Tim Binding: Island Madness

There were two other floors, reached only by the outside steps that ran up from the yard. The top floor was let out to the Guernsey Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society. Below that was Ned’s own office, as big as the rest of the station put together. Though he’d put down an old carpet to dampen the sound of the men playing cards down in the back room, if he’d been sensible he would have hauled it above his head and nailed it to the ceiling. They were a keen bunch upstairs and practised regularly. Babes in the Wood, Private Lives, Full House : Ned knew them all off by heart. In the middle of the room stood a large table with a long drawer underneath one side, the only article of furniture in the entire building which possessed both a lock and a key. In the far corner stood a coal stove, its cracked lagged pipe leaking a continual thin spiral of smoke. Two chairs, a filing cabinet and a torn map of the island held together with glue and brown paper were the only other furnishings. One telephone upstairs, one telephone downstairs, a spare bicycle and the Yellow Peril pressed into spasmodic service after their brand-new five-seater had been requisitioned by the Geheimnis Polizei. That was it.

George Poidevin, foreman for one of the island’s leading construction firms, was a pasty man and indignation quivered on him like cooked fat on the bone. He lived above a small grocery shop which his wife ran, close to St Sampson’s harbour. Recognizing his malevolent wheeze Ned had hastily checked his desk to ensure that nothing of any note lay for George’s greedy eyes to devour.

“George,” Ned said gaily. “What brings you here? Come to turn yourself in?”

George wheezed his way over, put his hands on Ned’s desk and panted across the stained woodwork. His breath smelt of strong sausage. The man had been eating meat!

“Do you know?” he said, blinking hard. “Do you know what they’ve just told the wife?”

Ned shook his head, hoping that George’s weight might prove too much for the table’s tired frame. Its legs were splayed out like a dog caught on an iced pond. When it fell apart he intended to chop it up for firewood.

“No,” he replied. “I don’t know. What have they told her? Something interesting? Eva Braun’s favourite recipe?”

George leaned further across, resting his weight on his ten fat fingers. The table creaked. The right far leg slipped further out. Ned prayed. A little further, a little further.

“They’ve only issued instructions that they be put on heavy workers’ rations, that’s all. Can you believe it! The bloody nerve!”

Ned wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

“They, George? Who’s ‘they’?”

“Them whores! Them bloody whores. There’s my femme working all the hours God sends her and Elspeth wearing her pins to a frazzle counting out their useless money and does either of them get heavy rations? Does they buggery. But it’s all right for these French mamselles, flat on their backs all day.”

It was all Ned could do to stop himself from laughing out loud. Another brothel had opened in January. There was the officers’ one over at St Martin’s, a spacious affair set in its own grounds, filled, it was said, with cancan girls from Paris; the one for the Todt officials halfway up George Street; and now a couple for the troops over at St Sampson’s. In the afternoons you could see the men standing patiently in an orderly queue stretching halfway round the little harbour, smoking treasured cigarettes or exchanging the odd rueful joke, hands in pockets, buffeted by the winds, just like the rest of the population waiting for the bread shop to open. It always made him smile. Even the Germans had to queue for something. Now that the weather was getting better, when they weren’t working the girls would start sunning themselves out on the roof, gazing out to where their homeland lay. Last year George had marched to the Feldkommandantur and complained that his wife could see them through their bedroom window.

“And so she could,” Ned had once told Bernie, laughing, “but only if she stood on a chair.” Ned rubbed his chin hard, trying to prevent a repeat performance.

“Well, it’s hard work,” he told George cheerfully. “There’s what, fifteen girls next to your place? Another fifteen down the road. With seventeen thousand troops to cater for that’s a lot of jiggery pokery called for. If you work on the principle that the average soldier expects to drop his trousers at least once a fortnight, that means that those girls have to accommodate eight thousand five hundred every week. Which means,” he did a quick sum on a sheet of paper, “two hundred and eighty-three each a week or forty-seven a day. Forty if they work Sundays.”

George Poidevin was not amused. “It’s a disgrace,” he fumed.

“‘You know what I said to them?’ I said, ‘Put it in writing and see what the States say. I’m not having my wife doling out heavy workers’ rations to French tarts without the proper papers.’”

Rumour had it that George Poidevin had once tried to slip the girls an extra loaf in return for a weekly you-know-what, and every one of them had refused. Ever since then he had been their implacable enemy.

“They won’t put it in writing, not an order like that,” Ned told him. “But they’ll make you do it just the same. Let’s face it, we’d all like extra rations, whatever we do. If those girls can wangle it, good luck to them. They don’t last long, you know. Not with the wear and tear they have to put up with.”

George had more to tell.

“And that’s not all. You know what Monty Freeman’s been told? Only to keep the bank open an extra hour on Fridays so that those trollops can waltz in and deposit their money without causing offence to us locals. That’s where my Elspeth works. Least she’s no Jerrybag. When I think of some of our girls…” He stopped short.

“Thanks, George.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

“Let’s forget it, shall we. Is that all you have to tell me or is there a purpose to your visit?”

“I wondered if you’d had any news about the break-in.”

Van Dielen’s yard had been broken into the night before. Sergeant Tommy Ie Coeur had found the fence smashed in. Nothing much stolen. A couple of containers broken into, the little office ransacked of its precious supply of tea and sugar. Papers strewn everywhere. Ned regarded him with reproach.

“George, I reported it to the Feldkommandantur. Take it up with them. The foreigns are no concern of mine. My advice is to forget it. Nothing’ll come of it. If you want to stop it happening again, put a dog in there. Something big and hungry that’ll bite the bastards.”

Ned shooed him away before Bernie came with his usual bag of treats. The less people knew about that little enterprise the better.

Bernie brought them over once every two days or so, under cover of a normal delivery. Since his garage business had slumped, Bernie had landed a job as part-time postman. It suited his lanky frame. It used to be said that Bernie was the only mechanic on the island who could lie underneath a car with his head poking out at one end and his feet at the other. There weren’t many tall men on Guernsey. Not until they came. Bernie followed fast in George’s footsteps.

“How’s business?” he asked, slumping the oily bag on the table.

“A few break-ins over at the Vale. A fight outside the Brighton. The only bit of excitement was when old Mrs Rowe stopped Tommy in the High Street the other day and asked him if he could show her the way to the black market.”

Bernie smiled. It was a nice story, even if it wasn’t true. Taking off his cap he scratched his head. His spiky hair was more suited to a lad of fourteen than a grown man nearing his thirtieth year.