Sometimes a person will come into your life and you will have absolutely no idea how or why they are there. Usually you will know them; they are the unexpected playground ally, the first person to break your heart, the colleague who shares your love of crocheted cushion covers...each of them enters the sphere of your existence and, for good or ill, makes an indelible impression upon you. Whether they remain life-long friends or pass through your orbit for a short time, you remain profoundly changed by the experience of knowing them and will carry them in your heart and mind, affected by their memory until the end of your days.
The person who has affected me most recently is dead.
I didn't know him; in fact, until a couple of years ago, I had no idea he even existed. But fate has a funny way of bringing people to your attention and, for whatever reason, I now find myself indelibly bound up in a story that stretches back before I was even born...
When I was a small child, there lived in the bungalow next-door-but-one to my maternal grandparents a kind old lady by the name of Mrs Wilgrove - "Aunt Jess". She passed away when I was six so my memories of her are few, but the abiding image I
have of her is a gentle, sweet old lady whom my grandparents were very fond
of. After Jess died I – in the way of
small children – blithely went on with my own life, only occasionally remembering
the woman who had briefly been part of my experiences thus far.
That is, until a
few years ago.
I had heard, in
the years since Jess’ death, that she had had no family to speak of and that
she thought of my grandparents in particular as a sort of ‘surrogate’. The thought made me sad; Jess was a lovely
woman and to think of her being on her own, especially at the end of her long
life, was terrible. The only other story
I remembered about her up to this point was my grandad once telling me that
Jess’ dad was a coal delivery man and had once delivered coal to the infamous
murderer Dr Crippen, with young Jess helping him.
Being intrigued by serial killers, you can imagine what impact the revelation had on me at the time! But that
was all I really knew, or remembered, and it wasn't until I was helping my
grandmother clear some things from her garage that Mrs Wilgrove and her story
came back into my life. Amongst all my grandad's old tools and the various detritus people accumulate over the years, I found an ice-cream tub with various small jewellery boxes, photos and an envelope in. Not recognising anyone in the photos (or indeed the jewellery I asked my grandmother about it and she told me it had belonged to Jessie Wilgrove and that, after she died and my grandparents were clearing out the bungalow, they had taken these things as keepsakes. Looking through the photos and other bits and pieces, I was struck by two typed letters from the War Office, dated from towards the end of the Second World War, and that is the moment Edward came into my life...
Edward A. Wilgrove was the only surviving child of Jessie and Edward Wilgrove. Born in 1923, Edward had a twin brother, William, who tragically died well before his first birthday. Edward senior had been gassed during the First World War and suffered with poor lungs for the rest of his life; he and
Jessie never had any other children. The
three of them carried on, a nice self-contained little family unit, until the
advent of the Second World War. This is
where the War Office letters came in...
I made a promise to myself the day I learned
their story: that I would honour the intentions of my dear grandad and go to Bayeux
Edward junior, my Edward, had joined the 9th Battalion
of the Durham Light Infantry. I have a
photo of him in his uniform which Jessie kept all those years; he looks, as so
many of them looked, so terribly young.
The 9th Battalion DLI saw service throughout the war in
several ‘hotspots’: North Africa , El
Alamein , Sicily Northern
Europe and the battlefields of Normandy . This is where the
inevitable happened. On the 17th July
1944 , at just 21 years of age,
Private 5837293 Edward A. Wilgrove was killed in the service of his
country. The first of the yellowed
letters from the War Office bears the grim tidings to his parents that his body
was laid to rest in a temporary grave in a makeshift cemetery, until such time
as it could be buried properly. The
second letter, dated early 1946, informs the reader that Edward’s body has now
been laid to rest with all due ceremony and formality in the British War Cemetery Bayeux . Unfortunately the
news of his son’s final resting place came too late for Mr Wilgrove; never a
well man, he had passed away in December 1945, leaving Jessie to cope on her own.
My grandmother told me my grandad had always wanted to take
Jess to the cemetery, so she could see her son’s grave and know exactly where
he was (for surely every mother wants to know exactly where her children are?) Unfortunately the opportunity never arose; in
the end, Jessie was too unwell to make the trip and she died without ever being
able to go and lay flowers on her child’s grave.
By this point in the story I was in tears. The thought of the kindly old lady I so
vaguely recalled from my childhood having no family left in the world, never
getting to visit her son’s final resting place in person…it was awful. I come from a close family and, whatever else
we may be, we are always there for each other; I couldn't and can’t imagine
what it must be like to have nobody at all to support you through what must surely be the most harrowing of experiences. Jessie had my grandparents in the end, and they were very close, but I was
haunted by the thought of her dying without ever being able to say some form of
final goodbye to her son. I asked if I could
take the letters and the photos; my grandmother gave me the jewellery as well, which
I still treasure to this day, but it’s the letters and the photo which haunt me
the most.
I don’t know why Edward and his story has become something I
feel so strongly emotionally attached to.
I knew his mother, yes, but only a little; I never knew Edward himself
or had any reason to until that day we were clearing the garage. But he’s part of me now; he and Jessie and Edward
senior and poor little William who died so soon…they are all part of my life
and the fabric of my existence and I can’t forget them.
