sink to look at her sister.

  Katherine’s face is contorted with some inner battle. ‘I’m sorry I went away for so long,’ Katherine begins, ‘but I had to get away.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you for going, Katherine,’ Margaret encourages, still a little defensive about her verbal onslaught of Monday night. ‘I know you wanted a career and you were fed up with Jersey, and I don’t think choosing not to have a family is bad, it’s personal choice.’

  Katherine looks at the glass of wine she’s cradling in her hands. Margaret in turn looks at her and listens to the silence, waiting; but there’s too much rushing around inside Katherine’s head to even contemplate opening up that can of worms.

  There’s no opportunity to carry on the conversation as the kitchen soon fills up with the rest of the family. First James appears for food, followed shortly after by Robert and Sophie. The meal is pleasant and Katherine finds herself relaxing for the first time, but she’s tired, really tired and shor
tly after dinner excuses herself to go to bed. She’s not sure if it’s the sudden exposure to the sea air, or the feeling of security on returning to her childhood home; or perhaps it’s just the emotional strain she’s been under. She hasn’t felt as tired as this in a long time and as soon as her head hits the pillow she is asleep.

  Finally, alone, Margaret sits in her kitchen, a book on her lap unopened. Their unfinished conversation preying on her mind. It’s like prising crab meat out of a claw. She can see Katherine is full of something, but as usual her sister is refusing to give up her inner thoughts. Just like that night before she’d left all those years ago.

  Sometime later, Katherine is woken by raised voices downstairs. It’s dark in her room, only a faint glow of street lamps finds its way in. For a few moments she lies still, hardly breathing; at first unsure of where she is and then listening to what is being said. There’s shouting and a note of distress in her sister’s voice, so she gets out of bed, slips on her dressing gown and goes to investigate. At first she hesitates in case she’s intruding on a domestic, straining to hear the thread of conversation. There are three voices: Robert’s, Margaret’s and James’s. She’s about to go back to bed assuming it’s a family row when she catches the unmistakable sound of somebody retching and vomiting, followed by a shriek from her sister. Katherine quickly switches on the stairway light and hurries down to see if she can help.

  ‘I’m telling you this is the last straw,’ Robert’s voice is raised and angry, Katherine has never heard him like this; he’s the type to let the world wash over him and not get riled by things.

  She hesitates again afraid she’s intruding, but then she hears her sister say, ‘Look at this mess, I can’t believe you can be so selfish,’ and decides to ask if she can help - despite the fact the prospect of clearing up vomit isn’t at all appealing to her.