A happy Sherborne lad, soon to be lost

A couple of weeks ago I told the dreadful story of the murder by the Japanese of John Houlton in 1943, brought up in Mill Hill Farm in the village. See this link. I mentioned I had no photo to share of him which made the story harder.

I’m grateful to Byron who has provided me this photo of the three Houlton lads, taken I think in the mid to late 1920s. The boys are listening to a radio with headphones, the radio inside the window of the village club. I can’t be 100% sure but a bit of detective work makes me fairly certain that John is the boy on the right. Seeing this young man here, with his brothers, makes the story even more anguished.

This really brings home to us that those names on the war memorial whom we remembered last Sunday were real people, part of the village, sons of the village. We recognise the very place where they stood in the photo, we recognise the humanity and the innocence in their faces and their happy smiles. Poor John’s face makes me weep to think he died a dozen years or so later in such awful circumstances, on the other side of the world, his body hidden, his life simply erased. My guess is that the photo will make you weep too.

Anyway it provides us with more resolve that we have 17 ancestor oaks to plant out this winter to keep the memory and respect and honour alive for them. A group of trees on a distant hillside is not enough. We need to find a home for individual oak trees, named for everyone on the memorial, where we can see them and associate each one with a real person like this young lad on the right. I’m going to bully you, unashamedly, to identify and offer space for just 17 oak trees. As a community these young men were wrenched from our care early in their lives. We cannot care for them directly but we are obliged to remember each one, and the oak trees will help. We’ll care for the trees, and hope their 500 year life will keep memory alive a little longer. We’ll change the world in 500 years time in this way, in the memory of the fellows like little John Houlton. What else will you do this winter that will last 500 years?

Let me know if you have space for a tree. Please.