She tries to imagine Ursula and John being here in 1921, with Annie by their side. She would have been twenty-three years old. Would she have been remembering the boys she teased in the school playground, as she stood among the graves? Or the lads who surrounded her at the roller-skating rink on Saturday afternoons? Perhaps she had a boyfriend or a lover who was called up but never returned. Other than Finlay, Annie had never spoken to her about the missing. Not a word.

In her online research, Georgia has seen a photograph of the cemetery from 1921, and knows that it would then have been filled with temporary wooden crosses with scratched-on details, not the carefully placed slabs of Portland stone professionally engraved with a cross or the occasional six-pointed star which are there now. She is quite sure that Ursula and John would have looked at every grave hunting for Finlay’s name; but they hadn’t found him. All they had was the letter from his commanding officer, saying that he had led his men courageously.

They would never have been asked about the personal words the stonemason might have carved at the foot of his headstone at a cost of threepence ha’penny per letter, because in the chaos, the Army didn’t know where Finlay was.

Did they guess? Did John choose a grave at random and decide that it was the one where his son lay?

She goes back to sit on the bench again and thinks about the scullery door, always left unlocked, just in case.

It’s almost noon when she stands to leave. The sun is overhead and there are few shadows. She has done her research and knows that when farmers or builders uncover the remains of a soldier, the Commission tries to find relatives. They look at dog tags and cap badges and regimental buttons and engraved hip flasks, and anything else that might help, but there is no guarantee of a correct identity because in the theatre of war, when men were killed by the thousand all around the battlefield, their uniforms were sometimes reused; taken off the corpses and put on by others who needed warmth or just something less worn out than what they were standing up in. She knows that occasionally there is a definite identification and sometimes it is discovered that the person already has a named grave, with a headstone placed there in error, bearing the name of another man. When this happens the Commission does not exhume the incorrectly identified soldier and try to establish who he might be. The original grave remains respectfully undisturbed, and a new headstone is carved and placed there instead.

Known Unto God.