All I know about my mother's family is they lived at Dial Green, Lurgashall, West Sussex, wrote George Larbey. Her parents were Ernest and Harriet Etherington. They had six children, I think in this order: Jim, Harriet (my mother), Ernest, Dorothy (Doll), Topsy and Jack.

My mother didn't give too much away when it came to her family, as unknown to me my eldest sister Pat was illigit; something that was kept from me until my mother died in 1959. One of my mother's aunts, who I knew, well told me.

The last time any of the family saw Jim was when he went to war about 1916, and they saw him being driven by horse and cart to Midhurst railway station to join his unit, the Sussex Regiment.

She said he knew as well as they knew they would never see him again. Jim was killed in that terrible Great War.

I found the poem, below, in my mother's autograph album when she died in 1959, and I suspect she copied it into there some when after his death.

I wondered whether, if you put it on your site, someone might read it and let me know who wrote it.

I would think by the dialect it was perhaps a Sussex person, and I would
think mother found it somewhere and altered it to suit her family by changing the end to Jim.

Census '21

There'll be one name less on the paper gal,
Than there was 10 years ago.
Gaw I'd love to put Tom's name down here,
O lord that it might be so.
When I was fillin' the form afore,
Tom sat in the corner there,
And laughed, as he said,
'When it comes next time there'll only be my chair!'
For he had thoughts of a home of his own,
With Lucy who lives on the hill.
But something came and took Tom off,
And Lucy she's up there still.
Yes something came, you know what I mean,
And Tom's name can't go down.
But 'tis writ elsewhere in letters of gold,
And Tom-he's wearing a crown!
There's one name less on the paper gal,
Don't cry, don't think of the Somme.
For there's one name more on the book of life,
The name of our own dear Jim.

Also in my mother's autograph book there are two photographs of soldiers, and I have often wondered who they might be. They are called F W Dean and J G Watson.