So our childhood was spent mostly outside the house, as far away from Father as possible. Outside – always providing we had done our homework and Father had checked it – we could wander free, just so long as we were back for meal times, our hands and faces clean. The countryside was a paradise for us, and we weren’t alone in it. There were wounded creatures to care for: an owl with a broken wing, a chick fallen out of the nest, a lost duckling, a lizard that had lost its tail. At one time Mary and I had a secret animal hospital in a shed at the bottom of our garden, and lots of little patients. We had woods and fields to play in, hills to climb, streams to paddle in. Here we could lark about without fear of disapproval.
Mary and I became more and more inseparable and protective of one another as we got older. At school we sat side by side and never played with anyone else in the playground unless we had to. I was always better at reading and singing, and Mary could do sums in her head without even thinking about it. We helped one another. So, when it came to homework, we expected to get the same mark, and of course we usually did.
oth of us harboured very different dreams. I wanted to travel the world – I think I got my wanderlust, in part at least, from the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island and Travels with a Donkey. I wanted to ride off to Edinburgh on a donkey, sail across the ocean to faraway places where I could be a singer or a dancer, or even join a circus – I loved acrobatics. Mary, on the other hand, wanted to grow up to be a teacher, to live her whole life in our village, walk the same fields and hills we could see from our bedroom window. She tried to dissuade me from following my dreams and always insisted I should stay here at home, so that she and I could be together and she could look after me. But I was determined to get away, somehow, anyhow.
So when the war began, in 1914, I took my chance. I was nearly eighteen by then. Many of the boys in the village were joining up and going overseas to France. So I decided to do the same, but as a nurse. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Mary. I just went into town on the bus, volunteered, and signed up. They needed all the nurses they could get, I discovered. I had to report to Aberdeen in a week. Mary was furious with me when I got back, as I knew she would be – she has never liked me doing things on my own, certainly not without asking her first. Mother cried and begged me not to go. Surprisingly though, Father approved of what I’d done, and supported me. He said that, as a family, we couldn’t stand idly by with the rest of the country going to war.
Mary and I had our first real argument. I always tried to avoid arguing with Mary, mostly because I always lost, but also because I knew it would only upset her. She said I was only joining up because I liked boys. I denied it of course, but the trouble was that she was right, in a way. We’d both been very shy around boys, but at eighteen I found they wanted to talk to me and joke with me. They liked me, and the truth was that I liked being liked, and I liked them. I was discovering I was pretty. It’s difficult for you to believe, I know, Michael, but I was really quite pretty in those days – in a quiet sort of a way. But I also wanted to become a nurse for other reasons, good reasons too.
I’d always loved looking after sick and wounded animals in the countryside, mostly wild animals. And sometimes I’d cared for the sickly lambs and calves on the farm down the lane from us. I could do the same I thought with the soldiers at the front, tend their wounds, be a comfort to them. And I could travel at the same time. I was determined that it was the right thing to do, and that I would do it whatever Mary said. She wouldn’t speak to me for days before I went off to Aberdeen to join up and do my training as a nurse. She came all the way to the station with me, silent and sullen the whole while, but as the train came in she hugged me so tight that I knew I’d been forgiven. I waved her goodbye and off I went to war, feeling sad, not wanting to go, yet longing to see this new world out there, a world that I’d only ever read about in books or seen in pictures. And with me on the train were the young soldiers in their kilts, all as excited as I was. It seems so silly now, so senseless, when I think of how many of them never came home again. But we had youth and hope in our hearts, and a song to sing. How we all sang on that train.
Within a few months I was out in Belgium, not France as it turned out, posted to a hospital a few miles behind the lines. Here we heard for the first time the rumble and pounding of the guns, theirs and ours, a dreadful overture of the horrors that were to come. We were near Ypres, outside a town called Poperinge. Almost at once we found ourselves looking after soldiers with dreadful wounds, dying soldiers. You cannot imagine the sights I saw, Michael, nor do I want you even to try to imagine them. Many nights I cried myself to sleep, and wondered how I could face the suffering I would have to witness again the next morning. I wrote every day to Mary and she always wrote back to me, her letters full of encouragement and love.
As I sat by the bedside, holding a dying soldier by the hand, trying to give what comfort I could, I could honestly feel Mary there beside me, helping me through it all. Some of the boys would ask me to write a letter home to a sweetheart or a mother. Often it was a last letter. I think they just wanted to feel that someone loved them.
t was while I was with those poor wounded soldiers that I first understood, Michael, that when all’s said and done, it’s what we all want and need most: to love and to be loved.
Perhaps you’re wondering by now why I’m telling you all this, rambling on as I am, what all this has to do with you? Well, I’m coming to that.
We nurses didn’t get much time off duty, but when we did, we’d walk into Poperinge, and stroll around the town. It was somewhere to go. There wasn’t much else to do, and it was just a blessed relief for us to be away from the hospital, for a few hours at least. That was when I first saw him. He was sitting outside a café in the sunshine with some of his pals, smoking a cigarette, having a drink. One of them called us over to join them. So we did. There were five or six soldier boys sitting there, and all of them keen to get to know us. You’ve got to remember there were hundreds of them out there, thousands, and hardly any girls from home. So we nurses were always rather popular wherever we went.
I noticed him first of course. There weren’t many black soldiers in the army, very few in fact. But it wasn’t just because he was black. He was the silent one, the only shy one there – the others were cheeky and cheerful, full of themselves, all banter and bravado. Not him. I liked him at once, liked his quietness. I felt easy with him. That’s why, when we accepted their invitation to sit down with them at the café table, I turned and talked to him. He also happened to be the handsomest man I’d ever set eyes on. As it turned out he didn’t have much to say for himself. I thought he wasn’t interested in me. But when, an hour or so later, we got up to go, he stood up and held out his hand. When I took it, it was suddenly as if there was no one there but us, no one in the whole world but us.
He said: “I hope we’ll meet again, Miss.”
“I hope so too,” I replied.
“I’ll come back here when I can – if you will,” he said.
“I will,” I told him.
That first meeting had the strangest effect on me. After it, I seemed able to bear my nursing work in the hospital so much better. I felt somehow as if I was floating above it, above all the pain and suffering of those young men, that I had a new-found strength to deal with it, that I was passing this strength on to them. Just the thought of my soldier boy in the café kept me going. I still didn’t even know his name.
I lived for my few hours of leave. Every week, I’d walk the couple of miles into Poperinge, to the café where we had met, and where I was quite sure we would meet again. Even as the months passed and he didn’t come, I never doubted for a moment that he’d be there one day. I’d sit outside the café at the same table, drink tea and write another letter to Mary, and wait and watch the people go by. When he didn’t come, and he didn’t come, I was disappointed, of course I was, but I never despaired. One day soon he would turn up and I would be waiting. On that,
I fixed all my hope.
It soon got round the hospital. I’d been seen sitting at the café again, and again, and again. My nursing friends knew what I was up to without having to ask, but they did ask of course. And I told them. I had nothing to hide – I didn’t want to hide it. Every one of them had something to say about it. They’d come along sometimes and sit with me, and wait, and of course they teased me. Some of them said I shouldn’t be ‘mixing with that sort’. I ignored them. Others, the kinder ones, and that was most of them, tried to warn me, kept telling me I mustn’t get my hopes up too much, that as like as not he’d have forgotten all about me by now, that’s if he hadn’t already been posted further away down the line. But one or two of my best friends did voice the only real fear I had, that the worst had happened, that he’d been killed.
Mary wrote to me saying, ‘You should be sensible, Martha, and put your thinking cap on, and not lose your head over the first man you ever met. For goodness’ sake, girl, you don’t even know his name! And, I must say this, Martha – and I don’t like saying it – from what you’ve told me about him in your letters, he is different from us, isn’t he?’
I still have that letter. I kept all Mary’s letters. Despite everything everyone said, everything Mary wrote, I held him in my head and my heart for all those months, and kept going back and back to the café whenever I could get a leave pass to go into town, which wasn’t often. There were always too many casualties to look after, so that we were sometimes on duty seven days a week, week in week out. And always the guns growled and thundered in the distance, and at night the flares went up on the horizon, reminding me that my soldier boy was out there somewhere – alive or dead, I didn’t know. I willed him safe. He would come back to me. He had to.
So you can imagine that I was over the moon with joy and relief, when I walked into the village square one sunny Sunday morning during a lull in the fighting, and found him sitting there at our table at the café, tucking into a huge plate of egg and chips. At his feet, I noticed, there was a small white dog with black eyes, gazing up longingly at each chip as it disappeared into his mouth. I stood there watching them both for a while before my soldier boy looked up and saw me. He stood up in a hurry, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I’ve been hoping you’d come,” he said.
“What kept you?” I said.
“The war, I suppose. But it’s quieter now. They gave us a few days’ leave. Some of the lads went home, most of them. I came back instead to see you. I’ve been sitting here, waiting for you to come. This is my third plate of egg and chips. Still, I’m not complaining. When I’m in the trenches I dream of egg and chips, and a hot bath… and a beer,” he added, laughing. He laughed easily.
Everything about him was so easy, so natural. The dog was jumping up, pawing at his leg. “All right, boy, all right. I think he wants to be introduced.”
“I’m Martha,” I told him.
“Meet Jasper,” he said. “He’s a German dog, really. Came over from the other side of No Man’s Land a couple of weeks ago, just strolled across and jumped down into our trenches. They were shouting out after him, ‘Kommen Sie zurück, Jasper!’ Come back, Jasper, that is! ‘Kommen Sie zurück!’ But we whistled him over and he just kept on coming. He’s our Company dog now. Something like a Jack Russell terrier, isn’t he? We adopted him and he’s adopted us. I look after him. He likes to go where I go. Seems he likes our Tommy chips better than he liked their Fritz sausages, don’t you, Jasper?”
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 wi
zard 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.
A Medal for Leroy Page 4
