The following was written by my late wife Elaine. She wrote a long book, a diary really, from which this is one passage:
Trip to Alderney, English Channel Islands; A Dream Come True
Ellen and I planned this trip, studying travel catalogs from the AAA Travel Agency in Lewisburg, and made all the reservations necessary, with their help, to be on Alderney on June 23, 1990, exactly fifty years after June 23, 1940, the date of Alderney’s WWII evacuation, to attend the Commemoration ceremony. As you’ll see, I wrote about the evacuation elsewhere in this book, as my Grandma Jane Herivel experienced this sad event.
Being there in Alderney on June 23, 1990, was a marvelous experience, important to survivors of the evacuation and their families. It was very moving, and there were people there from all over for the occasion, including many Herivels (My father’s family name). The service of Thanksgiving and commemoration was held at the same harbor where the boats had left 50 years earlier, and the Salvation Army Band provided the music. Many people present that day were children when they left the island on the boats fifty years before.
We found my father’s grandparents’ grave in the cemetery at St. Anne’s church. Our hotel was close to the St. Anne’s church bell tower, and we could hear it whenever the bellringers practiced. These were the same bells that warned Alderney’s residents that it was time to leave, when the Germans were coming 50 years ago. Most of these bells had been sent to the continent by the Germans to have melted down; they were later found intact in Cherbourg, France, and brought back.
Besides the bells, something Ellen and I loved to hear from our hotel room was the low, moaning sound made by the wind, almost all the time. It probably was wind off the sea, blowing through sea grass. Only one time since then, I heard the same sound through my bedroom window in Union. Wind through the screened windows? Wind through long grass in the field? I don’t know. But it brought back fond memories.
We met two of my father’s cousins, we walked around the entire coast, saw my grandmother’s house and the home with the one remaining cavalier statue on the roof, shopped in the fun Main Street shops, and ate at some good restaurants including a pub. We loved the main foods of the pubs: thick crusty breads and chunks of good cheese. Alderney people were free to take their dogs with them into pubs; those we saw were well behaved and sat quietly next to their human.
Ellen and I went into some of the bleak, stark German bunkers built along the coast during the Occupation, visited as close as we could get to the lighthouse, and learned more about the stories of shipwrecks I had heard when I was a girl. One of our cousins, Louis Jean, told us that if you stand as close as you can get to the lighthouse (which isn’t very close), and if its foghorn blasts to warn ships, “it would lift you off your feet.”
There are huge rocks all around the island, and salvaging exotic foods, stoves, mahogany, and other valuables made shipwrecks a big adventure for people on this tiny speck of an island. Somebody was quoted in one of my Alderney books: “There hasn’t been a good shipwreck for years.”
The other cousin we met, Doris Irene Brandon, was an elderly lady who walked up the steep hill to the hotel to give Ellen and I some books about Alderney from her own collection, (before she was married, she was a Brehaut, another Alderney surname), whose book And to Tell of Time was published a few years after our visit. I was able to get a copy by mail and it mentions my Dad and his brother and is of interest to Herivels. Ellen and I will never forget Alderney and the good time we had.
To be continued…
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About the Author: RD Blakeslee (1931 – 2024) built his net worth by only investing in that which can be enjoyed during acquisition and throughout life, as opposed to papers in a drawer, like stocks and bonds. You can read more about him here.
Photos: Courtesy of the Blakeslee Family
That is fascinating history that I knew nothing about. Wish Dave were still here to chat about it.