Creative Kindergartening

In August my two little pollywogs started kindergarten. At that time I was concerned that their first foray into academia would be less than an over-the-moon experience. Well, I am here to tell you that they are doing fine with the academics; the Three R’s—reading, writing, and arithmetic—have posed few, if any, problems so far. However, behaving is taking its toll.

Bryan loves to talk better than breathe, so I can understand why he doesn’t always hear his teacher. At some point, she probably mentioned that he should not put an empty Capri Sun pouch on his head in the lunchroom or roll rocks down the slide at recess. If not, he clearly knows now.

And although I appreciate his love of science, Bryan really can’t use “it was a science experiment” to explain away flushing the toilet 10-15 times to see how long it takes to overflow. Seizing this as a teachable moment, I pointed out that, had the toilet actually overflowed, he would have spent the rest of the day squishing around in socks and shoes soaked in pee water. I also advised him to never go to the bathroom with Riley, the tattletale.

Later that same day, Bryan found a broken rubber band on the floor and stuck it up his nose. It tickled. After digging the rubber band out of his nostril, he put it in a girl’s hair and told her that it was a spider. His teacher was not amused.
Still unconvinced that behaving was in his best interest, he began saying (according to him, of course), “Dan, dan, dan.” Two girls—one of whom was the recipient of the rubber band—told the teacher that he was saying, “Damn, damn, damn.” Again, his teacher was not amused.

Tyler hasn’t done any better. He skipped school to go with us on the Disney Cruise and was named Student of the Month while he was gone. We congratulated him on a job well done and hoped some of it would rub off on the rubber band man. About a week after he got back to school (Hickory Grove Baptist Church school), Tyler was honored during chapel. He cracked the very next day.

I don’t know why it is but most little boys simply can’t be good for very long. Tyler whacked two boys on the playground, was given a good talking to by his teacher, and whacked the boys again. When the teacher set him down for round two, he told her that he wished he had his bug sucker, because he would suck the breath out of her. Oh, brother. That wasn’t exactly a Christian response.

As of late the little boys are on the straight and narrow. Once Christmas is over, and the Naughty or Nice List is a distant memory, things may get back to normal. In the meantime, it’s a good thing they’re cute.

Experiencing Guernsey

One of my favorite books is 1000 Places to See before You Die by Patricia Schultz. I seriously doubt that I will get around to all 1000 of them, but I like the idea of trying. However, seeing is a long way from experiencing. A travel expert’s ideas of important and not so important places are fun to visit and satisfy my urge to see for myself, but experiencing…well, that involves so much more. Perhaps, by the end of my story, you’ll know what I mean.

Several months ago, Tim and I went to Guernsey, an island in the English Channel. Although Guernsey didn’t appear in 1000 Places or any other “must go” travel book, we didn’t really care. In the 1830’s, Tim’s family on his mother’s side summoned all the courage they could muster and moved to America. Letters from home survived the years, and Tim studied them carefully. After hours of research, he was ready to learn the truth about Peter Mollet and Betsey LePage.

After a quick 35 minute flight from London Gatwick, we landed at the tiny airport in the Forest which, by the way, has no trees. The car hire company was easy to spot, so in no time, Tim was sitting on the wrong side of the car. But he’s a pretty sharp guy and, a few minutes later, realized that he didn’t have a steering wheel.

Guernsey is a maze of two-lane, hedge-lined, unmarked, winding roads. On the way to the hotel, Tim hit an orange cone, drove across several sidewalks, scraped every hedge, came so close to an oncoming car that the mirror was knocked sideways, and accidentally turned on the rear windshield wipers. It hadn’t taken us 20 minutes to learn why the locals insisted on putting a large ‘H’ on the front of every hire car. The ‘H’ stood for ‘Horror!’

Tracey and Ash of Little Escapes in Jersey, another of the Channel Island, took care of the Guernsey part of our trip and made a reservation for us at the Hotel Jerbourg. Our room—up a flight of stairs, down four steps and up another two—featured a spectacular view of the neighboring islands from atop a cliff. Heather, the hotel’s friendly receptionist from Cornwall and part-time waitress at the Crow’s Nest in town, assured us that the dining room was still serving lunch.

“Have you seen that movie Walking the Line about Johnny Cash?” asked the waiter. “You sound just like the girl in the movie.”
Ah, Reese Witherspoon. Although Frankie never said that I looked anything like Reese, he and I became instant friends. He was a Guern working at the Hotel Jerbourg, and I was one of only two Americans on the island. Tim was the other. I thought that made us celebrities of sorts.

Most of the people working in Guernsey weren’t from around there. The red-headed waitress in the hotel’s dining room who seemed to work all day and all night “ran away from Wales.” The tall, blonde Australian waiter spent a summer at a camp in North Carolina. The German waitress had a strange fixation with matching the number of guests to the same number of chairs at the table. At the Crowe’s Nest, a rooftop bar at St. Peter’s Port, Jackie, a New Zealander, came to Guernsey to be near her boyfriend who was working in Spain. Nick, manager of The Absolute End, a restaurant along the water, was from southern Italy and was going home in a couple of weeks to visit his mother. At The Auberge our waiter was from Paris. And so it went.

A side note—the entire staff at The Auberge poured out of a van about 15 minutes before the doors were to open. I don’t know how they managed to get the restaurant up and running in such a short time, but they did. The place was packed, and the food was fabulous.

Tim applied my dad’s philosophy about dining in Florida (“If you’re in Florida, you have to eat seafood”) to Guernsey. Everywhere he went he found that the brill, salmon, oysters, scallops, and prawns were always fresh and delicious. At the Crowe’s Nest, Heather and Jackie insisted that he try the estada, a skewer of shrimp (complete with their little beady eyes), scallops, and veggies, and at the Petit Bistro, he downed over 50 mussels. Eventually, I thought he started to smell fishy.

We wandered through flower gardens, walked the streets of St. Peter’s Port, and toured the old castle and the German underground hospital. We squeezed through the various alcoves at the Little Chapel, a teeny, tiny one-of-a-kind church, liberally decorated with broken china. My friend, Becky McDowell, breaks china in the back of her garden as a way of relieving stress. The monk responsible for this breakage must have been wound really tight.

I don’t know what possessed me, but one afternoon I suggested a walk down to the water from our cliff-top hotel. We hadn’t made it all the way down when I came to my senses—I was going to have to climb back up. By the time I actually got back to the top, I was panting and climbing on all fours. So embarrassing!

Bluebell Wood was our favorite place. The bluebells bloom for about a month in May. I cannot possibly describe a ground cover of bluebells and ferns, so I’ll attach a picture.

On our first full day in Guernsey, we had an appointment at the Priaulx Library to discuss the Mollet-LePage letters with the research librarians. Margaret Edwards explained that Jean Vidamour who had been primarily responsible for the work on the letters was off that day. Margaret spent the next couple of hours answering our questions and guiding us through the library’s vast resources. When we left, we knew we would have to return the next day to meet Jean. Unbeknownst to any of us, Margaret and Jean became our friends over weeks of lunches discussing the subtleties of letters written in Guernsey patois.

When you decide to do something a little off the beaten path, word travels quickly. Before we left for Guernsey, Tim got a call from Pat English, a Guern who had immigrated to Tim’s hometown in Owego, NY. She was going to be in Guernsey visiting her brother and sister-in-law at the same time we were there, so they made plans for the five of us to get together.

We met Pat, John, and Margaret at St. Sampson’s bell tower and followed them home. The house, built in the 1830’s of local granite or “rubble rock”, was quite interesting. It was literally a corner house—the corner of the house sat on the corner of the road. The outside walls were 2’ thick, and the interior center wall was 3’. A new kitchen and bath had been added, but the two-door outhouse remained in the side yard. The dower wing included a living area and a kitchen downstairs and up the dark, creepy, narrow winding stairs was a bedroom. That would certainly discourage your mother-in-law from moving in with you.

Margaret served kirs of blackcurrant liqueur and white wine to everyone but John who preferred his whisky, and we all sat back ready to get acquainted. They were delightful and funny, and soon we felt right at home.

Tim and I had read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society which told the story of the German occupation of Guernsey during WWII. Earlier, we had seen the German underground hospital on the island and many of the fortifications. However, we never dreamed that we would spend the evening hearing a first-hand account of one of the worst times in the history of the island.

John was eight and his sister Pat was three when word came that the Germans would invade Guernsey. School-age children were to be evacuated to England for a few months ahead of the invasion. John’s mother doubted that the Germans would ever come, but still she sent John off with the other children. The Germans invaded six days after the children were evacuated.

As they boarded the ship for England, John and his best friend, Ronny, were told to stick together. In England, all the children were divided into groups and dispersed throughout the country. The 300 children in John’s group were taken to Manchester where families willing to house the children would make their selection. Catholic children were placed with Catholic families and did not have to suffer through the same sorting process as the other children. At the end of the evening, John and Ronny were the last two of the three boys left on the stage. They had refused to be split up, so there they stood. Finally, a family agreed to take all three boys.

The family’s two-bedroom house strained to accommodate three additional people. The daughter moved to the parents’ bedroom, leaving her brother to share their bedroom with the boys from Guernsey. The brother slept in his bed while the three boys slept in the other. After a day or so, the third boy was taken by a wealthy family, and a month later Ronny’s father came for him. John stayed for five years. During that time, he received four letters from home through the efforts of the Red Cross. Six months after the war ended, John went home.

When Tim and I left Guernsey, we spent a few days in London and Barcelona and then cruised the Mediterranean Sea. All along the way, we took the lessons from Guernsey and got to know the people we encountered. However, the evening we spent with Pat, John, and Margaret was the highlight of our trip.

Experiencing Guernsey was the way travel is meant to be.