Should We Evacuate? Molly Bihet

SHOULD WE EVACUATE?

My grandfather had been born in the house that we were living in, and he definitely wasn’t going to move out for any Germans. He was going to stay put. Now, he was elderly and he’d just lost his wife my Gran, so at the time my mother felt she had to look after him. My uncle was living with us as well, and he was a cripple; he’d been injured in the First World War and he had a bullet still in his spine, and he had difficulty walking.

My mother wanted us children to go, and my father said, “Well, you take the girls; go down the harbour”, as we lived so close to the harbour, “You take the girls down, go across on the boat to the mainland.” But, you know, that was a terrible worry for my mother and for fathers, and everybody in Guernsey, because we had never been anywhere before the war; I don’t even remember going to Herm or Sark or Jersey. I mean, we just stayed at home, and we didn’t have the holidays that everybody has now. So it was a worry, and we went down to the harbour three times, my sister and I; my sister was crying to go on the big boats that were down there waiting for the children, but I was crying to stay with my father, because I wanted to stay at home. So you can imagine what it was like, but three times we went down with our little cases, and three times we came back, because my mother wasn’t allowed to travel with us, with the schools. She could have gone independently with the school but I was at a different school to my sister, so we would have had to go on different boats.
MOLLY BIHET

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