This was Gran Nora’s book shelves before the family stripped it of the books we all wanted. Whilst I was at her house a couple of weeks ago I found a rather strange little book called The Alderney Story: 1939-1949 on the bare shelves and decided to take it home and read it.
Alderney is the most northerly of the Channel Islands and is about 3 ½ miles long by 1 mile wide. It is glorious in the summer sunshine and utterly bleak when it is windy and rainy. Like the other Channel Islands Alderney was occupied by the Nazis during the second world-war and it accommodated three German labour camps, Lager Noordeney, Lager Heligolond, Lager Borkum and the notorious SS Concentration camp Lager Sylt. All but a handful of the 1400 islanders were evacuated to the mainland and the work and concentration camps housed Eastern European, mainly Russian prisoners, hundreds of whom died during the occupation.
This little book is a curious mix of personal stories and as it was written in 1971 I should think that some of the information is incorrect, but it was still interesting. It made me realise how hard life was, both for the locals who were evacuated and the environment to which they had to return, but also for the prisoners who suffered in the camps.
However, there was one bit of the book that really made me laugh. In 1946, the year after Liberation, getting to and from the island was pretty difficult due to restrictions on the amount of boats going to and from the island. At one time there was a limit of 12 passengers and it was hard to get a place. Of course this did not stop the determined.
”Major ‘Peapod’ Palmer, finding himself stuck in Guernsey, devised an ingenious way out of the difficulty. He went to the Post Office, had himself weighed and stamped, and demanded to be posted with the mails. He was found to be within his rights; moreover, as postal livestock had to be accompanied in transit, the ship on that occasion sailed with fourteen passengers instead of the twelve allowed. On arrival in Alderney, the postman sent as his herdsman on the voyage retaliated by taking him to the Post office to be cleared in the proper manner, before delivering him, as addressed, to his wife.”
I love the image of the Major Palmer standing on the scales and attaching the stamps to his jacket. Let it never be said that the islanders were not resourceful folk. Maybe that’s why so many of them made it through the toughest period in Channel Island history.
