Carette of Sark

by John Oxenham

In building the prison in so marshy a district, advantage had been taken of a piece of rising ground. The enclosure was built round it, so that the middle stood somewhat higher than the sides, and standing on that highest part one could see over the sharp teeth of the stockade and all round the countryside.

BELOW BEAUMANOIR. "And in Sercq, the headlands were great soft cushions of velvet turf, the heather purpled all the hillsides, and, on the gray rocks below, the long waves shouted aloud because they were free." This is the slope below "BEAUMANOIR," looking into PORT ES SAIES.

That wide view was not without a charm of its own, though its long dull levels grew wearisome to eyes accustomed only to the bold headlands and sharp scarps of Sercq, or to the ever-changing sea. For miles all round were marshes where nothing seemed to grow but tussocks of long wiry grass, with great pools and channels of dark water in between. Far away beyond them there were clumps of trees in places, and farther away still one saw here and there the spire of a church a great way off.

When we came there the wiry grass was yellow and drooping, like bent and rusted bayonets, and the pools were black and sullen, and the sky was gray and lowering and very dismal. And in Sercq the rocks were golden in the sunshine, the headlands were great soft cushions of velvet turf, the heather purpled all the hillsides, and the tall bracken billowed under the west wind. And on the gray rocks below, the long waves flung themselves in a wild abandon of delight, and shouted aloud because they were free.

Then the east winds came, and all the face of things blanched like the face of death, with coarse hairs sticking up out of it here and there. The pools and ditches were white with ice, and all the countryside lay stiff and stark, a prisoner bound in chains and iron. To stand there looking at it for even five minutes made one's backbone rattle for half a day. And yet, even then, in Sercq the sun shone soft and warm, the sky and sea were blue, the fouaille was golden-brown on the hillside, the young gorse was showing pale on the Eperquerie, and the Butcher's Broom on Tintageu was brilliant with scarlet berries.

To any man—even to our warders—Amperdoo was a desolation akin to death. To many a weary prisoner it proved death itself and so the gate to wider life. To one man it was purgatory but short removed from hell, and that he came through it unscathed was due to that which he had at first regarded as a misfortune, but which, by shutting him into a world of his own with those he loved, kept his heart sweet and fresh and unassoiled.

In time, indeed, my hearing gradually returned, and long before I left the prison it was quite recovered. But before it came back the habit of loneliness had grown upon me, and there was little temptation to break through it, and I lived much within myself.

Many the nights I sought my hammock as soon as the daylight faded, and lay there thinking of them all at home. To open my eyes was to look on a mob of crouching figures by the distant fire, wrangling as it seemed—for I could not hear them—over their cards and dice. But—close my eyes, and in a moment I was in Jeanne Falla's great kitchen at Beaumanoir, with Carette perched up on the side of the green-bed, swinging her feet and knitting blue wool, and Aunt Jeanne herself, kneeling in the wide hearth in the glow of the flaming gorse, seeing to her cooking and flashing her merry wisdom at us with twinkling eyes. Or—in the glimmer of the dawn, my eyes would open drearily on the rows and rows of hammocks in the long wooden room, every single hammock a stark bundle of misery and suffering. And I would close them again and draw the blanket tight over my head, and—we were boy and girl again, splashing barefoot in the warm pools under the Autelets; or—we were lying in the sunshine in the sweet short herbs of the headlands, with kicking heels and light hair all mixed up with dark, as we laid our heads together and plotted mischiefs; or, side by side, with gleaming brown faces, and free unfettered limbs as white as our thoughts, we slipped through the writhing coils of the Gouliot, and hung panting to the honeycombed rocks while the tide hissed and whispered in the long tresses of the seaweed.