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97 CHAPTER THREE Reaching for Control It was Easter Sunday in 1941, and as Reverend Ord left church on his way home after services, he found himself with an uncomfortable escort. A German submarine was currently in the St. Peter Port harbor, and some of the men from its crew happened to be heading in the same direction as Rev. Ord for part of his journey. Ord could guess where the “filthy wretches” came from simply by their unwashed faces and the state of their uniforms. As they all reached the steep road leading up Monument Hill, the men apparently decided to have a little fun at the expense of this British reverend gentleman whom they had now encountered. The Germans fell in on both sides of Ord and entertained themselves with some rude comments at his expense. Ord walked in silence for some time, allowing this little comedy to proceed, before he spoke in their language himself and had the pleasure of watching the German faces fall. He later speculated as to the German soldiers’ reaction: “Had this cleric understood what they had been saying about him?” As this “little cavalcade” passed some of the Guernsey passersby, Ord could observe the sympathy on people’s faces and their deep concern to see him flanked by German soldiers. It dawned on him that news would quickly travel all over Guernsey that Reverend Ord was under arrest! Sure enough, later in the day a phone call came to his home anxiously seeking confirmation that he had been detained, and Ord had the pleasure of answering the telephone personally to put the caller’s mind at ease. But what, he pondered, would his wife, Grae, have thought had she been alone and answered the call herself?1 On that Easter Sunday, Ord was able to experience himself as the subject of the extensive network of rumors that served as one counterpoint to official German-controlled information . It is an exploration of such shadow methods of communication that will compose this chapter and serve as a first foray into understanding the hidden transcript of the Guernsey Occupation. Now that we have a rough outline of the events and shifting character of the first four years of Occupation, a sense of the panoptical style of German control, and a feel for the support and trust that the majority of the Guernsey population carved out for themselves, it may be possible to understand the rhetorical nature of resistance in its many forms. Those outside of the experience of Occupation (particularly when writing decades after the events) have had difficulty acknowledging and appreciating this resistance for one very good reason: outsiders, just like the Germans in authority, were never intended as the audience for these acts. One clear aspect of other studies of subordinated people is the specificity of intended audience for the hidden transcript. It is only meant as communication to “those in the know,” that is, to those sharing a position of powerlessness, and therefore it has “to costume itself and speak more warily” in the presence of the powerful.2 98| Chapter Three This necessarily restrictive audience has sometimes led to deep frustration in the Channel Islands with modern interpretations of their history. Our rapidly dwindling survivors of the time of the Occupation, modest as that generation tends to be, have recently opened up and shared their best anecdotes of clever thwarting of the German will, only to have these efforts dismissed as minor and unremarkable, or worse yet, viewed as some cover for mass collaboration . This is not a unique interpretive problem. Subordinated populations know intimately the aggression behind symbolic and coded discourse, and the use of these subtle means to affect the conduct of the powerful.3 Those outside the situation of powerlessness often only see the “façade of the public transcript” and are unable to see through a discursive guise that was, after all, designed to be “cryptic and opaque.”4 It could be said that the public transcript of the Occupation was metaphorically written in German, just as the official story of American slavery and post–Civil War Reconstruction was for so many years only written by whites, many of them slaveholders and their descendants. The story of most corporations and large businesses is written not by the many lower-level workers, but by the few in the front office. Thus there is a tendency for the shadow discourse of those without power (the hidden and the coded...

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