Homecoming memories shared

Sunday 15 December 2019

While Liberation Day is one of the most joyful dates on Guernsey's calendar, Homecoming Day in Alderney, with its history of a complete and sudden evacuation, is quite different.

The dwindling numbers of Homecomers who were children or young adults when they returned to Alderney late in 1945 and the following year, remember a feeling of relief threaded with sadness. It's a much more solemn anniversary than 9 May in Guernsey.

St Anne's church was used as an ammunitions store during the war, its six bells stolen. Braye Street was left in smoking ruins.

Homes were vandalised, picked clean of wood and slate, cherished possessions vanished, mothers and fathers bowed under the strain of beginning all over again.

December 15 1945 was the day that the first ship arrived in Alderney carrying hundreds of islanders who had been expelled from their homes in 1940 when invasion became imminent.

Pictured: Beda Sebire as a young woman. 

Beda Sebire was 12 when she, her younger sister Hira and their mother and father, Miriam and George, left. They ended up in a village near Bury in Lancashire. But Beda longed for the day when she could return to the fresh air, endless horizons and wild landscape of her home.

She was a few months shy of 18 when she and her family returned on the Autocarrier on December 22.

Now aged 94, on December 15 she reflects back on her own Homecoming.

"You think about the journey and what it was like when you went back and saw the houses. Thank goodness we were able to live in ours. The main thing was getting back home.

Pictured: The Mannez Lighthouse was the first sight of home Beda Sebire had seen for five years. 

"There was a gale so we came back hugging the coast of France – I hadn't seen Alderney from the sea before. I saw Mannez lighthouse first and being the sort of curious person I was, I wanted to have a good look at it. My father had to hold me under my arms to steady me as I leaned out. We were coming found Fort Albert when one of the crew members said, 'do you know we are going over a minefield?' I didn't know he was joking and it had already been cleared. I could see the jetty – I thought, surely we haven't come all this way just to be blown up?

"But we reached it safely and I was home. That's what I thought: 'home'."

The scale of the destruction was apparent as soon as they disembarked though.

"Braye Street was really devastated. All that was left was walls really. All the German concrete made it dreary and dull, everywhere you went. You hardly recognised some places.  My grandfather used to work at Mannez quarry and he went out to see what it was like. He came back and laughed. 'I never thought there'd ever be a day when I got lost on Alderney,' he told us."

After a few days at the Grand Hotel they returned home to No. 1, The Huret, in St Anne.

"Our house had been used as a canteen by the Germans," recalls Beda. "All the wooden banisters had been removed. My mother, Miriam, had always loved to collect anything that had a Willow pattern design on it – crockery, sheets, anything like that. They were all gone. Later when we were preparing the garden to plant vegetables we found them all smashed up and buried. She lost interest in anything like that when we came back. I suppose it seemed frivolous.

"But we got stuck in and made the place as normal as we could."

Her father, previously a farmer, later worked on the communal farm. Beda collected electric money; six pence per light in each house.

For Beda there was a silver lining to Alderney's wartime story. Barely a week after returning home she met a British soldier called George Thompson, who earlier had helped liberate Jersey. George had been tasked with getting them home safely after a party staged for home comers at Chateau Le Tocq.  He was instantly captivated by the spirited Beda and when he left to serve in Trieste, Italy, they wrote to each other incessantly.

They married in 1947 and were the first couple to get married in St Anne's Church since the end of the war.

Pictured: Beda and her husband George Thompson married at St Anne's Church in Alderney. 

December 15, the 74th anniversary of the first Homecoming is a both happy and sad occasion, said Beda.

"I was very happy to come back but sad to see the state the island was in. Some people saw it and turned round and never came back. So it's a bit of both on Homecoming Day."

Pictured top: Beda Sebire.