Read Online The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer - Free Book Online Page B

of it, but it began, ‘Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done, to have advanced true friends?’ It isn’t. I hope, wherever she is, she has that in her mind.
    Late in 1944, it didn’t matter what time the Germans set the curfew for. Most people went to bed around five o’clock anyway to keep warm. We were rationed to two candles a week and then only one. It was very tedious, lying in bed with no light to read by.
    After D-Day, the Germans couldn’t send any supply ships from France because of the Allied bombers. So they were finally as hungry as we were—and killing dogs and cats to give themselves something to eat. They would raid our gardens, rooting up potatoes—even eating the black rotten ones. Four soldiers died eating handfuls of hemlock, thinking it was parsley.
    The German officers said that any soldier caught stealing food from our gardens would be shot. One poor soldier was caught stealing a potato. He was chased by his own people and climbed up a tree to hide. But they found him and shot him down out of the tree. Still, that did not stop them from stealing food. I am not pointing a finger at those practices, because some of us were doing the same. I think hunger makes you desperate when you wake to it every morning.
    My grandson Eli was evacuated to England when he was seven. He is home now—twelve years old, and tall—but I will never forgive the Germans for making me miss his childhood.
    I must go and milk my cow now, but I will write to you again if you like.
    I wish you good health,
    Eben Ramsey
    From Miss Adelaide Addison to Juliet
1st March 1946
    Dear Miss Ashton,
    Forgive the presumption of a letter from a person unknown to you. But a clear duty is imposed upon me. I understand from Dawsey Adams that you are to write a long article for
The Times
on the value of reading and you intend to feature the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society therein.
    I laugh.
    Perhaps you will reconsider when you learn that their founder, Elizabeth McKenna, is not even an Islander. Despite her fine airs, she is merely a jumped-up servant from the London home of Sir Ambrose Ivers, RA (Royal Academy). Surely, you know of him. He is a portrait painter of some note, though I’ve never understood why. His portrait of the Countess of Lambeth as Boadicea, lashing her horses, was unforgivable. In any event, Elizabeth McKenna was the daughter of his housekeeper, if you please.
    While Elizabeth’s mother dusted, Sir Ambrose let the child potter around in his studio, and he kept her at school long after the normal leaving time for one of her station. Her mother died when Elizabeth was fourteen. Did Sir Ambrose send her to an institution to be properly trained for a suitable occupation? He did not. He kept her with him in his home in Chelsea. He proposed her for a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art.
    Mind you, I do not say Sir Ambrose sired the girl—we know his proclivities too well to admit of that—but he doted upon her in a way that encouraged her besetting sin: lack of humility. The decay of standards is the cross of our times,and nowhere is this regrettable decline more apparent than in Elizabeth McKenna.
    Sir Ambrose owned a home in Guernsey—on the clifftops near La Bouvée. He, his housekeeper and the girl summered here when she was a child. Elizabeth was a wild thing—roaming unkempt about the island, even on Sundays. No household chores, no gloves, no shoes, no stockings. Going out on fishing boats with rude men. Spying on decent people through her telescope. A disgrace.
    When it became clear that the war was going to start in earnest, Sir Ambrose sent Elizabeth to close up his house. Elizabeth bore the brunt of his haphazard ways in this case, for, in the midst of her putting up the shutters, the German army landed on her doorstep. However, the choice to