Alice Bardon was only five when her favourite brother went away to war. The fuss of his departure frightened the child and she ran and hid at the back of their Australian farmhouse home. She wouldn't come out to kiss him goodbye. When she came out of hiding, he was gone, writes Kieran Fagan.
From his home near Cairns in far north Queensland, he had volunteered to defend the Old Country at the outbreak of war in 1914. For George, as for many young first generation Australians, the Old Country was Ireland, and it was George's first stroke of luck that the army initially turned him down on medical grounds. He had a slight "weakness of the heart, after typhoid", the records show.
There is a famous and poignant photograph of the 11th Australian Infantry Battalion taken in Egypt in 1915. It is too large to reproduce here. A thousand young men in uniform, wearing the sloped hat of the Australian military, are standing in layered tiers on the lower levels of one of the pyramids. A few days later they sailed north across the Mediterranean and most of them died in the bloody battle we know as Gallipoli.
So George was saved from almost certain death, but those catastrophic losses meant the army was recruiting once more. When George volunteered again the following year, he was accepted into the 11th and sailed for Europe, aged 24.
Once more his luck held. He served in the infantry and survived the trenches in France and Belgium in 1917, and most of 1918. Family history recalls that he wrote home to say his best friend had been shot dead alongside him. George suffered nothing worse than trench foot, and an officer once pulled a gun on him to get him to leave a wounded comrade. In October 1918 he was given leave to visit his granny and his aunts and his first cousins who lived in Rathmines in Dublin, and whom he had never met. For George the war was over.
But he wasn't well. and his luck ran out. His sister Alice later explained what the family in Dublin had said at the time. "He was sick with Spanish influenza when he got there. But he would go out on those double-decker buses because he wanted to see everything when he was there. He was only there a few days and he was dead." The double-decker bus was probably the Dartry tram which passed near the Bardon household in Grosvenor Square. The Spanish 'flu that swept across Europe at the end of 1918 was devastating. In a single week in London that October, it claimed 2,000 victims. In Dublin my grandfather Willy Fagan was sent home from the Rotunda hospital to die of it in December 1918. "We can do no more for him", his young wife, my granny, was told.
George was buried with full military honours. The army records tell us that his coffin was made of "good polished elm" and the undertaker was a Mr Fanagan of Aungier Street.
George's little sister in Australia never forgot him. She was troubled by the memory of the day when he left and she hid without saying goodbye. Last year, as her life drew to a close, she asked her niece Julie Hawkins, who was visiting Ireland from Tasmania, to find where he was buried.
"Throughout my childhood," Julie remembers, "George's loss was spoken of in our family in hushed tones. . .he has a way of looking at you in the eye from those few precious photographs - he has a very strong presence about him. It was important for Aunt Alice that we find his grave."
And with the help of the Irish Army press office, and the Office of Public Works, George's grave was found. He lies in what locals call the soldiers' graveyard in Blackhorse Avenue, Dublin, near the Phoenix Park. The official name is Grange Gorman Military Cemetery. He is buried under a tree alongside three other members of the Australian Imperial Force, and surrounded by other fallen soldiers and sailors. It is a simple, peaceful and well-tended place, as befits young men who risked their lives for their families and friends.
Before she died, earlier this year, aged 97, Alice held in her hand a photograph of her favourite brother's last resting place. Her mind was active to the end, and she was happy that the search was over.