The 2025 E.M. Fletcher Writing Competition

“Serendipity, Cemeteries, & Serenity”

Riding away from the cemetery back towards Kingsford Smith Airport, I was mystified as to why there was no headstone on the grave. For me, today was the biggest Red Letter Day in what had become a ten-year cycling odyssey. I first conjured up in my mind’s eye the rough outline of today’s itinerary years ago. I didn’t know at the time that it would take so long to cycle home from England, but I did always know that, having landed in Sydney, my first destination would be the Eastern Suburbs Cemetery.

By the time I’d reached Sans Souci on the way to stay with friends, I had resolved to commission a headstone. It was the least I could do for my Grandfather - a man I had never met - for he wrote the Diary that saved my life.

Context: One of my earliest childhood memories is of my Dad showing me his father’s 1916 Pocket Diary, written whilst serving on the Western Front during The Great War. The small book, with its hundreds of pencil entries, was kept in its original light canvas pouch and stored in a small slide-out drawer in one of those old-fashioned roller-top desks. It was an incredible thrill for me, as a young boy, to sit on Dad’s knee and have him show me the diary. Every time this connection to my Grandfather occurred, I was immediately drawn to the bullet hole that had splayed up the fabric of the cover on the spine. I was of an age where anything to do with ‘bullets & war’ was enthralling. I was allowed to hold the diary, but wasn’t allowed to turn the delicately bound pages. So I would excitedly plead with Dad to advance the pages through January as I watched the bullet hole on the spline get smaller and smaller until it disappeared altogether. I was too young to be fully trusted with delving into the pages, but old enough to understand the basics of genealogy and anatomy to figure out that if the bullet strike had been a millimetre to “stage right” he would have been killed, thus snuffing out any possibility of him fathering my Dad in a decade later.

Fast forward thirty-something years and I inherited the contents of the roller-top desk. I kept all the things that I thought I was supposed to keep; the desk went to the Salvation Army, and the diary stayed with me. I packed it away in a box somewhere, and that box of small sentimental things was eventually shipped with the rest of my belongings to England when I emigrated. From time to time, as I moved house, I’d come across the canvas pouch, take the diary out, look at the bullet hole and reminisce about how, as a child, I couldn’t comprehend a world where I wasn’t in it. Now, as an adult and slowly descending into a seemingly bottomless pit of depression and despair, I could. I placed the diary back into the box and forgot about it.

Gambling had been my final downfall. After many years of foolish and self-destructive behaviour, my habit had reached a point where I risked it all on “one turn of pitch-and-toss”, but having lost it all, unlike the protagonist in Kipling’s iconic poem ‘If…’ I didn’t seem to have the fortitude to start again with nothing. Luckily, I had just enough resilience to see me through a winter of sleeping rough in the Welsh countryside, where I eventually reached that point where “the only way is up”, and I started to rebuild my life by re-engaging. Early in the process, I gathered several caches of belongings scattered among friends’ lofts and garages and was able to store them in one secure location for an indefinite period. I just needed “the turn of a friendly card”, and that card came in the form of the 1916 Diary re-discovered in a box in late 2015 - the eve of its Centennial Year.

Thinking a little bit more optimistically than I had done in the recent past, in my mind I toyed with the idea of somehow retracing my Grandfather’s steps using the diary as a guide. A good friend gifted me a bicycle, another shouted me the ferry ticket, and six weeks later I was heading to the Western Front. As 2016 drew to a close, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do once I ran out of Diary to follow. I was thriving, living day-to-day in France and Belgium, so, just like Forrest Gump, I chose to just keep going. I started to use the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s list of cemeteries where casualties were buried as ‘markers’ to replace the structure provided by the diary, and I would just keep going until I ran out of cemeteries. Because it is such a long list, three years later, in the Centennial of both the Armistice and the death of my Grandfather’s younger brother, I found myself still in France. So I aimed to visit the grave of Uncle Ken before riding on to the Remembrance Day commemorations three weeks later.

The surprisingly well-documented file compiled by the Australian Red Cross Society contains five statements from eyewitnesses to Uncle Ken’s death, all dated several months after the event. Perhaps the most detailed is the statement of an eyewitness;

“K.M. W… - Killed 20.10.18 - The enemy was shelling us heavily. W was in the dugout with 6 or 7 others. A shell burst on the corner and drove them out. He and his mate (Bombdr. Wootten) laid down in a crater. We heard the shell burst on them just before daybreak. They were both killed instantly (evidently in their sleep). I recognised W’s body. Their personal belongings were too torn to be sent home, but were handed in to the Major. I saw W’s body wrapped in a blanket; then down to the waggon [sic] lines. This happened on the main road up to Le Catelet.

- Gunner R.A. Sheehan,

29th Battery, A.F.A - 17.1.19”

Scouring the map for a village or town named Le Catelet near Busigny, where I knew Ken was buried, the only reference I could find was an administrative boundary, with the largest town being a place called Gouy. The most direct road from Gouy to Busigny was twenty kilometres long. Splitting the difference, and knowing it was in all probability not the scene of the action, I pulled up on the eve of the centennial of Ken’s death and set up my hammock in the corner of a muddy field halfway along that road. At 4 o’clock the next morning, my mobile phone alarm went off, giving me enough time to break bivouac, push my bike across the field and back onto bitumen. I rode the ten kilometres towards Busigny in eerie silence, the absolute opposite of what it must have been like a hundred years before as shells exploded all around. It was still dark when I reached Busigny Cemetery on the outskirts of town. Over the coming hour, the thick fog diffused the rising sunlight.

I was sure that I was the only family member to visit Ken’s grave, and I wondered if any of the Wootton family had visited Albert Wootton, who was buried six graves along. Both their names were remembered on this day and I placed a small wooden memorial cross at the foot of both headstones, but I wanted somehow to connect my Grandfather’s Diary to the visit, so I retrieved it from its waterproof storage bag. I didn’t recall any mention of Ken in the diary when I was reading each page meticulously on its centennial day in 2016, so I turned to the entry for what would have been Uncle Ken’s 21st, and penultimate birthday, and read softly aloud;

“Another quiet day. Fritz has been leaving us alone lately Thank Goodness. In the evening he dropped one within 3 yards of our pit. Thomo got hit up about having a light on. Fired about 20 rounds on our [unintelligible]. Fritz gave the trenches hell for a while. 4 Huns came over + gave themselves up last night. Things are drying up nicely and we advance soon. Delayed [unintelligible] until 11:30 tonight”

     Wednesday 20th December 1916

It was then that I set myself the goal of visiting his sibling’s grave as soon as possible after arriving back in Australia. I didn’t have any real idea of when that might be, but it was an idea that easily took hold in my mind. By now, I had already traversed Western Europe by bicycle for three years, living in my hammock, and relying on the generosity of supporters and the fruits of my part-time labour for subsistence. I knew enough about my new life that I would eventually get back to Australia. Five years later, having cycled ocean-to-ocean across Canada, I did.

Dragging the two pieces of checked luggage out onto the grassy area in front of the Sydney Airport’s Arrivals Terminal, I reassembled my trusty but somewhat rusty companion of fifty-something thousand kilometres. Now redundant, I packed the softshell bike-bag and oversized duffle bag into the bottom of one pannier before loading up the rest of my worldly belongings and setting off for Botany Bay.

The section my grandfather was buried in was easy enough to find; it was adjacent to the main administration building of the cemetery and clearly signposted “RC-CCC”. Finding Plot 45 would be a little bit more difficult, as I can’t see any indication of which corner of the rectangular section “Plot 1” was. “Not a problem”, I’d just lean the bike against a tree and wander down each of the five pathways traversing what I guessed were between three and four hundred graves until I spotted a familiar name. I retrieved the pocket diary and set off down the first pathway.

Half an hour later, I reached the end of the fifth pathway, which meant that I had failed to find the target headstone on the ‘first pass’. There were a few headstones where the names were illegible, so I set off again along the five footpaths to re-visit them for closer inspection. At the end of that stroll, I was no wiser where my Grandfather was buried.  If it hadn’t been a Public Holiday, I would have called in to the Office to ask for help to find him. That left me with my phone and the internet; I searched for a more detailed map of the cemetery, and that’s when a lightbulb went off in my head. I was searching for my surname and the registry was coming back with the Roman Catholic Section and a Plot number, which I couldn’t find because of the lack of any on-the-ground numbering system. But if I used the surname that I could read off a headstone I was standing in front of, then I could look up the Register to see what Plot number was ahead of me. If the number were a hundred or more away from “45” then I’d move to a different corner and try again. I did this a couple of times until I was in ‘the ball park’ plot number-wise, so then I’d search for the plot number of an adjacent grave, and then move up or down the row accordingly. Bingo, a few minutes later, and much to my relief, I was standing in front of a clean but bare rectangle of grass sans any indication of being a grave. I photographed the scene, my  “life” encapsulated in my bicycle, and the diary, the artifact that bound everything together. Time for me to continue on my journey. Silently proud to have reached here in the manner that I did, and a story I would have so loved to have been able to share with my late parents. The next time I visit, it will be to inspect the headstone. Now to think about the wording.

Busigny Communal Cemetery, France - 20th Oct 2018