English teacher Jess Ingles said the trip was a way to show the pupils what conflict, the students’ key theme in literature across the term, can look like in the real world.
‘We started with reading the First World War play Journey’s End, which was about the trenches. Then we have moved on to looking at different war poetry from all different times. So the First World War and then more recently the second. We’ll finish our unit by studying the local area and looking at Guernsey’s conflict history,’ she said.
They met members of Festung Guernsey who toured them through several Second World War sites, including the bunker of the Shrine of the Sacred Heart and the M19 automatic mortar bunker. They also went on a separate excursion to the Mirus Battery.
‘We’re so lucky that we’ve got this on the doorstep, and we can just bring them out for an afternoon. It’s amazing because so many of them have not been into these sites that Festung have opened for us,’ Miss Ingles said.
‘They’re like, “oh yeah, I’ve been”, but they don’t actually realise what’s underground. Lots of them play Airsoft, but they don’t realise there’s four batteries up by the Airsoft base. It’s a real community effort, and everyone believing in telling the students about their history, because it is their history and their family history.’
Miss Ingles said she particularly enjoyed listening to the different stories the students bring with them about their great-grandparents every year.
Pupil Sienna de Carteret, 13, was fascinated with how technology had advanced in the 20 years between the wars.
‘We’re learning about the wars but also how it’s different from what we’re reading, where it was just muddy trenches and now they had actual fortifications,’ she said.
The importance of educating young people about the history of Guernsey was underlined by Festung chairman Paul Bourgaize.
‘For some of them it is struggle, and a lot of adults don’t know any better. I was involved with the Liberation tour, and people came over for Liberation and were saying: “I didn’t realise the Germans were in Guernsey”.’
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