Home Is Where Love Is

This is the magical epitaph chosen by Charlotte, mother of 22-year-old Canadian John King.

He had contracted TB during his childhood but had managed to recover from it; if the body could isolate and fence off the infection, the disease could lay dormant for years, though a new illness or a physical shock could reignite it.

Which makes the fact that John enlisted in September 1915 as a Private, without waiting for the commission which his education and employment at the local bank in Campbelltown, New Brunswick, might have afforded him.

A year later, on 27th September 1916, he was wounded on the Somme; his lower jaw was blown away by bullets which shattered his face and neck.

Invalided back to England, he fought hard and was actually “doing well”, remaining resolutely cheerful, despite his grievous injuries.

Which made it all the more awful when, still convalescing the following spring, he suddenly took a turn for the worse.

On 22nd April 1917, the Medical Officer at Shorncliffe’s Moore Barracks Hospital had the dreadful job of telling him that the TB had been reactivated by the gunshot wounds he’d sustained.

His notes remark that at this point, John “seems to be in shock still.”

This time, he’d already used all his strength to fight the physical and mental injuries received on the Somme the year before, and he had no chance against reactivated TB.

A week later, he was gone.

But his Mum ensured anyone passing his grave at Shorncliffe on the Kent coast would know how loved her boy was.

Home Is Where Love Is – really not a bad thing to hold onto, going into a New Year.

Shorncliffe Military Cemetery, overlooking the English Channel above Folkestone, Kent