Valentine Joe (18 page)

The date was January 1915 and he was fourteen.

My grandfather was lucky. Before his regiment was sent overseas to fight, he caught pneumonia from marching around in the snow wearing his much-loved kilt. An army doctor realised he was underage and sent him home to London.

Joe wasn't lucky.

After a few weeks' training he was sent to Belgium where his two best friends were killed and he was gassed. After recovering in hospital in England, he went back to the Front and on 14 January 1916, exactly one month before his sixteenth birthday, he was killed.

Joe is buried at Essex Farm Cemetery, near Ieper, where you can go and put celandines on his grave.

Rebecca Stevens

Brighton, 2014

Text © Rebecca Stevens 2014

First paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2014
This electronic edition published in 2014
The Chicken House
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Cover and interior design by Helen Crawford-White
Cover photograph (boy) © CollaborationJS/Arcangel Images
Cover photograph (poppy) © iStock/April30
Cover photograph (dog) © Susan Schmitz/Shutterstock.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data available.

PB ISBN 978-1-909489-60-8
eISBN 978-1-909489-61-5