‘But then here’s my grandfather.’ He tapped the photograph. ‘In an image taken on a camera inside Dido’s house. So I went to the archive this morning and asked to see my grandfather’s papers. It hadn’t occurred to me to do that when we went before, because as far as I was concerned there was no mystery around him to solve. But there is. Because I asked for his identity papers and the papers say he lived here.’
‘He lived here?’ Lucy asked.
‘Yes, during the war.’
‘And then the deportation orders made sense because Matilda Grant was deported.’
‘Yes …?’ Lucy said, failing to quite catch on.
‘She was my great-grandmother. I didn’t know that until I worked out that Jack was her son.’ He tapped the photo of the young man. ‘This is Jack Grant – my grandfather.’
Lucy sat back in the chair, not quite knowing what to say. She was trying and failing to piece together the relationship between them all. Dido and Persephone, sisters … and now Jack.
‘He’s in two photographs,’ Lucy said. ‘Hang on.’ She ran to fetch the photograph of the four on the beach in 1930.
He took it from her, smiling. ‘Oh wow, look how young he is. And look at them – the girls I mean. You can tell which is which now we’ve seen their pictures on the identity cards in the archives.’
Lucy smiled. ‘You can.’
‘And who’s this other chap?’ Will asked and then turned the photograph over. ‘Stefan.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘You don’t suppose this is Stefan as in … Stefan Keller, Captain Stefan Keller, who was listed as being billeted with them in the war? All those years later?’
Lucy looked at the image again as Will turned it over. ‘Possibly. Maybe.’
‘Funny to think my grandfather was living here in the middle of the war and so was a German soldier. Most odd. They left in the middle of the war.’
‘Who?’ Lucy asked, looking up.
‘My grandfather – Jack. And my grandmother, before they got married obviously.’
‘They left Guernsey?’ Lucy clarified. ‘In the middle of the war?’
‘Yes.’ Will nodded.
‘Are you sure about that?’
Will nodded.
‘Impossible,’ Lucy said, almost triumphantly. ‘They can’t have done.’
‘Why not?’
‘Were they sent to a camp or a prison?’ she asked.
‘No. They went to England in the middle of the war. They went together.’
Lucy looked at him as if he was mad. ‘Will … do you think the English were running a passenger ferry to and from Guernsey in a time of war?’
He frowned. ‘Um …?’
‘Or even funnier, that the Germans were running one?’
Will smiled, understanding what she was driving at. ‘Do you think they … escaped?’ Will almost whispered the last word.
‘Possibly … Yes, it sounds that way.’
Will looked at the photograph of Jack in wartime, and the younger Jack on the beach, filled with the confidence of youth. ‘Well done, Granddad,’ he said to the photographs.
They sat in an awed silence, Lucy uncomprehending how anyone could be so brave as to escape an island under Nazi Occupation. The alternative must have been far worse.
