Читать книгу The Girl from the Island - Lorna Cook - Страница 6

Guernsey, Channel Islands

1945

There is a fine line between love and hate. She had tried not to cross that line, invisible as it was, but since the Germans came, she knew she had. She stood in the harbour of St Peter Port, and looked up at the town, the shops and hotels along the waterfront, the small houses nestled together in the distance. Only a few months after the liberation of her island, she breathed in the cool air of the place she’d always called home. It looked so different now but so much was the same, since the Nazis came. Since the Nazis left.

She passed along the harbour. The swastikas were gone, along with the occupying force that had placed them there. The street signs – crude wooden structures, made to inform the Germans where things were in their own language – had been taken down. At first glance, it was almost as if the war had never happened on this small stretch of the British Isles, almost as if the Germans had never been here. Except of course they had. And what they had left behind were the enormous concrete fortifications – grey scars on the landscape – that stark reminder that the Channel Islands had been part of Hitler’s Atlantic wall, part of his island madness. But what the Nazis had left behind could never compare to what they had taken.

Passengers were disembarking from a ferryboat, tourists mostly, tentatively setting foot back in the Channel Islands; back for its famous sand, its enviable sun. She was pleased the Channel Islands once again might be seen as a glorious holiday destination, the memory of what had passed in the war bleached away with the sunshine. But that wasn’t what she saw. She wondered how long it would be before she could see it that way again – how long before she would forget.

There were some things she would never forget, such as the power of a letter. Such an innocent thing, a piece of paper, but it held so much power.

Others had written similar letters; she knew that. She’d heard whispers that during the Occupation the island’s post office workers had steamed open envelopes addressed to the Germans, knowing full well that what was inside would condemn someone: a note that there was a radio hidden under floorboards here, a gun stashed in an attic there.

The power a letter held, the damage it could do. No, she knew she would never forget that.