Annie Barrows

visitors offering their condolences, meaning to comfort me, said, ‘Life goes on.’ What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn’t. It’s death that goes on; Ian is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and next year and for ever.

The Channel is no longer framed in rolls of barbed wire, the view is unbroken by huge VERBOTEN signs

The Russian prisoners of war were treated the worst, perhaps because of their victory over the Germans on the Russian Front.

The Germans did give the Todt workers one half-day a week off – Sunday. That was the day when the German Sanitary Engineers emptied all the sewage into the sea through a big pipe. Fish would swarm for the waste, and the Todt workers would stand in that faeces and filth up to their chests – trying to catch the fish in their hands, to eat them.

No flowers or vines can cover such memories as these, can they?

, if you don’t get back here soon, Charlie Stephens is going to have a nervous breakdown. He’s not cut out for work; he’s cut out for handing over large wads of cash and letting you do the work.

He’s not a man to cross, that one, with his thin smile, no matter how beautiful his ties are, and it would break my mother’s heart if my lifeless body was found bobbing in the Thames.

In other words, get a wheelchair, get a crutch, get a donkey, but come home now.

The real head of everything is the President of the States, who is elected by the STATES, and called the Bailiff. In fact, everyone is elected, not appointed by the King. Pray, what is a monarch for, if NOT TO APPOINT PEOPLE TO THINGS?

want to ask you some questions – they are highly personal. Dawsey said it would not be polite, but I say that’s a difference between men and women, not polite and rude.

In a good mood, I call my hair chestnut with gold glints. In a bad mood, I call it mousy brown.

Naturally curly hair is a curse, and don’t ever let anyone tell you different.