A Medal for Leroy (7 page)

f course I can’t pretend that was word for word what he said – so I’m making it up a little bit as I go along. But that was the gist of it. And I can’t remember how long we sat at that table downing egg and chips, and beer. I had my first ever sip of beer that day – Father would never allow alcohol in the house back home. All I know is that we talked and talked.

After a while he took my hands in his. He had big, beautiful hands, hands that swallowed mine, that made me feel safe. He said he wanted to know all about me, everything. So I told him. He looked at me as I spoke, his eyes never leaving mine, as if they were windows into my life. I could tell that everything I said seemed to fascinate him, and that amazed me – I never imagined anyone could be that interested in my little world of home: in Aberdeenshire, in the strange Doric language we spoke at home, how Mary and I were like two sides of the same coin, how each would often know what the other was thinking before she even said it.

But when I began to tell him something of my work in the hospital, I could see it hurt him to hear about it. So I didn’t go on. Instead I told him that it was his turn, that I wanted to know all about him. But he wouldn’t talk about himself, not then, no matter how hard I pressed him.

It was only bit by bit, over the next weeks and months, and over time since, that I’ve managed to piece together his life. And it’s really his life I wanted to tell you about, Michael, because you already know all you need to know about mine. You’ll understand why it’s important soon enough. I’ll tell you all I can, all I know.

His name was Leroy Hamilton. I’d draw you a picture of him if I could. I haven’t even got a photograph of him. So words will have to do. He was twenty-two, older than me by four years. But he seemed a lot older. He was born in London – I don’t know where and neither did he. All he could tell me about his family was that his father came from Barbados and was a sailor. His mother lived in Chatham, in Kent, near the docks. They had five children, and Leroy was the youngest. His father came and went, as sailors do, and so his mother had to bring the family up on her own. Then his father just stopped coming back. As a little boy, Leroy always imagined that he’d been drowned at sea, shipwrecked, otherwise why wouldn’t he have come home? Anyway, after that, his mother began to drown her sorrows in drink. Leroy said he thought she died of sorrow, as much as from the drink.

So, at the age of five, Leroy found himself an orphan, separated suddenly from all his brothers and sisters – he never saw any of them again – and taken off to a children’s home, to an orphanage in London. And that’s where Leroy grew up. It wasn’t so bad. He used to tell me that instead of just four brothers and sisters, he had hundreds of them now. Like all of them there, he had no mother and no father, and he felt the ache of that inside him, but in the orphanage they were all in it together, no one was any worse off than anyone else. They all wore the same uniform, and shivered at nights in their beds. Someone in the dormitory always cried themselves to sleep. The rules were strict, the punishments harsh. They all had to eat every morsel of food put in front of them, Leroy said. But at least they never went hungry.

Some of the children teased him about being black, called him names, but he wasn’t alone in that either. There were other black children there, and they learnt early on to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to all that – it was the best way to deal with it, he told me, unless you wanted to get into fights all the time. He promised himself he’d get back at them in his own way, in his own time – and that’s what he did too, as you’ll see.

As a boy, Leroy was always top of the class, especially when it came to numbers and sums and mental arithmetic. But he was always talking in class when he shouldn’t. One of his teachers started picking on him – he told me his name, but I’ve forgotten it – called him a troublemaker and was always standing him in the corner, ‘where Darkies like him belonged’, he’d say. Those were the very words he used. And this same teacher gave him the cane on his hand again and again for not trying hard enough.

“He wanted me to cry,” Leroy said, “which is why I never did.” After a while Leroy decided he wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t even say ‘good morning, sir’ with the others, when he came into the classroom. He got whacked again, for dumb insolence this time.

But one day, everything changed. Leroy won the school race on Sports Day. He beat everyone, including those twice his age and size. No one caned him again after that, and no one called him ‘Darky’ again either. And then they found out he was a real wizard at football, that he could dribble and shoot the ball better than anyone they’d ever had at the school before. Season after season he won all the matches for them. He was given a new nickname, and one that he liked this time, ‘The Wizard’.

And he wasn’t only a wizard on the football pitch. He discovered there was something he could do even better than football. He could sing. If ever there was a solo to be sung in the choir, then Leroy was chosen to sing it. The best moment of his life when he was a boy was when the choir was invited to go and sing in St Paul’s Cathedral, and he got up and sang ‘Oh for the Wings of a Dove’. He told me that while he was singing, when he heard his voice soaring up high into that great dome, it was as if he really did have wings. Best feeling in the world, he said.

And he was right.

Whenever we could, we used to go on walks in the fields around Poperinge. And one day he began singing to me – ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’, it was. Then Leroy and I found ourselves dancing. Can you imagine? Out in the open, under blue skies, in a field in Flanders, dancing. For once the guns were silent. He had his arms around me, and he was humming ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’ softly in my ear. I never imagined I could be so happy, that anyone could be that happy.

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.