Guernsey By Heart: Island Stories, Old Words & the Things Worth Passing On
In June 1940 about five thousand Guernsey children went down to the harbour with their teachers and got on boats to England.
Most of them spent the next five years in mill towns in the north. When they came home in 1945, some of them came home with northern accents. A lot of them could no longer talk properly to their own grandparents, because the grandparents spoke Guernésiais and five years away had taken it out of them.
That is the quiet moment the island's own language broke. Not in a law or a vote. At kitchen tables, one family at a time.
In 2001 there were 1,327 fluent speakers left. A few years ago the Language Commission put the number at fewer than a hundred, almost all of them elderly.
This book is about what's still here. The stories, the words, the food, the stones and the arguments that make Guernsey Guernsey, written down while the people who carry them can still put us right.
I'm not from Guernsey, and this book doesn't pretend I am. It's built from the island's own records and from the people who took the trouble to write its stories down. And it ends with a kit to help you get the rest from the people at your own table.
WHO IT'S FOR
If you were born here, it's your island told back to you, with enough you didn't know to start a row at Sunday dinner.
If you left, for university or work or love, it's home in your pocket, and a good Christmas present for the one in the family who went to England and stayed.
If your family were evacuees, or took evacuees in up north, it's the other half of the story.
If you moved here, it's the island underneath the one you live on.
THE BOATS, AND WHAT CAME HOME
The evacuation as families remember it, the five years on both sides of the water, and Liberation Day. The hard parts too, because the island deserves the true version and not the tidy one.
THE WORDS
The Guernésiais still hiding in everyday island English. How to say the place names properly, parish by parish. What the language sounds like, where you can still hear it, and the people working to bring it back.
THE GRAN'MÈRE, THE WITCHES AND THE FAIRIES
The stone woman at the gate of St Martin's church, carved more than four thousand years ago, broken on a churchwarden's orders in 1860 and put back together after the parish wouldn't stand for it. Why brides still give her flowers. The witches of Le Catioroc, the fairy passage at Le Creux ès Faïes, and the folklore Marie de Garis spent a lifetime collecting.
DONKEYS, CRAPAUDS AND THE MURATTI
Where the nicknames came from, every version of the story, and the football match that has been trying to settle the matter since 1905.
THE KITCHEN
Bean jar, and the arguments over it. Gâche, and the apple gâche melée. Ormering and the rules that come with it. Hedge veg and the honesty box, which might be the most Guernsey thing there is.
THE ONES WHO CAME AND STAYED
Victor Hugo's fifteen years at Hauteville House. Renoir at Moulin Huet in 1883. And Amelia Le Pelley, the island's first practising woman doctor, whose story was barely known until Ladies' College students dug it up and got her a blue plaque this summer.
TEN PARISHES
The whole island walked one parish at a time, with one story from each that the people who live there will recognise and the people who don't will want to go and see.
THE ASKING KIT
The part worth the price on its own. A plain list of questions to ask your oldest relatives this winter, set out so it feels like a chat and not an interview. How to record it on your phone without making anyone nervous. And how to make sure that recording outlasts all of us.
Buying from Guernsey? At checkout, choose Guernsey as your country, not United Kingdom, and put in your full postcode, both halves. A GY postcode won't go through under United Kingdom.
WHAT YOU GET
Guernsey By Heart. Around 20 chapters and 60 pages, plus the asking kit, a guide to saying the place names and a short glossary. A PDF laid out to read on a phone, tablet, laptop or e-reader. It downloads the moment you pay. Nothing comes in the post.
WHAT IT ISN'T
It isn't a tourist guide with opening times, and it isn't someone from away pretending to be born and bred. It's careful, it's sourced, and it's written with a lot of respect for an island that has been told about itself by outsiders for long enough.
YOU CAN CORRECT IT
If I've got something wrong, or missed the story your family tells, email me. It gets fixed, credited to you if you'd like, and everyone who has the book gets the new version free. However many times that happens.
If you're a donkey born and bred and you get to the end without learning something about your own island that you didn't know, email me and I'll refund you.
Tim Morris
Buying from Guernsey? At checkout, choose Guernsey as your country, not United Kingdom, and put in your full postcode, both halves.