This Is Guernsey

By Shaun Shackleton

Her evocative monthly columns recalling bygone days have delighted Guernsey Press readers for years - and now they’re being published as a book. Shaun Shackleton talks to Yvonne Ozanne about Love Apple Island MANY different things inspire people to start writing.

J. R. R. Tolkien began The Hobbit after seeing a blank sheet of paper while marking school certificate papers, Jilly Cooper wrote her first romance to help her family out of financial difficulty and Catherine Cookson started work on her romantic novels to cheer herself up.

But I’d wager that not many authors were inspired to write by an airport.

‘I always wrote letters to the Guernsey Press,’ said Yvonne Ozanne. ‘But they were going to put an airport at Chouet, so I wrote a letter about it because I was so upset, saying how wonderful it was growing up in the Vale and how it would all be spoilt.’

Editor Richard Digard saw it and gave it to the features editor.

‘Yvonne has written my life story,’ he told her.

She was invited to submit more and seven years and more than 80 columns later, she hasn’t looked back.

Then again, she does have a wealth of stories to draw on, starting with her own background.

Born Yvonne Brehaut in England in 1942 to Irish mother Mary and Guernsey father Edwin ‘Winno’, her parents were Vale growers with a carting and commission agency for collecting and selling tomatoes and flowers in England, including Covent Garden.

Yvonne was daughter number two of four and she also had a younger brother, Bruce, who was left deaf after a childhood illness of meningitis.

And it was with him that she first discovered her talent for storytelling.

‘I used to make up stories for Bruce. Cliffhangers. He loved westerns and we’d be going through a tunnel, crawling along the living room floor, and I’d say: ﾓAnd you can find out the answer tomorrowﾔ. And he’d go, ﾓYou can’t do thatﾔ.

‘That’s where I learnt about stories, how they can do a lot to take yourself out of yourself and learn about the world.’

Yvonne left the former Intermediate School (Girls’ Grammar) at 16 with O-levels in English, English literature, handwriting and art.

‘I went to be a typist for the Guernsey Press in 1959 when everything was in Smith Street - the offices and the printing presses. It was there I worked with Emile and Alf Digard and Gervaise Peek.’

She left the company behind when she married Tony Ozanne and then embraced further education - first at night school studying English and sociology A-levels and then the Open University through which, after eight years of hard work, she gained an honours degree in art history.

During that time she also had two children - Alison, who is a founding partner in AO Hall Advocates, and Michael, a university lecturer.

Yvonne’s degree has also allowed her to lecture.’I'm potty about the Italian Renaissance, Titian in particular.’

But her one great love is writing and her stories in the Guernsey Press have brought her much acclaim.

‘Readers started stopping me in the street and asking me if I was writing a book and if not, why not? Some people had been cutting out the stories and had a wardrobe full.’

The answer was to self-publish.

‘It’s been the biggest nightmare. I’m really non-technical. I don’t have a technical, mathematical or scientific section in my brain. I think God ran out of time with me.

‘I was going to cut out all the pieces in the Guernsey Press and send them to the editor.’

For the first couple of years of writing, she used a word processor. Now, she says, she knows what cut and paste means.

‘There’s been a lot of editing. That’s one good thing about being a trained secretary - though it’s the first time it’s come in useful.’

The process meant gathering 80 articles, all at around 1,000 words.

‘It’s going to be a doorstop,’ said Roger Jones, the book’s Jersey-based editor.

So it was decided to select 40 stories, together with sepia photos, and make the book 160 pages long. The process took around four months.

‘There’ll be another book for the other 40 stories. I will start earlier next year,’ Yvonne promised herself.

And the book comes with a cracking endorsement from Guernsey-born Hollywood actor Roy Dotrice.

‘What a wonderful trip down memory lane this delightful book gave me,’ he writes in the preface. ‘Yvonne has such extraordinarily descriptive powers that I was transported back to the halcyon days of my youth in that idyllic island of Guernsey.’

With her stories taking in everything from charabanc rides, swimming at Moulin Huet with her uncle, shopping aged six and marrying into the Ozannes of the Forest, she must have an incredible memory.

‘I do, but I don’t know why. That’s the creative side - it all comes in. You get more sensitive. I’m driven to write all the time.’

So much so, in fact, that she keeps notebooks everywhere.

‘At the side of the bed, in the car. I’m always tearing off bits of newspaper. I even dictate to the grandchildren while I’m driving. I drive my husband crackers.’

And she has even more in the pipeline, in the shape of two more books.

‘I’ve written a novel called Vivienne’s Reason, which is 156,000 words. It’s already been read by two editors, one of whom has written: ﾓA cracking good read with the striking backdrop of Guernseyﾔ.’

The novel is a family saga and much darker than Yvonne’s Guernsey Press articles. Her second novel is called Stolen, Stolen and is a romance based in the 1930s.

‘I like to enter a world that’s not today. It’s lovely to sit down and write about walking across a beach.

I love to get out of myself.’

An innate love of the Bailiwick also fuels her writing.

‘I feel an otherness, a spiritualness about Guernsey, Herm and Sark, where, if you’ll let it, it will come to you.’ And it was while she was on the west side of Sark that she experienced a good omen.

‘Victor Hugo sat next to me and said: ﾓIt’s your turn.ﾔ I went to the post office, bought a map and saw that [the visitation] had happened above the Victor Hugo Cave. So, thanks Victor.’

So what advice would she give to budding wordsmiths?

‘If anyone asked me how the hell do you set about writing, my answer would be: have faith in what you do. It has to be from you.

‘Stephen Fry once said, ﾓAnyone can do anything if you stop doing one thing: feeling sorry for yourselfﾔ.’

And Yvonne has proved that she can do anything with her gift for wonderfully insightful and highly evocative writing.

Just before I go, she sums up her love for her craft.

‘I think all art is magic because it doesn’t exist. That’s what I love about writing.’

* Love Apple Island by Yvonne Ozanne is published by ELSP and costs £7.95. Yvonne will be signing copies at the Press Shop, Smith Street, on Friday 16 November from 12-2pm and at Press Xpress, The Bridge, from 2-4pm on Saturday 17.