D-Day

[liadnan]

(In which I pontificate pretentiously)

I went home for the weekend, as I hadn't seen my parents for a while and won't be free for a longer while of weekends.

Since my father had a minor stroke some years ago now, his health has progressively degenerated. He takes a vast cocktail of prescribed medicines, one side effect of which has been to make him extremely emotional. We've got used, over the last couple of years, to him bursting into tears when something said in dinnertime conversation, or on the radio makes him feel this way.

A weekend of D-Day reminiscences on the radio obviously affected him deeply (I'm not sure it was the reaction Roy Hudd & Co discussing Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey and the rest would have expected). Born in Ireland in 1929, for reasons which are utterly opaque to me he and his family spent much of the war in one of the most dangerous parts of England, Kent and only moved back afterwards. But then, his father had illegally volunteered underage for the Royal Navy in 1914, and was stationed in the Dardanelles at roughtly the same time his brother was defending the Dublin GPO, so odd decisions run in the family. He remembers discovering, afterwards, bits of the huge con operation built up round Kent: rubber tanks, landing craft made of scaffolding and canvas, which were oh-so-carefully not quite hidden well enough to prevent the Germans learning of them and reporting a massive build-up opposite the Pas-de-Calais.

My mother, meanwhile (only half Irish) was growing up in Totton, just out of Southampton towards the New Forest. She remembers taking the train to school every day, a train that stopped at a small station at the heart of the transit camps... and not noticing a thing. Whether that is a testament to their camouflage skills or her lack of observation skills I know not. Her uncle had vanished off to Allied Command.. personally drawing maps of Normandy for Montgomery.

We went down to the river while I was home, a river where thousands of men embarked on transports to take them out to the ships. And on my way up to the railway station to catch the train back to London I noticed, on a long high wall that runs alongside the road, faded numbers painted on the wall. I'd never noticed them before, until my mother told me over lunch they were first put there to mark the points where the trucks were to line up, parked in the road before travelling on to embark.

My father might well not be affected so deeply if it weren't for his pills, but I don't know I would look at him askance if he was.

There is much wrong with the developed world, in which almost all the people I know live. But it could be far, far, worse, and one of the reasons it is not is D-Day. That it is not is a debt we owe to the memories of all those who conceived and planned what is possibly still one of the most complex operations of all time and above all to all those who died in its execution. It is a debt we can only honour by trying to ensure that we do not pass on to those who come after us a world less free, and less socially just, than we inherited.