Free A Medal for Leroy by Michael Morpurgo Page A

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