大象传媒

It was 1945 and my father, Corporal M. Hall, 4200087, Royal Welch Fusiliers, was serving out the last few months of the war in Germany. I was only a baby at the time, having been born in March 1944 but I know something of my father's last days in Germany through a series of small photos that he sent home to my mother.

Each of these small snapshots had a message, often humourous, or descriptive, on the reverse. Usually they showed where my father and his comrades were billeted, near this river or that town. Sometimes they were just photographs of the members of his'Click', as he called them, Harry, George, Jack, Doc, Hughie and Ted. One photograph is of a barn. On the reverse my father had written, 'The night before this was taken 'Jerry' tried to bomb us out of it, but as usual he missed'. Thank God.

During the spring and summer of 1945, my father's unit moved from Osnabruck to Hamburg and then on to Mulheim. A photograph from Hamburg, dated May 1945, bears the inscription 'We were here the night that PEACE was declared'. They must have felt relieved to have survived when so many others had fallen. Another message says that 'This is the lake in Hamburg that I told you looked so lovely when the sun was shining on it'. Good to know that his experiences had not lessened my father's ability to see beauty even in a land devastated by war.

One photo shows the truck in which the unit traveled, another shows them lying in a grassy field near Hamburg, soaking up the sun. They look relaxed but weary after the years they had spent fighting. They all look as if they just want to get home.

And so they did. By 1946, my father was reuinted with my mother and me in Derby. From what he told me later it took him many months, perhaps years, to settle back into 'real life'. When he first arrived home he was a stranger to me but with the passage of time we gradually got to know one another again. I never saw the letters that must have carried this small photographic archive across the sea from Germany to Derby so all I have left of my father's war is his medals, some other odds and ends and these few snapshots.

I'm glad my Dad did his bit for King and Country and survived to see his children, who meant so much to him, grow and prosper. Through his photographs and the messages he sent we can glimpse some of experiences as a soldier, and of a time that has faded into history.

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