and winding roads more than a little confusing, perhaps I need a guide?’
I was about to tell him to go to Hell when Pop spoke in my place, and I don’t know what it was he said since to my shame it was in German. Maybe two or three sentences then passed between them, and I couldn’t believe my ears. I later learned that Pop was explaining to Vern how he’d learned the basics as a prisoner of war. Of course, he was trying to unsettle this young sap and put him in his place, but I was wound up so tight, like the coil of a spring, so I didn’t care a tuppenny for Pop’s motives. To hear my own father speak that foul language was more than I could stand for. I was flushed and well near choking with anger.
‘Why should we take orders off of you?’ I asked. ‘In a few months you’ll be out!’
I felt a sharp dig in my ribs, courtesy of La Duchesse.
‘Kique tu fais?’ she hissed, ‘Tais ta goule. T es têtu!’
I glowered as Vern blinked in confusion.
‘Excuse me, madam?’
La Duchesse pulled herself up. ‘It is our local patois. I was calling my son here a blockhead. I presume I am still allowed to discipline my own son?’
Vern seemed amused. ‘It would be better you did so than I. But this patois you were speaking sounds quite French.’
La Duchesse glowered back at him. ‘We have Norman blood in our veins, and it was the Normans who beat the English in 1066, as you should well know.’
‘Aha!’ Vern’s slight smile broadened. ‘Well, I understand a little French, so now we have several languages in common.’
Languages in common! I looked from my parents back to this interloper, and couldn’t for the life of me decide which was worse. It was beyond me. What could we share with this man? He was a greenfly, a slug, a filthy Hun. Is this who I’d be taking orders from now? Not that I was any good at taking orders before! And them Germans did love to tell us what to do. Au yous, Emile, all too soon it was ‘verboten’ this and ‘verboten’ that. Vern had us churning out red and black Bekanntmachungen, making curfews, banning meetings and dances, demanding we surrender our cars and our boats. They forbade the buying and selling of liquor and fuel, they closed down shops, they even banned the boy scouts. Hé bian! We heard that Hitler wanted to bring a ‘New Order’ to Europe, well here we was getting a ‘new order’ every day.
And the fact that we had to work for them, to have their sickly green uniforms always in our sights. It was too, too terrible! I made plenty of noise about it, but La Duchesse told me to pull myself together. She said that if we didn’t do what Jerry asked then someone else would.
‘We’ll lose the business and be out on the streets. Do you know what it’s like to go hungry? I do, and I won’t go through that again. We have to make do.’
She was right, of course, but I didn’t want to hear it. I watched planes take off from the airport, on their way to blitz London. Nobody fought back. Unless you call hiding pigs or pulling down the road signs good enough resistance. Au yous, plenty of folk would like to take the credit for pulling down the road signs but I reckon more people did it than there were ever road signs! These were dark days. I hated the Hun for many things but what I hated most was what they did to our parents. Young and old stood divided, and that was a rift that never healed.
‘It isn’t black and white no more,’ said Hubert. ‘The Germans are in charge and we don’t know how long for. We none of us know what will happen next.’
We don’t know what will happen next! Was it a game of Nuts in May where we could change sides as we pleased?
‘You cannot be serious,’ I told him. ‘You cannot believe the Germans will win.’
And of course he couldn’t answer me because in truth they already had.
15TH DECEMBER 1985, 1.34 p.m.
[Fermain, sitting on bench, trying to look Intellectual.]
I was in the watchtower for ages with Michael, but I don’t know what we talked about. I only remember three little words going round and round in my head. ‘The Nazis Won’. Very romantic, it was.