Liberation by Michael Halliwell

For the 75th Anniversary of Liberation today, an article on what it was like as an evacuee during the Occupation, returning to a ravaged Island after five long years.

Reverend Michael Halliwell, Rector of St Brelade (1971-1996) was evacuated to England with his mother. His father stayed at his post at the General Hospital as Consultant Surgeon. Michael wrote on that in his excellent book "Operating Under Occupation: The Life and Work of Arthur Clare Halliwell FRCS, Consultant Surgeon at the Jersey General Hospital During the German Occupation, 1940-1945" (which is still available to buy).

Liberation by Michael Halliwell

As the years rolled by, and occasional Red Cross messages were our only link with home, we began to wonder when it would ever end.

We were away at school when the end did come, and as May got under way it seemed we would not have to wait much longer. My birthday is on May 8 and I hoped for a special birthday present. I had taken a small Jersey flag to school that term and kept it in readiness for the great day. Finally on the afternoon of May 9 we were called to our housemaster's study to hear Mr Churchill. In the middle of his speech we heard him say: And our dear Channel Islands are to be freed today".

Everyone turned and looked at me ; I smiled and nearly wept! Then I went upstairs and hung out my flag. Five years of refugee status were over, and I only wanted to get home.

Within a few days my father got permission to come over for a short visit. Special postcards had been printed and he sent us one with the short message: "Free at last and longing to see you".

Oxford was in the first pure green of early Spring when we did meet, and it was quite a shock for us both. I had left as a boy of twelve; now I was a young man of seventeen already trained in the art of war and only a year off military call up. He was smart as ever but looked so gaunt and haggard that I could only imagine what he had gone through during those five long years alone.

We had to wait for a while before we could get travel permits to enable us to return home. However, in due course the great day came; we travelled up by train to London, spending the night there before going to Victoria Coach Terminal, then by coach down through South London to Croydon Airport.

There the newly refurbished planes of the re-born Channel Islands Airways were waiting to fly us to Jersey and we all had the strange experience of our first flight.

The Island we found was a very different one from the place we had left; it was battered, shattered and down at heel. Most of the trees had disappeared, concrete gun-emplacements littered the shore and there were many ruined houses and hotels.

The British Army were everywhere, clearing up the mess, moving ammunition, and there were many places we still could not visit because of the danger of uncleared mines. One unexpected benefit was that because the Islands had been short of food for a long while, our rations were better than the rest of the United Kingdom.

Shopping was a strange experience, there was English money, Jersey money and German money all circulating at the same time. We soon got used to the fact that the small grey coins with the swastika - 20 pfennigs were worth tuppence half-penny, and we were very proud of our own Jersey stamps printed locally during the Occupation.

Obviously we spent a good deal of time exploring the Island and raiding the bunkers for anything that might have been left behind. Not surprisingly, anything of value had already been taken, but as I was studying German, I was interested to find quite a number of items of German literature lying around which belonged to the German Army library.

Gradually life returned to normal. but it was still a little while before we could travel without passports or "travel permits" as they were called. With the normalisation of life in the Islands. hotels were re-built. lines of fortifications were cleared, guns were tipped over the cliff-sides, the army eventually left and life in Jersey returned to normality