Discoveries

 Thursday dawned bright and sunny. It remained beautiful all day. In fact the Gorse Fox has resorted to a T-shirt. He joined Urban-Cub early on to walk Ellie to Dizzy Ducklings, then it was back to the usual Thursday agenda of shopping and administration.

Once the regular tasks were complete, the Silver Vixen popped out the front to plant some geraniums, and the Gorse Fox retired to his study. He had been looking up some information on the village of Wimpole in Cambridge. In so doing he came across a website that mentioned a "Law" being remembered on their War Memorial. He dug down, after all Wimpole is very close to the village where his Law ancestors lived. Sure enough he was the son of one the Laws the Gorse Fox already knew of. Indeed he turns out to be the Gorse Fox's 3rd cousin twice removed.

The Gorse Fox then dug down further to try and find what had happened to him. Well, John William had been sent with his regiment to Singapore and was captured when Singapore fell in 1942. He was PoW for the next two years, but then the Japanese decided that his cohort would be shipped back to Japan. The unmarked ship (they were known as "Hell Ships") on which he travelled had engine trouble and pulled into Manila for a couple of months, while the engine was repaired. It then set out on the return journey to Japan. It was attacked by 100 aircraft from a US carrier group, and the ship was sunk. John William and about a thousand of his fellow prisoners were lost. Despite all the research the Gorse Fox has done across his and the Silver Vixen's families, this is the first casualty he has discovered from WWII (though he's found quite a few from WWI).

We have Ellie with us overnight tonight. She's in the bath at the moment, being monitored by the Silver Vixen.