The Forgotten Soldier: He wasn’t a soldier, he was just a boy. Charlie Connelly

Williams and captured by generations of painters. It was a vista that had remained unchanged for a good couple of centuries, the same bell tolling for generations, the same birdsong from the heavens, the same shadows stretching across the grass year after year. I stood for a while, watching nothing in particular yet watching everything: history, nature and society in a view utterly devoid of people but which has somehow come to define a people.

      Once I’d got moving again, perhaps lulled too far by this watercolour perfection and having spied on the map a dotted green line that represented a more direct public footpath route to Harrietsham, I left the waymarked security of the North Downs Way to struggle clumsily across a recently ploughed field. Too accustomed to the well-trodden, signposted trail, I’d been tempted into a shortcut, one I messed up and led to me straying unawares into a wood that turned out to be private property. Ahead of me I heard the throaty rumble of a quad bike on which a man dressed in a green sweatshirt and combat trousers appeared, pulled up, switched off the engine and regarded me as if he’d just walked into his living room and found me sitting in his favourite armchair flicking through the television channels. Fortunately his initial save-it-for-the-judge-bucko demeanour as I explained where I thought I was soon gave way to a helpful point in the direction of the public footpath I’d believed I was on. Thankfully he’d realised he was just dealing with an incompetent buffoon with barely cursory map-reading skills rather than someone intent on pilfering birds’ eggs or putting on some kind of free festival. He even gave me a cheery ‘happy hiking’ as he gunned the quad bike and plunged back into the undergrowth.

      Once on the right path – which turned out to be ankle-deep in mud – I arrived in Harrietsham just as the shadows disappeared into the twilight and lights were winking on behind thick cottage walls. The weatherboarded Roebuck Inn was blue-white in the gloom, and I stayed there the night, my feet sore and my face tingling from the unseasonably warm weather. Warm though it was – strangely so for late March – even in the height of summer the fate of the long-distance walker is such that one is forced to crank up the radiators to ensure the underwear and socks rinsed out in the sink are dry by the morning.

      It was another sunny day as I headed out of the village the next morning to pick up the trail. After half a mile or so I came upon a bench, at one end of which sat a full-sized wooden sculpture of a fat friar cheerfully asleep, with his head resting in his hand to remind you that this path was also part of the ancient Pilgrim’s Way. I sat with him for a while, looking out across the valley as the Sunday morning church bells echoed around the villages, and could easily have joined him in a morning snooze if I hadn’t needed to be in Wye by sunset.

      Late in the afternoon I stopped to rest at a ruined church by a lake below a grand old house. All that remained were a tower, a small section of wall and a tiny side chapel. St Mary’s, Eastwell, dates back to the fifteenth century, and the flint-built tower in front of me was part of this original construction. It was a peaceful, shady spot and I ended up staying longer than I’d anticipated, poking around the graveyard, reading the stones and just sitting looking through the trees to the lake and listening to the birdsong echoing from inside a belfry long ago relieved of its bells.

      I was sitting on a stone slab that, judging by the remains of the walls around me, was once inside the main body of the church. St Mary’s had been badly damaged during the Second World War, then all but abandoned afterwards. In earlier times it would have been the place of worship for the family and workers of the Eastwell Place estate, but presumably an evolving social structure and the impact of the Second World War had seen the congregation decline almost to nothing. When the roof fell in in 1951 repair seemed pointless. The nave and everything but the tower, the small stretch of wall and the little chapel were demolished and removed in 1956, leaving just a tranquil ruin to be gently reclaimed by nature.

      I didn’t realise until I stood up to leave, but the slab on which I’d been resting my weary bottom was actually the key to the greatest story associated with St Mary’s. It’s a rectangular rubble-brick construction with a flat stone top, on the front of which is a plaque that’s quite hard to decipher unless you squat down in front of it and look closely, to read: ‘Reputed to be the tomb of Richard Plantagenet, 22 December 1550’.

      Richard Plantagenet, who was born around 1470, was an illegitimate son of Richard III, a boy raised in isolation, living and working with a tutor with very occasional visits from a man dressed in fine clothes the only break in the routine of endless one-to-one study. One day in 1485 the teenage Richard was hurriedly dressed by the tutor, put onto a horse and taken on a long journey that ended at a field in Leicestershire full of tents and apprehensive-looking soldiers: this was the eve of the Battle of Bosworth Field, the ultimate showdown of the Wars of the Roses. Young Richard was shown into the grandest tent of them all, where someone he recognised as the man who had been visiting him for as long as he could remember introduced himself as his father. If that wasn’t surprise enough for someone who had met few people other than the old boy who drummed Latin declensions into him, the man in the tent continued, ‘My boy, I am the King of England today, but heaven knows what I may be tomorrow, for the rebels are strong. If the Earl of Richmond wins the day he will seek out Plantagenets wherever they may be and crush them. Tell no one, absolutely no one, who you are unless I am victorious.’ This was to be Richard’s last meeting and only conversation with his father.

      The following day’s battle brought a bloody end to the reign of the Plantagenets in England, and when news filtered back from the fight that his father had been killed, the younger Richard immediately made himself scarce. He fled to London and commenced an apprenticeship as a stonemason, a trade he would continue for the rest of his life.

      In 1540 Sir Thomas Moyle employed an elderly mason in the building of his home and estate at Eastwell Place, a man who would stay working on the project for a full ten years until his death. Moyle noticed that the older man stayed aloof from the rest of the builders and masons, and he became, from a distance, fascinated by this enigmatic, faintly melancholy old workman. It was some time in the mid-1540s, when Moyle noticed the mason reading a text in Latin – most unusual for a labouring man – that he engaged him in conversation and eventually coaxed Richard’s story out of him. On hearing of Richard’s royal connections Moyle allowed this last of the Plantagenets to build himself a small cottage on the estate in which to live out his final years. He was buried on the estate and the tomb where I’d parked my rear end is his reputed last resting place.

      It’s a terrific story and one that I find myself hoping to be true. But as I looked at the tomb in what would have once been the nave of the church, I was well aware that wishing something to be true doesn’t make it so. I thought about Richard and I thought about Catigern of Kit’s Coty, both victims in different ways of wars and battles, and both possibly nothing like the men of their respective legends. These mythologies made me think about Edward: in a way I was mythologising him by trying to recreate his story and fashion his personality. Through the character traits and personal attributes I was attaching to him every time I imagined his experiences, I was creating a myth. The sketchy account of the basic movements of his regiment in the 10th Queen’s Royal West Surreys’ war diary provided the only clues I had to where he was and what he was doing in his final months, and even that was vague. I had no idea where Edward had been or what he was doing, and certainly I had no idea about who he actually was. Most disappointingly of all, I had no idea how, where or why he died. Was he single-handedly charging a machine-gun post and saving countless lives in exchange for his own? Was he taken out by an artillery shell while advancing across no man’s land? Did he absent-mindedly stick his head above the trench parapet just as a sniper fixed him in his sights? Was his death heroic, tragic or even comic? At the back of my mind I was even starting to wonder whether the decades of silence that followed his end had something to do with the nature of his death. Could he, I wondered, even have been one of the 300 or so British soldiers court-martialled and shot by their own side? Hero, traitor, coward or deserter, I reminded myself that I might never know for certain the truth behind Edward’s final days and death. Despite this resignation I still had to be careful not to create a mythology that might be at best misleading and at worst a gross distortion of the truth, even though I might never learn what the truth actually was.

      I heaved my rucksack onto my back and set off again, passing Sir Thomas Moyle’s old Eastwell Manor, now inevitably