The Book of Ebenezer le Page by G.B. Edwards

in the trap, and I was with Jim. She didn’t bother about what I might be up to, as a rule, if I was out with Jim; but that night, when she saw us, she said, ‘Now mind you boys don’t go up Horn Street, or they’ll throw rotten eggs at you.’ I wondered how my mother could know about Horn Street.
    It put ideas into our heads and we went down to the Green Shutters to have a look at the whores. There wasn’t none of them on show. All the shutters was closed, so they was all busy; but Madame Hamon herself was standing in the door. She said, ‘Bon soir, messieurs,’ and we said, ‘Bon soir, madame.’ Then we went for a walk along Havelet and up Hauteville and came back the short cut down Horn Street. My mother and father was standing against the railings by the market, looking over at the fire-swallower and the cheap-jack and the Salvation Army down below; and the German Band was playing round the corner of the Commercial Arcade. We was following our noses to the French Halls for to buy hot chestnuts we could smell roasting, but my mother spotted us and called us over. ‘Where have you two been?’ she said. ‘Aw, we’ve just come down Horn Street,’ said Jim, ‘but they didn’t throw no rotten eggs at us.’ My father doubled up laughing, and even my mother had to smile.
    As a matter of fact, La Rue des Cornets was rough, but there wasn’t many proper whores living there in those days. It wasn’t until the Green Shutters was closed down by the States at the beginning of the First World War, so as the pure English boys who came over for their Army training wouldn’t be led into temptation, that the whores went into private business in Cornet Street. They was very well behaved in public, I will say that for them. They used to sit quietly on the seats in the cemetery facing the Town Church and wait for customers. There was old tombstones all round against the walls and a lovely big tree growing in the middle. The road have been widened since then and part of what was the cemetery and all the tombstones have gone; and so have the old whores. St Peter Port is not St Peter Port without the old whores.

8
    It’s funny how when you remember you can’t choose what it is you remember. Nowadays I forget things from one day to the next. Of things that have happened of late years, I forget even the people’s names; yet I remember some things have happened fifty or sixty years ago, as if it was yesterday. I don’t mean to say I don’t get it mixed up sometimes.
    I am not the only one. There’s old Abe Robilliard from Rocquaine. He was only a boy when he used to bring stuff for his father to the Huts and I was there doing my time in the Militia. He had his golden wedding the other day. It was in the paper. He have had seventeen children, and fifteen are alive; and there are dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and over a hundred in the family. I ran into him in Town one Friday morning, and we had a drink in the Albion. A young chap came in and said, ‘Hullo, Gran’pa!’ He said, ‘Hullo, sonny!’ I said, ‘I didn’t know he was one of your grandchildren.’ He said, ‘I suppose he is. They all know me.’ I said, ‘Why, don’t you know, then?’ He said, ‘Goodness, no: the wife do!’ He remembered his own lot, though he didn’t always know which came first; but when it came to grandchildren and great-granchildren, they was the ones who had to do the remembering. I’m like that; and I don’t always remember which came first.
    I like soldiering. I fancied myself in a red coat and a red stripe down my trousers. I was a good soldier. They made me a full sergeant and I enjoyed myself. Three weeks at the Huts each year was a change from the greenhouses. Jim didn’t do so well; but all the fellows liked him. He wasn’t cut out to be a soldier. He never