In common with many other little villages, towns and cities on Sunday in our 13th century parish church, we commemorated Armistice Day 11th November, the day in 1918 the guns of World War One fell silent. Ours is a very simple ceremony, there is no procession, the congregation stands and the last post is played, not by a trumpeter, but on the organ. At 11 a.m we hold our two minutes silence. I say 'silence' for it was a very windy day, and the wind blew hard and played havoc with the huge copper beech trees nearby where the rooks nest in spring and filled the ancient granite church with 'wooshing' sounds . Then the names of those men from the village who were killed in both world wars were read out by Michael Ash, followed by the national anthem - all very moving. In our prayers we especially remember the servicemen from the USA and Canada who came in such numbers in 1944 to Devon in preparation for D Day landings as well as those who fell in subsequent conflicts.
The following story is how I came to make a contribution to the Imperial War Museum. A few years ago I was working for a large national charity, and as I was in charge of closing a lot of little offices throughout Devon. One day a volunteer handed me a little black leather diary which had been found at the back of a desk in one of the offices due for closure. It was a diary for 1940, and it was full of poems written in ink during the years 1940 - 1942, and signed with the nom-de-plume 'Michael O'Dwyer.'
In the front the author had written "If this little book is ever lost, the writer of these poems would be very grateful if the finder would return it to the owner." There followed an address and a London telephone number. The phone number given was in the long since vanished London telephone codes e.g FRObisher, FREmantle, SLOane to name a few. All the poems were about the war in London, starting with the Blitz and how people went down into the tube stations to shelter during a raid, and continuing with the entry of the United States in 1941 with an entry about Pearl Harbour, the fall of Singapore in January 1942, and in the back the names and addresses of the many people he met, the vast majority service men and women. The last entry, I think, was in November 1942.
For many years this diary lay in my desk, for all efforts of tracing 'Michael O'Dwyer' had come to nothing. The London address had been crossed out, and another address in Devon was listed, so I had to assume that 'Mr O'Dwyer' had retired to the West Country. I followed this lead, but the only person who remembered Mr O'Dywer was the post mistress. She thought he had died 'sometime in the Seventies,' and as far as she knew he had not been married, there were no relatives, and the bungalow where he lived had long since been sold.
What should I do? In a strange way I felt solely responsible for this little book of poems, which had obviously meant a lot to the owner. As he was obviously a civilian during the war, there was no regimental or service link to follow up.
So, for many years it lay forgotten in my desk, when one day I came across it during one of my very sporadic cleanouts. Then on the BBC I listened to a programme about the Imperial War Museum in London, and I emailed Maria from the IWM. Much to my delight she expressed an interest in the poems, and on my next visit to London I made an appointment to see her, complete with the diary.
I was so pleased and in a way relieved that Maria accepted the poems for their archives as she regarded the book as an important part of social history during WW2.
At last Michael O'Dwyer's poems has found a final home, and I like to think that if he knew he would be surprised and delighted.
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