Having been stored at St George’s Hall in St Peter Port, they were distributed to more than a hundred shops around the island and for the Burtons, this meant a trip to Albecq Stores in Retot Lane, better known to most as what became the Army & Navy Stores.
‘We lived up by St George’s in the Castel, so we took our little horse and cart,’ he said, ‘because you had one parcel for every person in the house and we had four in our house, plus our tenant had four as well.
‘On the way down, we called in at my grandparents and there were five there and their neighbours had seven.
‘You see pictures of people in Town with prams but we had a bloomin’ cartload of them for all our family and friends.’
He said they were all ‘pleased to have them’, as there had been ‘talk about something arriving – but we didn’t really know’.
‘It was five years since we’d had any chocolate,’ he recalls, ‘and it was hard stuff – you could break your teeth trying to bite into it.’
He is happy to admit that the food situation for his family had been nothing like as bad as was experienced by some islanders during that year.
‘We were farmers, so we weren’t as badly off as some of the Town people, by a long way,’ he said.
‘We had all the milk we wanted and we skimmed the cream off the milk and made butter, and we had our own vegetables – but we didn’t have any bread.’
Although the parcels undoubtedly kept many islanders alive who would otherwise have perished, they did not provide enough calories on their own to keep people alive and the island continued to use up its dwindling supplies.
Before and after the Vega shipments, Roy remembers people coming from Town to beg for food from their farm.
However, having helped them out, his family soon found that word got round and this led to inspections of their supplies. They had to be on their guard.
‘We were living right next to the German troops in the Beaucamps arsenal,’ he said, ‘but we still did things we shouldn’t have done, like black-market slaughtering of cattle and pigs, which we shared around.’
Another illicit activity was listening to the family’s crystal-set radio – concealed within a light-switch – which meant they had been aware of the Normandy landings and the subsequent Allied advances towards Germany that finally led to victory in Europe and the liberation of the Channel Islands.
Roy, now 94, has kept one of his empty parcels, which is little bigger than a child’s shoebox.
He keeps it with a collection of memorabilia which includes his identity card and a little autograph book, in which various German soldiers have written messages in English, having obliged a curious, 10-year-old Guernsey farm boy.
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