Last year, while I was suffering from my knee injury, my wife and friends went to stay in the superb hotel in the former convent at Gosnay, near Bethune. When the £ was doing well against euro it was not an impossible thing to do on a librarian's pay. We used to have occasional murders with ill-mannered middle class tossers - Bunty and Jacastas we called them who had no social graces and were an embarrassment to the English and a necessary evil to the staff.
Just down the hill from the convent is the small communal cemetery for Gosnay and along the back is a row of graves of men I can most certainly be proud to be English, and more importantly, British, for.
Lieutentant Dering John Jasper Radcliffe was just twenty-two when he died on 31.10.1917. He served with the 5th Bn Grenadier Guards. He had suffered a serious head wound and lost an eye in 1915, but soldiered on.