Liberated from Laufen and return to Guernsey

Video recording of Jack Ross interviewed by John Gaisford made on 12/3/2005
Edited transcript by J David 23/9/05

VE day or thereabouts I was in Germany, still in the camp, the Americans were in the camp with us, the American liberating army or battalion, or whatever it was, and we weren’t actually flown back for quite a time. My first trip back in a plane, the pilot apologised — it was a DC…one of the old Dakota things, a DC3, and it touched down, and took off again straight away. He said I’ve never done that before, and of course I had a chap there, all in a line down the side of the aircraft, looking down, coming over the White Cliffs of Dover, and I said “Oh, George” — he was as nervous as anything — “There’s the White Cliffs down there, George” “Oh, Oh, Oh, I don’t want to see that” Poor fellow, I don’t know what happened to him. And then I got back, I think we landed at either Stanstead — would it have been Stanstead? There were so many all around there, you know. My friend, who had been all through the Occupation, he told me that my wife had died a few days before we were liberated, because we were liberated May 3rd, and waiting then for our dear — listened to Churchill — “Our dear Channel islands…” you know. Quite a thing.

You couldn’t come straight back to Guernsey If you were important enough, Sherwill came back fairly quickly, well, he was important, He was going to be the new Bailiff wasn’t he. He was a nice chap, you know, very nice man, real gentleman. I mean, I knew him as Ambi, and he knew me as Jack, and the first time I met him after was in Le Riches’ tobacco department, I was doing tobacco and he had gone in to get his packet of fags, I suppose, and he saw me from the other end of the shop — “Jack!” — I wasn’t going to force myself on him, he might not want to talk to riff-raff like me, but he wasn’t that type of man anyway, he was like old Bill Arnold, did you know Bill Arnold, wonderful man, he was a lawyer, of course, He passed me once in Smith Street, his head was in the clouds there, he was thinking about something or other, because he wouldn’t have done that, wouldn’t have cut me, definitely not, so I didn’t take any notice of it, other people I might have done, called them jumped-up something-or-others. But Sherwill, he was a gentleman. A good camp senior, too. Then Frank Stroobant took over — or was it the other way round. No, Frank first, then Ambi came, because he had been in the First World War, and probably in the RGM, the Royal Guernsey Militia, or something like that, quite a few of them.
I was still in England when the Japanese business finished. I think that was August. I don’t know when I got back to England from Germany, I can’t time it from that. I met my wife there, in Gloucester, she had a dreadful posting to RAF Records, she was a sergeant, and she stopped me, “Aren’t you from Guernsey” sort of thing, “And how’s Vera” — that was my first wife — my little boy John was with me — he wouldn’t let me out of his sight, you know. Then I proposed to her, the second time I took her out, and we were married for fifty-seven years, she died two months ago, I nursed her for the last eight years, she was wonderful. I had noticed her the first day I came to Guernsey, overtook her going up Mount Durand, she was about fifteen, a bit younger than me, I was twenty-one when I came, I thought how skinny she was, I was walking up there with Norman Langlois who was married to Dorothy Hurrell, you know, I think they were cousins, anyway, and I said “ an awfully attractive girl, but she is not going to make old bones”. She was eighty-four when she died. I was wrong, happily. She was in the High Street on her first leave, obviously she was looking for me, but it was a real romance, really, because as I say we got married just like that, went to Sark for our honeymoon, got stranded there for a few weeks, a few days rather, I was hoping it would be weeks.

jack Ross

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