A Medal for Leroy Read online

  “You’ll be all right?” Maman asked her.

  “Pish, I’ve got Jasper, haven’t I?” she replied, recovering herself as best she could, and trying to smile through her tears. “Jasper and I, we shall be fine. But you will come and see us, won’t you? And thanks for being here today. She’ll be so happy you were with us.” She bent down then and chucked me under the chin. “Your Auntie Snowdrop loved you, you know, like a mother loves a son, that much.” She hugged Maman then. “And they say that no one loves anyone more than that.”

  “Quite true,” Maman said.

  “But,” I said, “how did you know we called her Auntie Snowdrop? We thought it was our secret.”

  “I have ears,” Auntie Pish said, reaching out and tugging gently at my ear lobe. “This boy of yours, he talks to Jasper sometimes, often far too loudly. I may be deaf, but I’m not daft. Boys are always too loud. Don’t worry, I like being Auntie Pish. It suits me, and she loved being Auntie Snowdrop.” She laughed then. “Truth will out in the end. Secrets, like the seasons, they never last, you know. And by the way, Poodle, I shall be sending you a parcel in the post, a present from Auntie Snowdrop; or maybe I’ll bring it up myself one day, turn up out of the blue at your house. I’d like that. I haven’t been to London in ten years or more – not since the War, come to think of it.” She put Jasper down. “Come along, dear,” she said to him. “Let’s go home.”

  And off she went up the hill, her stick tapping, Jasper running along ahead. He did stop once to look back at us – his way of saying goodbye, or maybe of telling me that he was thinking what I hoped he was thinking: that he really wanted to come home with me, but he couldn’t.

  Later, in the car on our way home, I was lost in my thoughts. Something was bothering me and I couldn’t work out what it was, not for a while. Then it came to me. I asked Maman, “And how did she know I was called ‘Poodle’ at school? Did you tell her?”

  “No, of course not,” she said. “You must have told that dog, just like you told him about their names, too loudly, probably. She’s really not as deaf as I thought. That’ll teach you to talk to dogs, to tell them your secrets. You can’t trust them, you know. How embarrassing, to be found out like that.”

  “But funny,” I said.

  “Oui, funny, mon petit chou,” she laughed, “very funny.”

  All the way home, I was wondering what Auntie Pish was going to send me.

  by this time – and Auntie Snowdrop’s parcel still hadn’t arrived, and neither had Auntie Pish ever come to visit us in London. Maman always said she wouldn’t, that she’d never leave Folkestone. To begin with, for the first few months after the funeral, I had hoped for the promised parcel with every post, but nothing came. By the time it did arrive, I’d long since forgotten about it. And even then, it didn’t come in the post.

  After Auntie Snowdrop’s funeral, Auntie Pish seemed to lose heart. We went down to Folkestone to see her much more often, not to spread snowdrops on the sea – it didn’t seem right to do that any more, not without Auntie Snowdrop there – but because Maman was worried about her. Auntie Pish’s memory was not as good as it had been, that was becoming quite obvious to us. She seemed more confused every time we visited. She kept talking on about Auntie Snowdrop as if she was still alive, and sometimes – which was quite unlike her old self – she’d burst into tears and become very anxious and agitated. She’d say such strange things through her tears, snatches of half-lost memories that neither of us knew anything about, mostly about her father, and her mother too.

  After one of our visits I wrote something she’d said to us down in my diary when I got home, because it upset me to see her so like this. “Father wouldn’t listen, you know. I told him I’d have to go with her, that someone had to look after her. But oh no, he wouldn’t listen, he wouldn’t listen. It broke Mother’s heart, broke my heart too.” We had no idea what she was talking about.

  As these episodes became more frequent, and made our visits more troubling, I wanted less and less to go down there to see her. I made lots of excuses not to go, football usually. I’m not proud of that now. Maman was not as faint-hearted as I was. She continued to go down to see her on her own most Saturdays, insisting that Auntie Snowdrop and Papa would never have wanted her left alone, that both Aunties in their own ways had been very kind to her when she needed it most. Then Auntie Pish broke her leg. We had a phone call from the hospital and both of us went down there as soon as we could.

  Maman and I sat either side of her bed as she complained bitterly about the food, how the nurses kept waking her up to give her pills when she wanted to sleep, and how she didn’t want the pills anyway. “Pish,” she said. “I don’t need pills. I want to get out of here. I want to go home.” But mostly it was Jasper she complained about. “It was Jasper who broke my leg. It was all his fault, his and the postman’s. I heard the postman come whistling down the path, so I went to the door just like I usually do to pick the letters up from the mat before Jasper gets to them. And what happens? Jasper comes charging down the hallway, barges past me and trips me up. If Martha had been there, it wouldn’t have happened. She always goes to the door.” She started crying then. “She’s not at home, you know. Where’s Martha gone? Where’s Martha gone? Who’s going to look after Jasper? And there’s the geraniums, the frost will get them if I don’t fetch them in soon.”

  “Don’t worry, Mary,” said Maman. “Michael and I will look after everything, won’t we, chéri?”

  “You will? You’ll look after Jasper and the geraniums? You’d like to look after Jasper, wouldn’t you, Michael?”

  Would I! Would I! I could hardly contain my joy.

  I turned to Maman. She didn’t look happy.

  “It’ll only be for a week or so, I promise,” Auntie Pish told us. “I’ll be right as rain in a week or so, fit as a fiddle, you’ll see.”

  So we went up to Auntie Pish’s house afterwards, and brought her geraniums in. I took Jasper for a run on the beach while Maman tidied the house and turned off the water and locked up. That evening we drove back to London with Jasper in the back of the car. I was over the moon. Jasper was coming home with me! At last I had a dog of my own. Jasper kept smiling up at me, panting with happiness.

  But Maman made it quite clear she did not feel the same. “That dog stays downstairs, Michael. Do you hear?” she said. “I will not have him up in your bedroom, and he is not allowed on the chairs in the sitting room, and if he makes messes, you clear them up. Tu comprends?” She sighed deeply. “I just hope that leg of hers gets better soon like she said.”

  But it didn’t. It took forever to heal. Maman was back and forth to Folkestone for weeks. Then, while Auntie Pish was still in hospital, she got pneumonia. After that she was too weak to look after herself. Maman found her a place in a nursing home just outside the town – not an easy task because Auntie Pish was very particular. She insisted she had to be able to see the sea from her bedroom window like she could back in her own home.

  Meanwhile, at home in Philbeach Gardens, Jasper had become one of the family. He slept on my bed every night, despite all Maman’s protests, bit the post as it came in through the door, and chased the cats in the park – there weren’t any gulls. Maman never came to like him. She did get used to him, feed him even, take him out for his walks sometimes. But whenever I wasn’t at school, Jasper became my constant companion. He came to football with me, chased the ball and made a nuisance of himself. We got on so well, knew each other’s thoughts almost. I had the strangest feeling sometimes that he and I were meant for each other, almost related, that somehow Auntie Snowdrop had arranged the whole thing.

  Sometimes, on Saturdays, I did go down to the nursing home with Maman, when football was rained off, or when I just couldn’t come up with a good enough excuse to get out of it. I never looked forward to going because we just had to sit there in her tiny box of a room – a bed, a bedside table and one chair. I had to sit at the end of her bed and listen to her rambling o
n for hours. She treated Maman now rather as she had treated Auntie Snowdrop. Maman was kind and attentive and endlessly patient, but as with Auntie Snowdrop, there were never any thanks. Auntie Pish just took her more and more for granted. She was even sharp with Maman sometimes. She could be really nasty.

  When I complained about this to Maman, and said she shouldn’t put up with it, she’d always make excuses for her. She’d say that Auntie Pish was very old and that old people get like that; that it was only natural that she might be a bit difficult and truculent at her age, how she’d lived through a lot, and had a heart of gold underneath. Maman was always so forgiving.

  It was on one of these visits, that out of the blue I received at last Auntie Snowdrop’s long-forgotten parcel. Wrapped in brown paper and tied up neatly with string, it was lying there on Auntie Pish’s bed when Maman and I walked into her room. “Auntie Martha wants you to have this,” she said. All these years later – nearly five years now – she still talked of her sister as if she was alive. “She’s wrapped it up specially for you. It’s breakable, so take care how you open it.”

  I didn’t bother about being careful. I pulled and tugged and jerked at the string until it came away. Underneath the brown paper, the parcel was neatly wrapped in layer after layer of newspaper, each layer folded over carefully. It took forever to open it. I couldn’t do it fast enough. It felt like a book of some kind.

  it for what it was. There, looking up at me, was Papa’s face. The frame was not polished, I noticed, as it always had been before on the mantelpiece in their sitting room in Folkestone. I felt Maman’s hand on my shoulder.

  “He looks pleased to see you, chéri,” she said.

  When Auntie Pish fell asleep soon after, we crept out of her room and drove home. I sat in the car with the parcel on my lap all the way back to London, opening up the wrapping from time to time to look at Papa.

  “I’ll polish that frame when we get home,” Maman said.

  “I’ll do it,” I told her.

  In the end Maman and I did it together, on the kitchen table, with Jasper up on a chair beside us, watching. Maman did the hard work, putting the polish on, and rubbing the tarnish off. It took some doing. Then I had the satisfaction of shining it up, breathing and polishing till it gleamed. Once it was done I took it up to my bedroom and stood it up on my desk. I sat there and stared at Papa. That was when Auntie Snowdrop’s words came back to me – I hadn’t thought about them in a long while. “Always remember, Michael, it’s not the face that matters, not the skin, not the hair, it’s what lies beneath. You have to look deeper, Michael, behind. Look through the glass, through the photo, and you’ll find out who your Papa really was.”

  I looked hard into Papa’s face, into his eyes, trying all I could to know the man behind the glass, behind the photo, behind the eyes.

  Jasper was with me, snuffling around my feet. I wasn’t paying him any attention, which was why, I suppose, he decided to jump up onto my desk and shove his nose into my face, knocking the photograph over as he did so. I heard the glass shatter as it fell.

  “Get off, Jasper,” I shouted, pushing him aside angrily. I’d never been so angry with him before. As I was standing the frame up again the glass fell out onto my desk in several pieces. I’ve often thought since that Jasper might have done it on purpose, because he knew, because he was trying to tell me, because Auntie Snowdrop had told him all about it, and he knew that’s what Auntie Snowdrop wanted him to do. He wanted me to find it, and so did Auntie Snowdrop. That’s why he broke it. That’s what I think, anyway.

  It was the first time I’d seen Papa’s face not through glass. He was already somehow more real to me, closer and more alive without the glass in between us. The photo was loose in the frame now, and had slipped down. I noticed there was one small piece of broken glass still trapped there in the bottom corner of the frame. I tried to prise it out with the point of my pencil, but I couldn’t do it. I’d have to open up the frame at the back if I was going to get it out.

  I hadn’t really noticed, not until now, but the back of the frame was nothing but a piece of cardboard, held in place by a few rusty-looking pins. All I had to do was to pull these out one by one and the cardboard came away easily enough. I had expected to see simply the back of the photograph, but there was something else there, a writing pad about the same size as the photo. On the front it said, ‘Basildon Bond’, in fancy printing, and below it, written in pencil, in large capital letters:

  It took me a little while to cast my mind back, to work it out. This must have been written then about a month or so before she died, because I knew that was in June of 1950. (I checked later in my diary and I was right about that.)

  She’d hidden it behind the photo for me to find. Behind the photo! Behind the photo!

  Maman called up from downstairs. “Chéri, I’ve got to go down to the shops. Have you got that dog up there? I’d better take him with me. He hasn’t had his walk yet. You’ll be all right on your own?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I told her. I opened the door to let Jasper out. He didn’t seem to want to go even when Maman whistled for him. She had to shout for him more than once. Even then he went only because I pushed him out – I was still cross with him. He gave me a long last look before he left. Read it, his eyes were telling me. Read it. Then he was gone, scuttling down the stairs. I heard the front door close after them.

  I was alone. I went back to my desk, picked up Auntie Snowdrop’s writing pad, sat on my bed, pillows piled behind me, rested the pad on my knees, and opened it. My heart was pounding. I knew even as I began to read – and I have no idea how I knew – that my life would be changed forever, that after I’d read this I would never be the same person again.

  m telling you this, writing it down for you, Michael, because we all have a right to know who we are. I should have told you myself, face to face a long time ago. Early on, when you were little, I always thought you were too young – or that was my excuse. And then as you grew up, I didn’t know how to tell you. I never had the courage, that’s the truth of it. I should have told your Maman too, but I could never quite bring myself to do that either.

  Now that I’ve been told in the hospital that time is running out for me, that I have only a few months left, I thought this was the one last thing I had to do. Somehow I had to tell you, and there seemed to me only one way to do it. I would put it all down on paper, and arrange things, if I could, so that one day you would find it and read it for yourself. I did try to point you in the right direction. I did tell you where to look, didn’t I? Look behind the face. Remember?

  I could have given it to your Auntie Mary for her to give to you, but I don’t want her to know I’m doing this – I don’t like to upset her. And anyway, as you’ll soon discover, this is between you and me. Your Auntie Mary knows the truth of everything that’s written here – she was so much part of the whole story – but she’s always told me it was best to keep it as a secret between her and me, just the two of us, and so it always has been. That way, she thinks, no one comes to any harm.

  Until just recently, until my last visit to the hospital, when they told me, I suppose I always used to believe she was right. But not any more. I think there are some things that are so much part of who we are, that we should know about them, that we have a right to know about them.

  If you’re reading this at all, Michael, then it means you’ve found my little writing pad behind the photo of your Papa, just as I intended you to. Please don’t be too upset. Read it again from time to time as you get older. I think it will be easier to understand as you get older. It’s not so much that wisdom comes with age – as we older people rather like to believe. It doesn’t. But I am sure that as we grow up we do become more able to understand ourselves and other people a little better. We are more able to deal with difficulty, and to forgive perhaps. If you are anything like me, Michael – and I think you probably are – I am sure you will become more understanding and forgiving as the years
pass. I hope so, because I’m sure that it’s only in forgiving that we find real peace of mind.

  I’m writing this as well, because I want you to feel proud of who you are, and proud of the people who made you. Believe you me, you have much to feel proud about. Perhaps my problem has always been that I have never been proud enough of who I am. I am a bit muddle-headed, simple-minded perhaps, and foolish – certainly foolish. I have always allowed my sister, whom I love dearly, to do most of my thinking for me. It’s just how we are and always have been. She’s been the strong one all my life, my rock you might say. I know she can seem a bit of a know-all, a bit overbearing; but as you’ll soon discover, she has looked after me, stood by me when no one else would. There’s a lot more to Mary than meets the eye – that’s true of everyone, I think. I should have been quite lost in this life without her. So here’s our story, hers and mine – and most importantly, yours.

  None of this will make sense if you don’t know to begin with how Mary and I were brought up, what kind of home we came from. We were born – Mary as you know, an hour or so before me – way up north in Scotland, in Aberdeenshire, in a grey old house in the countryside miles away from any town. I went into Aberdeen – which was less than twenty miles from our home – just once in my entire childhood, and then it was to the hospital to have my tonsils out. The countryside around us, and our village, was our whole world. We didn’t speak English in our house, but a strange language they call ‘Doric’. Not many people in our village spoke it. A few did, but only very few. I don’t think anyone speaks it any more these days, which is a shame. Father insisted we spoke it, read it, and even said our prayers in it.

  Father was a Minister of the Church – the Kirk we called it. He was rather disapproving and distant with us, a stern man. I don’t think I can remember him smiling once. I can’t even imagine it happening. Mother was kind enough with us, but she was very meek and mild. She lived, as we did, under Father’s rules, under his shadow. It became clear to us as we grew up that she had to do what Father said in all things. She was truly fearful of him, I think, as Mary and I were too. He never beat us or harmed us, but he was always a brooding presence. He moved about the house like a ghost. Every time he came into the room it seemed that a cold draught came in with him.