Free A Medal for Leroy by Michael Morpurgo Page B

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