A Medal for Leroy (10 page)

while, simply trying to take it all in, to piece together this new family I had just acquired, to picture my grandfather, to take on board what all this meant. Auntie Snowdrop had just redrawn the map of my life, and had become my grandmother. I had a grandfather and a past I’d never known about. All this was difficult enough to get my head around. But Auntie Snowdrop had left me with a dilemma. She had confided in me the deepest secrets of her life, and I didn’t know what to do with them.

Any moment now I’d hear the front door open, and Jasper would be charging up the stairs and barging open my door, and Maman would be calling for me. I knew what the choice was: either I could hide away the writing pad and keep Auntie Snowdrop’s secret locked inside me forever, or I could tell Maman. I picked up the photo of Papa, and looked into his eyes, into his heart, hoping he might tell me somehow what to do. He did.

All his life, he hadn’t known who his own father and mother were, what wonderful and brave people they were. I knew how much he would love to have known. The more I thought about it, the more I knew I would tell Maman, that I had to, that I wanted to. I remembered then how I’d pestered her all those years before when I was little to tell me more about Papa, how angry I’d been when she wouldn’t tell me. Well, how could she have told me? She didn’t even know. And I was about to tell her. In time I would tell everyone – I wanted to shout it out. Auntie Snowdrop had been right: now that I knew who I was, I was proud of it. I wanted the world to know. I was from Barbados, from Scotland and from France. How rare was that! How special was that! I couldn’t wait for Maman to come back, to tell her everything.

I was downstairs in the kitchen, waiting for her. I heard the key in the door.

“Cooee!” she called. “I’m back.” I sat there not saying a word as she put the kettle on. Then I told her I had got something to tell her, and that it was very important, that she had to sit down. She looked worried. “What is it,
chéri
?” she asked. “Is something wrong?” Jasper hopped into his basket and listened, ears pricked, as if he knew what I was about to do, as if he knew perfectly well the story I was about to tell was important for him too, that he was part of it, as of course he was, in a way.

“Maman,” I began. I opened Auntie Snowdrop’s writing pad in front of me on the table. “I’ve got things I have to tell you, about me, about you, about Auntie Snowdrop, Papa, everyone. You see this writing pad? Well, Jasper knocked over the photo of Papa and the glass broke, and I found it hidden in the back, behind the photograph. I was meant to find it. Auntie Snowdrop told me where to look for it years ago, but I didn’t understand. It’s like a kind of a letter-story, from Auntie Snowdrop to me. I’m going to read it to you out loud.”

“What’s it about?” Maman asked, sitting down.

“Secret lives,” I told her.

She sat very upright in her chair, and tense, one hand holding the other, her fingers twiddling her wedding ring. She seemed to be preparing herself. I began to read.

As I read, I’d look up at her from time to time trying to guess her thoughts, as all the family secrets and myths unfolded. Throughout, Maman sat there, almost expressionless, swallowing sometimes as she tried to control her tears, still twiddling her ring. I could hear Auntie Snowdrop’s voice in the telling, hear her voice in mine.

After it was over Maman said nothing for a while. Then she turned to me and hugged me so tight, I thought she would never let go. Then, holding me at arm’s length, she said: “Your Papa would so love to have known all that. To know he had a father like Leroy would have meant so much to him. She should have told him, told him everything. He had a right to know. And she should have told me too.”

“Did you mind hearing the truth about how Papa was killed?” I asked.

She smiled at me then. “Strangely enough, that’s about the only part of the story I did know,” she said. “A couple of months after he died, when I felt I could face it, I went to Manston, to the RAF air station, to meet his Wing Commander, to find out more, to collect your father’s things, his clothes, his medals, his photos and so on. The officer told me then that he had crashed on take-off. I never blamed the Aunties for not telling me, and certainly not now I know who Auntie Snowdrop really was. And after all, she was only telling me what I suppose I wanted to hear – that he had crashed into the sea, died a hero’s death, fighting in the skies.”

“So you knew,” I said, even now feeling slightly resentful that she had kept this from me. “Every time when we went down there to Folkestone you knew he wasn’t out there in the Channel. When we spread the snowdrops on the sea to remember him, you knew.”

“Yes,” Maman told me. “But I also knew that Auntie Snowdrop wanted me to go on believing their story, and I suppose I wanted to believe it too, even though I already knew the truth. The truth is sometimes so hard to accept. But I can accept it now, all of it. In the end you have to, don’t you?” She looked up at me then, with a smile. “You should do it one day,
mon petit chou
,” she went on, “do what Auntie Snowdrop says.”

“What?” I asked.

“Go to Belgium. Go to the battlefield where your grandfather was killed, where he still lies. You should go.”

didn’t go, not for years, not for decades. To be honest I think I just forgot about it. Life overtakes us. I was busy for years growing up, being a father and then a grandfather myself. And then, maybe it was just old age – I’m nearly seventy now after all. Are these reasons or excuses for delaying as long as I did? I don’t know.

Auntie Pish lived on well into her nineties. She mellowed, and became in her later years as sweet as her sister had been. I did just as Auntie Snowdrop had asked me to, and never told Auntie Pish about any of it.

Maman died only last year, also in her nineties. We live a long time in my family, unless wars take us young. It was while I was sorting through some family things after she died, rummaging through suitcases and cardboard boxes full of half-forgotten memories, that I came across one of Papa’s medals again – it was the one I’d had as a child, with the blue ribbon. That was what prompted me to search out Auntie Snowdrop’s story again – even after all these years I could never get used to thinking of her as Grandma however hard I tried.

I read it again out loud to my family the Christmas before last, when they all came down to see me.
Their story too
, I thought, and they should know it. After I’d finished, one of my grandchildren, the oldest at fourteen – she’d been called Christine after my mother – said how wrong and unfair it was that Great Great Grandfather Leroy had never got a medal for his bravery in the First World War. “It was just because he was black, wasn’t it?” she said. That decided me.

Christine and I would start a campaign to see if we could put it right. I did my research in the Imperial War Museum, sifted through dozens of regimental records. The more I looked into it the more I could see that an injustice had been done, that Leroy’s bravery had been overlooked. Deliberate or not? Who knows? Then Christine and I sat down and between us wrote to everyone we could think of, the Prime Minister, the Queen, the Minister of Defence. But it was hopeless. Some didn’t even reply, most just palmed us off. It was too long after the event, they all said. To review a case like this they needed new evidence and there was no new evidence. We did a couple of radio programmes, but nothing came of it.

It was Christine’s idea, a couple of years later, to go to Belgium, to see where her Great Great Grandfather Leroy had died, to put things right our own way. We went. We found his name carved on the Menin Gate, in Ypres, amongst the 50,000 and more other soldiers with no known graves. We visited the Flanders Field Museum and bought a map of the battlefield, saw exactly the field where he died, the hill he must have charged up that day with his pals, with Jasper. There was a farm nearby, at the top of the hill. We had the car with us, and Jasper – not the same Jasper of course, but a white Jack Russell terrier with black eyes like all the others the family has had down the years. It’s a family tradition I’ve kept going all my life – I’ve had five Jaspers in all now. You could say this whole story was about Jasper, in a way.

Christine did the map-reading. We found the farm, and parked in the farmyard. Jasper had run on ahead of us up towards the wood at the top of the field, chasing after some crows. Christine checked the map. She was sure this had to be the place, here or hereabouts anyway, closer to the wood, she thought. We followed Jasper. It was peaceful farmland now, a tractor making hay up on the ridge, cows grazing contentedly in a field nearby, and a church bell ringing in the distance. Jasper was snuffling about under a fallen tree at the edge of the wood.

“Wherever Jasper stops, if he ever does, wherever he next sits down for a rest. That’s where we’ll do it,” I said. “Agreed?”

“Agreed, Grandpa,” Christine replied.

Jasper had finished his snuffling by now, and was exploring along the tree line on the crest of the hill, nose to the ground. We followed. After a while he looked back at us, stopped, sat down and waited for us to come up the hill to join him.

“Here then,” said Christine. “Right here.”

So that’s where we dug the hole. Christine laid Papa’s medal in the earth. “The medal they never gave you, Great Great Grandfather,” she said. “We’re giving it to you now, because you deserve it. It was your son’s, my great grandfather’s, and now it’s yours too. You can share it.”

We pushed the earth back over the medal, trod in the turf, and stood there quietly for a few moments, each of us alone in our thoughts. That’s when Christine reminded me about the envelope I’d brought with me. I’d forgotten all about it. She did it for me, crouching down to scatter them on the grass, all the pressed snowdrops from my diary, every one that Auntie Snowdrop had given me all those years before.

“From Martha,” Christine whispered.

“From Auntie Snowdrop,” I said.

Some floated away on the breeze, almost at once, as light and as insubstantial as gossamer, but a few stayed clinging to the grass at our feet, enough to mark the place.

After a while we walked away. But Jasper sat there on the spot for some time, before he came running after us.

Afterwards we went to Poperinge and sat in a café with Jasper at our feet. I don’t know if it was the right café, and it doesn’t matter. We had egg and chips, and I had a cold white Belgian beer. Christine gave most of her chips to Jasper. From the look on his face he thought they were the best chips in the whole wide world.