Sarnia Cherie

I often think about my mother when I read in the papers about the refugees of wars across the world.  Their lives and experiences seem so removed from mine, yet my own mother was once a refugee.  That’s how she first came to this country from her Channel Island home of Guernsey.  At the age of nineteen, in the face of Hitler’s invasion force, she queued up to be packed into the hold of a small boat, and fled to England.  Afterwards she had no memory of the twenty-four hours spent on the English Channel dodging mines.  People told her she was full of jokes and laughter, keeping everybody entertained, but she didn’t remember this until the day she died.

When my mother arrived in Southampton, she was marched through the streets with a refugee label round her neck, as were her parents, her sister crippled with polio and her two other sisters and their babies, who also had just fled their homes.  Her father knocked on doors asking for help, but was told to go away.  ‘We don’t want you refugees round here,’ was what people said.      

My mother went to London to my father’s family, but her parents and sisters went up north.  At one point, my mother told me, the two sisters with babies lived in a single room with packing crates for furniture.  She said that when a local doctor, making a house call, saw their living conditions, he wept.  The other sister, paralysed with polio, had her wheelchair stolen from under her.  One of my mother’s brothers-in-law died.  The other one walked out on his wife.  My grandmother became ill.  My grandfather committed suicide.   

The Occupation of the Channel Islands was a tragedy for families like my mother’s who had to leave their homes to be looted and destroyed.  Yet theirs isn't part of the great British story of the Second World War - many people have no idea that a part of the UK fell under Nazi command.  

The Occupation was, of course, a tragedy too for those who remained on the islands. People starved.  Some died.  The Jews faced deportation and death.  Families like my own, where the father was English, were betrayed by their own island authority, who handed in their names to the Nazi high command, resulting in these families being rounded up and deported to German prisoner-of-war camps, some never to return. 

To their great credit, the people of Guernsey registered their protest at the treatment of their fellow-islanders by flocking to the harbour in St Peter Port to see them off.   Almost the entire local population turned up, flying illegal Union Jacks, and singing God Save the Queen and Rule Britannia as mothers, fathers and children were packed onto ships on the first stage of their journey to Germany.  There’s no doubt that, had they stayed, my family would have been amongst this number.     

My mother’s Guernsey story is one I’ve never been able to bring myself to write. I lived in its shadow throughout my childhood, never understanding what had happened or the true extent of what it had done to her. Recently I’ve been in Guernsey visiting relatives, taking photos and hearing stories of those times.  The cottage I’m showing you is the one my mother walked out of, never to return.   The grassy area in front of it was called ‘the dern’.  When I was there in May, it was a riot of wild flowers.  There’s a beach beyond the dern where my mother as a child played in the sand, climbed, swam and scrambled over rocks.  Every hour the Vale Church at the end of the bay rang out the passing of her young life.  On Sunday evenings, as the sun set into the sea, the Salvation Army band stood on the beachhead, serenading the white sands and turquoise waters with their hymns. Whenever my mother talked about Guernsey, she spoke of it in her mother’s Norman French as ‘Sarnia Cherie’.