The boy soldier who never came home

WITH his slight frame and baby smooth skin, brown-eyed Walter Charles Taverner looks little more than a child in his First World War uniform. This is the boy soldier whose words from beyond the grave are providing a fascinating insight into life in the trenches for primary school children today.

His long-lost diary telling of the hell of life on the frontline in 1915 has come to light after more than 90 years, discovered among a pile of old letters and greeting cards in a box marked “old bits and pieces” by his niece, a headteacher in North Yorkshire.

The slightly tattered, small, red, leather book, complete with a pencil that had been worn down to a tiny stump, appeared, at first glance, quite unremarkable. But as she opened it, Jill Pemberton realised that these pages held an incredible story.

With shells screaming overhead and snipers only yards away, 17-yearold Walter still found time to compile this pencil-written diary, in immaculate copperplate. “Plenty of bombs flying about,” he writes at one point.

As Mrs Pemberton read her young uncle’s words, she held the very pencil he had used to write them as he sat huddled in the mud-filled trenches.

“Just holding the pencil and realising that he held it in his hands too as he sat in the trenches, that really brought it home to me. I found it all very emotional,” she says.

He refers to “rough times” in the trenches and marching at night. “Attack on our left,” says one entry. He reveals how one of his comrades was hit in the knees. And he writes of how, even while in the trenches, they paused on a Sunday for a sermon.

In the heat of battle, many matter-of-fact entries only hint at the horrors he was facing in North Africa: “13 and 14 platoons got lost. Nearly cut off,” he writes. In October, after more than a month in the trenches, he reveals: “Our trenches only 15 yards from Turks.”

Walter is no Wilfred Owen or Rupert Brooke. He may be lacking their maturity and power of expression, but his sparingly used words are incredibly powerful nevertheless. At times, they are full of heart-rending emotion.

We can only imagine what this vulnerable youngster was feeling when he wrote: “Do not like the place.”

Walter wrote those words in North Africa in August 1915, the year before he was killed in action, aged just 19. All his family know is that Walter, the eldest son of a cooper, or barrel maker, was blown up. There were no remains.

Mrs Pemberton, headteacher at Fountains School, in Grantley, near Ripon, is now using the diary to bring the history of the First World War to life for pupils in her village primary school. With no veterans left to talk about the First World War, his is a poignant voice from history.

“There is not a huge amount of detail in the diary, but it is still very revealing.

You have to remember, he was just a 17-year-old lad. You wonder what a 17-year-old lad in Afghanistan might be writing today, probably something similar,” she says.

The first born of 13 children, only seven of whom survived infancy, Walter and his family lived in a tiny terraced house in the East End of London: “He was always described as the strongest child, but for someone so young, he had seen a lot of death. One of my aunts remembered when a new baby had been born and Walter remarked: ‘That is a weak one, I don’t think he will be making it’,” says Mrs Pemberton.

When his heavily pregnant mother, Beatrice, was told of their eldest son’s death, believed to be in late 1916 or early 1917, she collapsed on the spot and sadly lost the baby she was carrying. Mrs Pemberton’s mother, Vera, the thirteenth child, was born the following year.

Until recently Mrs Pemberton, 56, only knew that her mother Vera had an older brother who was killed in the First World War. “To me, my mum’s brother was a distant relative, except for a baby photograph taken of him in a frilly dress, I knew little of him. But this diary has somehow made Walter a real person again. It just brought him alive.”

A cousin then discovered a longlost photograph of Walter in his uniform as a fuller picture of the young soldier began to emerge: “I even found out from the ‘personal memoranda’ at the beginning of the diary that Walter took size eight boots, weighed 10st 11lb and was 5ft 7in.”

The whole family was extremely proud of Walter. “He was obviously a hero in their eyes,” says Mrs Pemberton, whose aunts remembered doing up his ‘putties’, the fabric strips wound around his lower legs as part of his uniform, when he came home on leave from training.

When he went off to train, he was still clearly a growing boy. Another aunt recalls their father commenting that he would have to cut a bit out of the door frame when he came home on leave, as he couldn’t get through the doorway with his cap on, he had grown so tall.

Children at Fountains School are finding Walter’s story fascinating, says Mrs Pemberton. “Both world wars happened many, many years ago for our children. This brings the whole thing alive for them. They have heard the story of my family and see how we are all linked to the past and how all of this is still very much alive in people who are alive today.

“They want to know all about Walter, how old he was when he died and they ask if he was frightened, and all sorts of things that I couldn’t answer very well.”

Initially in the diary, Walter chronicles his months spent drilling and training, which included bayonet fighting and digging trenches, with one line entries to mark church parades and marching at night. He even refers to the occasional “pay” of 4/6 (four shillings and sixpence).

But the tone changes abruptly once he boards a ship, headed ‘southbound’ and soon ends up in action in North Africa. On July 31, he writes of passing Gibraltar and “in sight of Algiers, North Africa”. Shortly afterwards, he describes being in action at Salva Bay when his ship was under aircraft fire.

In the back of the book, someone has signed his name in pen ‘Joseph Mohamed’ alongside some Arabic writing. Walter has written alongside it in pencil. “How little we know of each other.”

“For a young boy from the East End of London going to these exotic places, it can’t have failed to excite him. We can only imagine what it must have seemed like to him,” says Mrs Pemberton.

“Our children are used to television, 24-hour news, mobile phones and the internet and one of the hardest things for them to understand is how communication would have been so limited then.”

Walter mentions getting occasional letters and parcels from home: “To Walter, getting a letter from home would have been so significant,” says Mrs Pemberton. There is mention, on December 24, of a “Christmas card from Nell”.

“There was no one called Nell in the family. I do wonder who she was. Was she, perhaps, his sweetheart?” she says.

Towards the end of the diary, Walter tells how he spent Christmas in the Canadian hospital in Cairo, although he doesn’t reveal what was wrong with him. The boy who, before the war, had never been much further than the East End of London, recovered well enough to see the pyramids on January 6.

Walter’s last entry says “carry on in new diary” which, presumably, was destroyed with him the following year, when he died in action. No one knows what regiment he served with or how he was killed. “We presume it was a land mine or a bomb of some kind because there were no remains,”

says Mrs Pemberton.

When, 15 years ago, Mrs Pemberton’s brother, David, 62, was in Jerusalem, he visited the war cemetery there and discovered Walter’s name – Walter Charles Taverner – on a war memorial to those who fell in “Egypt and Palestine”.

When he showed the photograph to Walter’s remaining siblings, it was a moving moment. Another niece, Joan, says: “I can clearly remember my mum’s reaction. There was a sigh of satisfaction. It was as though the sight of the actual recording of Walter’s name could bring some sort of closure, after all these years. He wasn’t just abandoned, unrecognised, in a foreign land.”

The family also has a large brass medal featuring Britannia and two small dolphins and is hoping to find out more about Walter’s final days through official war records.

Now, at least, in the midst of their search, Walter’s relations can all take some comfort from the fact that the young boy soldier who went to war and never came home will always live on through his remarkable little red, leather diary.