WRITER Charlotte Zeepvat fell for the words of Thornbury poet Noel Hodgson after discovering one of his poems in her Children’s Encylopedia when she was a little girl.

At the age of seven or eight she found his famous poem Before Action, a prayer for courage in the face of death, in her book and started a lifelong journey to chronicle his tale. The obstacles that delayed her work by two decades meant that she included insights in to his life as a vicar’s son in Thornbury.

In the first chapter of Before Action: William Noel Hodgson and the 9th Devons – A Story of the Great War Charlotte captures the parish as it was when he was born in 1893.

“I was in contact with Canon John Cornwall who was the next child born in the vicarage after him,” she said. “He described the town and vicarage, he told me about the house and the garden, and about this person who was the dentist and that person who was the doctor. It gave me a lovely feel for the place.”

The vicarage was once condemned as ‘insanitary’ and the family had to move out of the parish. Charlotte tells how the community rallied round.

“They held a three-day bazaar at Thornbury Castle with Morris dancers and a local band to pay for it to be rebuilt. We wouldn’t think of doing something like that now.”

The book gives insight in to a man who had good friends and, unlike the other soldiers who had pin-ups of women, looked at postcards of the English Fells whilst enduring the horrors of war in France.

Charlotte remembers reading a note under the poem in her Children’s Encylopedia saying Lieutenant Hodgson, who won the Military Cross, died during the first day of the Battle of the Somme, two days after the poem was published. He was 23.

“It was the immediacy of knowing he ended the poem with the words ‘help me to die,’ so soon before he died. There were poems in there that I hated but this one caught my imagination and stayed with me.”

Charlotte, who was a writer for Royal Digest and author of several books on royalty, first wanted to write the book in the early 1990s but was encouraged instead to write about the subject she was known for as that was what everyone wanted to read.

Having researched Hodgson throughout her life the call eventually became too much but the delay meant she expanded her work to show what other parts of his life was like. It also led to her finding a man who had an incredible collection unpublished diaries and sketchbooks from his battalion, the 9th Devons.

“I’ve used Hodgson life as a window on different worlds, starting with Thornbury, the parish he grew up in.”

*Before Action: William Noel Hodgson and the 9th Devons - A Story of the Great War by Charlotte Zeepvat is published by Pen & Sword.