Beatrice Gold burned through life like a wildfire. Not a beauty in the traditional sense. Each individual feature was too much for her face. Lips a great wide dollop of strawberry jam, wild dark curls and a glint in her eye that spelt mischief. And right now, in about as much trouble as it was possible to be.
Naked, she lay crushed beneath a man’s hot body, his salt-brined skin burning next to hers, the sand dunes prickling the flesh on her back.
“Jimmy, you sod! Why did you have to distract me? I’ll have missed the last bus into town.”
He grinned and ran his hands down her arms, pinning them down into the sand.
“Distract you? How’s that for romantic!”
“You know what I mean.”
“Listen, you might as well stay. Don’t want you getting caught out after curfew.”
She smiled sweetly. “Oh please, the blockhead Boche won’t catch me. Most of them couldn’t find their own arsehole with both hands.”
He trailed kisses down her neck. “You’re so beautiful, Bea. Even if you do have a mouth like a sailor.”
“Behave,” she snorted. “Look at the state of me. I haven’t seen lipstick in three years and a coat hanger’s got more curves than me.”
Her thoughts instantly strayed to some of the Jerrybags in town walking round freshly rouged and scented. Some of the girls in Jersey would do anything for a handful of dirty Reichsmarks.
Jimmy leaned down to kiss her, but a well-placed knee in the groin soon had her free as she groped for her frock and pulled it over her head, before jamming her feet into an ugly pair of Summerland wooden clogs.
“I’ll get a proper tongue-lashing if I’m late,” she muttered, fastening up the buttons on her cardigan. “You know my mum… the only woman who can go on holiday and come back with a sunburnt tongue.”
Jimmy laughed, his cheeks creasing into dimples. The early evening sun brought out the deep muddy green of his eyes.
“Holidays.” He sighed, reluctantly getting to his feet. “Remember those?”
He pulled her close, trailed sandy kisses up her neck. “One day, Bea, we’ll travel all round Europe, no curfews, no barbed wire. Just empty beaches and cold beers.”
Jimmy La Mottée, a farmer’s son from St. Ouen’s. If she didn’t love him so much she would never have stuck it out. The cycle ride to his home on the west of the island from St. Helier was quite a feat on a bike with hosepipes for wheels. Bea’s physical health was at its lowest ebb. Before the war it had been a cinch, but now after each trip her lungs felt like they could split open.
The moment of purgatory began at 6 p.m. when the post office on Broad Street closed. Bea stared down at her skinny legs. The hunger was an actual gnawing pain in her tummy. It felt wrong to grumble—everyone was in the same boat after all—but three years of occupation had taken its toll. Even her soul felt emaciated.
Bea realized with a pang what she had actually missed even more than a good meal. Going to the library where Jimmy’s sister, her best friend Grace, worked and getting out any book she wanted. Losing herself in the glamour of a Hollywood motion picture. Skinny-dipping under the stars. The iron grip over the most petty details of their lives had tightened, the tentacles of Nazification slowly spreading.
Bea was still brooding when she realized Jimmy had asked her something.
“Huh? Did you say something?”
“That’s a charming response to my marriage proposal.”
He stared at her with a wry smile, grains of sand speckling his dirty blond hair.
“Don’t be so daft! Wait… you’re not serious, are you?”
“Please, Bea, just listen. It’s important.”
Jimmy pulled her back down into the sand dunes, hidden from view.
“I want to marry you.”
“You’re up to something. What is it?”
He laughed and rubbed his hands through his hair shaking loose the sand.
“Very well. I’m going to get off the island.” A nerve was jumping beneath his jawline.
“When?” she demanded.
“Tomorrow, if the tides are right. But listen, Bea, you have to believe me. When I make it to England, I’ll wait there for you. Then when the war is over you can come and join me and we can get married there. Maybe even move to London. You can’t stay working at the post office all your life.”
“B-but this is madness, Jimmy. You’re a farmer, not a fisherman. What do you know of the seas? The tidal currents around Jersey are lethal.”
“There are three of us, plus a French fisherman on the east of the island who has petrol.”
“But you can’t possibly escape from the east coast. It’d be suicide.”
“We aren’t. We’re going from the west.”
“But that’s even more dangerous! You’ll have to catch exactly the right current. If you don’t get blown up by a mine, you’ll be dashed against a rocky outcrop.”
“Denis Vibert managed to escape to England and in an eight-foot rowing boat,” he said, defensively, scooping up sand and letting it trickle between his fingers.
“Besides,” he continued slyly, “I have insurance.”
He opened his coat a fraction and she spotted the tip of a gun.
“Walther P38 pistol,” he said as proudly as if he were showing her a fatted calf.
“German?” she gasped. “Did you steal that?”
“Come on, Bea, it’s not considered stealing if it’s from Jerry.”
Panic slammed through her.
“And… and what about Dennis Audrain last year, and Peter Hassall and Maurice Gould? Dennis drowned. Peter and Maurice are in prison God knows where on the continent. No. It’s too dangerous, especially if you have that thing.”
The final grain of sand slipped from his hand and he turned to her.
“The point is, Bea, for every ten men that failed there’s one who didn’t, proving it can be done. I may end up in the Gloucester Street Mansion, but so what, at least I’ll have a story to tell the grandkids.”
A story to tell the grandkids?
There were no fables or heroic endings to be found in this occupation, just uncertainty, hunger and survival. Bea stared out through the dunes at the long sweep of St. Ouen’s Bay, its golden sands now smothered in an ugly scrawl of barbed wire and felt something calcify inside her. This island, once so beautiful, was now an anchored fortress. She felt hermetically sealed behind hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of concrete and all the other detritus of war. Day and night the engines smoked and machines pounded, to turn these ancient green islands into part of Hitler’s mighty, impregnable Atlantic wall.
She closed her eyes against the image of war and felt the cool ocean breeze combing her hair. Jimmy sighed into the wind. Being dissuaded by his parents from joining the British forces had been a bitter blow to Jimmy’s ego. He’d watched most of his friends virtually run onto the evacuee boats, champing at the bit to join the fight, leaving him behind to help on the farm as a reserved occupation. His parents had dressed his farming exemption up as a noble and heroic contribution to the war effort, but milking cows was never going to be enough for a man as patriotic as Jimmy.
“Bea…” He nudged her with his shoulder. “I’m not asking your permission,” he said. “I’m going.” He took her hand and his voice softened. “But I’d like to go knowing that you’ve agreed to be my wife. Please believe me. If I stay here, I think my mind’ll snap.”
“Oh, thanks very much!”
“No, you misunderstand, Bea. Try to see it through my eyes. My brothers are fighting alongside the British and what am I doing? Growing wheat for the Germans’ bread. Only today I had one of their agricultural commandos breathing down my neck. They don’t seem to understand that Mother Nature doesn’t abide by the orders of Feldkommandantur 515. I found one of the buggers in the yard the other day checking my cows’ teats and demanding stats on yields to see whether I’m selling on the black market.”
He broke off, wiped a hand across the stubble on his chin.
Jimmy’s anger was palpable. He bristled with it, like iron filings under a magnet. “I feel like a caged animal, Bea. Don’t you see? This island is a prison without walls.”
Bea ran her hand down his neck, feeling the tension of his corded muscles.
“Very well. You’ve made up your mind, but for the record, I think you’re barmy.”
“Are you barmy enough to be my wife?”
She laughed because if she didn’t she would cry.
“Certifiable.”
“Is that a yes?”
She nodded and dashed back her tears. She would never let him see her cry. Even when her father died, she hadn’t shown her frailty to anyone.
“Oh, Bea, I can’t tell you how happy you’ve made me,” Jimmy said, crushing his lips against hers with a scalding relief. But she tasted the fear seeping through his kisses and felt the cold hard weight of his stolen gun pressing into her chest.
He pulled something from his pocket.
“Oh, Jimmy…” She turned the battered tin ring over with her fingers.
“I engraved it with our initials. See.”
JLM. BG.
“It’s only temporary, until I can get something better,” he went on, scanning her face for her reaction. And in that moment she saw the whole of the occupation and its tedium and privation wash over his face.
She slipped it on her finger.
“This is something better.” Bea kissed him softly. “I love you so much, Jimmy La Mottée.”
She smelled them before she saw them, and fear rose inside her. Jimmy realized it too and pulled back, instinctively pushing her back down among the dunes.
Through the rushes, they spotted an Organisation Todt patrol, leading a group of Russian and Polish slave workers up the beach. There was a quarry not far from where they were sitting, and the prisoners were being marched back to their labor camp. Bea moaned softly at the sight of them dressed in nothing but rags, covered in mud and cement from a day’s labor, crawling with lice and disease.
Since the slaves’ and forced-laborers’ arrival on the island last August it felt like the trickle had turned to a flood and now, one year on, the place was filled with the wretched souls. She had seen their camps dotted round the island: long low wooden huts surrounded by barbed wire, full of people hollowed out with hunger and pain. There were no more sweet-smelling freesias and carnations, delicious tomatoes or new potatoes to be found in Jersey’s fields any longer. Just walking skeletons.
Their rigid, melancholy silhouettes grew closer and Bea found herself transfixed by their faces, eyes haunted under their peaked caps. Bea forced herself to look closely at one, trying to humanize a life that to the Germans was Untermensch—sub-human.
“He’s nothing but a boy,” she murmured in horror.
“Ssh. If they’re on their way back it must be past curfew. We’re in the military zone, don’t forget. They’ll shoot us on the spot if they see us here.”
The boy was 14… 15 at most. She winced as he trudged closer. She was thin, but he was nothing but bones draped in skin.
Before she could stop herself, she reached into her satchel and pulled out an old turnip she had found by the roadside. With all her might she flung it over the top of the dune and watched it bounce and roll up the beach, coming to rest at the boy’s foot.
Jimmy whipped round, horrified, his eyes so wide she could see all the whites.
“Halt!” screamed a guard, his harsh accent carrying on the wind.
The slaves fell on the turnip, but the boy, smaller and nimbler, grabbed it and devoured it, foam and mud bubbling from his mouth.
“What have you done, Bea?” Jimmy whispered.
The khaki-clad OT guard, hair gleaming like patent leather, face like a knife, strode up to the boy and as calmly as if he were stroking a cat, took his rifle and slammed it into the boy’s face. Bea heard the cracking of bone, as he crumpled to the sand.
“Nehmen Sie Ihren Hut ab!” Remove your hat. The boy lifted his head, blood streaming from a gash on his forehead, and yanked off his cap.
“Why is your hat off? Put it back on!” he ordered, winking at his fellow guards.
No sooner had the boy replaced it, the guard brought his rifle butt crashing down on his head. This time the cap flew off backward from the force of the blow. Laughing, another guard replaced the cap and gestured to his colleague. Two of the guards pinned the boy between them, his blood-soaked legs dangling off the ground.
The awful truth dawned on Bea. It was nothing but a sick game to these scum to see how many times they could knock his cap off before he died.
“I- I can’t watch this,” she whispered. Tears blurred her vision as she turned and crawled back along the dunes to where they had left their bikes, hidden in a thicket of trees by the coast road.
She leaned over the frame of her bike, consumed with guilt at the stupidity of her actions. The scorching pain of her anger dislodged other, darker memories that streamed over her uninvited. The dull thud of bombs. Blood seeping over the white planks of her father’s fishing boat. The fields of Jersey had run red with blood and tomatoes that summer’s day in 1940. Bea had been working late at the post office when the bombers had come. The night her father had bled to death in his fishing boat. And in their fear, confusion and grief, they had all wondered what would happen next.
Three years on, this was what.
“I hate them,” she seethed, feeling a sense of loathing sneak into every nook and cranny of her soul. “I hate the bastards!” Jimmy pulled her into his arms and moved his mouth to her ear.
“You see, Bea? You see now why I have to escape? People have to hear of this. The Nazis are telling England this is a model occupation. They have to know what is really happening here.”
She nodded, surprised to find herself agreeing, but more astonished to realize that, for the first time since her father had been ripped apart by a German bomb, she was finally crying.
The wind whipped through the long dune grass, spinning whirlpools of sand into their faces.
“I’m so sorry, Bea,” Jimmy said, struggling to hold back his tears. “Stay with me tonight, please.”
She nodded and lifted her sharp little chin. “I will. Because I’ve decided—I’m coming with you. I’m getting off this island too.”