In February 1941, a boy went down to the docks at Leith and signed on to a merchant steamer. He told them he was born in 1926, which made him fifteen, old enough for the sea. They signed him on.
His name was Reginald Earnshaw, and he was fourteen. Five months later he was dead, scalded by steam when bombs fell around his ship off the Norfolk coast. His body came ashore and was buried, the grave left unmarked, while his name was carved onto a memorial to the men with no grave but the sea, misspelled and uncounted. For sixty-nine years no one joined the two together. The lie that carried him to sea was the same thing that saved him from being forgotten - the false year he gave, set against the true one, proved how young he had been, and made him the youngest known British casualty of the whole war.
