DAD'S D-DAY

Watching all of those old soldiers last Friday has set me thinking about where the members of my own family were and what they were doing on that momentous day, because, to be perfectly honest, it's really not something that I can ever remember being mentioned. Mum's parents never mentioned it, nor did mum herself, and I was never really close enough to Dad's side of the family to ever really know much about anything they did, so I don't know how any of them felt about it, or how involved with it any of them were.

Did a huge sigh of relief cross the country, or were nails being bitten everywhere? After all, despite the feeling that the big push towards victory was finally on, many must have already realised that those much-feared telegrams would be getting printed in their thousands over the coming days, weeks, and months.

Maybe I was still too young when I was actually in the room with any of my family to have interesting conversations about anything other than my toys, or what we were having for tea, or whether I could go out to play, or perhaps I was just of an age when you got sent out of the room when the grown-ups wanted to talk, or I was already in bed when the big stuff came up. I remember being very swiftly "Shushed" in one hotel room when I asked (rather too loudly) what "The Dambusters" were when I read a page in the back of my book promoting another book about them from the same publisher.

I also remember a rather magical evening on holiday in Yugoslavia back when I was about ten when we were having an evening meal in a restaurant and my dad got chatting to another old soldier and started telling tales of their experiences in the war, of Oxo cubes, and boxing matches, and my father being mocked for his faith, but apart from that, and a few chunnerings around about the time of the 40th anniversary of V.E. Day with an old pal who had also still been battling away out in the Far East long after that, most of the time it just wasn't something that got talked about.

So, basically, I don't know where my dad was on D-Day, but I'm guessing it was probably working in a hospital in Bangalore. There's a photo from November 1944 which mentions being posted to Burma, but for most of the year before he'd been in India, working as a medic in various hospitals, cutting facial dressings into smaller pieces to make them less painful to remove, and dealing with unwanted pups in a slightly unfortunate way.

How he became a medic, I don't know.

I'm fairly sure that it wasn't for religious reasons. He once told me about injuring himself leaping underneath a gun, and a long story about getting drummed out of a parachute regiment which involved a badly packed parachute which would have killed him if he'd used it, but, generally, it looks as if my dad was just one of those people who the army had under their command but couldn't easily find something to do with.

It sounds as if the medics had a pretty tough job to do, on the whole, despite not being combatants, and dealing with the aftermath of some of those bloody battles can't have been easy. I did hear once that he got given a medal that few people get because of something particularly nasty that he had to do, but, once again, it was never talked about.

Well, not with me, anyway.

There was an interview with a conscientious objector on the radio on the day of the D-Day anniversary who was a medic on one of the Normandy beaches. He was a person who would not fight on principle, but was in just as much danger as anyone, as he ran about on those bloody beaches treating the wounded as best he could, so if you want to call such people cowards, I believe that you need to think about that again...

At that time, mum was twelve, which, given that she's gone now, just shows me how old the veterans are all getting, and how much we ought to be giving them our respect for what they did on our behalf.

Looking at them on Friday, though, it seems like some of them still look pretty spry though, and as if they'd do it all again if asked and, do you know what, I really wouldn't bet against them.