Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [2]
This never happened, did it? Britain won the war. History has changed.’ Ma listened to Celia’s cultured accent, the sort of voice you heard on the Home Service.
The Doctor’s voice was a whisper, there was no trace of his grin now. ‘Well, strictly speaking, according to “real”
history, you died on Hallowe’en 1913. You were three years old. A lovely young girl. I couldn’t prevent it.’ Was that a tear in his eye?
‘Stop it, you’re giving me the creeps.’
‘This isn’t a parallel universe, this isn’t an alternate timeline. History is running exactly as you know it. This is Guernsey, late December 1941. Merry Christmas, Celia.’
1 Resistance is Useless
The woman who called herself Celia Doras woke early, half-past six on the morning of 1 March 1941. She could hear planes flying overhead. Four of them, bombers, nothing out of the ordinary. They had spent the night on a bombing raid, and now as the dawn approached they were returning to the aerodrome at St Villiaze, three or four miles away. Just as the droning had died down, a second wave arrived, five or six of them this time. She pulled the sheet back and lay flat on her back, staring blindly at the ceiling, listening to them.
Everyone on Guernsey had grown used to the planes; most islanders could identify the different types by their propeller sounds. Usually, about sixty-five planes would leave during the course of the evening. Rather less returned the next morning. The islanders no longer resented them; truth be told, they hardly even noticed them.
The planes were German. It had been nearly a year since the Nazis had invaded. Celia hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen the invasion. She reached under her pillow and fished out a small hardback pocketbook. She’d been reading it the night before, and had forgotten to put it away. The title was embossed in gold letters on the damaged spine: Advice For Young Ladies. The book did contain a great deal of useful information — maps, codes and so on. One chapter, Chapter 8, recounted the events of the invasion in some detail and she’d pieced together the rest by talking to islanders.
Celia stared at herself in the mirror. She looked pale, her face sallow due to worry and rationing. No, it was more permanent than that. She was beginning to get old. She had her first wrinkles now: traces of worry lines across her forehead, crow’sfeet around her eyes. She wasn’t particularly old, but three months here had taken their toll. All the children had gone last year, all the young islanders. Something vital had been sapped. All that remained now were the middle-aged and the elderly, people waiting to die. The British government had told the Channel Islanders that because the islands weren’t of military importance there was no point committing acts of sabotage. They needn’t risk their lives, or those of their families, by organizing resistance. Could they resist anyway? There were Germans everywhere, in every house, in every shop, lining the coast, filling up the towns. In France, if you sabotaged a railway line you could be two hundred miles away before the Germans noticed. On an island only twenty-four square miles in area, there was no escape. So the islanders sat out the war — not cooperating with the Nazis any more than they were forced to. It sounded so easy. Some tried more than passive resistance. Marcel Brossier had cut a telephone line. Celia thought that she had met him a couple of times: he was a quiet man, an ordinary man. The Nazis discovered him and shot him without even the pretence of a trial. Everyone had a story like that, everyone had lost a friend. What could be done, though? The Nazis were everywhere. Young, fierce and ambitious, it was as though they’d come from another world. Celia had never been so aware of her own mortality.
Just before Christmas last year, much to the astonishment of the German authorities, Celia had come back to the islands to help her mother at the family boardinghouse, or so she claimed. Until she arrived, the full extent of the