#41

[Digital reproduction of Artefact found 31 May 2024 in the cellar of  Dragon Hall, King Street, Norwich. Provenance uncertain, pending forensic analysis. Provisional assessment by National Centre for Writing (Hannah Garrard) ‘Although this sheet presents as a faded diary entry I believe it is very likely to be a fabrication by one of the Storymakers recruited to prepare material for the Hall’s wider public opening. It is unhelpful to have this uncertainty: volunteers were asked to submit their work in the usual way.’]

DEAR OLD BARGE

Walter Blunt’s Diary 

25th day of October 1920

This a new diary, my first, given to me by my mother. She had it for my father, who died before I returned from the war abroad.  I have been away for four years, sixteen when I left, twenty now, back in our rooms in Old Barge Yard.

How should I start? I am in between a war and a future I do not know. I know where I was in 1917, in France, in the trenches. I have seen men fighting and falling, killing and being killed. I have seen the bodies of men with their insides blown out. I have seen men wounded beyond imagining, screaming in pain and asking to be finished off. I have done that. I have seen horses galloping in circles on three legs. I have seen men sleeping in mud for an hour then being woken to battle again.

But since 1918 I have been to Afghanistan and Egypt. I have been part of our failure to capture Gaza, with very many losses. I have flown over the desert. I have had adventures. I have lain with women.

And now I have seen my family again. My dear mother, my brother, my sisters. Five of us in two small rooms. There are thirty-seven families in Old Barge Yard, nigh on one hundred and fifty of us altogether, crammed in the space between the old Hall and the river. ‘Slums’ they are now calling them, and they say many will be pulled down soon in what they call ‘clearance’.

The war did for over three and a half thousand brave Norwich souls. And some were killed by their own. I knew John Abigail from Thorpe Hamlet. My uncle worked with his father as a carter. John told me he twas proud to be in the Norfolk Regiment but he was soon broken by the horror and shot for desertion.

There are other survivors from the war hereabouts; shell-shocked, many of them. Add me to that list, I reckon. We now face the future, all along ‘Hard-Up Street’ as they call it now. There is talk abroad of Revolution. People here who have resented the war are thinking about Socialism. The Spanish Flu started when I was away. They say it is abating now, but death is still around. Frederick Todd was pulled from the river last week, drowned near St Anne’s Wharf.

Sunday last I walked along the river to the Cathedral. There was a goodly number, of women mainly, gathered at Life’s Green, next to a chapel dedicated to St. Saviour. Nurse Edith Cavell has her final resting place there. The Germans shot and buried our heroine in 1915, but she is returned to her city and may she rest in peace

So what lies next for me? Work or fight? There are still many trades round here. Corn stores, oil wharfs, malt houses. There will be work after slum clearance building what they call homes for heroes. I have looked for employment in the Daily Press. They have it in the Free Library on the corner of St Andrews and Duke Street. I walk there every day after breakfast. I welcome the peace there, the silence after the constant hubbub of home. But the jobs listed are not to my taste or skills. Brick layers, cardboard box manufacturing, cowmen, tractor driver, furnaceman, yardman. Although I don’t want to be considered as unemployed, recruited for the useless job of widening the roads. Jobs for heroes indeed and the road to destitution can be easily found. I have heard of whole families ending up in the Bowthorpe Workhouse.

I also read the news in the Daily Press, of what is going on in the wider world that I have so recently left. Ireland is interesting to me. The British government brought the Lord Mayor of Cork to Brixton jail for having a cypher code and seditious material. He has died on hunger strike. So too did an Irishman in Cork jail. He claimed his bomb to be a ‘curio’. This new story from Dublin is a bad one. “Not hearing a sentry’s challenge during curfew hours, Thomas Moore (24) of Cromer, who had come to the city with a horse and trap to see a veterinary surgeon, was fired at, and his head was blown off.”

And yet I am attracted to Ireland. The black and tans are there from over here, and now the special officer ones, the Auxiliaries, are recruiting. I might be accepted by them through my service as a temporary officer with the Norfolks, and for a spell attached to the Royal Flying Corps. The Auxies are well equipped to do the Royal lrish Constabulary’s dirty work and the pay is good. Twenty-one shillings a day… I could work for a month here in Norwich and not earn half as much.

My sister, Alice, does not want me to go. She wishes I might go back to work for William James. She says I should join the Lads Club, opened two years since in King Street. But I do not want the play acting of fighting with padded gloves. I can fight with a rifle and bayonet. And this is a gloomy place to me. Ghostly dark alleys, much drunkenness. That I prefer the real danger of uniform and battle may likely seem foolish to some, but not to me.  

I have decided. Tomorrow I will tell my family that I go to the recruiting office at the castle and sign up for Ireland. My mother will weep I know, sisters and brother too. But I must do it, I must make my own future. The money will help the family and pray God this so-called war of independence will be over soon and I will return a hero again. 

NCW Curator’s note

WA Blount [sic] of Norwich is officially recorded as having joined the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary on 5 November 1920. He was killed in an IRA ambush alongside three comrades at Clonfin, Co Waterford on 2 February 1921. His body was returned to his grieving family in Old Barge Yard. His final resting place is not known.  

This is a work of fiction.