Kensal Green Cemetery main gate, the office window just visible
In this detail from the Pinkwell School’s records we see the last date of Ray’s cousin’s attendance, the date of her death, and her reasons for leaving: ‘Killed in an Air Raid’
Although on my mother’s side (the Child family side) there were no less than six male members around in 1939-1945, their ages and reserved occupations would keep all but one of them from military service during the Second World War. One put out fires with the Auxiliary Fire Service, another saw that lights were put out with the Air Raid Precautions organisation, while a third was kept busy making bits for the clockwork that set off torpedoes. ‘But one of your uncles’, my mother mentioned, only once in my lifetime, ‘was killed. Ernest was his name and he lived here, you know.’ The ‘here’ in this case was number 4 Bravington Road, a tenement building in London Paddington, the top floor of which was taken over from my uncle by my parents as tenants when they got married in August 1939.
‘Was he a soldier?’ I asked, being a schoolboy not yet in long trousers and desperate for tales of the battlefield, ‘and did he kill lots of Germans?’ But the reply was not what I wanted to hear: ‘No, dear; he worked for the Great Western Railway and was killed during an air raid, but he was a lovely man and a wonderful brother.’
The disappointment of not having a hero – one of the Western Desert, storming-the-beaches-on-D-Day kind anyway – did much to shut the incident from my mind. Happy anyway, with the thought that joyful memories of Uncle Ernest still dwelled in my mother’s heart and mind. _ at is until decades later when visiting my parents’ grave, and with an hour or so to spare, I popped into the office at Kensal Green Cemetery.
‘Yes, I certainly can tell you if your uncle is buried here,’ said the cheerful girl behind the counter. ‘Child you say, Ernest Child, just give me a moment.’ We must take note here that on that sunny afternoon in May 1988 computerised records had not yet reached West London’s famous cemetery and that the ‘moment’ requested involved a trip to an adjoining back room where a dusty, bulky ledger was taken down from an even dustier shelf full of similar tomes.
Uncovering the records