There’s an unsolved puzzle in the original story which underpinned the first novel by authors SL Roman.

The original boy Ken Carter was killed by a German bomb in November 1940 in the southern English town of Egham in Surrey. He lay in an unmarked grave for more than 60 years in Englefield Green cemetery. A member of the Evacuees Association, Jean Slattery, kept his story in her heart and eventually the child was given a proper headstone.

But the question which always dogged writers Sarah Onions and Laura Meloni (the pen name for SL Roman) was why Ken Carter’s mother had not arranged for her son to be given a proper headstone. The historical evidence showed that Mrs Carter had been energetic and determined in the face of her son’s bad luck which also included the untimely death of her husband, one month after the baby boy was born. Despite this she moved the family from a rougher area of the seaside town of Brighton to a bungalow near to pretty Withdean woods. She also wrote a letter to the local Surrey Herald newspaper in Egham thanking well-wishers who’d sent flowers after the boy’s death.

Sarah later interviewed a member of Mrs Carter’s family – a Londoner called Martin Waddilove. Mr Waddilove attended the ceremony in 2004 to give his cousin a proper headstone. He told Sarah that ‘gran just gave up’ perhaps explaining why Mrs Carter didn’t pursue a marked resting place for her child.

The lack of a headstone was made worse because the other boy killed in the bombing in November 1940 – George Button – also an evacuee – had a very distinctive memorial put up to him in St Andrew’s Church in Hornchurch in Essex after his body was returned home from Egham. And the girl killed on that fateful night Barbara Whitton Arkell was also given a proper resting place.

The writers under the pen name of SL Roman often talked about the sad strand in the original unlucky boy’s life. He was born on March 13 1929 and as mentioned, his father died a month after his birth. Ken was evacuated to Egham, supposedly safe, where he was living in a house hit by a bomb. A local woman screamed at the wardens who refused to get him out of the ruins. And then his body laid unmarked in a grave into a new century.

In the words of one of the reviewers of One Year One Night by SL Roman, ‘it seemed a tragic fate was at work on the life of the young boy displaced by war’.

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