Tales of German occupation on Remembrance Sunday
Fr Jason Murphy encounters an interesting lady on his rounds in the Lisdarn Unit for the Elderly in his latest column Let the Busy World Be Hushed...
She stood along the sea front amid islanders buoyed up with excitement as they cheered on the Allied soldiers who waded to shore from the landing craft and made their way through the cleared paths of mines across the sands of the golden beaches. They waved handkerchiefs until the line of soldiers numbering in their hundreds reached the promenade carrying boxes of supplies to feed the hungry thousands who had waited five long years for their arrival.
They had gathered in the hours previous beneath the balcony of the Pomme d’Or hotel, these thousands of Jersey residents, the eleven year old girl in their midst, clothed in her thread bare summer dress, to listen as the Bailiff of the Island declared to the awaiting islanders that liberation was finally theirs, that World War Two had ended and their island was once again free.
They had lived under Nazi occupation for five long years and neither German soldiers nor the island residents could foresee another year of trying to survive with little provisions and, at times, nothing to eat.
She could recall the day she stood along the same streets within the sure hold of her father’s arms, bewilderment in her eyes, as these German soldiers with confidence paraded through their streets, those five years previous. The rhythmic sound of their boots marching along to the beat of the drum, their heads turning to salute the flag of the swastika, which hung from every hotel and municipal building that had been occupied across the island to house their officers and the military machine that was to be put in place to defend this island from an Allied attack.
Before their very eyes, these grey-clad soldiers looted every shop along their way, taking all the islanders’ supplies, to the disbelief of the shop keepers and islanders alike who wondered what they were to do, how they would survive in the time to come.
These German soldiers transformed the rolling hills of the quiet valley around her home, erecting billet huts and munition stores, dotted all around the fields where cattle once stood, keeping a watchful eye over her family’s every move for the five long years that the war was to last. For theirs had been a happy home, content on their beautiful island, free to roam in the shadow of her brother Bruce. Her father Bill Owen, a Welsh man who had moved here to work, married a local girl, Florence Le Rouley. It was an idyllic childhood - blue skies and sandy beaches, people who helped each other out in this tight-knit island community until that fateful day of occupation in 1940 when the Germans shattered their idyllic world apart.
She remembered clearly watching on from one side of their garden fence as Russian and Polish prisoners of war were hoarded up like cattle from the beaches to build the German military hospital and all the fortified bunkers, which dotted the island; and then the nightly sounds as the children listened from their beds to the soldiers marching past their home with billy cans in hand to collect limpets from the seashore.
For the ensuing years all life was suspended, no Father Christmas, no presents or festivities, all forms of communication or transport forbidden, no letters to relations on the mainland, no wireless sets to tell of news of the war. Indeed, towards the end of the Occupation, her own father was arrested and near transported to a concentration camp but for a turn of fate after a raid on their house whereupon a radio set was found hidden in a grandfather clock that the family had listened to for nightly bulletins from the BBC.
With no food in the shops or clothing of supplies, bar a Red Cross parcel that was delivered each month, families had to become self-sufficient - growing their own vegetables and produce and rearing a few chickens, sharing what they could with fellow islanders. Clothes that children had outgrown, shoes, boots all were shared around.
As the War progressed even the German Soldiers grew emaciated as the German War Machine weakened and the little girl recalled how locals had to hide their cats and dogs to save them from being served up as the German’s next meal.
When the day of liberation finally came 80 years ago this year and the welcome sight of the Allied forces marched on to their island, it was a day of great rejoicing that German Occupation had ended, and Islanders was free.
But all these years on, to pass her by in the Lisdarn Unit for the Elderly, you wouldn’t know that the 91-year-old sitting in the chair, recovering from a broken pelvis, had this extraordinary story of a childhood to tell. Which of her nurses, carers or indeed the bed managers could ever imagine that Margaret Duffy had this story to tell, getting back to her feet after a fall.
We can only come to know if we have time to sit and talk a while and she might tell you of the young man from College Street in Cavan Town, Paddy Duffy, who came to the island as a painter and in the months to come met the young girl in the Island’s Ritz hotel and thereafter married her and brought her to live in his home town of Cavan and thereafter on the outskirts of the village of Redhills.
So, on this Remembrance Sunday as some recoil from the symbol of the poppy, remember too that it represents stories of ordinary people who lived extraordinary lives in an age of World War that soon living memory will also forget.
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