Free The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer Page A

the way I did. He wanted only her grazing land for his cows. So I thought, If it’s rhymes the Widow Hubert wants, I will find me some.
    I went to see Mr Fox in his bookshop and asked for some love poetry. He didn’t have many books left by that time—people bought them to burn, and when he finally caught on, he closed his shop for good—so he gave me some fellow named Catullus. He was a Roman. Do you know the kind of things he said in verse? I knew I couldn’t say those words to a nice lady.
    He did hanker after one woman, Lesbia, who spurned him after taking him into her bed. I don’t wonder she did so—he did not like it when she petted her downy little sparrow. Jealous of a little bird, he was. He went home and took up his pen to write of his anguish at seeing her cuddle the little birdy to her bosom. He took it hard, and he never liked women after that and wrote mean poems about them.
    He was a tight one too. Do you want to see a poem he wrote when a fallen woman charged him for her favours—poor lass. I will copy it out for you.
    Is that battered strumpet in her senses, who asks me for a thousand sesterces?
    That girl with the nasty nose?
    Ye kinsmen to whom the care of the girl belongs,
    Call together friends and physicians; the girl is insane.
    She thinks she is pretty.
    Those are love tokens? I told my friend Eben I never saw such spiteful stuff. He said to me I had just not read the right poets. He took me into his cottage and lent me alittle book of his own. It was the poetry of Wilfred Owen. He was an officer in the First World War, and he knew what was what and called it by its right name. I was there, too, at Passchendaele, and I knew what he knew, but I could never put it into words for myself.
    Well, after that, I thought there might be something to this poetry after all. I began to go to meetings, and I’m glad I did, else how would I have read the works of William Wordsworth—he would have stayed unknown to me. I learnt many of his poems by heart.
    Anyway, I did win the hand of the Widow Hubert—my Nancy. I got her to go for a walk along the cliffs one evening, and I said, ‘Lookie there, Nancy. The gentleness of Heaven broods o’er the sea—Listen, the mighty Being is awake.’ She let me kiss her. She is now my wife.
    Yours truly,
    Clovis Fossey
    P.S. Mrs Maugery lent me a book last week. It’s called
The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935
. They let a man named Yeats make the choosings. They shouldn’t have. Who is he—and what does he know about verse?
    I hunted all through that book for poems by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. There weren’t any—not one. And do you know why not? Because this Mr Yeats said—he said, ‘I deliberately chose NOT to include any poems from World War I. I have a distaste for them. Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.’
    Passive Suffering? Passive Suffering! I could have hit him. What ailed the man? Lieutenant Owen, he wrote a line, ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.’ What’s passive about that, I’d like to know?That’s exactly how they do die. I saw it with my own eyes, and I say to hell with Mr Yeats.
    From Eben to Juliet
10th March 1946
    Dear Miss Ashton,
    Thank you for your letter and your kind questions about my grandson, Eli. He is the child of my daughter, Jane. Jane and her newborn baby died in hospital on the day that the Germans bombed us, the 28th of June, 1940. Eli’s father was killed in North Africa in 1942, so I have Eli in my keeping now.
    Eli left Guernsey on the 20th of June along with the thousands of babies and schoolchildren who were evacuated to England. We knew the Germans were coming and Jane worried for his safety here. The doctor would not let Jane sail with the children, the baby’s birth being so close.
    We did not have any news of the children for six