Dangerous Waters, page 6
They had both laughed as they knew that nothing would entice Kate away from her beloved home and friends. She was an active member of so many groups and clubs that there would be a riot if she tried to leave.
It was now lunchtime and sitting at the old table, cosy by the range, Jeanne savoured the first proper meal in her cottage. As she finished her salad, the kitchen became suffused with the smell of baking. Jeanne felt the hairs on the nape of her neck stand on end. Closing her eyes, she saw her grandmother, be-floured and aproned, beaming her big warm smile.
‘Thanks Gran,’ Jeanne whispered. The aroma receded, to be replaced by the tang of the sea coming through the window. This fresh smell induced her to go for a brisk walk on the beach.
That evening Jeanne prepared a simple stir fry to the background of Robbie Williams. Without a TV the evenings would have been lonely, but the new micro stereo she had bought at The Bridge would keep her company.
She had not read much of the latest Maeve Binchy before she started yawning. She went upstairs to bed. The bedroom now seemed much cosier. The flowers and bright new bedlinen gave it a warmth which had been lacking a few days earlier. She switched off the heater and climbed into bed. Would Guernsey be able to offer her the healing she so badly needed? She had loved it once. Perhaps the spark was still there. She hoped so. Turning over she was asleep within minutes.
Her sleep was not dreamless though. She dreamt she was a child again playing hide and seek with her parents and becoming frantic when she couldn’t find them. Suddenly they appeared, laughing and reaching out to her. With relief she threw herself into their arms, feeling safe once more.
chapter seven
High on Jeanne’s list was finding her grandmother’s recipes and family papers and she began her search the next morning. After going through the cottage collecting a hotch-potch of paperwork she piled it all onto the kitchen table.
She then remembered the attic.
Grabbing a torch she went up the ladder. It was cold and extremely dusty. Shivering, she looked around at the scattered boxes and the various articles which represented her family’s past. There was an old wooden tailor’s dummy – she had forgotten that Gran had made her own clothes ; an ancient, leather sailor’s trunk bearing the initials O.E. Le P. –(Granpa’s? she wondered); a Singer sewing machine in a solid wooden case and various boxes filled with photo albums, old clothes, pictures and children’s toys. There was also stuff from her parents’ house that had been considered worth keeping, but she wasn’t ready to look through that yet. She found some older boxes filled with assorted papers and notebooks and took them down, one at a time.
Coughing up the disturbed dust, Jeanne washed her hands and brushed off the cobwebs before carrying the boxes into the kitchen. It was becoming cluttered in there and she decided to eliminate all the papers not worth keeping. Grabbing a black sack, she went through old bills and receipts that were no longer relevant; old magazines about fishing her grandfather had accumulated over many years, so well read that they were falling apart; and the parish magazines her gran had kept which were not as well thumbed.
Thinking about this, Jeanne realised that she had rarely seen her gran reading anything. She preferred to be doing something she considered useful, like cooking or gardening and was quite dismissive of reading as a leisure activity. She had always tut-tutted when she saw Jeanne with her head buried in a book which, when she was a teenager, had been most of the time.
‘You’re not reading again, my girl, are you? You could give me a hand in the garden. The herb beds need weeding and I want some chives, sage and rosemary to make up a remedy for old Mrs Le Prevost who’s been poorly. Now, put that book down and out you go!’
‘Ok, Gran,’ Jeanne replied, reluctantly putting down the P.D. James she’d been reading and went out to the herb bed. She usually enjoyed pottering amongst the herbs and loved their scent on her hands as she picked the bunches her gran had asked for, but she had just come to a particularly gripping part of the thriller and had been loathe to break away. She sighed, anticipating the pleasure of getting back to her book later. Going back indoors she was given the rare privilege of helping Gran prepare the tincture for Mrs Le Prevost. Gran’s remedies were much sought after by elderly neighbours who were not keen on modern medicines.
Smiling at the memory, Jeanne remained thoughtful for a few more minutes. Books had been, and still were, very important to her but her gran had had a far more limited education. She had also held the traditional view that women were to run the household and raise children and not forge careers. Her daughter-in-law had met with approval by renouncing her job as soon as she had married her son, Owen.
Shaking her head, Jeanne filled the black sack with the unwanted items so that she could start sifting through the boxes from the attic. These yielded the most interesting finds yet – old notebooks with a mix of pasted in and loose pages, neatly written, in varied handwriting. They proved to be recipes in English, French and the local dialect, Guernsey French. They seemed to cover many years of cooking from both sides of the Channel. Jeanne’s heart began to race as she turned the pages. Wow! Looks like a real treasure trove, going back more than a hundred years!
For Jeanne, Guernsey French, known as ‘patois’, related to the French dialect of Normandy, was equivalent to double-dutch. It was no longer taught in schools and because most of the island children had been evacuated during the Second World War there had been little chance to pass it on to the generation now in their middle years. Only the more elderly islanders had learned it as children. They still used it occasionally among themselves, particularly when they wanted to say something unflattering about the mainlanders or much younger locals. She remembered her gran chatting to her friends in patois and unable to understand a word they were saying. Probably just as well! She grinned, putting the notebooks and loose recipes carefully to one side before looking at the other boxes.
There were a variety of papers representing her father’s childhood and youth. She glanced at everything, planning to go through them more thoroughly another time. Seeing her father’s name on the papers had made her stomach lurch. The ghosts of the past were not going to lie down quietly, she thought. Frowning, she opened another box which had been sealed long ago and was full of yellowing, handwritten letters.
Intrigued, she flipped through the envelopes and noticed that none bore any stamps so must have been hand delivered. They were all addressed, in the same handwriting, to her grandmother in her maiden name of Ozanne. She carefully opened the top letter with mixed feelings. Oh, my God, what’s this? Perhaps I shouldn’t be reading these. They’re private letters belonging to Gran. Looks like a firm hand but the English is poor, can’t really make it out. Turning to the last page she glanced at the signature – ‘Wilhelm’.
A German! Perhaps this was written during the German Occupation! That was over sixty years ago when Gran was a young woman. Mm, could Gran have had a secret past? She didn’t destroy them so perhaps she meant me to read them one day? Or maybe I’m just trying to excuse my prying!
Troubled, she paced around the kitchen, deciding to read one of the letters later.
By now it was late morning and Jeanne made herself a coffee as she flicked through her grandfather’s papers. They were mostly old receipts from the Fisherman’s Co-operative on the Castle Pier where he sold his catch. Some would be bought by the catering industry and some by housewives.
In her mind she was suddenly a little girl sitting in her grandfather’s van, intoxicated by the smell of freshly caught fish and so happy that she had been asked to help, that she was bouncing up and down in excitement.
Granpa, twinkling, turned to her, ‘Calm down, m’dear. Not sure the ol’ springs can cope with all that bouncin’. Soon be there, eh.’
When they arrived at the wholesalers he gave her a small tray of fish to carry, making her feel important.
‘There you are, lass. I’ll take the big ’un.’
She felt honour bound not to drop it and she didn’t, even though her arms ached. She walked so slowly that her grandfather had to shorten his stride to avoid bumping into her. She had passed the tray to the smiling man behind the counter. After putting down his own much heavier load, her grandfather had patted her head and said, ‘Good girl. I couldn’t have managed without you, eh.’ Jeanne had glowed with pride all the way home and couldn’t wait to tell her parents how much Granpa had needed her help.
The smell of freshly caught fish that always clung to the van and to her grandfather had remained with her over the years and whenever she now went into a fishmongers she was reminded of him, winking at her as she carried that tray.
He had died at sea, still working at seventy. His fishing boat had been caught in a sudden squall and been dashed onto the hidden rocks, notorious in these coastal waters. He had been a strong and capable sailor but had been knocked out and had been, unusually, alone. His mate had been taken ill at the last minute and her grandfather had not wanted to miss collecting a good catch of lobsters, fetching premium prices at that time.
After his death Jeanne and her mother had spent more and more time at her gran’s cottage and less in their own house not far away. Her father, an engineer, worked abroad for weeks at a time so they were happy to be with Gran. A couple of years after Granpa’s death her father had secured a job on the island, enabling him to spend all his free time with the family he loved.
Jeanne sighed as she turned over the fragile pieces of paper which were still stirring up images of the past. She didn’t really want to throw the receipts away but was unsure what use they had, apart from being a link with the past.
As a writer she was conscious that seemingly innocuous documents might have a relevance at some time and she was beginning to toy with the idea of a story or article based on the papers now strewn over the table. Having decided that she needed proper containers and files, she went out and bought a selection from a shop in Cobo.
By the time she had sorted the papers into labelled files she was hungry and cooked herself a light lunch. After clearing away she still had a couple of hours before the builder was due and concentrated on the recipes.
The majority of these were in her grandmother’s handwriting, but she did not recognise those written in French and they looked much older. The paper was almost brown with age and the ink and writing seemed to belong to an earlier era, perhaps the 1800’s, she guessed.
Jeanne vaguely remembered being told that her gran’s family from Normandy had been connected with some famous midnineteenth century Parisian restaurateurs. They had catered to the gourmands of the city and their food had, according to legend, been of the highest standard. When the couple retired they went to live with their son who had married and moved to Normandy. It was the younger couples’ daughter and her husband who had moved to Guernsey sometime in the late 1800’s or early 1900’s, as Jeanne remembered the story.
It was thrilling to think that she might be in possession of the recipes that had originated from those Parisian restaurateurs, possibly written down by their son or granddaughter. Scanning them she hoped that her schoolgirl French would be up to translating them.
She grinned as she read ‘Daube de Boeuf Provencale’ and was able to translate it sufficiently to recognise the recipe that Molly had pinched from her mother, Janet. All the French dishes were of the classical haute cuisine style and a complete contrast to the local Guernsey dishes more usually favoured by her grandmother. She guessed that the French dishes were cooked on more formal occasions and at times when her grandparents could afford the expensive ingredients required, such as beef and wine, which had to be imported into the island.
The local dishes were based on ingredients more readily and cheaply available, such as fish, shellfish, rabbit, pigeon, chicken and eggs. Jeanne fondly remembered some of Gran’s chicken and rabbit dishes and thumbed through the recipes in her writing to try and find them. They were written in a mixture of Guernsey French and English making them difficult to follow. She read some of the headings – ‘Bouidrie d’Poulet et Legumes’, obviously something to do with chicken and vegetables – ‘Aën Pâtaï à Lapins’, rabbit perhaps? – ‘Enne Jarraië d’Haricäots’, probably the famous Guernsey Bean Jar and ‘D’Ormés Picqueläi’, something to do with ormers, a local delicacy, Jeanne guessed. She decided to ask Molly for advice on the translations.
As she was flicking through the notebooks, trying to make sense of what her gran had written, the doorbell rang and Jeanne was surprised to find that it was already half past four. She opened the door to greet Martin Brehaut and invited him in. He was of medium height and his dark hair was showing flecks of grey. His eyes darted around the kitchen as she led him through.
‘Thanks for coming so quickly, Martin, I know how busy you builders are,’ she smiled at him.
‘No problem, Jeanne. Good to see the old cottage again.’
As she looked puzzled, he went on,
‘About five years ago I did some work on the roof for your grandmother as well as one or two other little jobs she had at the time. Hope the roof’s stayed sound since then?’ He smiled hesitantly.
Hmm, Jeanne thought, a shy and honest builder. That’s a plus.
‘Yes, I think so. Shall we go round and I’ll explain what I’d like to be done?’
Martin nodded and they went from room to room while Jeanne consulted the list that Peter had drawn up. He made little comment, just nodding or shaking his head at appropriate moments as they walked round. He went up into the attic on his own and was gone so long that Jeanne was concerned that he may have knocked himself out on a low beam. Just as she was about to go up the ladder, his now much greyer head appeared in the hatchway and he came down and stood beside her.
‘Yes, it’s dry, for sure, and the beams are sound. No sign of dry rot or woodworm.’
Jeanne smiled her relief and they checked the bedrooms with Martin tapping and knocking on the walls and ceilings as they went round. As she opened the door to the little bedroom she waited for a reaction from him but none came, he just tapped and knocked as before. They went outside so that Martin could have a good look at the walls and roof.
‘Can see a few tiles that’ve slipped and the gutter’s leaking in places,’ he said as he pointed to rusty stains on the walls and down the drainpipe.
‘Best to replace the lot with black plastic and get rid of the old iron ones,’ he added. Jeanne nodded her agreement and they went round inspecting the windows and doors, which were all wooden and weathered but still sound. When they had checked everything off the list Jeanne asked him if he wanted a cup of tea but he shook his head.
‘Best get going, Jeanne. Lots to do tonight. I’ll work out some figures for you by next week and drop ’em in. Need to talk to my plumber and electrician first, though.’ He nodded at the cottage, ‘Be good to see the old place come alive again! Mrs Le Page was a nice ol’ dear but she wasn’t as bothered about the cottage as the garden, eh?’
‘No, she wasn’t, but at least she kept it dry and in one piece.’
Martin nodded and left, bearing his copy of the list of works.
Jeanne decided that she, at least, needed a cup of tea and switched on the kettle. As she stood waiting for it to boil she thought about Martin Brehaut. She had liked his quietness and the fact that he hadn’t bombarded her with lots of extra work that he considered necessary. He had accepted that she only wanted the basic professional work doing and that she would do the finishing touches herself and would source her own fittings. He had also offered her his builder’s discount on sanitary fittings and tiles – another plus.
After she had finished her tea Jeanne phoned the Ogiers. Peter answered.
‘Jeanne, I’m glad you phoned, I’d been wondering how you are.
Staying warm?’
‘Yes, very warm, thanks. But it sure is a messy job cleaning out those fires every day. Makes you appreciate the wonders of central heating! Martin Brehaut came round today and I was quite impressed with him. I should get his quote by next week and then I’ll have to chat up the bank manager.’ She paused. ‘Is Molly there, Peter? I’d like a quick word if she is.’
Molly came to the phone and Jeanne told her about the papers she had been going through. She mentioned the recipes and the problems with the Guernsey French.
‘Do you know anyone who could translate them for me?’
Molly thought for a moment and answered ‘Yes, I might do. There’s a Mrs Le Maitre who, like us, is a member of La Societé Guernesiaise and is fluent in the patois. I could give her a ring and ask her. Is there much to translate?’
‘About thirty recipes, I think. But they’re all quite short and some are partly in English, too. I’m trying to translate the French recipes which are a bit easier but if I get stuck would you give me a hand? Your French was pretty good if I remember rightly.’
‘Yes, of course. I’d love to see the recipes anyway, particularly if they’re as good as the Daube de Boeuf Provencale. How exciting! Perhaps you could write a cookery book, Jeanne!’
‘Mm, perhaps. Hadn’t thought of that. Have to see how they turn out in English and if the ingredients are easily available.’
She tingled as her writer’s buzz was stirred.
‘There’s something else, Molly. I’ve found a number of letters written to my grandmother before she was married and they’re from a German! Do you know anything about Gran’s past, perhaps during the Occupation?’
‘No, I don’t. Your grandparents were very private people and your father never said anything. Do you think these are love letters then?’ Jeanne heard the disbelief in Molly’s voice.
‘Well, at first glance I certainly think so! The English isn’t very good though so I’ll have to read them more thoroughly to be sure. There’s about forty of them so I think they must have been, at the least, very good friends! He was called Wilhelm.’
‘Heavens! It certainly sounds as if there was something going on. A number of local women did have German lovers during the Occupation and some even had babies. A few married after the war although I don’t think many stayed here. I suppose it would have been awkward for them and any children. Well, I’m all agog now! I love mysteries – hope you’ll keep me informed!’
