didn’t see German planes circling in the skies. We knew something bad was coming our way. Boatloads of refugees arrived from France, telling tales of the barbarous Hun. At every street corner I gobbled up gossip, making notes in my little pocket pad. And the stories I heard!
‘They slice the arms off little kids for sport. They are man-eaters. They use women and babies as cannon fodder.’
The French are a race prone to exaggeration, as I now know, and they never stopped stoking my fevered imaginings. If only I’d stayed in school and listened to my teachers, eh? But the schools were all closed down, so I was on the loose.
Hubert would shake his head at me, like he saw the bad things stewing in my brain.
‘Si nous pale du guiabye nous est saure d’l’y’vais les caurnes’ is what he said . . . ‘Speak of the devil and you shall see horns’. He was always talking in patois to me.
Hé bian, that language has been dying for longer than I’ve been living. I miss hearing it spoke and I miss hearing him speak it.
He’d make me sit with him in the office so as to keep me out of trouble. Of course, with half the island gone our business had gone with it. There were signs on every hedgerow saying ‘Why Go Mad? There’s No Place Like Home’, but by then we were going mad being stuck at home. Pop turned to his Bible and I hid my head in stupid comics, losing myself in cartoon adventures. What I knew of the War came from Rover or Wizard, and of course our father had no time for it. I caught him flicking through them once, mumbling to himself.
‘It won’t be like that,’ he said, his long arms hanging limply at his sides.
‘So,’ I placed myself squarely in front of him, ‘tell me what it will be like.’
He shook his head. ‘There aren’t words to describe the horror.’
It wasn’t the first time I’d asked him, nor the first time he’d refused.
‘Who wants the truth, eh? What I’ve seen, Charlie, it won’t make a good adventure story for little boys like you.’
How it made my young blood boil! Now, though, I understand it all too well. If you have seen something so terrible why tell of it, since words give it fresh life and substance? Bury the past. Deny it as long as you can. The only trouble is, the more you deny something the more power it will have. Look what has happened with our Occupation: our States deputies want it tidied into a tourist guide and treated like a day trip, but there are dead and rotting bodies buried in the tunnels and lying at the bottom of our cliffs. Can’t you smell death? It is a travesty and it is a whitewash!
Vère dja, j’pourrais t’encaöntair d’pis maïr haôute jusqu’a bass iaôue . . . Emile, I am your big brother, I am your bad brother, and that’s how I’ll be remembered. I’ll admit I did wrong and that I’ve got blood on my hands, but I’ll not stand here alone. There are people on this island who have got away with murder. I’ve been shelled out enough times on this, but I’ll not be silent no more. You write down what I tell you, word for word, and remember it’s all true. Then I’ll die easy.
You do it for me, Emile, let your pen be my revenge.
13TH DECEMBER 1985, 5 p.m.
[Dad’s study]
I know I shouldn’t call this Dad’s study anymore – he’s been dead a lot longer than Nic – but this is still my favourite room. I do all my best thinking in here, and I like to remember how it used to look. There was a huge desk with paper stacked up all around it, just like the walls of a fortress, and books and box files were jammed onto every spare shelf, or scattered all over the sofa. Dad said he had a system but I never worked out what it was. (Not that I was allowed in here, or could even make it through the door.)
Today it’s clean and empty: Dad’s books have gone, plus all the files and shelves, and Mum’s painted the whole room white. She said Dad had let things get outof-hand, so what he called his LIFE’S BLOOD was actually mostly scrap paper. There’s a lot more space and light now, and you can even see the carpet, and that