“Rank and regiment?”
“Captain and the Royal Fusiliers would be my guess.”
She disappeared behind a closed door, but was back within fifteen minutes clutching a small brown file. She extracted a single sheet of paper and read aloud from it. “Captain Guy Trentham, MC. Served in the First War, further service in India, resigned his commission in 1922. No explanation given. No forwarding address.”
“You’re a genius,” I said, and to her consternation kissed her on the forehead before leaving to return to Cambridge.
The more I discovered, the more I found I needed to know, even though for the time being I seemed to have come to another dead end.
For the next few weeks I concentrated on my job as a supervisor until my pupils had all safely departed for their Christmas vacation.
I returned to London for the three-week break and spent a happy family Christmas with my parents at the Little Boltons. Father seemed a lot more relaxed than he had been during the summer, and even Mother appeared to have shed her unexplained anxieties.
However, another mystery arose during that holiday and as I was convinced it was no way connected with the Trenthams, I didn’t hesitate to ask my mother to solve it.
What’s happened to Dad’s favorite picture?
Her reply saddened me greatly and she begged me never to raise the subject of The Potato Eaters with my father.
The week before I was due to return to Cambridge I was strolling back down Beaufort Street towards the Little Boltons, when I spotted a Chelsea pensioner in his blue serge uniform trying to cross the road.
“Allow me to help you,” I offered.
“Thank you, sir,” he said, looking up at me with a rheumy smile.
“And who did you serve with?” I asked casually.
“The Prince of Wales Own,” he replied. “And you?”
“The Royal Fusiliers.” We crossed the road together. “Got any of those, have you?”
“The Fussies,” he said. “Oh, yes, Banger Smith who saw service in the Great War, and Sammy Tomkins who joined up later, twenty-two, twenty-three, if I remember, and was then invalided out after Tobruk.”
“Banger Smith?” I said.
“Yes,” replied the pensioner as we reached the other side of the road. “A right skiver, that one.” He chuckled chestily. “But he still puts in a day a week at your regimental museum, if his stories are to be believed.”
I was first to enter the small regimental museum in the Tower of London the following day, only to be told by the curator that Banger Smith only came in on Thursdays, and even then couldn’t always be relied on. I glanced around a room filled with regimental mementoes, threadbare flags parading battle honors, a display case with uniforms, out-of-date implements of war from a bygone age and large maps covered in different colored pins depicting how, where and when those honors had been won.
As the curator was only a few years older than me I didn’t bother him with any questions about the First World War.
I returned the following Thursday when I found an old soldier seated in a corner of the museum pretending to be fully occupied.
“Banger Smith?”
The old contemptible couldn’t have been an inch over five feet and made no attempt to get up off his chair. He looked at me warily.
“What of it?”
I produced a ten-bob note from my inside pocket.
He looked first at the note and then at me with an inquiring eye. “What are you after?”
“Can you remember a Captain Guy Trentham, by any chance?” I asked.
“You from the police?”
“No, I’m a solicitor dealing with his estate.”