A Medal for Leroy (9 page)

o that’s what we did, moved to the other end of the country and if anyone asked who little Roy was, we told them the Zeppelin story. And that’s where Roy grew up, by the sea in Folkestone. I stayed home and looked after him and the house and the garden, and Mary was a teacher in a junior school nearby – she became a headteacher in the end. A wonderful teacher she was too. It’s true she could be a bit sharp, a bit brusque, with the children, but she was always kindhearted towards them. She had their best interests at heart, and they knew it.

Of course it all turned out to be a lot more complicated than either Mary or I had first imagined. What we hadn’t realised at first was that we’d have to live out our story, not simply tell it. And for Roy that story was the story of who he was, how he came to be with us. Roy grew up not just calling me ‘Auntie’, but believing that’s what I was to him. When he asked about himself, as of course he often did when he grew old enough, we’d tell him about the Zeppelin raid, about how his mother, our sister, had been killed in it, and how his father had died in Belgium in the war – that bit was much easier to talk about than the rest, I can tell you.

We told him how as a little baby he had survived the Zeppelin raid and been brought out alive from the ruins of the house. Every day as he grew up I yearned to tell him the truth, that I was his mother. I wanted him to know all about Leroy, and about Jasper. I longed for him to call me Mummy, especially at the school gates when I saw and heard all the other children with their mothers. But Auntie Martha I was to him, and Auntie Martha I stayed. It was hard to bear, but I knew it had to be. I locked the secret in my heart and kept it there.

In a way, Jasper was Roy’s idea. He loved dogs and was always asking if we could have one. My little boy, once he got an idea into his head he’d never let it go. Mary always said no. I never argued with her. I knew better than that. I just did it. Without telling her, I went and bought Roy a dog for his tenth birthday. I found one just like his father had had in the trenches, like the one I’d met at the café that day in Poperinge, a little white Jack Russell with black eyes. When I brought the dog home, Roy wasn’t back from school. I told Mary we had to call him Jasper. As it turned out she didn’t object at all. It was unspoken, but she knew fine why I had to call him Jasper, why I’d chosen a little white Jack Russell terrier, that Jasper and Leroy were lying out there somewhere in a field in Belgium, undiscovered; that I thought of them every day of my life.

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,