Finn
I asked Philly to tell me more about being a War Detective.
It sounded like a pretty cool job, and I wondered if it might be something I could do.
Mum and Dad worry a lot about what I’ll be able to do when I grow up, on account of me not being a Team Player.
I’m not worried though. Since Philly’s been here, I’ve thought of lots of things I could do.
I could be a codebreaker at GCHQ because they still exist. I looked it up online and they have a whole section about applying to be an intern in maths and cryptography.
I’d be good at keeping the Official Secrets Act too.
I reckon I could make up some new ciphers that even a supercomputer would find difficult to crack.
But I think I’d also like to be a War Detective because it involves having persistence and spending a lot of time looking at headstones in graveyards.
I’m already pretty good at both those things.
Philly said she joined the War Detectives when she was ready to wind down a bit.
‘I’d worked all my life at GCHQ, once the war had ended, and my twins had grown up and gone on to have careers and families of their own.
’ She told me she has grandchildren and she’s even a great-granny, like Ella was to me.
The War Detectives work from an army base in Gloucestershire, so she didn’t have to move house when she joined them.
They are a team who search for missing servicemen and try to give them a proper burial.
Mostly, they’re dealing with soldiers who were killed in the First World War, which was also called the Great War but I don’t know why because that was a really terrible one for losing people, which is not great at all.
Philly says it was largely down to the way wars were fought then, and all the mud.
Even now, human remains keep turning up in the fields of northern France and Belgium, which is where some of the biggest and longest battles were.
When they do, if the remains are identified as being British because of things that are found with them, the War Detectives get involved.
They can use DNA testing nowadays to try to identify the bodies.
They also use a lot of deduction. For example, if they find a cap badge for a certain regiment then that gives them a starting point to work from.
Then they can see whether there are any other bits of uniform left, like the stripes on a sleeve that show the rank of a soldier.
And sometimes there are things like rings or photographs that help too.
They have a big database of people who are still missing and relatives who are trying to track them down.
It’s not just Philly who’s spent her life searching.
‘Not so many went missing in the Second World War,’ Philly told me.
‘The majority of the remains we were asked to try and identify from that time were from RAF crash sites, usually in the Netherlands and Germany.
I found that especially hard, having worked with so many airmen myself in my time.
It became very personal, trying to match up the remains with their families.
‘Sometimes, too,’ she said, ‘we managed to put a name to an unknown burial, like some of the war graves we looked at in the cemeteries here. That usually happened when researchers or family members gathered some evidence pointing to a particular place and they’d submit it to the War Detectives who could then look into it further.
We also had to rule out any other possible candidates who might be in a particular grave, you see, before we could officially say that a particular grave belonged to a particular person.
It has to be able to be proven beyond doubt. ’
All of this has to be done by research only, because the exhumation of war graves for the purposes of identification is strictly forbidden.
Otherwise, as Philly says, you’d be digging people up right, left and centre and it would be chaos.
But if they can successfully identify who an unknown grave belongs to, then they have a rededication service, with full military honours, and put a proper headstone in place with the person’s name.
They don’t usually dig up the body and bring it home for a burial or cremation, though, even if that’s what the family wants.
‘The general rule is fought together, died together, buried together,’ she explained.
Philly says it’s all about giving people Closure, and even though she’s been to a lot of rededication services, she’s always found each one very moving because it meant an awful lot to the families to know where their loved ones were.
I asked her what Closure means and she said it’s about finding a resolution to something, a bit like the feeling we get when we work out a Sudoku or a Magic Square and everything fits into place at last. I understand that – I hate it when I can’t work out a maths problem, it keeps me awake at night and I have to do some trampolining to try to stop thinking about it.
As Philly said, there are few things worse than Unfinished Business.
Then Philly told me something else interesting that she did quite recently, even after she stopped working as a War Detective. ‘You remember what I told you about Gwido Langer, the Polish Bureau Chief?’ she said.
‘Yes. He was buried in a cemetery in Perth, the city in Scotland, not Australia, because he was made to feel ashamed about not getting the other people in his team out of France earlier and losing some of them.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, well remembered! Well, I met up with Maksymilian again at the unveiling of a memorial at Bletchley Park to commemorate the contribution the Polish codebreakers had made to cracking Enigma way back at the start of the war. It just has three names on it: Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Ró?ycki. The others who had spent those years at Cadix, deciphering other coded messages and making sure they were sent to the Allies, still go unrecognised. But at least those three are now remembered at Bletchley, tucked into a corner of the grounds between the huts and the Cottage where I met Dilly Knox. Yes, Maks was there that day, for the unveiling, and we had time to talk afterwards. We spoke of Gwido Langer, and I told him I had visited Gwido’s grave in the cemetery in Perth, where he lay with so many other Polish servicemen, and put a red and white wreath there.
Maks told me Gwido’s family in Poland really wanted people to know that the story wasn’t as it had been made out to be.
He had always tried to do his best for the whole team at the chateau, but they were so dependent on the French.
The delay in getting out wasn’t Gwido’s fault.
He’d been so courageous, too, when he was captured, interrogated and then sent to Sachsenhausen.
He’d always kept the secret and protected not just his own team but the whole codebreaking operation for the Allies.
It was a terrible injustice that he was laid to rest in the corner of a foreign graveyard where his family couldn’t visit him easily. ’
She paused, looking at me to make sure I was still listening, which of course I was.
‘That conversation put the wheels in motion. I was able to contact the powers that be in Britain, to help Gwido’s family in their petition to have his body exhumed and brought home to Poland.
And so, at last, in 2010 he was given a state funeral in his hometown of Cieszyn, with full military honours. ’
She stopped again, and I could see she was remembering because it’s important, so I didn’t interrupt to ask her any questions.
‘It was December and the snow was falling,’ she said.
‘Big wet flakes that bowed the branches of the cypresses lining the path through the graveyard. We walked behind the cavalcade of soldiers, one of them carrying a photo of Gwido, just as I remembered him from the chateau. So many people turned out to pay their respects: those of us who were left – his old comrades – but many young people too. We stood at the graveside as they played the Last Post and the snow fell faster, drawing a veil across the hills beyond the town. Once the army and his family had laid their wreaths on the grave, I left a bouquet of white roses and chrysanthemums, tied with a red and white ribbon.’ She sighed.
‘They know how to do things properly, the Polish military.’
‘So did it give Gwido Langer’s family Closure?’ I asked her, because she’d finished talking.
She blinked, looking at me as if she’d forgotten I was there. Sometimes she seems to be remembering things so deeply that she does that. Her eyes go all misty.
‘Why, yes Finn, I believe it did.’
‘And now they have a place they can go, to remember him properly.’
She smiled and her eyes were brighter again. ‘Exactly.’
And then we both said at precisely the same time, ‘It’s so important.’ That made us laugh, and then it was time to make our Marmite sandwiches for lunch.
When Dad came home after supper that evening, he said the sailing camp was going very well.
‘Tomorrow is the last-but-one day, so would you like to come and do some dinghy sailing, Finn? The forecast is good, not too much wind so conditions should be perfect, and you can go out on your own if you prefer not to be with the others.’
I thought about it for a bit. Even just thinking about being with the other kids and the large boy’s mother who had said those things about me made me feel a bit sick again.
Then Philly said, very quietly, ‘You know, I should love to get out on to the water again one day. It’s been years since I was in a boat. ’
‘I could take you tomorrow, if you like,’ I said. Because I knew she would sit still and not do anything upsetting.
‘I’d love that.’
And so we made a plan to go in the car with Dad the next morning and Take Part in the sailing camp for 1 day, at least.