Justine's article about Mothers' Day in the Saturday Telegraph

[marina]

nice pic of the tribe and a good read , especially that sobering quote

that's meant to say fill it in

popped a couple in amazon basket - will do it for my brood

marina, your dad was a bit late getting to D Day, wasn't he?

Arf - he was one of the first off actually WW, he was supposedly hauling a radio set for some marines, but his tendency to disobey any orders he didn't care for was his undoing. He was in the landing craft cockpit sharing a forbidden ciggie with a pal just off Hermanville at dawn when they were hit by German artillery. His pal was killed and he badly injured - the only two casualties on the entire craft.

Having a mate killed right next to you must be so hard to deal with

DH's dad saw a lot of action. His speciality was retreats, he was at Dunkirk and Crete. Mine was in a baths unit - useful, but not very heroic - the nearest he came to danger was when a wet pipe he was carrying nearly touched a live wire

Dunkirk must have been terrifying
Dad would not talk about his war experiences for years wendy . His two older brothers had the sort of war careers your dad did, shifting catering packs of tea around on Malta etc, and never really understood. But after months in hospital dad just took off on Demob Day and bummed around the Meditteranean for about ten years, sending his embarrassed parents photos of him in djellabahs and on tramp steamers. We still have them, they are extraordinary. Then he chopped down the privy at Achiltibuie Youth Hostel for firewood...got done for poaching...and finally succumbed to inevitable and became a bookkeeper.

No, I don't think FIL talked about it much either - from what DH says he was jokey about it, (he was jokey about most things)but he was shot in the arm - when DH was little he would see it when they went swimming but not otherwise.

I've been semi-listening to Fortunes of War the last few weeks - the lives and experiences in that were a bit more dramatic than the norm but still, it's so hard to imagine what they went through and how many were lost.

Also read today about the Bethnal Green tube air-raid shelter disaster 65 years ago Have you seen the list of names here? Look at the Mead family...

WW, the Bethnal Green commemorations were in the London news at the weekend. Terrible tragedy