A Place of Hiding

“Jealousy and spite,” Graham Ouseley declared. “They sold us out for that as well. Old scores settled by whispering a name to the devil Nazis.”


He was glad to tell them that most of the time it was a foreigner betraying someone: a Dutchman living in St. Peter Port who became wise to someone’s hidden wireless, an Irish fisherman from St. Sampson who witnessed a midnight landing of a British boat down near Petit Port Bay. While there was no excusing that and even less forgiving it, the fact that the quisling was foreign born made the betrayal less of an evil than when a native islander did it. But that happened as well: a Guernseyman betraying his fellows. That was what had happened to gift.



“Gift?” Deborah asked. “What sort of gift?”

Not gift, G.I.F.T., Graham Ouseley informed them, an acronym for Guernsey Independent From Terror. It was the island’s underground news-sheet and the people’s only source of truth about Allied activities during the war. This news was meticulously gleaned at night from contraband radio receivers that were tuned to pick up the BBC. The facts of the war were typed up on single sheets of paper in the wee hours by candlelight behind the shrouded windows of the vestry of St. Pierre-du-Bois, and then distributed by hand to trusted souls who were hungry enough for word of the outside world that they were willing to risk Nazi interrogation and the aftermath of Nazi interrogation in order to have it.

“Quislings among them,” Graham Ouseley declared. “Should’ve known, the rest of us. Should’ve taken more care. Should never’ve trusted. But they were of us. ” He thumped his chest with his fist. “You understand me? They were of us. ”

The four men responsible for G.I.F.T. were arrested upon the word of one of these quislings, he explained. Three of those men died as a result of that arrest—two in prison and the other attempting escape. Only one of the men—Graham Ouseley himself—survived two hellish years incarcerated before being freed, one hundred pounds of skin, bones, lice, and tuberculosis. But they destroyed more than just the creators of G.I.F.T., those quislings who betrayed them, Ouseley said. They informed on those who sheltered British spies, on those who hid escaped Russian prisoners, on those whose only “crime” was to chalk a V for victory on the cycle-seats of Nazi soldiers as they drank at night in hotel bars. But the quislings were never forced to pay for their misdeeds, and that’s what rankled with those who’d suffered at their hands. People died, people were executed, people went to prison and some never returned. For more than fifty years, no one spoke up publicly to name the names of those responsible.

“Blood on their hands,” Graham Ouseley declared. “I mean to make them pay. Oh, they’ll fight against it, won’t they? They’ll deny it hot and loud. But when we spread out the proof...And tha’s how I want to do it, you two. Names first in the paper, and let ’em deny the whole thing and get themselves advocates to set things right. Then the proof comes, and we watch them squirm like they damn well should’ve squirmed when Jerry finally surrendered to the Allies. That’s when all of this should’ve come out. The quislings, the bloody profiteers, the Jerrybags, and their bastard Kraut babies.”

The old man was working himself into a lather, his lips wet with spittle. Deborah began to fear for his heart as his skin took on a bluish tinge. She knew it was time to make him understand that they were not who he thought they were, which was apparently reporters come to hear his story and to print it in the local newspaper.

She said, “Mr. Ouseley, I’m terribly afraid—”

“No!” He shoved his chair back from the table with a surprising strength that sloshed the coffee from their mugs and the milk from its jug.

“You come with me if you don’t believe the story. My boy Frank and I, we’ve got us the proof, you hear that?” He struggled to his feet, and Cherokee surged up to help him. Graham shook the assistance off, however, and trundled unsteadily towards the front door. Once again, there seemed nothing for it but to follow him, to mollify him, and to hope that his son arrived back at the water mill before the old man suffered from his exertions.