The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

Author:Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows [Shaffer, Mary Ann & Barrows, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), Best of Decade, 2008, B&N
ISBN: 9780385341004
Publisher: Dial Press
Published: 2008-07-31T14:00:00+00:00


An Animal Lover

From Sally Ann Frobisher to Juliet

15th May 1946

Dear Miss Ashton,

Miss Pribby told me you would be coming to Guernsey to hear about the war. I hope we will meet then, but I am writing now because I like to write letters. I like to write anything, really. I thought you’d like to know how I was personally humiliated during the war—in 1943, when I was twelve. I had scabies.

There wasn’t enough soap in Guernsey to keep clean—not our clothes or ourselves. Everyone had skin diseases of one sort or another—scales or pustules or lice. I myself had scabies on my head—under my hair—and they wouldn’t go away. Eventually, Dr Ormond said I must go to Town Hospital and have my head shaved and the tops of the scabs cut off to let the pus out. I hope you will never know the shame of a seeping scalp. I wanted to die.

That is where I met my friend Elizabeth McKenna. She helped the nurses on my ward. The nurses were always kind, but Miss McKenna was kind and funny. Her being funny helped me in my darkest hour. When my head had been shaved, she came into my room with a basin, a bottle of Dettol, and a sharp scalpel.

I said, ‘This isn’t going to hurt, is it? Dr Ormond said it wouldn’t hurt’ I tried not to cry.

‘He lied,’ Miss McKenna said. ‘It’s going to hurt like hell. Don’t tell your mother I said hell.’

I started to giggle, and she made the first slice before I had rime to be afraid. It did hurt, but not like hell. We played a game while she cut the rest of the tops off—we shouted out the names of every woman who had ever suffered under the blade. ‘Mary, Queen of Scots—snip-snap!’

‘Anne Boleyn—thunk!’

‘Marie Antoinette—whoosh!’ And we’d finished.

It hurt, but it was fun too because Miss McKenna had turned it into a game.

She swabbed my bald head with Dettol and came in to visit me that evening—with a silk scarf of her own to wrap round my head as a turban. ‘There,’ she said, and handed me a mirror. I looked into it—the scarf was lovely, but my nose looked too big for my face, just as it always did. I wondered if I’d ever be pretty, and asked Miss McKenna.

When I asked my mother the same question, she said she had no patience with such nonsense and beauty was only skin-deep. But not Miss McKenna. She looked at me, considering, and then she said, ‘In a little while, Sally, you’re going to be stunning. Keep looking in the mirror and you’ll see. It’s bones that count, and you’ve got them in spades. With that elegant nose of yours, you’ll be the new Nefertiti. You’d better practise looking imperious.’

Mrs Maugery came to visit me in hospital and I asked her who Nefertiti was, and if she was dead. It sounded like it Mrs Maugery said she was indeed dead, but also immortal. Later on, she found a picture of Nefertiti for me.



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