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

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