When Roy came back from school that day he was ecstatic. He said we were ‘the best, the most supreme aunties in the whole wide world’. Jasper instantly became one of the family, and Roy’s favourite playmate, always game for a game, if you know what I mean. And always there to comfort Roy when he was sad – Jasper seemed to have an instinct for that. Like any good friend, he knew when he was needed most. They were inseparable.
Roy grew up to be so like his father. He had the same open face and easy smile that had first enchanted me, and like his father, he turned out to be a wizard with a football, and he could sing quite wonderfully too. Like his father he was pretty good with sums as well, ‘bright as a button’ his teacher told me at mental arithmetic. I taught him the songs his father had taught me, and I always asked him to sing the same song for me on my birthday, as a special treat: ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’. I only had to close my eyes and it was Leroy’s voice, Leroy singing, Leroy humming.
If you tell a story often enough – no, let’s be honest, let’s call it what it was, a lie – if you tell a lie often enough, and for long enough, particularly if you live it, in the end you forget it’s a story altogether, you forget it’s a lie. You come to believe it, and I suppose that’s what happened. In time, I no longer even noticed when Roy called me Auntie Martha. As he grew up, Mary and I endlessly talked over whether or not the time had come now to tell Roy the truth at last. But our secret had been lived out for too long. Neither of us wanted to risk telling him, Mary least of all. She always said that we should die taking the secret with us.
“‘What the mind doesn’t know, the heart can’t grieve over.’ Let’s just leave it alone,” she’d say, “at least wait till he’s twenty-one. We’ll tell him then.” So we left it alone and never told him. We shouldn’t have done, but we did. We left it too late.
Roy was just nineteen when the Second World War began in September 1939. He joined up at once as so many young men did, and was soon a pilot in the RAF. He was out in France with his squadron when he met this French girl. He wrote us long letters about her. Both of them got out of France just in time, just before the fall of Dunkirk. He brought her to see us. Christine she was called. You call her Maman. He was very proud of her, so very fond of her, and once we’d got to know her so were we, and so was Jasper.
The wedding soon after was a quiet affair, in a Registry Office in Folkestone – just Mary, me, the two of them – and Jasper. Roy insisted that Jasper had to be there. I remember he had a bit of an argument with the man in the Registry Office about that, but Roy was in his Flight Lieutenant’s RAF uniform. He was a Spitfire pilot, and he looked like it, and that helped, helped a lot. Jasper was allowed in, and sat beside me all the way through the wedding. Actually, he slept through most of it.
We were living through the Battle of Britain that summer of 1940. The skies above us were the battlefield. We’d see the German fighters and bombers coming over in their hundreds, watched the dogfights, hoped and prayed every day that Roy was all right.
He was stationed not far away at RAF Manston; so for a while Christine came to live with us here in his old room, and worked as a waitress in the town. When the phone rang that day in September 1940, I answered it. The call was from Manston. It was Roy’s Wing Commander. He asked if I was Roy’s wife. I said that Roy’s wife lived with us, but that she wasn’t in.
“Are you his mother then?” he asked.
I shouldn’t have said it, but I did. “Yes,” I told him.
“Then perhaps you could break the news, perhaps you could tell his wife… be better coming from you perhaps.”
“Tell her what?” I said.
“That Roy was killed this morning. We don’t know exactly what happened yet. An engine failure on his Spitfire, we think, on take-off it was. He crashed. I am so sorry. He was a fine man, and a brave flying officer, the bravest of the brave. Everyone here thought the world of him here. We shall miss him more than we can say.”
ary and I, we told your Maman together when she came home from work that evening, told her as gently as we could. She sat there unable to speak, unable even to cry. We made her cocoa and put her to bed. She lay curled up on her bed for about a week, refusing all the food we offered her. She just lay there, rocking herself. There was no comforting her. I came in to see her one morning and she was sitting up looking out to sea, with Jasper beside her on the bed – he’d hardly left her side the whole time. Jasper might have been old and slow by now, but he still knew where he was most needed.
“I don’t want Roy to have been burnt, to have died in flames,” she said, without turning round. “I want him to have gone down out there, out at sea. Is that how it happened? Tell me that’s how it happened.”
“Yes,” I told her. “Out in the Channel it was.”
I told Mary what she’d said, and she agreed that it could only hurt her more if Christine knew the truth about how he had been killed. Ever since we heard the news about Roy I had longed to tell her the whole truth about Leroy, to put my arms around her and tell her that I was Roy’s mother, to share my grief, share hers. I couldn’t do it even then, but as I sat beside her, I did say that I had lost a dear, dear friend in the First World War, and had never forgotten him. And I did say that Roy may have been our adopted son, but that we had never thought of him as that. To us, I said, he had always been simply our son, and always would be. It was a kind of truth, at least.
Well, Michael, the rest you know, or can guess. Like me, all those years before, your Maman discovered she would be having a baby. We wanted her to stay on and live with us. We begged her not to go to London where the bombing was inflicting such terrible damage, but despite all that, despite all we said, she was determined to go. There was translation and interpreting work she could do there, for the war effort, she said. She had to go, had to do it. She explained that it was because she was French, because her country was occupied by the enemy, and because that enemy had killed the man she loved. She promised she would come down to see us as often as she could. And she always has.
So you were born in London, Michael, and I had a grandson. You had a grandmother and never knew it. Now you do. Now you know everything. Look after the photo of your father, polish the frame for me, and tell your children my story, because it’s your story and theirs. Look after Auntie Pish for me, won’t you, as she looked after me. And go and see the place where your grandfather lies, out in Belgium – I never had the courage to do that. He would like that. I would too. We’ll be together again by then, Leroy and I, in a happier place, a peaceful place, where the colour of a man’s skin is invisible, where no lies are told, because none are needed, where all is well.
I send you all my love,
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 ev
en 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.
It was a phone call from Michael Foreman that set me thinking about writing this book. Had I read or heard about Lieutenant Walter Tull, he asked me, the only black officer to serve in the British Army in the First World War? I hadn’t. But I did my research, and discovered how this extraordinary young man had grown up in an orphanage in London, had played football for Spurs, then joined up with his pals when the war began in 1914. As a soldier he was much respected, and brave beyond belief, his actions on the field of battle worthy of a medal for gallantry. He never received one. He died leading his men in attack in 1918. He has no known grave.
A Medal for Leroy Page 6
