Chapter 2
chapter
St. Peter’s Parish, Jersey
At Uncle Arthur and Aunt Opal’s dairy farm, Ivy parked her bicycle outside the farmhouse of rosy Jersey granite. “Uncle Arthur? I came to patch you up again.”
“It’s nothing to bother about.” Uncle Arthur emerged from the barn, also of granite. “You shouldn’t have come all the way out here. Not that you aren’t welcome, mind.”
Yet Ivy noticed a hitch in Uncle Arthur’s step. “Since I’m here, I might as well look.”
“No escape now.” Charlie trotted out of the barn. He’d taken a summer job at the farm, mainly because the Germans allowed extra rations for laborers. Regular rations didn’t provide enough for a growing fourteen-year-old boy, even with Fern and Ivy surreptitiously slipping him extra portions.
Uncle Arthur pulled off his cap and entered the house. “Opal? Ivy’s here. Your doing, I suppose?”
“Of course.” Aunt Opal set a plate of potatoes on the table and motioned for Charlie to sit and eat. “Ivy and I are conspiring to keep you alive, cruel and conniving women that we are.”
With a dramatic sigh, Uncle Arthur flopped into a wooden chair at the table. “If only your ravishing beauty hadn’t enticed me into marrying into a medical family.”
Aunt Opal kissed the top of her husband’s head and brought a pot to the table. “Water’s been boiled and cooled for you, Ivy, and I have clean bandages. I’m afraid I have only a sliver of that awful green French soap.”
“It’ll do.” Jersey had run out of soap in the early months of the occupation, and the Germans sent a low-quality soap that didn’t even lather. After Ivy washed her hands at the sink, she sat at the table and opened her bag. “No use hiding. Show me.”
Much grumbling emanated from Uncle Arthur’s square face, but he rolled up his trouser leg and propped his foot on an empty chair.
An unbandaged, three-inch laceration cut across his calf.
Ivy palpated the red, raised edges. “As soon as you get a cut, you must cleanse it with water and soap if you have it. Then bandage it to keep it clean. With our poor diets, we can’t fend off infections as we ought.
Simple cuts are taking six weeks to heal. ”
Uncle Arthur groaned, this time closer to acceptance.
Ivy cleansed the wound with soap and water.
Over the past two years of the German occupation, the Jersey Medical Society had met monthly to discuss the worsening health situation.
The “occupation ulcers” developing from simple cuts.
The cases of life-threatening sepsis. And the scarcity of medications.
“This will sting.” Ivy opened a bottle of iodine and painted the wound area.
Uncle Arthur hissed through his teeth.
“I’ll visit again tomorrow. In the meantime, keep the wound clean and bandaged.” She glanced up to Aunt Opal.
Aunt Opal patted Charlie’s shoulder. “Charlie and I will tie him up if we must.”
Charlie swallowed a bite of potato, pan-fried without any fat. “May I, please?”
Uncle Arthur gave his nephew a mock glare. “Cheeky lad.”
Charlie pinched his own cheek. “The cheekiest.”
Ivy chuckled and pinned a strip of fabric around her uncle’s calf. Uncle Arthur would surely miss Charlie when the boy returned to school at Victoria College in a few weeks.
Uncle Arthur tugged down his trouser leg. “Would you like to hear the latest news?”
In June, the Germans had confiscated ten thousand wireless sets in Jersey. Losing the news on the BBC made the islanders feel more isolated than ever, with only censored news allowed in the Jersey Evening Post.
Ivy didn’t want to know where Uncle Arthur had hidden his wireless, but she did want the news.
Uncle Arthur rested his sturdy forearms on the table. “The Germans have already told us about their advances on Stalingrad.”
“Of course.” German victories received full coverage.
“But they didn’t tell us American pilots are arriving in England. The BBC did.”
Charlie’s dark eyes darted around. “Then they can send soldiers. Then they can invade.”
“Someday,” Uncle Arthur said. “And soon.”
Ivy managed to smile. Although the Channel Islands had surrendered to the Germans without bloodshed—other than a couple dozen poor souls killed in Luftwaffe air raids to Jersey and Guernsey—the Germans certainly wouldn’t allow the Allies to land at so low a cost.
Aunt Opal cleared away the extra bandages. “Remember not to spread the news. If you must, speak in Jèrriais.”
“Oui, ma bouonnefemme,” Uncle Arthur said in the local patois. Before the war, Jèrriais had fallen into disuse, but it was regaining popularity. Since it was descended from an ancient Norman tongue, it sounded a bit like French—but not enough for a French speaker to follow.
“Mêfie-té,” Aunt Opal said.
“I’m always careful.” Uncle Arthur clapped his hands to his knees. “Come, young Charlie. Let’s see to those cows.”
“Thank you.” Charlie handed Aunt Opal his plate. “Ivy, tell Fern I’ll be home in an hour.”
“I will.” Ivy glanced at her wristwatch. How had she lost track of time again? “Oh no. I’m late. I told Fern I was low on iodine solution, so she rang Carter’s Chemist’s. They were to have a bottle ready for me an hour ago.”
“Carter’s?” Aunt Opal washed Charlie’s dish. “The Picots have always used Island Drugs.”
“Mr. Johnson retired and closed his shop last week.” Ivy packed the empty iodine bottle in her medical bag next to her sketch pad. If only she hadn’t stopped to draw that sweet patch of bell heather. “I must rush. Fern scheduled two appointments in the surgery late this afternoon.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “Without Bill and the boys, Fern has only us to boss around.”
“Oh, hush. She’s trying to keep the practice afloat. And I am always late.” Ivy kissed her aunt and uncle goodbye and rushed outside.
She pedaled hard down narrow roads bound on each side by unforgiving granite walls. If only she could drive to save time.
Not long after the Germans arrived, they’d requisitioned Ivy’s brand-new car. As a physician, she’d been allowed to keep Dad’s older-model car and to receive a petrol ration, but a small one, best reserved for night calls and emergencies.
She turned left onto Route de Beaumont, cutting close to the corner.
A lorry came straight at her. Ivy veered to the left and rammed sideways into the wall. She cried out, planted her feet, and grabbed her left wrist.
“Watch where you’re going,” a soldier shouted in a German accent from the lorry. “Stupid girl.”
Ivy knew better than to tell him to drive slower. Far too many islanders had died due to reckless German drivers.
She palpated her throbbing wrist. Nothing broken—except her wristwatch.
“Oh no.” She’d never be able to get it repaired. The jewelers’ shops had closed long before, with no stock and no spare parts. Now punctuality would be even more difficult.
Ivy mounted her bicycle and crossed the road. The previous summer, the Germans had switched traffic from the left to the right.
She coasted downhill through verdant hills, lightly forested, bright with sunshine and flowers and begging to be sketched.
Around the bend came the sound of harsh voices and tramping feet.
Ivy slowed down.
Ahead of her, men trudged along the road, five abreast, some wearing civilian clothes, some wearing an unfamiliar army uniform. Torn. Ragged. Colors muted by filth.
A filth that penetrated Ivy’s nostrils. The smell of unwashed bodies and dirt and bodily fluids—and disease.
A pudgy German soldier marched up to Ivy, waving a truncheon.
Ivy gasped and yanked her bicycle off the road, onto a drive heading into the valley.
The motley column marched past her, dozens upon dozens of men.
The guards wore the brown uniform of Germany’s Organisation Todt, which built the hideous fortifications marring Jersey’s landscape.
They’d brought in hundreds of foreign workers, mainly Spaniards and Frenchmen, but these men now marching up Route de Beaumont had a Slavic look about them. And the uniforms—they were Soviet.
Ivy’s breath snagged. The Nazis considered the Slavic peoples to be “subhuman,” and from the condition of these men, they treated them accordingly.
But these were human beings created in God’s image, and she refused to let revulsion or pity warp her face, only concern.
One man, with wheat-colored hair and a scar across his cheek and brow, met her gaze with a desperate look. “Please, miss. Can you spare any food?”
She had none. “I’m sorry. I have—”
A truncheon slammed down on the Russian’s shoulder, and he stumbled.
Ivy cried out.
A guard shook his victim’s arm and barked at him in German, waving the truncheon in Ivy’s direction.
The Russian wore red epaulettes on his double-breasted smock—an officer, most likely. With his head bowed, he glanced at Ivy from under a strong brow. “He says to tell you, to tell your comrades, that if you feed us, you must be prepared to join us.”
Somehow Ivy nodded. “I am so sorry, sir.”
The guard scowled at her and shoved the officer back into formation.
The formation that kept marching. Dozens—no, hundreds of men. Many with makeshift bandages. With rags in place of shoes.
Ivy kept her chin high, kept giving the men the same look of sorrow mixed with respect, even as tears tingled on her cheeks.
She’d been trained to soothe suffering. And now she could do nothing at all.
Ivy turned onto King Street, delayed by who knew how long, aching from the memory of the bedraggled Todt workers.
In the once-thriving shopping area, too many shops were boarded up—those that sold goods that were no longer attainable. Most other shops were open only three days a week, with queues to buy the weekly ration of six ounces of meat and three ounces of sugar and two ounces of butter.
After King Street turned to Queen Street, Ivy locked her bicycle to a bench, a necessity with rampant thefts, and she removed her medical bag. Losing that would be even worse than losing her bicycle. She could never replace the instruments.
Inside Carter’s Chemist’s, Miss de Ferrers was working today, rather than Mr. Carter.