A Place of Hiding

“Nothing wrong with my legs. I c’n stand with the best of them. Had to do that when the Krauts were here. Stand still and look like you’re queuing for meat. Not passing ’long the news, no sir. No radio receiver in your dung hill, son. Look like you’d just a’soon heil Mr. Dirty Moustache as say God save the King, and they didn’t bother you. So you could do what you liked. If you were careful.”


“I remember that, Dad,” Frank said patiently. “I remember your telling me about it.” Despite his father’s protest, he lowered him onto the toilet seat, where he began to pat his body dry. As he did so, he listened with some concern to Graham’s breathing, waiting for it to return to normal. Congestive heart failure, his doctor had said. There’s medication, naturally, and we’ll put him on it. But truth to tell, at his advanced age, it’s only a matter of time. It’s an act of God, Frank, that he’s lived this long. When he’d first received the news, Frank had thought, No. Not now. Not yet and not until. But now he was ready to let his father go. He’d long ago realised how lucky he was to have had him around well into his own sixth decade, and while he’d hoped to have Graham Ouseley alive some eighteen months longer, he’d come to understand—with a grief that felt like a net from which he could never escape—that it was just as well this was not to be.

“Did I?” Graham asked, and he screwed up his face as he sorted through his memory. “Did I tell you all that afore, laddie? When?”

Two or three hundred times, Frank thought. He’d been listening to his father’s World War II stories since his childhood, and most of them he could repeat by heart. The Germans had occupied Guernsey for five years, preparatory to their foiled plan to invade England, and the deprivations the populace had endured—not to mention the myriad ways they had attempted to thwart German aims on the island—had long been the stuff of his father’s conversation. While most children nursed from their mother’s breasts, Frank had long suckled at the teat of Graham’s reminiscence. Never forget this, Frankie. Whatever else happens in your life, my boy, you must never forget.

He hadn’t, and unlike so many children who might have grown weary of the tales their parents told them on Remembrance Sunday, Frank Ouseley had hung upon his father’s words and had wished he’d managed to get himself born a decade earlier so that even as a child he could have been part of that troubled and heroic time.

They had nothing to match it now. Not the Falklands or the Gulf— those abbreviated, nasty little conflicts that were fought about next to nothing and geared to stimulate the populace into flag-waving patriotism—and certainly not Northern Ireland, where he himself had served, ducking sniper fire in Belfast and wondering what the hell he was doing in the middle of a sectarian struggle promoted by thugs who’d been taking murderous pot shots at each other since the turn of the last century. There was no heroism in any of that because there was no single enemy who could be identified and against whose image one could fling himself and die. They weren’t like World War II.

He steadied his father on the toilet seat and reached for his clothes, which lay in a neatly folded stack on the edge of the basin. He did the laundry himself, so the undershorts and the vest weren’t as white as they might have been but, as his father’s eyesight was growing steadily worse, Frank was fairly certain Graham wouldn’t notice.

Dressing his dad was something he did by rote, always easing his father into his clothing in the exact same order. It was a ritual that he had once found reassuring, giving a sameness to his days with Graham that made the promise, however false, that those days would continue indefinitely. But now he watched his father warily, and he wondered if the catch in his breath and the waxy nature of his skin presaged an end to their time together, a time that had now exceeded fifty years. Two months ago he would have quailed at that thought. Two months ago all he wanted was enough time to establish the Graham Ouseley Wartime Museum so his father could proudly cut the ribbon on its doors on the morning it finally opened. The passage of sixty days had changed everything unrecognisably, though, and that was a pity because gathering every memento that represented the years of German occupation on the island had been the mortar of Frank’s relationship with his father for as long as he could remember. It was their shared life’s work and their mutual passion, done for a love of history and a belief that the present and future populations of Guernsey should be educated about what their forebears had endured. That their plans would likely come to nothing now was something which Frank didn’t want his father to know just yet. Since Graham’s days were numbered, there seemed no sense in dashing a dream that he would not even have had in the first place had Guy Brouard not walked into their lives.

“Wha’s up for today?” Graham asked his son as Frank pulled the tracksuit trousers up round his shriveled bum. “ ’Bout time to walk the construction site, i’n’t it? Breaking earth any day now, a’n’t they, Frankie?