Spring-Summer Pure Jersey Part 1 with adverts:jersey Cover AW

Life and
Liberty
Jersey’s experiences during World War Two have left
enduring memories. When your liberty is taken away,
you don’t forget in a hurry. Broadcaster Sue Cook, who
has presented everything from the Holiday programme to
Radio 4’s popular Making History, looks at how the Jersey
of today remembers all its yesterdays.
22 pureJersey
LIBERATION FESTIVITIES LIBERATION SQUARE, ST HELIER
to Jersey – the ideal
wartime holiday resort!’ exhorted
‘Come
the brochures. ‘The bays with
their eternal sands, sea and sunshine
together produce an atmosphere of
peaceful tranquillity…’
It was May 1940. In Europe, World War
Two was well underway. By contrast,
Jersey’s sandy beaches remained bathed in
quiet sunshine. There was no reason to
expect otherwise. After all, the First World
War had passed the Channel Islands by.
Why would the second be any different?
‘Happily, our island is far removed from the
theatre of war,’ the brochure went on to
say. If only. Six weeks later, on July 1st,
1940, that ‘peaceful tranquillity’ was
shattered when the German Luftwaffe
bombed St Helier. Two more days and
Hitler’s forces had landed. The island was
under German rule for the best part of the
next five years. Deliverance arrived on May
9th 1945, the day after VE Day, when the
British Navy sailed into St Helier. It was an
occasion of such relief that, more than 60
years on, the annual Liberation Day
festivities on May 9th are still hugely
important on the island.
Not one to miss a good celebration, I arrive
the morning before the big day. I am booked
into the famous Pomme d’Or Hotel,
headquarters for Hitler’s Navy during the
Occupation. It stands in Liberation Square
and I stop to admire the striking memorial
statue depicting the moment occupation
became liberation: seven bronze figures – six
islanders and a British soldier – triumphantly
holding aloft a giant Union Jack.
An estate car pulls up with a trailer loaded
with chairs. Volunteers busy themselves
setting them out in rows. In front of them a
stage is being assembled – the focal point
of tomorrow’s ceremony when the guest of
honour will be His Royal Highness the Duke
of Kent. The party atmosphere is already
beginning to build.
From my room at the Pomme d’Or
overlooking the square and harbour, I’ll
have a grandstand view of tomorrow’s
proceedings. No time to unpack now, I’m
due to meet Tom Bunting, one of Jersey’s
Blue Badge guides and an expert on the
island’s wartime heritage.
We meet at the appropriately named
Gunsite Café, a converted German-built
concrete command post overlooking sandy
St Aubin’s Bay. Its tranquil pale-blue décor,
chalk-written menu boards and sea view
make it hard to visualise its warlike
function. Over fresh orange juice and
home-baked carrot cake Tom tells me that
most of the old German bunkers and gun
emplacements are still in evidence. Instead
of destroying them, the ever-practical and
resourceful islanders have put them to
good use. One, filled with sea-water, is a
storehouse for freshly caught lobsters.
Others serve as a turbot farm and a
museum filled with relics and artefacts
from the Occupation. Yet another has
become a cycle hire shop.
Similarly, the concrete sea-walls the Germans
built all round the island are still doing their job
so efficiently that there’s no need to replace
them. As I discover later in the day, these and
other wartime relics have a strange beauty
all of their own, their presence amongst
sea-cliffs and headlands fusing brutality with
beauty much in the same way as a medieval
castle in a mountain setting.
Later, Tom promises, he’ll show me the
Corbière Radio Tower on the west coast,
once a German observation post, now
converted into a six-storey holiday home
with stunning 360-degree views across
ocean and field. When I see it I can’t help
thinking that it mirrors its near neighbour,
the Corbière Lighthouse, a famous Jersey
landmark on the rocks below. If so, it’s by
happy accident – I doubt that the Germans
planned it that way.
But first, Tom’s going to take me on his
‘Living with the Enemy’ walk, which proved
an instant hit with Jersey’s visitors when he
introduced it in 2006. It’s a two-mile
wooded stroll from the Gunsite Café to the
astonishing Jersey War Tunnels (more on
these later). We set off along an idyllic
country lane, crossing a mill stream before
finding a wooded trail almost hidden
between the trees. As we walk, Tom talks
about the harsh reality of life for the people
of Jersey under German rule.
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