大象传媒

After D-Day, after VE Day,after VJ Day, THE Day: the day Dad came home.
I was not yet thirteen on the morning when the Normandy invasion was announced. It was in an unusual setting in that we were camping in the best front room while my mother was spring cleaning the diningroom, where we lived most of the time because of the back boiler which heated the water. The dining table and big old wireless had been moved in for comfort and to us kids it was already quite a special occasion. And the day was sunny....
I was laying the table to the eight o'clock news - was it Alvar Liddell reading it? Of course our first question was "Does that mean that Dad will be home soon?"
My personal estimate was about three weeks or a month.
Whatever my mother answered, it would not have been a strategic summing up of the possible time scale, nor did she attempt to point out on our much-annotated Times map of Europe just how far the invading troops would have to travel, nor even the possibility of defeat. In rural Anglesey we had been protectd pretty well from the nastier realities of war, though blackout, sirens,rationing, digging for Victory(which she hated), clothes rationing and hand-me-downs (which we hated)and especially the absence of Dad were bad enough. We were mercifully too young for the bigger picture still.Now the 大象传媒 News began to figure more and more in our lives, and we registered some of the names: Caen, Arnhem,the Ardennes, the Rhine , Berlin. The last did have a ring of finality about it, but still the big question hadn't been answered. It was explained that the war in the far East had still to be won.Meantime my father had been in North Africa, Sicily and Southern Italy, Naples and Rome, never fortunately in the front line. He sent us a sketch of himself smoking a pipe with Vesuvius (also smoking) in the background. It was recognisably our Dad. So, when was it to be?
VJ Day passed and I was not yet fourteen. My birthday was in October - might it be that Dad would be there? Not so. Christmas then? It was not likely so my mother had accepted an invitation to join some friends in Caernarfon. We were, it semmed,waiting to hear......
Then my mother was clutching a letter which arrived on Christmas Eve! What a glorious Christmes message. My father would arrive in London on January 11th 1946 and catch the Irish Mail,the daily London to Holyhead train which connected with the night mail boat to Dublin. This did not stop at our Llangefni station but at nearby Llanfair P.G., that funny little place with the long and barely pronounceable name. My Uncle John, Dad's elder brother and Flanders veteran, would pick him up there and all would be well.
Picture the scene. The table is set for supper. The fire is burning brightly in the grate. Uncle John and my mother leave for the station at half past eight. My little brother has gone to bed. My Auntie Gladys and I chat, and watch the clock. Time passes. We calculate when we might expect them back.A quarter past nine? Too soon. We chat some more. We make up the fire as instructed. Ten o'clock strikes. Has the train been delayed? Has Dad missed the train? He would surely have rung next door, our only neighbours with a phone. Has the car broken down or run out of petrol? Should we boil a kettle? It must be said that Auntie Gladys is a very good chatterer and the time passes reasonably quickly in one way but woefully slowly in another. We suddenly realise that the fire has sunk rather low and I set off to fetch a shovelful of coal. As I come back into the room I hear a car. I hurl the coal into the embers, fling the shovel into the grate and run down the passage and there he is, after four long years - my Dad, only a day late.It is now January 12th, thanks to the total disruption of the service by - fog.
My brother was fetched and we had our supper. Uncle John and Auntie Gladys drove off. We were a family again. Only later did I discover that the fog had been vey thick on the road, the railway and especially on the platform. There my mother, by now in something of a state, had caught sight of a slight figure in uniform at the other end, rushed towards him, flung herself into his arms and kissed him enthusiastically. He said appreciatively "Well, that was very nice but I think you may have the wrong man"...
The right man was there too.
We were happy now. I was not old enough to understand the adjustments that had to take place, what we had lost by his absence, the impact of his return, the ways in which all of us had changed and the lasting effect of it all. We were fortunate that the transition was on the whole reasonably easy.
I still have the Vesuvius card and a delightful two-page itinerary of my father's overland journey home. Did everyone have one, I wonder, or was it a Battalion special, or a private initiative?

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