The granite bedrock of communal identity, to use the metaphor again, is language. By this measure I was disinherited from my Guernseyness the day that I was born. And not only me but my generation. Born in the nineteen fifties to Guernsey-French speaking parents we were brought up not to speak our parents’ own language. I heard it all about me – my parents spoke to each other in it – but it was out of reach. I could understand but could not speak. I had been made culturally autistic. I had been made dumb to the language that communicated the life about me. A language which could trace its roots back through the recent trauma of German occupation when, indiscriminate of source, it had incorporated the word kaput (Ch’est tche kaput), back through the centuries to Rollo, the Norman pirate who was given the Duchy of Normandy in 912 A.D., who dropped his Scandinavian tongue (what transmutation of identity was this – perhaps the same as ceasing Guernsey-French in favour of English) and adopted the langue d’Oil tongue of the native population of northern France (A few Nordic words were retained though and remain as part of the now fading language – words like mielles (sand dunes), dehus (dolmens), vraic (seaweed). In the case of vraic it may have just managed to jump into the Guernsey-English idiom and so may survive a bit longer). And further back to roots in the soup of Latin and Celtic and Frankish vernacular.
Guernsey-French was a mature language drenched in the lives that had been lived on the island over centuries, vowel sounds and consonant combinations with no exact parallel in French or English, phrases and sayings which used the local events of life to communicate some essence or other of thought – surely this must be an aspect of Guernseyness; the internal use of reference points – Guernsey culture taking its own experiences to use as expressions of its nature. I found these two entries in the Dictionnaire Anglais-Guernesiais: for the word “lengthy” – “en avant ni but ni fin ‘coum les pereieres de Jacques Ozaunne” (to have no ending like James Ozanne’s prayers) - Mr Ozanne was a Wesleyian preacher; and for the word “paunch”: “aen ventre de Doyen” (Dean’s paunch) – a well known country ecclesiastic of the late 19th Century was noted for the huge size of his belly which gave rise to the
expression.And yet for all its vigour and history Guernsey-French has been given up without a struggle; pushed away, consciously severed, broken by the twentieth century. Guernésiais was vibrant but unprotected, a peasant language of unwritten rhythms and syntax which has had no shield against the long deep night of evacuation and occupation (what tests of expression to maintain the native tongue), and then the long attrition of the homogenising onslaught of the last fifty years. When I was born my parents, early in their adult lives, already knew that their own language was fading and that their children’s Guernseyness was going to be different to their own.
Their decision not to teach me the patois would sever a link with unknown ancestors. I was to become the ancestor of a new inheritance, of a new Guernseyness. My birth year was Year Zero.
We looked back to where Jersey must be. Indeed we could just see under the cloud the line of the coast floating on the waters. It slid away and disappeared. We saw another line glowing in the darkness ahead... It was Guernsey! ... against the raging sea our steamer forged ahead, and an hour or so later slowed up, and then halted, in front of a faery like town, picturesquely staged up steep hill slopes... With its old Norman Roofs, with the proud Gallic cock on its church spire, Saint Pierre Port has indeed an air of home for us French refugees, which is indeed irresistible. The very name is a Welcome; remember that Saint Peter keeps the doors of Paradise!
Now all my father's precious manuscripts were in one huge trunk which he could not bear to let out of his sight. In the kind of weather we were suffering it was a terrible decision, that of entrusting all these unpublished masterpieces to a little cockle shell of a boat... Father had to decide to gamble twenty years of work and hand it over to the caprice of the waves. He took that chance.
And we climbed down to the boat that waited at the foot of the gangway, swinging ten foot up to us and ten foot away from us with each wave. Two burly matlows slung the trunk carelessly down, and perched it on the bows of the boat, with no more concern that they would have done with a bale of cotton or a basket of cod.
It was dreadful--for some minutes the trunk wobbled on the breakers... I could see the Contemplations disappearing under ten foot of water. But luckily there is a Providence which watches over Poets. Though the storm raged fiercely, more fiercely than ever, we landed safely on the quay.
"Not since the extraordinarily poetic Book of Ebenezer le Page has a single volume made the soul of the island so unremittingly its focus. The results are powerfully moving: a work that deals with both losing a home and finding one. Two sides of the same coin. For Guernsey people, or visitors, this book is a rich addition to their experience of the island."Naturally Richard and I looking forward to this a great deal. The book is a double fronted concept, which has two front covers. The name A Guernsey Double derives from the fact that there are two poets in it, is that doubles were coins, which were still legal tender into 1960s. However Jane Mosse has also been very involved, not least in proofing and editing. Without her help, for example, patois might have appeared (disastrously) as patios in the text.
Ho! all ye sons of froth and smoke,
Who daily to the eyes must soak
In reeking lather that might choke
Old Nick, thus smeared :
Come, hear me sing, ye smooth chinned folk
My theme's the beard.
All ye who every morning mow
Crops that have no time to grow
Bid you but once the luxury know
Shown in my lyric,
You would your strops and razors throw
Where th'wise threw physic.
We children of the good old school,
Observing Nature's every rule,
Wear a long beard to keep us cool
In summer season,
And warm in winter--where's the fool
Can better reason?
Doris: Yer, it’s all round the Bridge, your sellin’ to a Jerseyman. That Mrs.Falla from Holmdene, she says you took a lower offer than Tom Duquemin’s. She says you got no soul, sellin' our heritage to a foreigner. When I went in Le Riches, the girl behind the counter never lifted ‘er head once to speak to me, just took my money. There was a Jersey pound note in the change! We’ll have to do somethin’. What’re we gonna do?
Wilf: We’ll go to the bank an draw out all the housekeepin’ this week in crappo money. See if they don’t take it. Besides, Le Riches is a Jersey firm, she’s workin’ for the crappos. (Pause) ….Somebody painted a ‘J’ on the number plate of the truck last night and what’s more, they altered the name of our house from Sevenoaks to fiveoaks.
Doris: If this keeps up, we’ll have to sell up an’ move to bloomin’ Jersey.
Wilf: No fyur, it’d be all crappos to us two donkeys………What we’ll do is ask Mr.Critchlow to put an ad in the Press to say the field’s still for sale, that way they’ll know it’s not sold to anyone.
Doris: Is anyone else interested in buyin’?
Wilf: Not yet, but Mr.Critchlow is bringin’ someone around later, says he has cash in hand. That sounds dodgey to me, wot if ‘ees English, or French, we’ll have no friends left.
Doris: I’m off to Lilly to help ‘er bunch,…by the way ther’s a letter come…yer…. cheerie.
"...was a friend of Compton Mackenzie who had met on the isle of Capri in 1925. Mackenzie objected that he had been used as a model for the character in Lawrence's short story. There are, indeed some similarities.According to Wikipedia "Mackenzie at first asked Secker, who published both authors, not to print the story and it was left out of one collection".Compton Mackenzie lived on Capri from 1913 to 1920. He then bought the island of Herm and Jethou in the Channel Islands. After financial difficulties, he sold Herm and moved to the smaller island of Jethou in 1923. In 1925 he bought the uninhabited Shiat Isles near to Harrris in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. He never lived there but did live on the nearby island of Barra, where he built a house. When Sir Compton Mackenzie died in 1972 he was buried on the island of Barra."
All through that winter men had been pouring in, onto the island: engineers from Belgium, skilled construction workers from France, men laden with theodolites and drills who bored holes and tapped rocks and drew their indelible marks in the sand. There seemed no end to them. Down in St Peter Port the harbour was jammed with trawlers and tugs and great floating cranes, their necks bent double in search of their prey; metal rods, barbed wire, timber, and cement – always cement, the essential dust of His creation, cement in the flat-bottomed barges which wallowed their way from Cherbourg, cement stacked twelve feet high on St Julian’s Pier, cement hauled round the island on the narrow-gauge railway built from Cherbourg, to be mixed and poured and moulded into the fertile shapes of war. A military chastity belt of His design had been fitted around the island’s most tender regions, so that like a jealous lord He could prevent any violation of His fresh, plump property. But still He wanted more: more concrete, more guns, more men. In all of Western Europe there was nothing that glittered in His mind eye more brightly than the Channel Islands. Inselwahn, they called it. Island Madness.
