introduction
7
1916. Joyce always thought of Arthur and celebrated his short life through her vivid recollections. Like Joyce, Lily Baron remembered her loved one, this time her dad, killed at Bourlon Wood in November 1917. Lily, born in 1912, had distinct memories of him and his last leave at home, and in the summer of 2010, just short of her ninety-eighth birthday, she visited France and entered the wood at the point where he died to lay a wreath and say a prayer. Her wreath was adorned, appropriately, with lilies and a card on which she had written ‘Thank you for five years of real happiness – I’ve missed you all my life.’ Lily died in December 2010. Donald Overall, now aged ninety-eight, went to France in September 2007, to the south of Arras where his father was buried in June 1917. As flight engineer in a Halifax bomber, Donald had flown over northern France on many occasions during 1944 and 1945. He had stared down into the night’s inky blackness and thought of his father ‘down there’, and the promise he made himself one day to visit. At the grave of his father, he recalled with emotion: I’m an old man, I am supposed to be tough, I thought I was hard, but I’m not. He’s my dad. I miss him. I missed him as a boy and I miss him as an old man. It is very important that I have come back, can you understand? I feel closer now than I have ever been. That time he carried me to bed was the last time and this is the next time, ninety years. I don’t know how much longer I will live but I will never forget him. I would have come here, I wouldn’t have cared if it was snowing, because it meant something.
George Musgrave is younger, with no such recollections, only the picture of a train. He has spent a lifetime honouring his father, but he remembers, too, how much his mother struggled to keep the family together. There is no memorial for her or any monument to recognise her dedicated work, nor those like her. And
881g_The Quick and the Dead (final).indd 7
08/08/2011 15:12:53