Living with the Germans - house search

The Germans came to search our house, which was maybe two or three years later I don’t know why, but they came to search the house, and they searched … they burst into the door, and went upstairs, went everywhere looking for anything, we didn’t know quite what it was they were looking for. But after they’d gone, my old grandfather said, “Oh, that’s got them”, he said. “They didn’t find my gun that was outside”, and my mother and father, they nearly had a fit, because if that had been found at that time, they would have been shot. My grandfather surely would have been, because that was the one terrible thing to keep was a gun, you can imagine going around the island with a gun, shooting perhaps the Germans. So my mother and father said, “Well look, Gramp, we can’t hand it in now; the Germans are going to think, ‘Oh, that’s strange, you’ve got a gun’, so we’ll have to all keep quiet, and you children will have to keep quiet as well. Grandpa’s hidden this gun in the sawdust in the back yard, so we’ll have to just keep quiet and hope they don’t come again.”
MOLLY BIHET

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