A Place of Hiding

Guy hadn’t disagreed. There were no extreme elevations on Guernsey save perhaps for the cliffs on the south end of the island, which dropped precipitously down to the Channel. But the presence of the Channel itself with its salt-laden air made the cliffs unsuitable as a place to which the collection could be moved...i f they even could find a building in which to house it, an unlikely prospect.

Guy hadn’t suggested the museum at once. He hadn’t at first comprehended the breadth of the Ouseleys’ collection. He’d come to the Talbot Valley as the result of an invitation extended by Frank at the coffee-and-biscuits conclusion of a presentation at the historical society. They’d assembled above the market square of St. Peter Port, in the old assembly room that had long since been usurped by an extension to the Guille-Alles Library. There they gathered to listen to a lecture about the 1945 Allied investigation of Hermann G?ring, which had turned out to be a dry recitation of the facts gleaned from something called The Consolidated Interrogation Report. Most of the members were nodding off a mere ten minutes into the talk, but Guy Brouard had appeared to hang upon the speaker’s every word. This told Frank that he might be a worthwhile confederate. So few people really cared any longer about events that happened in another century. Thus, he’d approached him at the lecture’s conclusion, not knowing who he was at first and learning to his surprise that he was the gentleman who’d taken the derelict Thibeault Manor between St. Martin and St. Peter Port and engineered its renaissance as Le Reposoir. Had Guy Brouard not been an easy man to know, Frank might have exchanged a few pleasantries with him that night and gone on his way. But the truth was that Guy had displayed an interest in Frank’s avocation that Frank had found flattering. So he’d extended the invitation for a call upon Moulin des Niaux.

Guy had doubtless come thinking that the invitation was the sort of polite gesture which a dilettante makes to someone evidencing a suitable degree of curiosity about his area of dabbling. But when he’d seen the first room of boxes and crates, of shoeboxes filled with bullets and medals, of armaments half a century old, of bayonets and knives and gas masks and signaling equipment, he’d given a low, appreciative whistle and he’d settled in for a lengthy browse.

This browsing had taken more than one day. Indeed, it had taken more than one week. Guy Brouard had shown up at Moulin des Niaux for two months to sift through the contents of the two other cottages. When he’d finally said, “You need a museum for all this, Frank,” the seed had been planted in Frank’s mind.

It had seemed like a dream at the time. How odd it was to consider now that such a dream could have slowly transmuted into a nightmare. Inside the cottage, Frank went to the metal filing cabinet in which he and his father had been storing relevant wartime documents as they came across them. They had old identity cards by the dozens, ration cards, and driving permits. They had German proclamations of death for such capital offences as releasing carrier pigeons and German declarations on every conceivable topic to control the islanders’ existence. Their most prized objects were a half-dozen examples of G.I.F.T., the underground daily news-sheet that had been printed at the cost of three Guernseymen’s lives. It was these that Frank lifted out of the filing cabinet now. He carried them to a rotting cane-bottomed chair and sat, gingerly holding them on his lap. They were single sheets, typed upon onion-skin paper with as many carbons beneath them as could fit through the platen of an ancient typewriter. They were so fragile that it was nothing short of miraculous that they had survived a month, let alone more than half a century, each of them a micro-millimetre’s statement about the bravery of men who would not be cowed by Nazi proclamations and threats.

Had Frank not spent his life being schooled in the importance of history, had he not spent every one of his formative years right on into his solitary adulthood being taught the inestimable value of everything remotely related to Guernsey’s time of trial, he might have thought that only one of these sheets of wartime gossamer would suffice as a representation of a people’s resistance. But one of anything was never enough for a collector with a passion, and when that collector’s passion was for fostering remembrance and exposing truth so that never again took on a meaning that would stand the test of time, having too much or too many of any item was simply not an issue.