91Čȱ¬

Mrs Stella Le Tissier interviewed by Margaret Le Cras 25/4/05
Edited transcript of recording

Mrs Le Tissier. So, wait a minute - Slave labourers. Ah, those poor slave labourers. I felt sorry for them. They used to come up in lorries, up the road. As I said, there was no trees in front of our house, it was only if I was looking nearly straight out, in the front, you know, straight in the road, we weren’t far from the road, but we could see, and I used to look through the window at home and see them go up in the lorry.
They were going up the hill to build fortifications where the — I don’t know, now, in French we call it Les Corvas, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, that’s Les Corvaies, on Pleinmont, but they say Pleinmont now, they never say Les Corvas. And I looked in my French dictionary, and Les Corvaies is a place where people have got a lot of fields and do work in. Well you see that was the thing before the war, we had two farms, Mr Sarre’s farm and Mr Le Quesne’s farm, and Mr Sarre that grew vegetables and had fields, and of course it was all in Les Corvas, so I don’t know what they call it in English now, they just say Pleinmont. But that was the fortifications, and where the fortification is built, that was Les Corvas. And I don’t mind what they say, when I hear them say Pleinmont, but its Les Corvas. And during the Occupation my brother made friends with slave labourers, because they were at the Imperial , you see, and ah, they were hungry, and they used to look for places to go to, and Ralph told them — you could see they were gentlemen, you know, they weren’t riff-raff, you know, but anyway, they came up. There was Gerit, there was Yacob, which is Jacob, and there was Tony. They were lovely boys, and when they used to come in home, because my mother perhaps was mending, perhaps reading, and Dad was, well we still had our wirelesses, this was 41, 42,
And when the boys used to come in, they used to come, and they used to go — manners you see, they used to go to Mum “Good night, miss” We wanted to laugh! But they were lovely, and they used to listen to the Dutch National Anthem, before the news, - before they gave the English news, they used to sing the Dutch National Anthem, the French National Anthem, the Polish National Anthem, and the English National Anthem, I don’t know if people know that, but that’s right. It’s never been mentioned. But we were there, and I know it’s true. And they used to listen to the news, and Mum —well we weren’t too bad for rations — used to make them a cup of tea, because we still had tea, and perhaps she’d bake a little cake, we came on rations, but we weren’t too bad, when they came.
They went about February or March, and they took our addresses and they were going to write, we never heard from them, and we think, we think, after I read something and heard something on the news, there was a boat with evacuees on, not evacuees, with slave labourers on, and it sunk beween France and Guernsey. And this Yacob he stopped coming home, and we asked the boys why, Oh well, he’s gone to Mr Tostevin’s, he’s gone up to a house, it was a Mr Tostevin that lived, because he has more to eat there. You see, we didn’t take offence, because we were glad. But they were lovely lads. And then, of course, you know…
I………. Did a lot of people in that area take them in, in the evenings?
Mrs Le Tissier. Well I only know this Mr Tostevin from the Portelette, and us, and there might have been others, I don’t know, buts that all I know of.
I………. Where did they sleep? Where did they live, like?
Mrs Le Tissier. In the Imperial Hotel. And when we used to go , when we passed round there, you’d see them queueing with their little cans, and they said they hardly had anything. And they used to say, if my parents saw me, what would they think. But you see it came worse, we had the [veg?] that was the [ ] of it, you know. But anyway. Ah. I’ll tell you about this slave worker, in Town, this was in 1942, I was with my aunt, because we didn’t go a lot on our own to Town, you know, we was [ ] because we passed the airport, and you had to be careful, you know. Anyway, we were in Town and went to Maison Carré and had a cup of tea, and all of a sudden we heard the windows shaken, and we all went to get out of the shop, and Mrs Plummer said “Go on, come on, come round here” — I don’t know what she had behind there, it was a sort of little shelter they’d made, and we all went in there. Then it stopped, and we went out, and there was a slave worker — I can see him as well as anything — in the Arcade, by where Creasey has got the Men’s shop now, and he was jumping “Oh the English have come, the English have come, the war’s finished, the English have come”. Oh poor thing, this was in 42! I’ve never forgotten it, and I don’t know what happened to him, but I’ll never forget it, he was so excited! “The English have come, the English have come”. But Auntie and I came straight home.

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