Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [4]
Celia kept her eye on the kettle as it boiled on the stove, although she could hear them whispering about her. She carefully measured out a third of a teaspoon of coffee, just enough to flavour the water. Another advantage of living with Germans: they hadn’t confiscated the large catering jars of coffee, or the big boxes of tea leaves. Supplies were beginning to run low now, though. With a scowl, Celia realized that the Germans had each taken heaped spoonfuls for themselves. She glanced over at them, but they weren’t looking at her any longer. Someone else had come into the room.
‘Hello, Celia.’
It was Anne, her sister. She was shorter than Celia, and was a redhead. At sixteen, she was half Celia’s age. They didn’t look like sisters at all, really. Over the months, though, they’d learnt to look out for each other. Anne’s fiancé had left the islands and had joined the British Army. She hadn’t heard from him in over a year; he could be alive or dead, he could have a desk job in London or be serving in the jungles of Burma. Anne had a worn grey dressing-gown pulled tightly around her. The German boys gawped at her, and she recoiled. They were just acting like young men throughout the world would, but their uniforms gave them power, literal and psychological. Anne came over to Celia, shielding herself from the Germans. As she passed their eyes met and Anne gave a faint smile, a moment of recognition and understanding.
Anne helped her mother at the boardinghouse. Cleaning up and cooking for the Germans billeted there was a full-time job. Celia did the same sort of work, but at the ‘town hall’, what had been the Royal Hotel. After a couple of slices of toast (no butter) and a quick wash, she headed there. It was a ten-minute walk along the seafront. St Peter Port, the largest town on the island by quite some way, looked like most British seaside villages, with tiers of gaily painted hotels and shops piling up from the harbour. As might be expected, there was an odd mix of architectural styles: provincial French alongside Georgian, with a large contingent of Victorian hotels and public buildings marking the age when the islands became a tourist destination. Not forgetting the more recent concrete pill boxes and gun emplacements.
There was a strong sea breeze, although the weather looked set to improve. Celia strolled along, looking out past Castle Cornet to the open sea. There was a hazy black shape on the horizon, a German ship, probably a frigate. The sense of violence was all-pervasive: war machines filled the skies, patrolled the seas, both on and under the surface, artillery swarmed over and under the land. All along the beach German soldiers with rifles oversaw construction work.
The sea wall was being fortified by Todt workers. Slaves, as they used to be known, before slavery had been abolished over a century before. These were men from Georgia, who had been captured on the Eastern Front. They were over a thousand miles from home and all wore drab work clothes that were now little more than rags. They were undernourished, permanently on the verge of death, yet they had to work throughout the day under threat of summary execution. The Nazis considered them subhumans. All that mattered was the victory of the Reich — since all enemies of the Reich would die, it was best that they died working for the Reich. The Georgians grunted rather than spoke, never smiled and grimly accepted their fate. As Celia walked past them to work they hardly seemed human: the Germans had worked a chilling self-fulfilling prophecy. No one really knew how many slaves there were on the island — they were used, as here, to fortify the island, to work the fields and to maintain the roads. No one was entirely sure where they slept. No