Part 48
I first visited Jersey in the Channel Islands in 1938, at the age of 2. Unlike many other people who cannot remember that far back, I do have a few memories of that time. My parents decided to leave Weybridge in Surrey, England to live in Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, close to the French coast of Normandy.
It is a predominantly English-speaking island. Historically, it was originally part of the Duchy of Normandy, but when the Normans invaded England in 1066 and their Dukes became the Kings of England, Normandy fell under the English king’s control.
In the 13th-century, Normandy was lost by England and the ducal title of Normandy was surrendered to France. However, the Channel Islands remained under the auspices of the British Crown. Today, the islands form a British Crown Dependency.
Jersey, the largest island, became a popular holiday resort with beautiful scenery, a moderate climate and its own quaint culture. My Dad had thoughts of setting up a business there. We had a house in St. Brelade’s Bay a few miles from the capital St. Helier. It was a beautiful part of the island, and I still have some memories of the place. There was the bizarre incident when my father decided to build a canvas roof for my pedal car. Sadly, I only used it once because I had cut a corner in the garden and ripped part of the canvas. My old man, who would have a history of not letting me touch things like my own toys, promptly took the pedal car away and gave it to some “more deserving” child.
On the 1st of July 1940, the Germans invaded the Channel Islands and occupied them for the rest of the war. There was some advanced warning and many families scrambled to get back to the UK. In fact, my mother and I were on the second to last ship out of Jersey. My Dad was on the last ship, the normal cross-channel ferry “Isle of Sark,” with 647 other men whose wives and children had preceded them. He told us later that they had seen the German fleet approaching the islands as they steamed away in the opposite direction.
In 1956, at the age of 20, having returned to the UK from South Africa, I quit my job as a farm laborer in Pulborough in Sussex and joined my pal Alan Louw, who had recently arrived from Namibia, to go on a canoe trip around Europe. We had already purchased two collapsible Kayaks from a company in Twickenham. In the first of our amazingly unrealistic ideas of how to get to Europe, we bought ferry tickets to Jersey, thinking that it might be possible to canoe the 19 miles from the island to the French mainland.
After buying our tickets, I was left with about five shillings. Alan had a little more. We landed at St. Helier, the capital, and planned to spend the night somewhere in the countryside – in sleeping bags. We caught a bus to take us out of the town. As it drove along the shorefront, we spotted a tiny island just off the shore. It was probably no more that about 30 feet by 20 feet in size, but it seemed like a perfect spot for us to spend the night. We left the bus and walked down to a small beach, assembled our canoes and paddled the few yards to “our” island.
We both slept like logs until the sound of footsteps awoke us. I peered out of my sleeping bag and, to my horror, saw at least a dozen people walking all over “our” island. The tide had gone out and it was now attached to the main island of Jersey. A few moments later, a dignified, elderly lady approached us and said mildly, “Good morning. Just to let you know I happen to own this island…and anyway, as you can see, it’s not such a good place to sleep when the tide goes out!”
We apologized and explained that we needed to get a job before we could afford any other accommodation. She gave us a big smile and replied, “Perhaps I can help you. My house is just a few yards away and I happen to be the leader of the local Girl Guides on the island. I have a nice tent that we could put up on my lawn and you can stay there until you’ve sorted yourselves out.” We thought we’d died and gone to heaven, and we completely forgave her for not including a couple of Girl Guides to go with the tent.
At any event, we spent our entire time in Jersey sleeping in the tent. She was quite the sweetest and most generous person we had met since our travels began. She continually cooked little goodies like rhubarb pie for us to eat. We managed to scrape together enough food to cook on our Primus camp stove, but her beautifully cooked little additions were most welcome.
We went back into St. Helier and asked around for jobs. We were told that a popular cafe in town was looking for helpers. We presented ourselves to the owner, who asked if by any miracle we knew anything about the new coffee machine he had just bought, as no one there knew how to work it. It turned out that it was one of the early Gaggia espresso machines that produced the new Italian sensation of the 1950s, the cappuccino. Once again, luck was on our side. Both of us had spent some time working in London coffee bars where the cappuccino was all the rage.
The owner of the St. Helier cafe was ecstatic. We started right away. Within days, word of the new Gaggia machine spread around town. There were queues reaching right down the street to sample this new coffee sensation. We worked our butts off but did get some free time once we had trained other staff to work the Gaggia machine.
To cap it all, we went down to the main beach one day to have a swim and I spotted someone I had dated previously in England, sunbathing with a number of other girls. It turned out that, although she was a trained ballet dancer, she would take other dancing jobs, especially in summer shows that travelled to interesting places like Jersey. Alan quickly teamed up with one of the other dancers and the four of us had a fun time until the girls left a couple of weeks later.
Meanwhile, we had established that it would be simply too dangerous to paddle our canoes across to France. We were told by locals that heavy seas and dangerous currents would make it reckless in the extreme to attempt a canoe crossing. We continued to work in the coffee bar, but also looked around for other ways of reaching the nearby mainland.
Once again, our wonderful hostess came to the rescue. She had the good idea of introducing us to the editor of the Times of St. Helier, which provided the main source of news on the island. The impressive-looking gentleman took us to lunch and was intrigued by our story of how we had travelled from Namibia, in my case by working my way across on a cargo ship, then working in London and elsewhere, and how we managed to photograph a map of the waterways of Europe. We added that the idea was to get as far as, from memory, Prague in then-Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic).
The editor printed a glowing story of us as intrepid adventurers needing a way to get across to France. Days later, the St. Helier Yacht Club contacted us to say that two of the yachts in the annual St. Helier/St. Malo (in Normandy) yacht race were prepared to take us aboard and drop us off on the French mainland.
Saying goodbye to our wonderful hostess and the coffee bar owner, we each boarded a separate yacht. Thankfully, they did not expect me to crew on my boat, as within minutes I was seasick and disappeared onto a bunk below decks. Despite my useless contribution to the race, the yacht I was on managed to win the race. The skipper and crew were so delighted that they insisted that Alan and I remain with them for a couple more days before we started our grand adventure in Europe.
My youth was a time of adventure and wonder at the world around me. How terribly sad that today’s youth have been consigned to a world that is deemed to be dangerous and heading towards some kind of global oblivion. Of course, most of that is rubbish but it has confined today’s youth to much smaller goals and lesser spaces.
Thankfully, there is at least one bright spark on the horizon, the pending new adventures of ExoBrain, as it will bring order to the chaotic state of the digital world. It will also provide the promise of good clean, honest communication, that I only now dimly remember from the heady days of my youth.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.