I suppose the hairdressers was a funny place to be talking about the First World War. I was yelling above the sound of the drier about a mystery I was trying to solve. It was bound to attract attention. I’ve never been renowned for the softness of my voice so when the manager approached I thought she was going to ask me to be quiet. Instead she said, “I think I may be able to help with your problem.”
Could she help, I wondered. It was 1997 and I’d been puzzling over a mystery since the previous autumn when I read a novel about the First World War, a subject I’ve always been interested in. A childhood memory had surfaced after reading the book and I rang my mother. “Didn’t Dad have a brother who died in the Great War?” I asked.
Mum knew his name had been Harold but she didn’t know any more than that, and Dad had died some years before. All his eight brothers and sisters were now gone too, there didn’t seem to be anyone I could ask. I rang the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the lady was very helpful. Harold Henson died in 1915, she told me, at the battle of Loos. His regiment had been the Northumberland Fusiliers.
“That can’t be him,” I said, “my father’s family lived in Nottingham.”
“Well,” she continued, “this soldier enlisted in Nottingham.”
I also learned that only one Harold Henson died in the First World War so it had to be him.
This was a mystery. Why would a Nottingham lad have joined a northern regiment? I was curious to find out about this boy who fought and died for his country at the age of nineteen, and would have been my uncle. I rang a cousin in Nottingham but he didn’t know any more than I did. With a large family spread around the Midlands there were some cousins I didn’t even know. It seemed an impossible task but my fascination was mounting.
Perhaps officialdom might have the answer. I wrote to the Ministry of Defence but discovered Harold’s documents had been destroyed along with thousands of others during the blitz of 1940. Undaunted, I tried the Northumberland Fusiliers museum. They had no individual records of my uncle but they had the regimental diary of the man who commanded his battalion. Tragically Harold was only in France for fifteen days before he was killed. This seemed to be as far as I could go, but I’d become fond of this boy by now and longed to know more about him.
On Christmas Eve my husband asked me to open one of my presents a day early. “I can’t wait any longer,” he said. “I’ve discovered something amazing and you’ve got to see it.”
He had bought me a book about the Great War, which included personal reminiscences from old soldiers. In the section covering the Battle of Loos there was an entry from a man called Harry Fellows who had been in the same battalion as my uncle.
“Not only that,” my husband said, “Fellows was from Nottingham and had a friend called Henson.”
I could hardly believe it, a breakthrough at last. I wrote to the author of the book asking if I could be put in touch with Mr Fellows’ family. I was sure he held the key to the mystery. I was disappointed when the writer said she was no longer in touch with the family who had supplied her with the memoirs. Once more I seemed to have come to a halt.
This was the point I’d reached that morning in the hairdressers. The day everything changed.
“I know someone who’s an expert on the First World War,” the salon manager said to me. “He writes books on the subject and I’m sure he’ll be able to help.”
I was willing to try anything so wrote to this man, telling him about my uncle’s painfully short participation in the war, and explaining about the old soldier Harry Fellows whose family might help me. Almost by return of post I got a letter to say that Harry Fellows had been a member of the Western Front Association, I was even given the address of the Nottingham Branch.
I was reluctant to get too excited but once again I wrote a letter giving all the details and hoped I’d hear back soon.
As well as having a loud voice I have pretty sharp hearing and a few days later, as I walked up the drive, I heard the phone ringing. By the time I got indoors the answering machine had picked up the call and I heard a man’s voice saying the very name that had preoccupied me for so long, “Harold Henson.” I grabbed the phone and found myself talking to a man called George. My letter to the Western Front Association had been passed to him because, and I could hardly believe my ears, he was a friend of Mick Fellows, Harry Fellows’ son.
Mick Fellows was was stunned to hear from a relative of his dad’s wartime pal. He showed me his father’s war diary and in one entry the mystery of joining the Northern regiment was solved.
Harold, along with several pals, had signed up for the army on a Saturday morning in September 1914. One of these friends was Harry Fellows.
“We want a long ride in a train,” they said to the recruiting sergeant. None of them had been further than Derby before.
“There’s the Duke of Cornwall’s Regiment,” they were told, “or the Northumberland Fusiliers.”
“There’s no football in Cornwall,” one of them said. “We’ll take the fusiliers.”
So began Harold’s tragic army career. A year later, after training, the regiment sailed to France and Harold died in their first taste of action at Loos. As the troops moved forward into the trench Harry Fellows was sent by the commanding officer, with a message for their Captain. He left my uncle’s side and never saw him again; Harold’s body was never recovered. Harry Fellows went on to survive the war and when he died in Nottingham, aged 92, he asked for his ashes to be returned to France to be buried close to his friends.
We travelled to France for the 80th Commemoration of the end of the war, and spent four days visiting many battlefields and cemeteries on the Somme, and attending the great ceremony in Ypres. We went to Mametz Wood where Harry Fellows’ remains are buried and took part in a short, very moving service to commemorate him, and all his fallen comrades.
There was another visit that we’d organised, one I would never forget. On our last morning Mick Fellows met us and we drove to Loos. It’s mining country and in November was a bleak, unwelcoming place. Dud Corner cemetery was beautifully tended, grass cut neatly between the graves. Around the perimeter walls huge slabs of stone bore details of those missing in action; it was here that I finally saw my uncle’s name. I had to crane my neck to read it and my husband lifted me up so that I could feel the contours of the carved letters. As we left our poppy crosses, and signed the book of remembrance I thought our mission was complete. Mick Fellows had other ideas.
He took us back through the village of Loos to a farm. We got out of the car and walked along the edge of a well-tilled field that sloped gently up to a ridge. When I realised where we were I couldn’t speak. Me, the one with the big mouth and a line of chat for every occasion – rendered dumb. We were in the field where Harold fell. Mick passed around a whiskey bottle and we drank a toast to my uncle, and all those who marched away to fight and never returned.
Back home I traced as many members of the family as I could to let them know the story I had uncovered. It was a joy to meet cousins I never knew existed; to see faces that bore traces of my own features. I wondered which of us might have looked like Harold, and how different our lives might have been had he come home from the war.
They quickly came to know me as the cousin from Leicester who talked a lot. But I know their lives were also made richer by discovering the uncle whom most had never heard of, who would forever lie in the windswept French countryside, and who now, would never be forgotten by his family.
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