PRIVATE Johnson Gideon Beharry, the first soldier in the British Army to win the Victoria Cross in 23 years, comes from a family so poor that his father eked out a living tending a neighbour’s cow because he could not afford his own.

As word of his heroism spreads in his Caribbean home, Private Beharry’s family are waiting to meet the Queen. Already they have been fêted by the Royal Navy and the British High Commissioner in Grenada with a private visit to the destroyer HMS Liverpool, which is on anti-drug patrol off Grenada.

Florette Beharry, 50, his mother, said: “We would like to say thanks to everyone in Britain who supported him, and especially the Queen and the Government. We feel happy that they accepted him because they know he is not British. We feel proud.”

Private Beharry has been calling his family from the base in Germany of The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, where he is recovering from wounds he sustained during an ambush in Iraq, and his family are hoping for an invitation to meet the Queen. “I would love to see the Queen, it would be a wonderful experience for me,” his sister, Jill, who is training to become an accountant, said.

Private Beharry, 25, is the fourth of eight children — all, like him, with names beginning with J: Jude, Jackie, Jill, Jamila, Jeffrey, Jefon and Jade. The eldest is 30 and the youngest 14.

When he was a boy, his family could not even buy bottled gas to heat their stove and had to forage for wood from coconut trees. His father, Michael Bhola, 52, survives now by making cement breezeblocks that he sells for 50p each in his yard in the village of Diego Piece.

His 85-year-old grandmother, Elain, had ten children herself and boasts of having more than fifty grandchildren.

Although Diego Piece now has electricity, the Beharrys get water from a standpipe. The clan is still recovering from Hurricane Ivan last year, when the tin roof was ripped from their house and their belongings drenched. The roof of the dwelling where Private Beharry grew up has been replaced, but several electrical appliances were lost.

Private Beharry’s VC, awarded for courage under fire in two ambushes in southern Iraq, which put him in a coma, has brought great pride and a flurry of visitors to this remote corner of the globe.

As a child he attended school in the village, but left at around 13 to become a house-painter and odd-job man. Neighbours remember him as a dutiful and peaceful boy who liked to ride his bicycle.

At 18, he left for Britain, where one of his sisters also lives, hoping to go to college. However, after working as a builder, he followed a friend into the Army. A year later he sent for his teenage sweetheart, Lynthia, from a nearby village to join him in Britain, where they were married. He told his mother that he was going to Iraq only the day before his departure. “I was not happy; I was just numb,” she said.

Despite his injuries, Private Beharry said yesterday that he planned to return to active duty. “I will get back on my feet and serve again,” he said. “I will be fine, and need to look out for my wife. My injuries have not put me off serving abroad. One of my bosses wants me to go to Afghanistan to train soldiers there. That is ideally what I would like to do. The Army is what I know and love; so it’s the only career for me.”

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