大象传媒

My dad Jim Jennings, youngest of 11 children was in the Second Battalion Grenadier Guards at the outbreak of WW2.

My late mother told me how my dad, had come safely home from Dunkirk. Two boats had been sunk but he managed to escape on the third. Afterwards, at his mother鈥檚 house, in Bethnal Green, his sister said the sound of snoring from him and some other survivors was deafening.

Some time later my mother was waiting for him to come off duty outside the barracks (either Wellington Barracks in Birdcage Walk or down in Poole, Dorset). The soldier at the gate enquired whom she was waiting for. She told him and enquired if the soldier knew him? 鈥淜now him,鈥� he replied, 鈥渉e saved my life at Dunkirk鈥�. He went on to explain that he had been injured and that my dad had carried him for three days on his back until they reached the ambulances. When my mum asked him about it he shrugged it off as something that anyone would have done. My mum said that his experiences at Dunkirk had changed him. I sometimes wonder if that soldier survived the war. I hope that he did.

I was born in March 1944. At the time of my birth my dad had been missing for five months and it was to be another sixteen months before my mother was informed that Grenadier Guardsman James Jennings had been killed in action on the 8th November 1943 and was buried at Monte Cassino in Italy.

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