A Medal for Leroy Read online

  ut I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t want to miss anything out.

  By the time Leroy’s voice broke, he was out of the orphanage, apprenticed to a carpenter, and playing football for his local side. Whenever he played, wherever he played, he was still ‘The Wizard’. The name stuck with him and stayed. The home supporters loved him, but when they played away the crowd would sometimes call him all manner of horrible things from the terraces. But that only made him play all the harder to win, to make them eat their words. He had found his way of getting back at them.

  He had an offer to play for The Arsenal the week before war broke out, in August 1914 it was. In the newspapers they called him ‘the wonder wizard of Walworth’. He’d soon be playing not just for The Arsenal, but for England too, they wrote. He was that good. But all his footballing pals were joining up, everyone in the team. There were posters all around, everywhere you looked: ‘Your Country Needs You’, ‘For King and Country’.

  Leroy was swept along on a tide of enthusiasm, patriotism, and optimism, as they all were, as I was too. The whole country was. He knew he had to go where and when his country called. It was his duty. Leroy stuck with his pals, his football team. They all joined up together, and went off across the Channel to fight. So Leroy never played for The Arsenal, nor for England either.

  By the time I met him that day in the café in Poperinge only a few months later, seven of the football team who’d joined up with him were already dead.

  “I’m the only forward left,” Leroy told me. “But I can run faster than any of them, dodge and duck and dive – you should see me. No Fritz bullet’s going to catch me, Martha girl,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  He told me he had to be back with his regiment in a couple of days. They’d be moving up again into the Front Line, into the trenches. “Tomorrow evening, same time, same place? To say goodbye?”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  But we had a lot of casualties in from the Front that day, so it was late and nearly dark by the time I could get away. I had no leave pass this time, because I knew they wouldn’t give me one if I asked, not two days in a row. So I skipped off without permission. I’d be back in an hour or so, no one would even know I’d been gone. That’s what I told myself, that’s what I hoped.

  I knew he’d be waiting, however late I was. Jasper was lying at his feet looking very fed up. Leroy was the only one sitting there. I didn’t have to be back on duty until six o’clock the next morning. All I knew, all he knew, was that we wanted to spend every moment we had left together. We forgot everything else. We found a little room above the café, with peeling flowery wallpaper and a narrow bed. We spent the whole night holding one another, loving one another. Jasper kept trying to jump up onto the bed, but we pushed him off. We wanted to be alone. Jasper didn’t think much of that.

  When I woke in the morning, Leroy was gone. It was already past seven o’clock. I knew I’d be in big trouble when I got back. I ran all the way just the same. In the end I got off quite lightly. They put me on report of course. After a dressing-down from the Major, who ticked me off in no uncertain terms about neglect of duty, he told me there were to be no more leave passes for me for two months. There were dire warnings too about what would happen to me if ever I went off like that again. But I didn’t mind. I was on cloud nine, and that’s where I stayed for the weeks that followed, until the morning I got to the hospital, and saw Jasper sitting outside, waiting.

  I knew at once. One of the nurses told me. Joanna she was called, I remember – she was a lot older than the others and turned out to be the kindest of my friends. She warned me as I came in. But nothing and no one could prepare me for what I saw. Leroy was lying there unconscious, hands at his sides, hardly breathing, barely living. He’d been wounded in his leg and in his back, I was told, and had lost a lot of blood. I was there beside him holding his hand when he woke up. He didn’t know me, not at first.

  I tried to go about my nursing duties as before, but it was hard for me to leave his bedside, especially when the infection set in and the fever made him delirious. I could tell from the look on the doctor’s face that Leroy had very little chance. So many of them died of infection. All I could do with him, as I had with so many others, was to try to keep him cool, and make sure the dressings on his wound were changed often, and pray. I prayed so hard for him, begging God to let him live, promising I’d pray every day for the rest of my life, and go to church again every Sunday.

  I sat all night and every night with him. This soldier was my soldier, and I was his sweetheart, his real sweetheart. Joanna tried to persuade me to let her sit in for me, told me I had to get some rest, to go to bed, but I wouldn’t leave him. Sometimes I’d hum the songs he’d taught me, ‘Sally Gardens’ mostly, so he’d know I was still there. And Jasper stayed too, sitting outside on the hospital steps, just waiting. Doctors, nurses, and walking wounded would come by, and feed Jasper and talk to him. Everyone knew who he was waiting for by this time, just as everyone knew about Leroy and me. I was there at his bedside when he opened his eyes one morning and smiled up at me.

  “Jasper all right?” he asked. I felt his forehead. The fever had gone.

  e had a precious few weeks together in the hospital, as patient and nurse, but of course we were a lot more to one another than that. We didn’t try to disguise it. There wasn’t any point. Everyone knew. I didn’t much care whether the nurses and doctors approved or not by now, and there were plenty around the hospital who tutted, I knew that. But all his pals who came to visit, sometimes half a dozen at a time, loved him like I did – well, not quite as much as I did perhaps. He seemed like a best friend to all of them.

  They said what a ‘lucky beggar’ he was. Bobby did most of the talking when they came – he’d been the goalkeeper in the football team back home. He was the one who told me how it had happened, how when the whistle had gone, they’d gone over the top into No Man’s Land, Leroy kicking a football ahead of him, Jasper running along beside him, as he always did. But they hadn’t got far, about halfway across, before the German machine guns opened fire and the shells started falling all around. Several of them went down. They had to take shelter in a crater, in a shell hole, Jasper still with them. They lay there all day and into the night.

  When it had all quietened down, they heard the sound of a man crying out for help, screaming in pain. Leroy didn’t think twice about it, they told me. He clambered up out of the shell hole and went out there, out into No Man’s Land, to fetch him back. But once he found him he discovered there were two more men lying out there as well, both badly wounded, one of them unconscious. Twice more he crawled out into No Man’s Land to bring them back. And still no one spotted him. But the last time Leroy went out there, the flares went up and he was caught out in the open. Machine guns opened up, rifle fire. That was when he was hit, shot in the leg.

  Three lives he saved that day, and without a thought for his own. They were all on the way back across No Man’s Land, carrying the wounded men with them when the shelling started and Leroy went down, hit again, a shrapnel wound this time. Bobby piggybacked him back to the trenches. “He was awful heavy to carry, I can tell you,” he said.

  It was from Bobby and his other pals that I learnt so much more about Leroy than he’d ever told me himself. He was just a Private soldier, the same rank they all were, but Leroy was the one they always followed. They believed he was lucky. Leroy and Jasper – they were like talismans to them, lucky mascots.

  “All we’ve got out here is luck, luck and pluck,” Bobby told me one day after the visit was over, as we walked out of the hospital ward together. “Leroy’s lucky. So we stay as close to him as we can. That way we get lucky too. He got a lucky wound, a Blighty one, so like as not they’ll send him home. Never seen pluck like it, bringing those boys in like he did. He should get a ruddy Victoria Cross for that, if you ask me. It’s what we all want, a medal for Leroy. We told the officers what he did, the whole story, that he dese
rves a medal. Course, being like he is, they probably won’t give him one. But I’m telling you, there won’t be no justice in this world if Leroy doesn’t get a medal.”

  Bobby was wrong. They didn’t send him home. Instead, they sent him to another hospital further behind the lines for rest and recuperation, and within a couple of months he was back in the trenches. And Bobby was right: there was no medal for Leroy either, but more about that later. Leroy wrote me a letter every day. Each of his letters was like a song to me. I could hear his voice in every word he wrote. I read them over and over last thing at night, and prayed to God to protect him. God is good, I kept telling myself. God is kind. God is listening. He’ll look after my Leroy.

  It was Bobby who came to the hospital a few weeks later, and told me how it happened, how Leroy had been killed. They were going forward up a hill to attack a German machine gun post, Leroy kicking the football ahead, leading the charge as usual, Jasper at his side, when they saw him fall.

  Bobby said you always knew when a man was shot dead, killed outright – he’d seen it often. A dead body just crumples. Leroy collapsed and lay still. He didn’t suffer, he assured me, just went out like a light. They tried to go out and bring him back, but the Germans counter-attacked, so they had to leave him where he was. They never saw him again. Jasper must have stayed with him or been killed. They never saw the dog again, either.

  At first, when I became ill, the doctor at the hospital thought it must be out of grief, and gave me leave for a couple of days. I spent most of the time walking the fields around Poperinge, sitting in the café, remembering. When I got a fever, a few days later, they told me I’d caught an infection. The infection did pass, but it left me weakened and unable to carry out my duties. That’s why they sent me home.

  Mary, who knew everything from my letters – I’d hidden nothing from her – met me at the station in London and took me back by train to Scotland, and home to Aberdeenshire. I knew already that she didn’t approve. But now I was home, now we were together, there were no recriminations, no blame, only kindness. Mary and Mother nursed me as best they could and Father prayed at my bedside and encouraged me to read the Bible more, to pray more. “It’s the only way to find comfort,” he told me. But I wouldn’t pray, and I wouldn’t read the Bible. Hadn’t I prayed to this same God, his God, night after night out in Belgium, and hadn’t he deserted me? He had not saved Leroy. And besides, no loving God I could imagine would have allowed such suffering as I had witnessed at the Front.

  For weeks on end I lay there in bed, losing the will to live with every day that passed. The doctor was called in to see me. Dr Glennie. He was a peaky-looking man with cold hands, often with a dewdrop on his nose. One morning he came and examined me, listened to me, tapped me, and then peered at me severely over his spectacles.

  “I know exactly what’s wrong with you, my girl,” he told me. “You’ll be having a baby, in about six months’ time.” He also added, just for good measure, how upset my father would be, that I had brought shame upon my whole family, my church, the entire village. I hardly heard him. All I could think was that I would be having Leroy’s baby, that Leroy was still with me, still alive within me. In that moment all my sorrow lifted. I had something to live for again.

  y father never spoke to me again. A few hours after the doctor left Mary came up to my room to tell me that Father had said I would have to leave the house as soon as I was well enough and never return. She had tried, Mother had tried, all they could to persuade him to relent, but he was adamant.

  “So I told him straight,” Mary said, “if Martha goes, I go.”

  These were my father’s very words in reply, “Then go. I have no need of such faithless daughters.”

  I never forgot those words, as I have never forgotten Mary’s goodness to me. I left everything to her, all the arrangements, where we would go when I was strong enough to travel, how we would live. Our greatest regret was that we had to leave our dear Mother behind. She promised she would come and visit when we were settled, which she did from time to time. But I never saw Father again, nor did Mary. All our lives, Mother did all she could to bring us together, to forge some kind of reconciliation, but he remained implacable until the day he died.

  Mary took me far away, to a place where no one knew us, to a little cottage outside a seaside village in Cornwall – near Penzance it was – because she thought the sea air would be healthy for a growing child. Here I had my baby. I called him Roy, and he was as handsome as his father had been, and so like him in every way – how he looked at me, how he laughed. Even as a baby he already had his father’s big hands.

  I think we would have stayed in Cornwall all our lives if we’d had a choice; we loved it there. Mary was teaching at the local school, I was nursing the baby, who was growing up healthy and strong. We’d sit on the sand in the sunshine and watch the fishing boats coming in and out of the harbour. The war, still going on across the sea, seemed a whole world away. But tongues were wagging in the village.

  It was common enough everywhere in those days for a mother to be left alone with fatherless children. There were several families like that in the village. After all, hundreds of thousands of young fathers had been killed out there. But Leroy had been black.

  Roy was much less obviously black than his father, but still noticeably darker than anyone else in the village, and darker than me too. Some people wouldn’t speak to us. Some even crossed the village street to avoid us. Most weren’t like that of course, but there were enough disapproving glances, enough tittle-tattle to cast a long shadow over our lives. We were beginning to feel like outcasts.

  Then one morning, our landlord – the local farmer – came to the door and told us we’d have to leave. He didn’t say why, but we knew the reason. We had two weeks to pack up and go, he said. “We don’t want your sort around here,” he said, “and what’s more we don’t want your kind teaching our children.”

  Mary was at once incandescent with rage, and told the farmer just what she thought of him, and then drove him out of the cottage with a broom. It was quite a spectacle!

  Mary decided we had to move away, as soon as possible, as far away as possible from these ‘miserable people’ as she called them. It was a newspaper report that gave her the idea. There’d been another Zeppelin air raid on London and lots of people had been killed and wounded. I remember she sat me down at the kitchen table as I was feeding Roy, and told me she’d worked it all out.

  “Wherever we go we can be sure it will be the same,” she said. “They’ll look at you and little Roy and they’ll gossip away, they’ll weave their wicked tales. Well I’m not having it. I’m not. So I’ve decided we must invent a story of our own, about us. Now, this Zeppelin raid on London – there will be orphans, won’t there? There are bound to be orphans. We shall adopt one of them. His father will have come from Barbados and has been killed in Belgium – truth in that – and his mother will be from London, killed in this Zeppelin raid. We will be the sisters of that mother, and being the nearest relatives, his aunties, her only family, we will look after the baby. The natural thing to do. Must happen all the time. That will be our story, little Roy’s story. We won’t live too close to London – don’t want to be near those Zeppelins when they come over, do we? I’ve read about seaside places in Kent, seen pictures too. I like the look of Folkestone, it’s a lovely town. Roy will still grow up by the sea, and no one will know us. And when they ask, as they will, we’ll just tell them our story. Simple. We shall find a place to live. There are schools in Folkestone. I shall teach. All will be well, Martha. Don’t you worry.”

  o that’s what we did, moved to the other end of the country and if anyone asked who little Roy was, we told them the Zeppelin story. And that’s where Roy grew up, by the sea in Folkestone. I stayed home and looked after him and the house and the garden, and Mary was a teacher in a junior school nearby – she became a headteacher in the end. A wonderful teacher she was too. It’s true she could be a
bit sharp, a bit brusque, with the children, but she was always kindhearted towards them. She had their best interests at heart, and they knew it.

  Of course it all turned out to be a lot more complicated than either Mary or I had first imagined. What we hadn’t realised at first was that we’d have to live out our story, not simply tell it. And for Roy that story was the story of who he was, how he came to be with us. Roy grew up not just calling me ‘Auntie’, but believing that’s what I was to him. When he asked about himself, as of course he often did when he grew old enough, we’d tell him about the Zeppelin raid, about how his mother, our sister, had been killed in it, and how his father had died in Belgium in the war – that bit was much easier to talk about than the rest, I can tell you.

  We told him how as a little baby he had survived the Zeppelin raid and been brought out alive from the ruins of the house. Every day as he grew up I yearned to tell him the truth, that I was his mother. I wanted him to know all about Leroy, and about Jasper. I longed for him to call me Mummy, especially at the school gates when I saw and heard all the other children with their mothers. But Auntie Martha I was to him, and Auntie Martha I stayed. It was hard to bear, but I knew it had to be. I locked the secret in my heart and kept it there.

  In a way, Jasper was Roy’s idea. He loved dogs and was always asking if we could have one. My little boy, once he got an idea into his head he’d never let it go. Mary always said no. I never argued with her. I knew better than that. I just did it. Without telling her, I went and bought Roy a dog for his tenth birthday. I found one just like his father had had in the trenches, like the one I’d met at the café that day in Poperinge, a little white Jack Russell with black eyes. When I brought the dog home, Roy wasn’t back from school. I told Mary we had to call him Jasper. As it turned out she didn’t object at all. It was unspoken, but she knew fine why I had to call him Jasper, why I’d chosen a little white Jack Russell terrier, that Jasper and Leroy were lying out there somewhere in a field in Belgium, undiscovered; that I thought of them every day of my life.