Meeting slave workers at the Bean Depot

Edited Transcript of Margaret Le Cras interviewing Mrs Evelyn Bryce

(continued from “Horticultural work during the German Occupation of Guernsey”)

Apart from that I can’t remember much about what we did there, but when we went to the depot, the people who grew the beans, brought them, and the place we went to was the same Irene that I used to go[ ] before, and it was her father’s greenhouses, so he was more or less in charge, and there was I suppose a dozen girls, we’d take our cushions, but there was no heating, it was so cold in the winter, so we’d do some exercises to warm up, and we’d sing, you know, some of the girls, we were church goers, so we’d have sung hymns, choruses, so we had fun.
I tell you what, I was specially friendly with this Irene whose father had the depot, and the beans that were damaged, we had boxes to put them in as we shelled them, but if they were damaged they couldn’t be used for sowing, then we could put them in our bags, little marks…
So, one day, some foreign labourers saw us, and came in the greenhouse. They looked terrible, and their feet were all in rags.We were so sorry for them. Some of them were Dutch, I don’t know if they were all Dutch, so we were. The girls said, why don’t you go, take Irene for a little walk down the garden, and if the foreigners come we’ll give them some beans, so that Irene wouldn’t know. We agreed, off we went, and when we came back the foreigners were there, and the girls had given them some beans, but the pockets were broken, and the beans were falling out all over the place. It was really awful, but I never heard, there was no reprimand
One day, when these foreign workers came, I had some sweets with me, because I was the only one, I think, who used to go to queue for sweets, and they wanted some. I said, well you’ve got to sing for them, I don’t know how we made them understand, perhaps some of them did speak English, so they sang, to get a sweet, so I gave them a sweet. There were three or four of them,

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