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MARY CHAMBERLAIN is a novelist and historian. Her debut novel, The Dressmaker of Dachau, was published in 18 countries. She is the author of non-fiction books on women’s history, and Caribbean history including Fenwomen, the first book published by Virago Press. She lives in London.

ALSO BY MARY CHAMBERLAIN:

Fiction

The Mighty Jester

The Dressmaker of Dachau

Non-fiction

Empire and Nation-building in the Caribbean: Barbados 1937 – 1966

Family Love in the Diaspora: Migration
and the Anglo Caribbean Experience

Narratives of Exile and Return

Growing Up in Lambeth

Old Wives’ Tales: The History of Remedies, Charms and Spells

Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village

Title

THE HIDDEN

Mary Chamberlain

Author’s Note

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The German invasion of the British Channel Islands began on 30 June 1940 and was completed with the surrender of Sark on 4 July 1940. All but twenty of the residents of Alderney had been evacuated to mainland Britain, along with many men of military age, and some women and children, from Jersey and Guernsey. The islands were not liberated until 9 May 1945. They were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied during the Second World War.

The governors of Guernsey and Jersey had been recalled to London shortly before the Germans invaded, and their responsibilities handed to the bailiffs, Alexander Coutanche in Jersey and Victor Carey in Guernsey, with instructions to continue administration of the island under the German authorities.

Between September 1942 and February 1943, residents who had been born in Britain were deported to internment camps in France and Germany. They did not all survive the war. Those Jews remaining on the islands (most, but not all, had been able to evacuate before the German invasion) were also deported in the same period to France and then to concentration camps in Germany or Poland, where many were murdered.

With no hinterland in which to hide and no assistance from London, resistance in the Channel Islands was limited to protests and acts of defiance. In Jersey there was a clandestine network of safe houses for escaped prisoners, organised by Norman Le Brocq, a member of the Communist Party who also distributed leaflets encouraging mutiny within the German forces. Some individuals engaged in clandestine protests like the ‘V for Victory’ daubings, or secreting notes disclaiming Hitler into German possessions, and a few clergymen protected members of the outlawed Salvation Army church; Charles Rey, the Jesuit priest, used his geological collection to manufacture crystal sets after the confiscation of wirelesses in 1942.

Islanders charged with resistance were also deported or, after August 1944, imprisoned locally.

Prologue

PROLOGUE

St Helier, Jersey: June 1985

The chequered marble floor needed a scrub. Her heels clicked as she crossed it, echoed in the hollow house. The vast oak staircase was still there, though the balustrades were dull and dusty, the ruby carpet threadbare on the tread, the stair rods covered in verdigris. To her left was the officers’ bar, where she’d first heard ‘Lili Marleen’ being played on the gramophone.