Family Tree of Matthew James Heys
1.0 Our Family
1.1
Meeting
We met at the Cable and Wireless
Exiles Club, on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham, in 1976.
Pam
worked there on some evenings of the week, behind the bar, and worked
at Thames Television in Twickenham in the daytime. I was an
intermittent resident during that summer after a tour of work in
Gambia. During the summer I made occasional visits to Head Office,
visits to my family in Lancashire and had a long summer break at the
Montreal Olympic Games and the bi-centennial celebrations in Boston.
By the end of the summer we were seeing each other on a
regular basis but another overseas posting had come along and I was
working in Abu Dhabi with R and R leave in the UK every four months.
We managed to keep in touch and saw each other every four months.
Pam visited Abu Dhabi in early 1978 and we were married at St
Stephen's Church, Twickenham, on 13th May.
A few weeks later another
overseas posting came along and we set off to drive to Ankara, Turkey
in our Peugeot Estate Car.
1.2
Turkey
To be written
1.3
Matthew
To be written
1.4
Tonga
When Matthew was one year old we were
posted to the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean. It was a
wonderful place to live and life was very free and easy for a couple
of years.
The journey to Tonga was torturous. We lived in
Rossendale at the time and flew from Manchester to Tongatapu over a
period of about three days - via London, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Fiji
(two airports) and finally on to Tonga. With a one year old it was
pretty tiring although we spent a night in Los Angeles and visited
the original Disneyland en route. At that time Cable and Wireless
would pay for a seat for a baby over one year old when traveling such
long distances - as Matthew was thirteen months old he just
qualified. I dread to think what the journey would have been like in
only two seats.
The Kingdom consists of about 160 islands
strung in a vaguely north-south direction about 1000 miles north east
of New Zealand. Only about ten of the islands are inhabited and only
three of those have major population centres. We lived on the main
island of Tongatapu (Forbidden Tonga) along with about two thirds of
the entire population of the Kingdom. The capital, Nuku'alofa, was
the business and banking centre of the island but it wasn't a large
place and there was only a moderate amount of traffic.
Even
at the beginning of the 1980's there was no television and radio
reception was difficult if you wished to listen to anything other
than Radio Tonga. This didn't seem to matter as we lived a wonderful
outdoor lifestyle amongst the friendliest people you could ever wish
to meet. Even the climate was moderate/tropical and never went too
hot although the humidity was always high and sometimes hurricanes,
cyclones and earth tremors occurred.
We lived in a company
house about a mile away from the satellite station which formed the
hub of Cable and Wireless operations on the island. The journey to
works was sometimes by bicycle and only took about five minutes and
of course it was possible to return home for lunch. We employed a
gardener and a housemaid, both of whom should have been retired on an
age basis. Haouli the gardener was a whiz with the machete and used
no other implement. The flower beds were forever growing larger at
the expense of our lawn as he hacked away around the edges. Anna
Maria our housemaid was not familiar with western appliances and not
very suited to the job - she had what seemed to be a bad smoker's
cough and often filled the washing machine and the basement with
foam. Haouli and Anna Maria were wonderful with Matthew, Pam ended up
doing the housework while they looked after the him. We had a lovely
paw-paw (papaya) tree right outside our front door and the large
fruits could be harvested at breakfast time and were lovely with a
dash of lime juice.
Large cruise ships used to call at
Nuku'alofa and the wharf was only a quarter of a mile from our house.
At the end of the day the tourists would return to their ships -
Canberra, Sea Princess and even once the QE2 - and the Tonga Police
Band, immaculate in their dress uniforms, would play a selection of
popular tunes. Waltzing Matilda was the most popular. Pam would push
Matthew down in his push chair to listen to the band and wave the
tourists away.
After we had been in Tonga for a year, in
early 1982, we took a two week recreation break in New Zealand and
drove a camper van from Auckland to Christchurch via Rotorua,
Wellington and Queenstown. Close to the end of our holiday we heard
that a terrible hurricane had swept over Tongatapu and that there was
much devastation. The journey back to our house from Tongatapu
airport was frightening, many houses had been blown away and many had
lost their roofs and lots of debris was strewn everywhere. Our house
had survived intact although there was much water ingress to the
carpets and furniture. What really struck us was how the sea had
washed over our large garden and killed the lawn and the wonderful
hibiscus hedge that surrounded the entire garden.
It wasn't
long before things started to recover, and because we were residents
we received an equal share of all the food aid that soon arrived.
What to do with sacks of flour and sugar which wouldn't keep for long
in that climate? Pam baked and baked and filled our large chest
freezer with bread and I volunteered her to bake two hundred cup
cakes for a works "do". The Tongans polished them off in no
time - but Pam has never forgotten my generosity.
There was
material aid too. The Mormon Church, which had several churches in
Tonga, sent 1,000,000 board feet of sheet plywood, amongst others and
soon the island was functioning again.
We had to stow our
large satellite antenna during the high winds and point it directly
upwards so that it offered minimal resistance. Of course this meant
that it wasn't pointing at the satellite and Tonga was effectively
cut off from the rest of the world. This happened on one other
occasion during our stay in Tonga. Anti-apartheid protesters were
protesting the televising of a Rugby match between New Zealand and
South Africa - they took an axe to the waveguide of the satellite
station in Auckland and were successful in stopping the transmission
of the broadcast to overseas locations and perhaps didn't realise
that they had cut-off several Pacific Islands from the outside world.
1.5
England Again
To be written
1.6
U.S.A.
To be written
1.7
Back Home
To be written
This page last updated 25 Nov 2006
