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17 CHAPTER ONE The Panoptical Occupation Everyone seems to be in a dreadful hurry. If you wander today through the narrow, winding streets of St. Peter Port, you may hear rapid footsteps behind you as young and not so young Islanders walk briskly past. I once felt the light, sharp rap of a woman’s cane on my leg (eighty, if she was a day) to urge me out of the way as I lollygagged through the Pollet, the extension of High Street that curves gently down toward the harbor. It almost seems that these busy people will run out of room and continue walking purposefully right off the Island and into the English Channel. But there has always been an energy here that runs counter to expectations of sleepy island life. Guernsey is not simply a place for wealthy British tax exiles and tourists drawn by the harbors, beaches, and pleasant little shops. It is a thriving investment and banking center, and the digital revolution has thrown its invisible net of modernity over the ancient buildings and narrow, cobbled streets. It is a place that wears its long history comfortably while closing its hand firmly around the future. The sleek sailboats and little fishing vessels of today sail the same waters where the Romans had their harbor and later privateers and smugglers worked a darker trade. The ferries from England and France daily pass the brooding Castle Cornet, which in its various forms has guarded the harbor since the thirteenth century. And, a visitor walking the narrow streets and precipitous stairs that rise in layers from the harbor may stop to examine the plaque commemorating the burning of three women for heresy in 1556. Reading that Perotine Massey gave birth to her son in the inferno, only to have him rescued alive and thrown back into the flames at the order of the Bailiff, provides a chill even in the midsummer Guernsey sunshine. Or, the visitor may continue on to visit Hauteville House, the home of Victor Hugo during his fifteen-year exile, where he penned Les Miserables while he designed its exquisite garden and eccentric gothic-funhouse decor. Leaving St. Peter Port, or one of the other little towns dotting the edge of the Island, might lead to a walk through a dark, fragrant forest or along the many high cliff paths with their endless views to sea and vertigo-inspiring plunges to the rocks and salt spray below. Yet, the interior of Guernsey holds a storybook feel, not flat and barren as islands sometimes seem, but rich with undulating green and fields surrounded by the hedgerows, stone walls, and the shady lanes of a British countryside. Waiting for one of the large green and yellow buses that somehow squeeze their way through the narrow roads, you might look over to a twelfth- or thirteenth-century church and its graveyard, or to a house with a “witch’s seat.” These stones that jut out of the chimneys of ancient houses provided a resting spot for passing witches, preventing them from flying down the chimneys and cursing the residents. In a field close by there likely will be Guernsey cows comfortably grazing, each attached by a long rope to her 18| Chapter One individual stake like a dog in a suburban backyard. Yet walk down another lane back toward the sea and there it stands, cold and stark against the sky: a German watchtower. The Island of Guernsey is a palimpsest, written on so repeatedly by history that the physical markers of previous eras seep through to give intriguing glimpses of the past. Even so, there is something jarring about the juxtaposition of Nazi Germany with its ancient towns and narrow streets. The fact that so much left from the Occupation can be found in concrete bunkers, underground tunnels, and the detritus of war makes this time period substantially different in its physical remains as well as its ethos. Although the imprint of violence and war is not unique to the Occupation period, there is a clear aura of control and containment. In Islander emphasis on the ring of jackboots in the Pollet or the sound of German martial music echoing off the buildings of the High Street is some sense of violation, but also a fascination with the simple incongruity of it all. It may have been that very air of unreality that made evacuating Guernsey in 1940 such a difficult individual decision, despite the imminent threat of...

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