Mary Ann Shaffer

Think about it: I’ve never seen your home – I don’t even know where it is, really. New York, but which street? What does it look like? What colour are your walls? Your sofa? Do you arrange your books alphabetically? (I hope not.) Are your drawers tidy or messy? Do you ever hum, and if so, what? Do you prefer cats or dogs? Or fish? What on earth do you eat for breakfast – or do you have a cook?

You see? I don’t know you well enough to marry you.

I’ve read all the ‘unclassified’ government reports on the state of the Islanders’ health, or lack of it; their happiness, or lack of it; their food supplies, or lack of them. But I want to know more. I want to know the stories of the people who were there, and I can never learn those by sitting in a library in London.

A reporter asked a Guernsey Islander, ‘What was the most difficult experience you had during the Germans’ rule?’ He made fun of the man’s answer, but it made perfect sense to me. The Islander told him, ‘You know they took away all our wirelesses? If you were caught with one, you’d get sent off to prison on the Continent. Well, those of us who had secret wirelesses, we heard about the Allies landing in Normandy. Trouble was, we weren’t supposed to know it had happened! Hardest thing I ever did was walk around St Peter Port on the 7th of June, not grinning, not smiling, not doing anything to let those Germans know that I KNEW their end was coming. If they’d caught on, someone would be in for it – so we had to pretend. It was very hard to pretend not to know D-Day had happened.’