Xanthe
St Helier, April 2019
Xanthe is so engrossed in Hugh Jackson’s journal, so involved with his personal and professional dilemmas, that she feels she has stepped back in time to the war years. She is surprised by her sense of kinship with this man, a stranger who feels closer than many people she knows.
As she reads, she tries to imagine what it would be like to manage seriously ill patients when essential medication like insulin was scarce, when no antibiotics existed to treat serious infections, and soap and disinfectant were luxuries. And as for having to make house calls on bicycle because fuel was in short supply, that didn’t bear thinking about.
Eager to find out more, she reads on, hardly looking up from the journal. She can’t get over her good fortune in having found this hidden treasure and wonders why he concealed it rather than handing it in to the relevant authorities. He must have hoped it would be read, but did he imagine it would take over seventy years for someone to find it? Xanthe doesn’t believe in karma, serendipity, or any of the New Age claptrap that masquerades as profound truth these days, but she can’t ignore the fact that she, a doctor like Hugh, has discovered his journal.
She reflects on this coincidence, if that’s what it is, as the morning light streams through the kitchen window, warming her eyelids as she closes her eyes against its dazzle. Everyone should read this journal, she thinks as she sips her coffee and waits for the toast to pop up. As a doctor, she finds it sobering to remember that there was a world before antibiotics, MRIs, ultrasounds and ECGs.
She thinks about her great-grandfather who performed emergency appendectomies on the rough-hewn tables of farmhouses. It had always been a popular family story held up by her parents to foster gratitude for the advantages they enjoyed. She had always admired his dedication and acumen, but now, thanks to the diary of a stranger, for the first time she can empathise with the heartache and anxiety of doctors who performed medical miracles in days gone by.
She rinses her mug and plate, stacks them on the draining board, and runs back upstairs. Still in her T-shirt and pyjama pants, she flops down in the bedroom armchair and picks up the journal, one hand propped against her cheek. A moment later she is back in the 1940s, with its restrictions, shortages and privations. She still finds it difficult to accept that this quiet, almost bland little island had gone through such a traumatic time.
Engrossed, she loses track of time, something that would never have happened in her Sydney life. She has already begun to divide her existence into then and now. ‘Then’ was a rigidly disciplined life in which time was the enemy. Even in her gap year after leaving school, while travelling around Europe with two girlfriends, she had filled every minute of every day with frenetic sightseeing, desperate not to miss a single gallery, museum or nightclub, all of which now form a kaleidoscope of jumbled memories. In Jersey, she is free to indulge herself, without measuring her life by exams to be passed, duties to be ticked off, or ward rounds to be endured. Now she feels her shackled spirit begin to pry loose from its bonds.
There are passages in the journal that make her feel like a voyeur peering through the windows of someone’s life. At times it is painful to read how Hugh, which is how she thinks of him, lays bare his anguish, disappointment and loss. Personal disclosures make her uncomfortable. She has always avoided confiding in friends. If she couldn’t keep her own secrets, why should she expect others to do so? She has never encouraged confidences either, unsure what was expected of her in return.
It strikes her that perhaps Hugh concealed the journal because he used it only to talk to himself on paper, to vent his thoughts and feelings. Perhaps the man whose profession obliged him to listen to the secrets of others could not bring himself to share his own. Maybe he never meant strange eyes to see the emotions he withheld from the world.
Xanthe puts down the journal and thinks back to the diary she kept in her teenage years. She recalls recording sizzling infatuations that invariably ended in crushing disillusionment, eagerly awaited events that never lived up to her hopes, and academic success that always fell short of her ambitions. Writing had been a purge rather than a revelation, and several years ago she had destroyed that embarrassing record of misguided adolescent hopes. Coming face to face with her teenage self made her squirm. Now she wonders what was it about the passionate outpourings of her turbulent heart that she hadn’t been willing to confront.
Her thoughts return to Hugh, whose unintentional confidante she has now become. He couldn’t have been much older than she is now, and yet he had made such painful choices, sacrificed his own happiness, and made the most of the traumatic consequences that ensued. She wonders how she would have reacted in his situation. She sighs. No way would she have had his strength. Or his resilience. That’s a word that tightens her muscles. It reminds her of the situation she has come here to escape.
She reads on, eager to find out whether he and his wife will be reunited, and how his little boy will react when he meets the father he has never seen. And now, as she puts the journal aside for a moment, she thinks about Miss Murphy, the outspoken librarian, and about young Tom, who, like Hugh Jackson, have become so real to her.
Glancing out of the bedroom window, she sees a jaunty little red sportscar with its roof down, parked outside the house. It reminds her of Hugh’s beloved Alvis, the car the Germans confiscated. It’s a brand she has never heard of. A man in a peaked cap and navy windcheater is sitting at the wheel reading a newspaper. It takes her a few moments to realise that it’s Bob Blampied, who has probably been waiting there for the past fifteen minutes. She springs up, and without stopping to brush her hair, she feverishly pulls on her leggings and lozenge-printed Zara top. Grabbing her puffer jacket and the black quilted Calvin Klein bag her mother gave her for her last birthday, she runs downstairs and out of the house, slamming the door behind her.
Bob folds the newspaper, and with a speed that belies his age, hurries to the other side of the car to open the door for her. She is amused by his old-world gallantry. As she fastens her seatbelt, she apologises for keeping him waiting.
He waves away her apologies with a smile that is engagingly mischievous. ‘Not to worry! I have all the time in the world.’
As he removes his cap, his fine white hair falls across his forehead, and his eyes are a startling blue. ‘Before we go, two questions. Do you mind having the roof down?’
‘I love it.’
‘Question two: is there anything in particular you’d like to see?’
‘I’ve only been here a couple of days so anything you show me will be great. But if possible, I’d like to find out more about the Occupation. I was intrigued by the displays in the War Tunnels yesterday.’
He thinks for a moment and nods. ‘Right. We’ll start with the memorial to the slave labourers at Grouville.’
She is about to say that she has just been reading about the slave labourers but stops herself in time. Hugh must have had a reason for concealing his journal, and it would feel like a betrayal to discuss its contents.
As Bob negotiates the twists and turns in the roads with surprising speed, she keeps pushing her hair back from her eyes, but she likes the breeze on her face. Fifteen minutes later, they are skirting the broad sweep of sandy beach at Royal Bay. He offers to park so that she can look at the impressive beach, but she shakes her head. She has seen lots of beaches and would rather see the memorial he mentioned.
As they drive on, he says, ‘We’ll be there soon, but first there’s something I’d like you to see.’
Several minutes later, they pull up near a sign that says La Hougue Bie. She looks at him questioningly but he gives a mysterious smile. They cross an expanse of lawn scattered with daisies, past nut-brown squirrels that dart along the grass and scamper up the trunks of birch trees. She tries to keep up with him as he strides towards a huge grass-covered mound that dominates the site.
They come to an opening in the man-made hill. ‘You are standing in front of one of the most remarkable structures in all of Europe,’ Bob says slowly, and pauses for his statement to sink in.
‘This is a Neolithic burial site, a passage tomb that was built about 3500 BC, one thousand years before the pyramids. You can go inside, but be careful. You can’t stand up in there, and it’s dark, so just feel your way along until you come to the end of the passage. There are recesses along both sides where they used to bury their chieftains.’
Confined spaces make Xanthe feel panicky and trapped, but she doesn’t want to miss out on this experience. Taking a very deep breath, she hunches over and steps through the small entrance. She treads slowly along the narrow passageway, sliding her hands along the gigantic slabs of stone on either side. They are surprisingly smooth to the touch, as though highly polished, and as she follows the passageway, she feels recesses on both sides and thinks about the chieftains buried there thousands of years ago. Her breath is shallow but she comforts herself with the thought that in a moment she will be outside again.
The passage ends in what seems to be a kind of altar. Xanthe is very still, no longer conscious of being in a confined space, and she allows herself to absorb the strangeness of this sacred site. She doesn’t feel alone. It’s as if, in this cathedral of stone, the breath of generations past emanates from the slabs of granite, reaching out and enveloping her. Overwhelmed by this sensation, she feels a link with the people who built this tribute to their chieftains and their gods so long ago.
She blinks as she emerges into the sunlight, where Bob is waiting for her. She doesn’t speak, as if observing a brief silence in honour of the generations that have gone before them. He respects her silence in a tacit understanding of the impact of the experience.
After several minutes, he says, ‘If you stand on this spot at dawn on March 21, which is the spring equinox, you’ll see the sun gradually flooding the ground like a river of light until it hits the back wall,’ he says. ‘Bloody amazing, what those Neolithic people could do.’
Looking up, she sees a conical building sitting on top of the mound, like a hat planted on top of a squat body. She follows Bob along a steep, narrow path covered in daisies and buttercups until they reach the summit. Below them, fields and meadows are spread like a gigantic patchwork quilt in every shade of green and brown. In the distance, a misty coastline rises from the water. ‘That’s the coast of Normandy,’ Bob says.
‘I had no idea it was so close.’
Turning to look at the building on the hilltop, Bob says, ‘That’s Jerusalem Chapel. It was originally built in the twelfth century and became a pilgrimage site in the fifteenth century. Some of the pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem climbed all the way up here on their hands and knees.’
He chuckles. ‘This was where the Dean of Jersey conned the pilgrims, who must have been a pretty gullible lot. He placed a statue of the Virgin in the chapel and told them that if they gave a generous donation, they would receive a sign. What they didn’t know was that the wily clergyman had a small boy sitting behind the statue, and if the pilgrim’s coin was big enough, the child would make the sign of the cross. Of course Dean Mabon claimed it as a miracle!’
Xanthe compares the piety of the pilgrims on the summit with the devotion of the Neolithic people beneath it. Although several thousand years separated them, the search for spiritual meaning remained constant.
From the base of the hill, they walk towards the German bunker that has become a memorial to the slave labourers. ‘This bunker was originally supposed to be a command post if the Allies landed here,’ Bob says.
She frowns, and he explains. ‘Mr Churchill decided that we had no strategic value, but Hitler was obsessed with the Channel Islands. He was convinced that when the Allies invaded Europe, they would use these islands as a stepping stone, and that’s why the Germans built massive fortifications all over Jersey. You might be surprised to hear that we were more heavily fortified than any part of the Normandy coast.’
On top of the bunker a bronze sculpture grabs her by the throat. It depicts a deformed man trying to claw his way out of the earth that threatens to swallow him up.
‘That was sculpted by Maurice Blik, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp,’ Bob says. ‘He knew what it took to survive in inhuman conditions, and I think he conveyed it.’
By now they are inside. It is so dark and cold in there that she shivers, regretting leaving her puffer jacket in the car. On the walls are extracts from the testimony of some of the slave labourers. The Germans killed starving prisoners for stealing potatoes in the fields, one wrote. Another described the disposal of the dead: Several bodies were placed in a single box and dumped in the harbour. That box was used over and over.
‘The boy who wrote that was fourteen years old,’ Bob says, and his usually cheerful expression becomes sombre. ‘When the Jerries couldn’t get more work out of the poor buggers, they shipped them back to Germany, to one of their extermination camps. Some of them were only boys.’
She recalls Hugh’s description of the escaped slave labourers he found in his garden stuffing chicken feed into their mouths, and his decision to form a network of people to shelter them.
Suddenly she recalls the unusual name at the top of his list. She looks at Bob again.
‘You’re one of the people who sheltered them, aren’t you?’
He raises his white eyebrows. ‘How on earth did you know that?’
‘I googled you,’ she says. It’s true, she had looked him up last night to get a sense of what kind of guide she might be in for. Seeing his name in Hugh’s journal had been a shock, as if he’d walked out of its pages. ‘You were a hero during the Occupation.’ She doesn’t reveal that her curiosity about him was aroused by Hugh’s journal.
He makes a disparaging motion with his left arm. ‘Don’t believe everything you read.’
‘But it’s true. You got an MBE from the government for what you did, as well as a medal from Russia for rescuing slave prisoners. And there’s a photo taken of you in Red Square with Sasha’s mother in the sixties.’
‘I was just part of a network, but I wasn’t any more heroic than the others,’ he says slowly in his beautifully modulated voice. ‘Hugh Jackson was in the thick of it. So were Brigid Murphy, Ethel Carter and the de Gruchys, among others.’
He stops talking and sighs. ‘Sorry, I forgot you don’t know any of those people.’
She is about to contradict him because she feels she does know them. Having to conceal what she knows from the man who has been so open with her makes her feel uncomfortable, but the secret contents of the journal are not hers to disclose.
He points to a quotation on the wall. Remember the past, Live for the present, Hope for the future.
‘Abba Kovner wrote that,’ Bob says. ‘He was a Jewish resistance fighter who escaped from the Vilna Ghetto and joined a partisan group that fought the Nazis. After the war, he was consumed with revenge, but he realised that it would destroy him, and that the best revenge was living a fulfilled life. He became a great poet.’
She wonders if letting go of vengeance was a kind of forgiveness, and whether it was prompted by altruism or self-preservation.
‘Where did these slave labourers come from?’ she asks.
‘Russia, Poland, Spain, France. Some were Jews.’
She recalls the Stars of David scratched into the granite walls of the Jersey War Tunnels. ‘And the two I read about on the internet, where were they from?
‘One was Russian, the other was a Polish Jew.’
‘That must have been so dangerous. How did you manage it?
He shrugs and makes a dismissive gesture. ‘I didn’t do it on my own. There was a group of us.’
As they walk towards the car, she looks up at him, and does a swift calculation. ‘You must have been very young at the time. How did you get involved?’
He looks at his watch. ‘I’ll tell you over lunch. Do you like crab sandwiches?’
The road north is unexpectedly rugged and the landscape is barren. Apart from slopes covered in blazing gorse, there is little vegetation and few houses.
Occasionally she hears the clatter of hooves and turns to see a rider wave as he gallops past. When she looks down, she feels dizzy. Savage cliffs plunge down to the dark water, which foams as it smashes against the base of the cliffs. The only sounds are the booming of the waves and the squawking of terns that roost in the cliffsides.
Bob parks the car and they walk towards picturesque ruins on the top of a headland.
‘This is Grosnez Point, and you’re looking at the ruins of a fourteenth-century castle,’ Bob says, putting on his sunglasses against the glare. ‘Philippe de Carteret defeated the French here in the sixteenth century.’
‘Jersey is almost French but not quite English,’ Xanthe says slowly, thinking about the proximity of the Norman coast, the French place names and the English history.
Bob slaps her on the back. ‘You’ve got it in a nutshell,’ he laughs.
As they continue driving, the scenery becomes even more spectacular until they are looking down on a beach that makes Xanthe catch her breath.
‘Plémont Bay,’ Bob says as they descend the steep road towards the café. ‘Tides all around Jersey are treacherous, and you have to be careful not to get caught by them. If you come here one hour before the tide goes out, you can watch the beach gradually appearing before your eyes.’
Savage cliffs and treacherous tides reveal a surprisingly darker side of Jersey’s landscape than its peaceful fields, lovely beaches and flower-spangled meadows would indicate, Xanthe thinks as the waiter shows them to a table at the Plémont Café.
The café is perfectly located to allow diners to feast their eyes on the view, and as they wait for their crab sandwiches, Bob sits back and places his sunglasses on the wooden table.
‘I was nineteen when all hell broke loose in 1940,’ he begins. ‘I can still remember the moment when the bombing started. I was swimming and when I heard the explosions, I scrambled out of the water as fast as I could and sheltered behind some tamarisk bushes until it was over.
‘At work, I was the lowest form of life, an office boy, but a few days later everything changed in a way I could never have imagined. As soon as they announced voluntary evacuation, our manager and his deputy fled to England, and when Colonel Wilson, our insurance boss in Southampton, put through a call to our manager, I had to tell him that both he and the deputy had gone.
‘Colonel Wilson was a small man who insisted on being addressed by his title. God help you if you called him mister. He was a short man.’ He pauses for a moment and chuckles. ‘You know, I’ve come to the conclusion that tall men command respect naturally, and that’s why small men are aggressive.’
Xanthe smiles. Bob is very tall. So is she.
‘Colonel Wilson was furious,’ he continues. ‘“Have you gone bonkers? Have you been drinking?” He was bellowing down the phone. “Are you trying to tell me that the British Government abandoned British territory without a shot being fired? I don’t believe a word of this nonsense! Put me through at once!”
‘He didn’t seem to know anything about the demilitarisation or evacuation, but as I found out later, people in England didn’t have a clue what had happened to us. There were still ads on the London Tube showing pretty girls lying on a beach and urging people to spend a bomb-free holiday in Jersey!
‘So at nineteen, by default, I ended up in charge of our office. I had to hire a new secretary and I deliberately took on a young girl with no experience whatsoever. An experienced secretary would have terrified me, and I reckoned this new girl wouldn’t realise that I had no idea what I was doing! She lasted about two years and then I employed another girl who didn’t have any secretarial skills.’ He has a faraway look in his eyes as he adds, ‘Milly was the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.’
Xanthe sits forward, intrigued that the memory of an infatuation more than seventy years before has the power to evoke such nostalgia. ‘Sounds like a romance,’ she suggests.
‘Her heart was somewhere else, but that’s another story,’ he sighs.
Xanthe longs to hear more about it, but he returns to his wartime experiences.
When the waiter brings their crab sandwiches, she takes a bite and returns to the topic of the slave labourers. ‘What did people think when they saw them?’
‘I was shocked to the core. Until then, we tended to think that the horror stories we’d heard about the Germans were hugely exaggerated. It’s probably what we wanted to believe. But now for the first time we could see what they were capable of. One day, at the old priory at Morville, I saw a young slave labourer attached to two trees by branches they’d wound tightly around his neck. The slightest movement would have strangled him. We heard that some of them had been thrown alive into wet concrete.
‘The poor buggers used to scavenge for food in the fields or people’s gardens at night, desperate for something to eat. You wouldn’t believe it, but some of the locals reported them for digging up their vegetables.’
‘So how did you get involved in helping them?’
‘One evening Dr Jackson cycled over to my place in Victoria Street and said he had a problem. He and I had talked about the plight of the slave workers the week before when I came to see him about a medical problem, so he decided to sound me out. I told him I was in. He explained that we’d need enough people to move the escapees from one parish to another every night. One of our group was Brigid Murphy, the librarian. I’d always thought of her as an old crank, but she was fearless. There were a few couples involved as well, people Dr Jackson knew and trusted, and we made sure no-one else knew we were sheltering the escapees.’
As they head back towards St Helier, Xanthe marvels that he showed such resourcefulness at such a young age. It occurs to her that crises don’t create character; they reveal it.