'He's my dad - I still miss him'

'I remember the day we heard' ... Donald Overall, 98, whose father died of his wounds near Arras in 1917. Photograph: Richard van Emden

The first world war left 360,000 children fatherless. Very few now survive, the youngest are in their 90s. These are the last of those who lost a father in the trenches of the western front, on the beaches of Gallipoli or in the deserts of the Middle East. Their stories of suffering and loss are as valid as those of the soldiers, but have been largely ignored. Here, six of them talk about the effects on their lives of losing their fathers so young.

Donald Overall

Donald Overall's father died of wounds near Arras, in 1917, leaving a widow and two young sons. Donald is 98.
I was five when my father came home on leave. He sat me on the instep of his foot, and I used to hold his hands and he would rock me up and down. He was in his army uniform and I could smell his khaki and tobacco because he smoked a pipe. I then remember him carrying me upstairs on his shoulder.
I remember the day we heard [about his death] very distinctly. Mother and I were downstairs in the hall when the doorbell rang. I was hiding behind her as she was handed an envelope. I remember she opened the letter immediately. I didn't know what it said but she screamed and collapsed on the floor. I didn't know what was wrong.
Mother stayed in her bedroom for about 10 days and then she turned on her side and said to me, "Your father's dead, he won't come back. Now you are the man of the house." And I said, "Me, Mum?" I was five years old. That changed my life – it had to.
I'd look after my brother and I'd look after my mother … I accepted it all. Obviously I lost my childhood but I never felt I had, because I had to look after my family and I felt 10 feet tall.
On 11 November 1920, I was with Mum and my brother at the Cenotaph when it was unveiled by the king. I remember that nobody dared move; nobody wanted to move. There was the Cenotaph resplendent, spotlessly clean. My mother stood there with her arms around us two kids and she cried, and I just stood there dumbfounded.
I can't forget that day. I was feeling for my mum and I'd never had to confront those feelings before.
In the second world war, I joined the RAF. On one occasion we came critically close to crashing. At that moment it flashed through my mind that my wife would have a sergeant's pension on which to live. Later, I was racked with the knowledge that I had come perilously close to leaving my sons, and at roughly the same age as when my father had died and left my brother and me.
At the end of the war, I wanted to stay on in the service. I came home to talk to my wife; I was telling her about this job. She never said anything until I'd finished. "Well, love," she said, "the two boys need their father." Now how could I answer that when I had never had a father? I couldn't sign on for another four years. I would have loved to, but the kids come first don't they?
Donald visited his father's grave in France in 2007 and said at the time: "I'm an old man, I am supposed to be tough. I thought I was hard, but I'm not. He's my dad. I miss him. I missed him as a boy and I miss him as an old man. It is very important that I have come back. I feel closer now than I have ever been. That time he carried me to bed was the last time and this is the next time."

Clara Middleton

Clara Middleton's father, Richard Whitefield, died of his wounds in hospital in 1917. She is 104.
"Your dad's been wounded, and he's very bad – it's in his leg, a sniper shot him." Of course Mother was crying when we got that news. We used to go every month to see him in hospital in Nottingham, and he looked awful. When Dad died, everything went haywire. Mother went out and was walking up and down the passageway at the side of the house like a mad woman.
Mother knew that the money coming in wouldn't keep us, so she went to the school and got permission for me to stay at home until the youngest daughter went to school. So I stayed at home and looked after her and looked after the others. I used to do everything at home because my mother was working so hard, six days a week. There was no one else to do it so I did it and I enjoyed it. I didn't miss school because I knew what I was doing was right.
I was a slave. I went to work for this lady, cleaning. I was only a kid and I'd got to scrub this big floor and some back stairs and I got two shillings for that; they gave me it like it was £100. People used to have me cleaning for them and my mother had to let me go because we wanted the money.
Old hands I'd got at 10 years old because I was using soda in the water and that was terrible for the hands, and they'd be that painful. I used to get Vaseline and rub it in but people reckoned it was your own urine that was best for your hands – made your hands tingle but it was good.
Mother was so pleased that I was saving money and looking after the family but she would not show it. She was a very hard woman, hard as nails, but I knew her from old and she did appreciate it. I was proud and I loved doing it, but it did make me old.

George Musgrave

George Musgrave's father, Alfred, died of his wounds in 1917. He is 96.
When he was wounded, my father wrote to my mother, sending his fondest love and kisses "to you and the dear boy", and mother went to see him. She could hardly talk about what she saw there, going into the hospital, but she told me that the men were crying out seeing an Englishwoman, a civilian.
After he died, she received a letter from the War Office sending the remainder of his possessions. They came in a little brown paper parcel and included his gold watch, the chain of which was hanging out of the brown paper. It had come through the post and nobody had stolen it. That was a vivid memory she had.
She got a small pension, but the amount was trivial – it never replaced the money Dad would have brought in and, of course, she had to pay the rent and the landlady to keep an eye on me while she was out.
Mum was a very good seamstress and there came a time when all the other boys in the school had long trousers. She went to the cupboard in the corner of the room. She'd saved my father's trousers, tailoring them to my size. They were drainpipes, out of fashion, and I was the laughing stock of the school. I didn't want other children to know my difficulties, and for that reason I went into my shell. I didn't want to be seen. I didn't feel I had anyone to talk to so I had to fend for myself. I had grown up an isolated child playing on the floor; I had my own world so I could easily retire into it the older I grew.
Every Armistice Day, Mum would wear black with perhaps a white blouse and Dad's medals. A maroon sounded and we'd see all the vehicles come to a stop, and all the horses and carts and all the people would stand there, and the two of us would look down from our room on to the trams and tram wires and she would shed a tear and grab me and say, "You are all I have."
The one tangible thing I had from my father was a picture of a train that he drew for me while he was under fire. So when I went to school and began to draw, the teacher said, "Oh, he draws such wonderful engines." That was in memory of my father.

Charles Chilton

Charles Chilton's father, also Charles, was killed in action in 1918. He later co-wrote Oh, What A Lovely War with Joan Littlewood. He is 94.
My father was a rough diamond. He was a painter and decorator's clerk when he decided to join up in October 1916. He'd only just got married, had to, I was on the way and so, with his friend Sunny Morgan, he enlisted – and both got killed.
Mother remarried but she died shortly after the war, so I went to live with my grandmother. She often talked about my father. She thought he was a saint and quite often she'd have a row with my father's younger brother and she'd say terrible things, "I wish it had been you that had gone and not him," which led to him bursting into tears. It was awful.
But then because he was dead she thought much more of him, of course. On Armistice Day, my grandmother and Sunny's mother used to get together at our house and cry. Each time, Mrs Morgan would bring a picture of my father and her son together, taken before they went overseas, and she would give it to me. She seemed to have endless copies.
Periodically and unexpectedly, officials from one of the ministries responsible for war children sent a woman to visit my house to see how I was looked after. There were quite a few of us, eight in all, living in four rooms. Me and two uncles lived in the back kitchen, which was our bedroom, but when the inspector came my grandmother always took me up to a bedroom and said that was where I slept – had they known I lived in the kitchen they'd have taken me away and my grandmother would have lost my dad's war pension given for me.
I was just an appendage at the end of several of my father's siblings. I was a bit of a nuisance to them because my grandmother seemed to favour me above her own children because she would say "He's my boy's boy," and that made me very precious to her, though I couldn't relate to her loss at all. I'd never met my father, and although I had affection for my mother, by the time I was seven, she was dead.
When I was married, my wife and I often went to Italy for our holidays, and my grandmother said to me one day, "When you're on your way to Italy, do you ever go near Arras? Why don't you call in and get me a photograph of your father's grave."
It turned out that he didn't have a grave, but he was on the Arras memorial to the missing. When I saw his name I didn't get emotional. Instead, as we share the same name, it looked like me on the wall, but my grandmother was delighted to see it.

Violet Downer

Violet Downer's father, Samuel Baker, killed on the Somme in 1916. She is 98.
There's a picture of me with Dad taken in an open barn at the end of my grandparents' cottage in Albourne. That was just before he went to France. He was reported missing on the Somme and I remember my mother scanning the papers every day, looking for his name. They never said he wasn't coming home. I don't recall Mum saying he would never come home, but he didn't.
We were always moving about. Mum just couldn't settle after Dad was killed. When the government produced a brass plaque for all those who had lost someone, my mother wasn't grateful, she was disgusted. "That for a husband," she said.
Mum remarried but never showed any emotion with her husband, and I never saw them hold hands or kiss. I don't think she loved him. She was still talking about Sam. Mother used to say, "Sam did this" and "Sam did that", and my stepfather used to say, "Oh, it's always Sam!"'
I never forgot Dad. There was nobody to replace him so I never really understood why my mother married again because she doted on my father. I asked my mum sometimes, "Why did you marry again?" and she used to say, "I had to do something or we would have landed up in a home."

Gertrude Harris

Gertrude Harris's father, Harry Farr, was shot for "cowardice" in 1916. He was eventually pardoned in 2006. She is 98.
Six months after my father was killed, my mother's pension and my allowance was suddenly stopped. Mum went back to the post office and asked the postmistress, who obviously knew my mother, andwho said, "I am ever so sorry, Mrs Farr, but there is nothing for you." She must have inquired and told Mother that owing to the way her husband had died, you were only allowed a pension for six months and nothing for me. So there she was, aged 21, with a three-year-old child.
We were made homeless and Mother, in looking for work, had to explain why she needed to go into service with a young daughter. Eventually, my mother got a job at a home in Hampstead and they were willing to take me, which in that era was a wonderful thing as it was unheard of for a child to go into service.
My upbringing was unnatural. Whenever I hurt myself, Mother used to say, "Now don't you cry. Don't you let Cook hear you." She was so afraid that if I made a fuss we'd have to go. If I was ill, I used to be isolated in the bedroom garret. If I got mumps or measles I would be left up there with a sheet dipped in Lysol draped across the door to keep the germs away from the rest of the family.
I never knew my father had been executed. Then, at a family gathering 40 years later, an aunt said to me, "Is this true what I hear about how Harry died?" The rest of the family turned round and said "We don't talk about Harry." I didn't know what she was talking about. So wWhen I came home I asked my mother: "Is that right, what Auntie Nellie said?" She said, "Yes, it's true. Your father was shot for cowardice and the family disowned him."
Mum was a little lady but she was a very proud woman, and always said, "My Harry was not a coward, he was a brave soldier." On Armistice Day, she used to watch those veterans and say: "Harry should be there with them."
My daughter Janet led the campaign to get a pardon for my father. When the news came in 2006 from the solicitor, I was so astonished that when he said, "We've got it," I didn't know what he meant, and it took quite a while to realise. To me now, Harry is a real person whereas before I didn't know him. Now I feel I do. He's not just Harry any more, he's my dad.
• These interviews are from The Quick and the Dead, by Richard van Emden, published by Bloomsbury, £20. To order a copy for £16, with free UK P&P, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846