This will be a purely personal memoir as I don’t wish to encroach on things which my parents will be telling you in their own words, and more accurately, but maybe just a few introductory details will be in order.
John Crossley Hayes was born near Manchester in 1910 as the youngest of a large family. His father was an entrepreneur from a mining background, and he was the first of the family to go to university.
Manchester, then as now, was a thriving cultural centre and home of the glorious Halle Orchestra. My father made the most of his time at Manchester University, regularly attending Halle Orchestra concerts and playing the flute in an orchestra himself. He composed music which was played on the BBC. He also travelled extensively in Europe during the late 1920s and 30s, which in those days was a rare and adventurous thing for ordinary people to do. He met my mother, who was Hungarian, when he went with the Scouts to their 4th World Jamboree in Godollo, Hungary in 1933. She was the love of his life and they married in 1934.
Just before war broke out in 1939 he had landed what was for him a dream job teaching in Guernsey. He had been in an Army Reserve - he was in the Territorial Army - but for some reason the British Army didn’t want him. Just before he got the Guernsey job he had been involved in the evacuation of a school in Manchester. This must have been a very unpleasant experience, because when the Guernsey schools were evacuated almost immediately after they got there my parents decided not to go.
I was three when war broke out so my memories of the early war years are patchy. My grandfather, who had a gift for making money and spending it, had bought us a beautiful house called Greneze on the cliffs in Jerbourg. It was in the Lutyens style (or would that be Arts and Crafts style?) and can be seen on old postcards. It was full of fascinating nooks and crannies. Unfortunately it was torn down in later years, probably in the 1970s, because by then it had been very badly neglected. In 1940 we had scarcely moved in when the Germans commandeered it as a billet for officers. When we moved back briefly at the end of the war we found a tin of golden syrup which had miraculously survived under the floorboards where my father must have hidden it and forgotten to retrieve it. How we could have done with that during the war! There was also a collection of records of 30s dance music left behind by the Germans such as:
“Sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m blu-hoo
My disposition depends on you-hoo”
I remember this song because in all my life till then I had never imagined that anyone would orchestrate such a rotten piece of music. I couldn’t understand the Germans wanting to play it.
There was a German bunker next to our house which we children were not allowed into, and I remember playing on a stupendous anti-aircraft gun big enough to have been camouflaged as a bungalow. This was probably one of the First World War guns at Frie Baton, because by then we had got our car back and were able to travel a little. But much later my father told me that there was also a First World War gun from Strasbourg near the monument in Jerbourg.
To get back to the war years, the chief consolation of our lives through the deprivations of wartime was music. There was no radio or TV or any other communication with the outside world, no new books or magazines. For children there was one film marooned on the island, a Laurel and Hardy, and we saw it once a year. But our lives were rich in music. My father spent hours composing on the piano, or on the flute, or just practising the flute, and when not writing his own music he was teaching music at Vauvert School, where he was teacher-in-charge for the duration of the war, or playing the piano in Assembly. We had an enormous repertoire of English, Welsh, Scottish and American folksong, songs by all the great composers from Handel and Mozart to Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn and others too numerous to name. We were spiritually sustained by the great Anglican hymns in morning Assembly and my father invariably picked the best tunes. What a pity so many of these old glories have been elbowed aside in modern schools in favour of hymns some of which have all the spiritual content of congealed porridge.
Then the Germans were always singing. You would come across small groups of soldiers marching off somewhere to do something and they were all splendid singers. A lot of it was “schinderaza, boomderaza!” stuff, which of course small children like, but a lot was very high quality. After all their national song Deutschland uber Alles was set to a tune by Haydn.
My mother too was always singing Hungarian songs around the house. Best of all we would have singsongs round the piano with all the family, which went on for hours and we never ran out of music or words. This is what people used to do in Victorian times before professional music became universally available. There is no greater pleasure in family life than making your own music together at home, so long as it is done for sheer love of the music and not for lower motives. It is probably a lost art now except among a very few.
They say that eating together is what bonds a family together, but mealtimes can be pretty stressful in wartime when what there is to eat is often not very nice, even though my mother was an excellent cook. As the war dragged on things got worse until in the end the entire population was obsessed with food. And if there were shortages there were also gluts. There was one dreadful period of about three weeks when we had nothing but parsnips. Ugh. Yuk.
It is fashionable these days when writing about one’s parents to criticise them and go into great detail about mistakes they made. I have never felt tempted to do this. Towards the end of the war my parents became severely malnourished so that we children could have enough to eat. They were both extremely thin, they both got boils, and you could fit a half crown (a large coin) into the scar left by a boil on my father’s back. He once ate a cabbage covered in blight so that the rest of us would not have to eat it.
It wasn’t just food we were short of. I remember in Assembly one cold rainy morning seeing one of the older boys come in wearing a pair of ladies’ evening shoes. It was an amazing sight but acceptable at the time
After the Germans commandeered Greneze we lived in Collinwood, a pleasant house in the Vardes where we spent the rest of the war years. German soldiers were billeted next door and at the end of our lane lived von Helldorf, German Chief of Staff. We only ever saw him in a car which he used to drive pretty fast.
There were two major events in our lives during the war. One was the mass deportation of non-Guernsey British people to Biberach in Germany. Like all other foreigners we had to pack up at very short notice and we had a huge bonfire in the garden. I remember that I went to the quayside with my mother to where the people were embarking, perhaps to say goodbye to somebody. We entered a huge shed full of people and trestle tables covered with open suitcases. At the eleventh hour we were reprieved for some reason we never found out, but we assumed it was because my father was needed as a teacher.
The other event was when my father was sent to prison for having a radio. I remember that the German Field Police came to the house one day when my sister and I were playing in the kitchen. My father, who was very tall, suddenly bounded in at great speed, ran past us into the garage and threw a book into the coal bunker. What this book was I never found out, but he was incarcerated for six months and was let out now and then when he was needed at school. We used occasionally to see him around town with other prisoners doing jobs. We regularly took him food and Mother used to write long letters on toilet paper which she stuffed into bread.
When he got out of prison and got back to school, he was disgusted to find out that some other teacher had taught us the Edwardian ballad Just a Song at Twilight. I thought this song was quite nice.
My father was a dedicated and imaginative teacher. He normally taught the older children, but I remember he once filled in for my class when our regular teacher was away. We were learning about the Crusades, and he acted out for us a knight coming home to his lady back in England and unrolling a magnificent oriental carpet: “see my lady what I have brought you!”
Both my parents had active and enquiring minds and a spirit of adventure. My mother, who had not been to University, had a keen interest in science, especially astronomy, and on clear nights would show us the stars through her telescope. They were both always learning new things. Towards the end of his life my father learned Morse Code and acquired several shortwave radios which enabled him to listen in to Morse chatter worldwide. He once told me he was able to listen to police car conversations in Tokyo!
After the war my father took up a career of teacher training in Cyprus and Africa and we enjoyed a few years of exotic travel of a kind which no longer exists. In 1947 we took our tiny Morris Minor on a holiday around France and Spain, both of which looked deserted and utterly unspoilt. Major tourist honey pots such as Versailles were barely open so you could drink in the atmosphere untroubled by crowds. We had to find a little old caretaker man to let us - just us - into the Altamira caves so we could marvel at the prehistoric paintings undisturbed. On the vast empty beaches of Alicante I was pursued by a little girl who wanted me to give her my gold hair band in exchange for a loaf of bread. (Of course I gave it to her although it had been a birthday present from my aunt.) Two years or so later we drove through Austria and saw Berchtesgaden a deserted ruin, with goats sitting in the room where Hitler had once held court, among broken glass which still hadn’t been cleared away.
Later, when I was in my teens, I spent summer holidays with my parents in Uganda, and remember a trip by car to what was then the Belgian Congo. There were no troubles then and it was an intense, awe-inspiring, eerie place; a seemingly limitless wilderness full of animals.
After that of course I was living my own life, remote from my parents’ lives, so in this brief memoir I shall fast forward to my father’s last years when he and I shared a house together in a Wiltshire village. ( My mother died in 1977).
My father was one of those people who mellow with age. As a young man he had a hot temper, but this fell away as he grew older and he became wise and philosophical. He had always had a delightful dry sense of humour and that is a useful thing to carry with you into old age He was self-contained and in old age became increasingly shy, even rather reclusive, perhaps because increasing deafness made socialising difficult.
In the late 1990s he went with immediate family to Tristan da Cunha, one of the remotest places on earth. It was the last but not least of his exotic journeys. Unfortunately he could not physically get onto the island as this involved everyone climbing down the ship’s side on a rope ladder and literally jumping into a dinghy at the bottom, which was bobbing up and down on the Atlantic swell.
He remained keenly interested in the wide world and spent many hours listening to the BBC World Service in the middle of the night.
My father was a survivor, and he knew you have to do whatever is necessary to preserve health and independence into old age. When arthritis began to creep up on him and he was told he might end up in a wheelchair, he changed his regular diet immediately and gave up tea, coffee, citrus fruits, meat, dairy products and everything else that was suggested except potatoes. He had not one but two vegetable gardens and took great pleasure in them as he did in cycling and beekeeping until these became too arduous. Well into his nineties he spent up to three hours every day gardening, much of it heavy work such as digging. On one of his rare visits to the doctor he spoke of his way of life, whereupon the doctor stood up and shook his hand.
At nearly 94 he saw no reason why he should not live to a hundred, but in the heat wave August of 2003, which killed thousands of elderly people throughout Europe, he too succumbed, mainly because he was trying to get gardening jobs done when he should have been indoors. But then again, maybe there is such a thing as fate and it was his time to go.
There was something distinctive about him that could leave a powerful impression on other people. Once a year he used to ring the Skoda garage to get his car serviced. The people on the other end always knew who he was as soon as he opened his mouth and before he had a chance to tell them his name. “Hello Mr Hayes…”
Ildiko Hayes September 2009