Read Online A Medal for Leroy by Michael Morpurgo - Free Book Online

he looked at me, how he laughed. Even as a baby he already had his father’s big hands.
     
    I think we would have stayed in Cornwall all our lives if we’d had a choice; we loved it there. Mary was teaching at the local school, I was nursing the baby, who was growing up healthy and strong. We’d sit on the sand in the sunshine and watch the fishing boats coming in and out of the harbour. The war, still going on across the sea, seemed a whole world away. But tongues were wagging in the village.
    It was common enough everywhere in those days for a mother to be left alone with fatherless children. There were several families like that in the village. After all, hundreds of thousands of young fathers had been killed out there. But Leroy had been black.

    Roy was much less obviously black than his father, but still noticeably darker than anyone else in the village, and darker than me too. Some people wouldn’t speak to us. Some even crossed the village street to avoid us. Most weren’t like that of course, but there were enough disapproving glances, enough tittle-tattle to cast a long shadow over our lives. We were beginning to feel like outcasts.
    Then one morning, our landlord – the local farmer – came to the door and told us we’d have to leave. He didn’t say why, but we knew the reason. We had two weeks to pack up and go, he said. “We don’t want your sort around here,” he said, “and what’s more we don’t want your kind teaching our children.”
    Mary was at once incandescent with rage, and told the farmer just what she thought of him, and then drove him out of the cottage with a broom. It was quite a spectacle!
    Mary decided we had to move away, as soon as possible, as far away as possible from these ‘miserable people’ as she called them. It was a newspaper report that gave her the idea. There’d been another Zeppelin air raid on London and lots of people had been killed and wounded. I remember she sat me down at the kitchen table as I was feeding Roy, and told me she’d worked it all out.
    “Wherever we go we can be sure it will be the same,” she said. “They’ll look at you and little Roy and they’ll gossip away, they’ll weave their wicked tales. Well I’m not having it. I’m not. So I’ve decided we must invent a story of our own, about us. Now, this Zeppelin raid on London – there will be orphans, won’t there? There are bound to be orphans. We shall adopt one of them. His father will have come from Barbados and has been killed in Belgium – truth in that – and his mother will be from London, killed in this Zeppelin raid. We will be the sisters of that mother, and being the nearest relatives, his aunties, her only family, we will look after the baby. The natural thing to do. Must happen all the time. That will be our story, little Roy’s story. We won’t live too close to London – don’t want to be near those Zeppelins when they come over, do we? I’ve read about seaside places in Kent, seen pictures too. I like the look of Folkestone, it’s a lovely town. Roy will still grow up by the sea, and no one will know us. And when they ask, as they will, we’ll just tell them our story. Simple. We shall find a place to live. There are schools in Folkestone. I shall teach. All will be well, Martha. Don’t you worry.”

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