A Medal for Leroy (8 page)

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 deserves 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.”