REMAINED "DEAD" FOR TWENTY YEARS

Evening Star, Issue 22441, 11 September 1936, Page 12

REMAINED "DEAD" FOR TWENTY YEARS

WHY HE KEPT SILENT DRAMATIC MEETING WITH MOTHER A man whom his 85-year-old mother had mourned as dead_ for 20 years told why he had never visited her, although yearning all the time to see her. He had been reported dead in the war, and in order- to save his mother from a shock that might kill her should her “ dead ” boy walk into the house; he did not return home, but settled in another district. In the end. however, he met her without anv. warning. Tlies were happily reunited at their home in Benfleet (England). Mrs Warren, the mother, a frail wisp of a woman, her lips quivering with emotion, told an interviewer how a big bronzed man knocked at her door and asked for a lied for the night. She did not know him until he picked her up in his arms, and smiling, said. “ Don’t you know me, Mrs Warren?” It was her son. Stoker Petty-offioer John Warren. “ It’s my baby,” she shrieked. “ It’s my son John. • They told me you were, dead. ...” “ It was while John was in the Navy during the war,” she said, “ that I had a, visit from one of his comrades. mother’s Mourning. “ He told me that they had fought together on the same deck at the Battle of Jutland. John, he said, had been chopped down by a shell at his feet, and he had died a brave man. They engraved his name on a local war memorial. I mourned ray son as dead.”

Tears coursed unchecked down the old woman’s cheeks. Her son placed a comforting arm across the thin shoulders. “ I want to meet the man who told that terrible lie to ray mother,” he said grimly. “ I want to meet the man who cheated me of my mother’s love for 20 years. At the end of the war 1 was mine-sweeping, and when I was discharged the first person I met was another sailor from my own district. “ He stared at me as if he had seen a ghost. ‘Why, John I’ he exclaimed. ‘ you’re dead. . . .’ Then he told me how badly my mother had taken the news of my death. ‘ Better lie .low for a whole,’ he advised. *lf you went back now the shock might kill her.’ “ Tortured by the desire to see ray mother and home again though I was, I knew he was right. Better far to sacrifice myself than have my mother die of shock. The years passed. I married and settled down in Winchester, working as a builder’s labourer. My sons grew up into manhood without ever seeing my mother. “ Then a few months ago in Leytonstone I met an uncle of mine. He did not recognise me, but I told him who I was. I made him promise to tell my

mother that I was alive, and secure in the knowledge that she knew or my home-coming, I knocked at her door, “ But my uncle had forgotten ta break the news. It's a wonder tha shock did not bill her. She has been ill, but she is happy now.” , .