A PIECE of Second World War French history has returned home thanks to a Chepstow teenager.

Adam Golaup restored an album recounting memories of the occupation of Laval in north-west France.

Adam’s mum Caitlin said: “The book has around 40 pages and was written by students at the Lycée de Garçons de Laval, capital of the Mayenne region, just after the war. It’s filled with evocative hand-drawn images and powerful stories of Nazi occupation, the French Resistance, the arrival of the Allies in 1944 and post-war rebuilding of a shattered infrastructure, as seen through the eyes of fiercely patriotic French schoolboys.”

Immediately after the war the album was given to Adam’s great-grandfather, Leon Henry Cook, who signed and dated it in 1946. Cook was in France looking into setting up a European edition of the New York Post. In the decades that followed, the album was considered a family treasure. When Leon’s son Tom died earlier this year, the family decided that the book should be returned to the people of Laval.

Adam, who is in Year 10 at Chepstow School, travelled with his grandmother, Jessica Skippon, to Laval to repatriate this unique and important piece of Laval’s history and met with Jérôme Chevreul, archivist for Mayenne.

Caitlin added: “Jérôme told them that since 1972, there has been a national competition for schoolwork like this book and he thinks this might have been an early prototype.”