She wasn’t prone to drama but yesterday had been the most dramatic day she’d experienced in a long time. At home, she got up and went to the gym and then got down to work, met friends for dinner or trips to the theatre or cinema, planned the occasional holiday, went out for work functions, came home, slept. Rinse and repeat. There’s a reason why she didn’t come back here. Too much drama. Plus, she had no home in Guernsey – not after her parents sold up and left.
She only knew a few people on the island from her school days. Most, when they reached their twenties if not before, upped and left for the mainland. Some returned when they had children and wanted a more sedate pace of life, a good job, usually in finance, and to be able to finish work at five o’clock and head to the beach for a picnic. It was idyllic, now Lucy thought about it. Her childhood had been easy, all she’d known, until she’d got itchy feet and knew the rest of her life needed a little more excitement than what Clara had seemed happy to settle with.
She didn’t know when she’d eventually fallen asleep but she had heard the dawn chorus at some point and that had jolted her. Her eyes stung with tiredness and she rubbed them profusely as she got ready for the day. Lucy set up her laptop in the study ready to plan her articles for upcoming issues of a medical practice’s customer newsletter and to finish off the work for the plush toy company. The large desk sat in the bay window facing the room and she threw open the windows behind her, letting the coolbreeze in, both airing the room and serving to keep her awake as she worked. There was no Wi-Fi in the house and so she compiled emails, saved them and made a point to visit a café, buy a coffee and send them later. She wasn’t in the mood to rig up her phone data to her computer.
Every now and again, Lucy picked up her phone and checked it, but there was still nothing from Clara. She hated arguing with anyone, let alone her sister, and Lucy knew if Clara didn’t make contact with her today, then she would have to make the first move; something she was loath to do.
She broke for lunch early, eating a sandwich in the kitchen, Radio 4 playing quietly on the old Roberts Radio that she’d finally managed to get working on the window ledge. The roller blind in the kitchen had been down the entire time and Lucy opened it and looked out towards the large walled back garden. With the sun shining on it, it looked beautiful and Lucy took the rest of her sandwich outside and wandered around. Rose bushes were growing a bit haphazardly but showing an abundance of small tempting curls and colourful buds. A garden bench was positioned at the far end, looking towards the house through the sweep of garden. Lucy wasn’t really into gardening and knew nothing about plants, but she knew when one was pretty enough to sit and appreciate.
It distracted her for long enough to forget about checking her phone for messages from Clara, but when the sun became too bright as it lit the garden in its full glow, she went inside.
Lucy couldn’t face working and she closed the laptop lid, steeled herself and messaged her sister. Had Lucy provoked Clara into slapping her in some way? Although in her tiredness she couldn’t remember the exact words that had propelled Clara into violence. Lucy could be the bigger person and apologise, but surely it was Clara who owed Lucy the apology.
She paused, her fingers on the screen, ready to type but not sure quite what to put. She opted for,‘Can I collect Molly from school and spend the afternoon with her?’Short and sweet.Regardless of what was happening with Clara, she wanted to be able to spend time with her niece.
She barely had time to put the phone in her jeans pocket before a reply came back from Clara confirming that Molly would like that and that Clara would inform the school. It was a perfunctory reply and gave nothing away.
There were a couple of hours until Molly finished school for the day and Lucy went into the sitting room and glimpsed the Perspex box marked ‘P’. She’d forgotten about it, but seeing it now reminded her about the box she’d taken to Clara’s. She unclipped the lid of the Perspex box and looked at the contents. It was full of official-looking documents, newspapers and magazines and Lucy lifted them gently out to take a look. Most were from the 1940s and a few were from the 1960s, which seemed an oddly large gap of twenty years between the two dates with nothing in between.
The newspapers were yellowing and there were thin copies ofThe Starand theEvening Press. Some were complete newspapers, folded over, and some were just the odd scrap cut out and kept from the time of Guernsey’s Occupation; acts of resistance and sabotage reported on by the newspaper staff and then, judging by the tone of voice, heavily edited by the Germans to demonstrate to all who read that these crimes would be punishable in the strictest terms and that Islanders would do best not to continue. She flicked through clippings of cables being cut, of red V for Victory signs being painted on signposts and doors, of foreign workers going missing, of prosecutions of locals for being out after curfew or for aiding those they shouldn’t, of British spies being captured on the island and the condemnation of Guernsey families who’d hid them, and the arrests of those whose homes had been raided and who had been found with illicit radios hidden under floorboards after they had been expressly forbidden by the occupying force.
Lucy flicked, breathlessly, through more and more clippings ofmore and more ‘offences’ until the print swam before her already-tired eyes. She’d thought Guernsey hadn’t really had a resistance, as such, but seeing these few acts of sabotage and defiance listed one after the other in the newspaper cut-outs made her think again.
At the bottom of the pile was a copy ofThe Starfrom July 1st 1940. Next to the masthead on the front page, presumably paid for and placed before the arrival of the Germans, were adverts for tobacconists and fertilisers. But the rest of the page was dedicated to an ‘Order of the Commandant of the German Forces in Occupation of the Island of Guernsey’. The next day’s newspaper held an even longer version of that published before and it was obviously a struggle to get all the orders onto one page as the second version had a smaller font and was crammed into the page.
Lucy read, entranced at things she’d learnt in passing years ago but had long since forgotten about.
The first orders related to a newly imposed curfew from eleven o’clock at night until six o’clock each morning, and a ban on motor-cars for private use. Next to these, on the newspaper, was scribbled a note in elegant handwriting:
Dido, how will you get to and from the club now? We need to talk about you not singing there anymore. Persey. x
As Lucy folded the newspaper out to read the rest of the orders from the early days of the Occupation, an envelope that had been resting within the pages of the paper fell out. Lucy bent to retrieve it and looked at the address on the front:
Miss Persephone Le Roy, Deux Tourelles, Les Houards, Forest
The elaborately named Persephone had cropped up again, packed up in a box marked P. She picked up her phone andmessaged her dad. He’d know a bit more, surely. Inside the envelope was a short note, written on wafer-thin paper, which Lucy read.
Persey,
Condolences about your mother. I appreciate it might be a terrible inconvenience at this awful time, but can you meet me by the statue of Victor Hugo in Candie Gardens at ten o’clock this Saturday? It’s important. I have something urgent I must tell you in person.
Lise
X
Chapter 6
1940
Persey read the newspaper that Mrs Grant had fetched earlier that day. The orders from the Germans were vast. She circled the ones relating to curfew strictly being imposed at eleven o’clock at night and the ban on the use of motorcars and hastily scribbled a note on the newspaper for Dido to read. Would the cabarets and clubs even be open now the Germans were here? Or if they were … would it just be full of German officers, watching her young, beautiful sister singing most evenings? The thought drained the colour from her face and she wondered what form their lives would take with the Nazis ruling the island. Was Dido’s original prediction about rape and murder actually quite close to the truth?
She had not told Dido or Jack about Stefan’s arrival on the island and found it easy to forgive them for forgetting him so readily. They had not thought about him the way she had over the years. The moment she’d had with him outside Deux Tourelles had been brief and she’d been too shocked when he’d said her name to question him further. The questions wouldn’t come, and his fellow officer had coughed pointedly down by the gate and Stefan, their friend of old, had apologised, turned and left.
She had not been able to ascertain why he was here, why he’d been at Deux Tourelles, why he’d not made himself known tothem … just stood and waited to be recognised. Was it shame? None of it made sense and what made even less sense to Persey was the fact that her kind, calm, caring friend was in a German uniform, had joined a war full of hate and malice and helped add to all of that by being a participant in it, on the side of spite and wrong.
Persey knew why she wasn’t going to tell Dido and Jack just yet. If and when Stefan returned to see them, she would let him tell them why he was here.
She continued to read the notice in the paper:
