DEAD BOV'S RETURN.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3382, 11 July 1927, Page 7

DEAD BOV'S RETURN.

On October 3, 1914, a French schoolboy, Raphael Gabriel Raymon, was playing with his comrades in the streets of Merincourt. There was a sudden clatter of horses’ hoofs at the other end of the street) and round the corner came a patrol of German cavalry. The boys scattered and fled. Raphael never saw his playmates or his home again. He made his way to Lens and Bethune and found himself, with other refugees, transported to England. On the way to England the ship struck a mine and sank, and it was believed that all on hoard perished. Raymon. however, was rescued and brought to England. For thirteen years his parents have given him up for dead. Yesterday (writes a “Daily News” representative) I found a dark-faced young man of 24, with sleeves rolled up, rolling barrels on to a brewer’s dray in the Clerkenwell district. It was Gabriel Raymon, or, as his friends know him, “Ralph” Raymon, the lost Freiich boy, now grown to man’s etsate, and newly married to an English girl. It was through making the arrangements for his marriage that the young man was able to prove his identity and to discover that his father was still alive.

“I should say I am glad to find that my people are still alive,” he said, “and also to prove to them that lam not dead. I have had no word from them yet; the matter is in the hands‘of the French Consul, but you can imagine what it will be like when I am able to communicate with them again. There are my mother and two sisters. . . . Oh, no, I haven’t quite forgotten my French during the time I have lived in England. “Everything seems very far away now. I remember taking part in the ‘retreat’ of the refugees. ... I was wounded three times before I got across to England. Of coarse, I was only a boy and didn’t quite realise what was happening or where we were going. Then I found myself in England. For a time I was at Folkestone, then I was sent to a place near Ashfield, and was in other parts of the country before I came to London. I got work and began to pick up English, and went to live in lodgings at South Tottenham, where I remained until my marriage last week.”

In the little South Tottenham side street where Raymon ■ has spent the greater part of his life in England, everyone has a good word to say for him, “He is a fine hard-working, modest chap,” said one of bis friends. “He never talked much about himself, though we all knew he was French, and that he had come over here with the refugees. If it were not for that you would have taken him for an Englishman.”