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

of the A–Z and opened the old map, placing them side by side on the table, two landscapes divided by a century but whose urban contours made them recognisable as the same place. I ran my forefinger down the page of the A–Z and then did the same to the map until I found where I needed to go.

      On the old map, Gadsden Mews is there in the east of Kensal Town, a wedge of North-West London still hemmed in today by the canal, the railway and Ladbroke Grove. Within this triangle on the old map, concentric streets of tightly packed houses shrink towards the very centre where, shoehorned into a cramped space between the backs of the residences, there are two rows of tiny squares named Gadsden Mews. There’s no Gadsden Mews on the A–Z, it’s long gone, but the surrounding streets survive and I could at least get close if I could find Hazelwood Crescent.

      I drank my tea, headed back out into the sunshine, turned east along the Harrow Road, crossed the bridge over the canal and walked towards where Gadsden Mews used to be.

      After crossing the canal I headed for the landmark of Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower until I found Hazelwood Crescent nestling in its considerable shadow. The entrance to Gadsden Mews had been at a slight dog-leg kink in Hazelwood Crescent that’s still there today, so I’d be able to pinpoint almost exactly where the mews once lay. The streets were quiet as I reached the hint of a bend I was looking for. On this spot had been the only way in and out of the slum tenements, the tiny three-storey wooden houses packed with the poorest of the poor, where whole families often lived in single rooms with little in the way of comfort or sanitation. Kensal Town itself was a poor area, but even Kensal Towners would probably have looked down on Gadsden Mews.

      I gauged my bearings and stood for a moment looking into where the entrance used to be. Ahead of me was Hazelwood Tower and to my right was the gable end of a low block of flats. I was about to move on when the sign on the front of the block of flats caught my eye – it was called Gadsden House. So there was an echo of the old place here after all. I walked around a little further, passed between a couple of apartment blocks and made my way into the centre of the Kensal New Town estate at the heart of which was a tarmacked basketball court bordered by a bright blue metal cage where the breeze moved a few leaves around in a far corner. The gate was open; I walked onto the court and stood at its centre. Hazelwood Tower dominated one end and on one side the court was overlooked by the balconies of Gadsden House. Somewhere beneath my feet lay the heart of Gadsden Mews. Somewhere here, within no more than a few feet of where I stood and where my shadow fell, was where my great-grandparents had eked out their lives of relentless hardship and poverty, and where Edward Connelly was born.

      Ahead of me lay a long, hard journey through a short, hard life. Around 175 miles south-east of me, as the crow flies, was a small, neat, unvisited grave. I looked a little incongruous standing in the middle of an empty public basketball court on an estate in North-West London clad in full walking gear and rucksack, but this was where a story with a mysterious, tragic ending began. I was beginning my physical journey from the cradle to the grave, through the all-too-brief life of Edward Connelly. I took a last look around, shifted my rucksack into a more comfortable position, strode away from the basketball court and set out for Belgium.

4

       ‘A half-deaf kid from the slums of Kensal Town’

      It would be more than a year before Edward was christened, perhaps suggesting he was a sickly baby for whom the first year was touch and go. But he survived and by 1901 the family had moved from Gadsden Mews to Admiral Mews, a few hundred yards west, close to the railway lines. It doesn’t seem as if they were moving up in the world. Booth’s notebooks, having set out the extreme poverty of the surrounding streets, described Admiral Mews as: ‘If anything worse than the foregoing. Houses on north side only and a few stables at the eastern and western extremities. Rough, noisy, all doors open, passages and stairs all bare boards, the usual mess … Gipsy looking women standing about, Irish. The worst of this block of streets.’

      Two-year-old Edward was no longer living with his parents. Instead he was living with his grandparents, which was probably more to do with the nature of the tenements than any family disagreements. They were living in the same building, but George and Marion were in one room with Robert, my grandfather, aged eight, while Marion’s parents, the Christophers, George and Mary-Ann, lived with Edward in two rooms along with their 42-year-old son John.

      Edward received some rudimentary schooling at the local mission school, but for families like the Connellys the capacity to supplement the meagre household income was always the priority, and Edward would have been sent out to work as early as possible, probably at the age of fourteen. In the 1911 census, when he was twelve, he was still living with his grandparents and his uncle John in Admiral Mews, close to his parents, but there’s one extra detail: on the census return Edward is described as ‘a bit deaf’.

      Within weeks of that census John Christopher died suddenly at home from a brain haemorrhage. It’s very possible Edward was there as his uncle held his head, let out an agonised cry and lurched across the room, scattering furniture and belongings before crashing to the floor in the corner, limp, motionless and ash-grey.

      Edward next turns up in the 1915 wage books of the Great Western Railway’s Old Oak Common railway depot, a vast establishment that employed a large number of local men and boys. Edward’s job was washing railway carriages, not a pleasant task in the age of steam and unchecked industrial pollution. He’d finish his shifts grimy and black with soot and filth, exhausted and arm-sore from the relentless brushing, but he was bringing in an income, which for a half-deaf kid from the slums of Kensal Town was about all that could be asked of him.

      It’s after this that the trail goes cold until Edward’s death. He would have been fifteen years old when war broke out in the summer of 1914, but it’s impossible to know what kind of impact it would have had on him and life in Kensal Town. His uncle Robert would have gone off to fight almost immediately, but we can only guess at how this might have affected Edward. Were they close? Robert lived in the same warren of streets, so he would probably have been a regular visitor to his sister and grandparents. Edward would have seen his uncle frequently as he grew up, but what would his thoughts have been about the war? How would he have taken the news of his uncle’s death in 1916? Would he have expected to go? Would he have tried to enlist under-age? What was the nature of discussion among his friends and neighbours? The talk around Admiral Mews – of enlistment, of the men who had already gone, of the prospects for a quick resolution to the conflict – would have been replicated in every street and among every boy of Edward’s generation. There hadn’t been an event in history at that point to unite a nation and affect its everyday life like the First World War. It permeated every county, every town, every street and every home. Nobody was unaffected.

      Most of us will have an Edward Connelly in our backgrounds: a youngster born on the cusp of centuries who’d grow up to be a participant, willing or not, in the greatest war and the greatest tragedy of the modern age up until then. These lads weren’t poets, they weren’t officer material – they did nothing heroic beyond their best. They went off to war as cheerily as they could, made the best of it, had no say in its strategy or planning and just did what they were told. Many of them came home afterwards and resumed their lives; others didn’t and lie to this day in the soil of France, Belgium and further afield. These lads were raised among grimy cobbles rather than the playing fields of Eton, and there were thousands of them right across the land.

      Take Admiral Terrace, for example, where the Connellys and the Christophers lived. According to the 1911 census there were twenty-nine households in Admiral Terrace containing 127 people of all ages, from elderly couples to enormous family broods crammed into the pokey rooms of eleven shabby buildings. I combed through these records for the names of men and boys who would have been of official military age during the First World War and then compared those names to any surviving military records I could find. I unearthed eight men, not including Edward, who went off to war, four of whom were killed. Two of those who died were brothers: William and John Lovell, twenty and twenty-three respectively, killed in March and August 1918. Including Edward, that’s five First World War deaths from one small