The Department 19 Files: The New Blood: 1919

Jenny’s employer, the wife of a plain-speaking Yorkshireman who had made a fortune in the cotton mills of Preston, had taken a liking to her and had permitted David to be educated alongside her own children, an act of kindness that his mother would never cease to be grateful for. She raised her son to be fiercely proud of the father he had never met, and despatched him to the Holmwood townhouse on Piccadilly on his eighteenth birthday with the belief, burning in his chest, that he was the equal of any man.

From there he had gone to Sandhurst, his place secured and his bills paid by Arthur Holmwood, and across the Channel to Europe in late 1914. He was gassed at Ypres in the April of the following year, and returned to his regiment in time to survive both Verdun and the churning nightmare of the Somme. By the end of 1916, he had begun to be viewed as something of a lucky charm, having survived four of the most devastating battles of the war, and was beloved by his men, whom he never treated as anything other than equals. His run of luck finally came to an end in April 1917 at Vimy Ridge, when a bullet found its way into his knee and stayed there. He was still recovering in a field hospital fifteen miles behind the line when Quincey Harker led his Special Reconnaissance Unit into Passchendaele, and saw out the final months of the war at General Headquarters in Montreuil, before returning to London and the War Office, and taking up his role as a member of the Holmwood household.