9 - The Moon Man and His Back Story: 11 September 2024

I am staying in Killarney in Kiln Lodge, a wonderfully clean apartment nestled in the hills of Killarney.  Today I only drove for about 2 hours.  It is one week since my arrival in Ireland and the need to move quickly from one place to another to get done what I want to do, has eased.  The most pressing tasks that I wanted to do, have now been done. 

Even the pain of being in this beautiful country called Ireland has eased a little.  I have only a few days to go and I am certain I will never return.  There is no reason to return here.  Margaret has been laid to rest in the holiest spot in the whole of Ireland and I have carried out my solemn promise to her without any help from the people she thought were friends right until the moment of her death. 

Neither I nor Margaret have any friends left in this gorgeous country.  All of those we once thought were friends, abandoned Margaret and me soon after Margaret was given her terminal diagnosis.  The pain of that abandonment still hurts, but it is nothing compared to the pain of losing Margaret herself.

I doubt that anyone except the very few who did not abandon me will ever read this blog.  That does not matter either because I am writing for my own benefit.  If others lack the time or energy to read it, that does not harm me.  In any event, I am now mostly beyond further hurt.

Margaret’s battle to beat the untreatable cancer which took her down is set out in detail in my book The Circle of Love.  The Circle of Love will be published later in 2024.

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For the remainder of this trip, I will continue my efforts to track down the remaining traces of the Moon Man.  The Moon Man was yet another remarkable individual who did not deserved to be forgotten so completely.

Less than a week after learning on 10 July 2020 that Margaret had an incurable cancer and would probably be dead before Christmas, Sylvia sent me a photo of a Postcard she had found in her late mother’s things.  On the front was a photo of a church in Bootle, Liverpool.  On the back was a short, handwritten note addressed to Sylvia’s grandmother Eliza Hankin.  The Postcard was dated 14 August 1914.

I could not read the handwriting at all, but I was puzzled that something seemingly so trivial had been kept for more than 100 years.  I guessed that the unknown writer of the Postcard must have been the sweetheart of Sylvia’s grandmother.  I guessed that because it had been kept for so long, the writer of the Postcard must have been important to Eliza Hankin.  I began calling the writer of the Postcard, The Moon Man.  I wondered what the name of the Moon Man had been and what had happened to him.  I wondered who Eliza Hankin had been and what had happened to her.  Did she die of a broken heart waiting in vain for the return of the Moon Man?

Sylvia told me that her grandmother worked as a servant in a small school in the town of Hoylake.  Hoylake is in the English County of Cheshire, on the southern side of the River Mersey.  Most of the Hankins were born in Liverpool on the northern side of the River Mersey.  I wondered who had been the owners of the school that Eliza had worked in?  How had a domestic servant in a school in Hoylake ever come to meet the Moon Man?  Were her employers rich because of inherited wealth?  Were they the sort of people that I would be glad to have as friends?

So in the brief intervals between the seemingly endless succession of medical appointments and hospital stays inflicted on Margaret because of her terminal diagnosis, I began looking for the Moon Man. 

My search for the Moon Man began in July 2020.  I always did my searching in the gaps when Margaret did not need me to do anything – and the gaps were few enough.  Apart from the continuous round of appointments, it was my job to ensure our home kept running on a relatively regular basis.  I did the cooking, even though Margaret’s appetite was often poor.  I kept the house as clean as I could.  And in the gaps, I kept looking for the Moon Man until I found him.

In September 2022 - and to my great delight - I discovered the name of the Moon Man.  The Moon Man was Alfred Pearson.  He had been born in Liverpool in 1895 and he was the grandson of an Irishman called John Scott from County Armagh.  John Scott had fled Ireland with his two younger brothers and John and his brothers had been counted in the 1851 English Census.  In 1851 John had claimed to be 18 years old and that his two younger brothers were 16 and 14 years old.  I presume he told this lie to try and persuade the English “Welfare” authorities that they did not need to try and “help” him or his brothers.  Given the state of the “Welfare” system at that time, I too would have lied about my age in the Census.  They were all younger than their claimed ages.

Alfred Pearson, grandson of John Scott enlisted in the King’s Own Liverpool Regiment on 2 September 1914.  He was blown to pieces on 2 July 1916, the second day of the Battle of the Somme.  Alfred has no grave – and although heroes do not need graves, we should at the very least remember their names.

By hard work and intelligence, Alfred Pearson had obtained scholarships and finished what we now call primary and secondary schooling.  By even more hard work and intelligence, he had qualified as a teacher in what was then called Chester College.  Chester College was the first genuine teacher training institution established in the whole of the United Kingdom.  What should have been a long career as a much revered teacher was brutally cut short on 2 July 1916.

In the remainder of my visit to Ireland and the United Kingdom, I will visit places that I had mostly never heard of until I began looking for the Moon Man.  I tell the story of the Moon Man in my book The Postcard From the Moon.  The Postcard will be published in 2025.