Joyce Wilks (85), née Le Templier, during her recent return to Jersey Picture: TONY PIKE (00806607)

A woman who, during the German Occupation kept American prisoners of war up to date with the BBC news, died in January 2010.

However, on a visit to the Island last year to celebrate her 85th birthday, she spoke to Alasdair Crosby about her experiences of the Occupation and her life after the Island’s liberation

JOYCE Wicks (née Le Templier) was born in 1924 and went to St Luke’s School before gaining a scholarship to the Jersey Ladies College, as the Jersey College for Girls was then called, in 1934.

Her late teenage years were spent with her family in Occupied Jersey. She recalled: ‘My father, Reginald Le Templier, had a hidden ‘‘cat’s whisker’’ radio and he used this to listen in to the BBC. I would then type out this news for the prisoners on paper, roll it up and put the report in a tin.

‘The tin was weighed down with a stone, and I would take a friend of mine, Pauline Davis [later Pauline Jesty], who had polio and was in a wheelchair, for a trip around the camp’s perimeter. When the guards were not looking I would throw the tin over the high fence. That was how the prisoners of war got their news of the outside world.’

There were a number of American prisoners of war in a camp on South Hill. This has long since been obliterated (the present-day learner driver practice area marks the spot), although one of the camp latrines can still be found in the undergrowth.

‘In May 1945 I was able to tell the PoWs that the Island was about to be liberated, and when they were released from internment they all said: “We must meet Joyce Le Templier!” One of them proposed to me, and another gave me his identity tag. I corresponded with him for years afterwards.’

Joyce’s father was a gas mains layer and the family lived at 23 FB Houses, Grève d’Azette.

The picture of Joyce Le Templier on her Occupation registration card

She recalled some of the more awkward moments of the Occupation for the family: ‘The German soldiers used to use the playing fields for their sports.

One day there was a knock on the door, and it was a young German officer who wanted to plug in the lead of the tannoy equipment for use with their game.

‘My father almost had a fit, because the German opened the cupboard where the wireless was hidden, and he was scrabbling around trying to find the plug. Fortunately, he didn’t see the wireless!’

Towards the end of his life Mr Le Templier was a verger at St Luke’s Church. He died in 1974.

For Joyce, the joy of the Liberation was followed by her marriage in 1947 to an ex-RAF officer, Thomas Young, who was by then flying as a commercial pilot for Channel Islands Airways. Joyce was working at the Airport as a secretary.

Going out with her fiancé meant using the plane for trips to France and coming back to the Island loaded with smuggled French cigarettes. She confided that she could string the packets with 200 cigarettes around her waist, under a full skirt.

But one day, in May 1948, her husband flew to France to pick up a cargo of cherries, which he transported to England. He never came home, as his plane crashed in southern England.

Joyce was pregnant and gave birth to their daughter, Sue, 12 days later. The young mother did not want to stay in Jersey after the death of her husband and went to live in Wales with her in-laws. Later she remarried and moved to Surrey.

Last year’s trip had been her first visit to Jersey since then for both mother and daughter, now Sue Greville Collins.

‘How tragic it was,’ said Mrs Greville Collins, ‘that my mother went through the Occupation years and all its unhappiness, and just when that was over and she had met someone she loved and found happiness with, she had that happiness taken away from her so soon.’