There is a tiny etching on my bedroom window; ‘W G Dolling, Hinton St George’ in curly Victorian script. It’s only really visible on sunny mornings in winter when the sun is low and hits the window at a certain angle. We’d lived in the house for a couple of years before I spotted it.
Hinton St George is hundreds of miles from here. I did some research on Ancestry and discovered that William George was the grandson of the couple who lived in this house at that time. He died of TB on Valentines Day in 1888, aged only 21. His father, the rector of Hinton St George, died two years later. His only sibling, an older brother, died unmarried and childless, a decade later. His mother lived on for another decade, in a cottage near the church where her family were all buried, and close to the rectory where she had raised her two boys. That must have been so hard, to survive them all like that.
I went to find William’s grave there, last summer. On it, hidden under moss, was a bible passage about love being the greatest gift. I sat on the grass in front of the little row of Dolling graves and said hello, and told William that thanks to his little bit of bored schoolboy graffiti a century ago, he is not forgotten, even though the family had no descendants to remember them.