Day Sixteen - Jersey - 18 April

It was a good day for museum visiting. The weather was cold with rain coming in fits and starts for most of the day. We caught the bus into St Helier to catch the bus out to the Jersey War Tunnels which are in the centre of the island. Unlike the Isle of Wight and Guernsey the bus routes do not go around the entire island; Jersey’s bus routes radiate out from St Helier. This means we often have to return to St Helier to get onto a different bus route.

We spent two hours totally absorbed in the displays in the tunnels and we thought the museum was excellent. It outlines Jersey’s war under German occupation from 1940 to 1945. The very large tunnel complex was excavated by forced labour as a bombproof storage and repair facility before being converted into a casualty receiving station which was never used. The war years were described through a range of techniques including very moving video and audio vignettes of Jersey people who lived through the war years.

Just like Guernsey, near the end of the war the people were starving and only survived through Red Cross packages from Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Up until the arrival of the packages the people resorted to many different ways to survive. Sweet beet was made into a sugar equivalent and bramble leaves were dried to make tea. The average temperature in the tunnels is ten degrees and we were thankful for our Gortex coats over our fleeces. By the end of the last tunnel we were very cold and retreated to the museum’s warm café to thaw out. We were still in the zone of the starving people in the war and felt very thankful for our potato and leek soup. We were each given Jersey Identity Cards when we bought our museum tickets. When we walked through the museum we had to find “ourselves”. Henk was Clifford Cohu a local priest and was arrested for distributing allied news and was sent to a concentration camp in France where he died. I was Douglas Le Marchand who tried to escape from Jersey in a boat. He was shot and died when a bullet went through the boat. His companions survived. We were pleased to find that we weren’t collaborators.

In the early afternoon we caught a bus to Durrell which is in the north east of the island. The weather had improved and we wanted to walk from Durrell to Rozel Bay to see if we could see France from the cliffs. We did this but the walk wasn’t as pleasant as we expected as it was along a narrow, country road which doesn’t make for relaxing walking. The traffic wasn’t too busy thankfully. On the way back to the bus we were slower as we had to walk up an incline into stiff winds and occasional rain. We were very glad to get back on the bus at Durrell and get back to St Helier and onto our hotel to get out of the cold and rain.

When we ventured out for dinner the sun had come out but it was still very cold. It was the first time we had seen St Aubin Harbour with water. We walked to the end of the harbour and I took the opportunity to take some photos. We sat in the pub at a table overlooking the harbour watching the tide go out. It was a pleasant view from our cosy pub.