大象传媒

My dad was a scholarship lad, and I've got the books he won to prove it, all with elaborate dedications in the front: Edwin Cuningham Andrews, for Essays, Geography, French, English, Latin.

But he was a country lad, grown up in Wilmslow, used to walking or - if he could - riding to school. Liked music, played the sax, and in the thirties played in a dance band and fancied it as a career.

But the war came, and he signed up. Royal Engineers, but as a despatch rider: he was neither royal nor an engineer. Nor a great despatch rider. Crashed off his bike in Belgium and got sent home for repairs.

Not much wrong, so out he went again. I think around April 1940. But that was when it was all SNAFU. As they moved back, he got detached from his regiment - if he'd ever had time to connect with it - and he just hurried with the last drift of stragglers towards Dunkerque.

Late, lost, and always vague, he found himself on the outskirts of a village. He was tired, hungry and alone. He knew he had to follow the general run of troops but wasn't with anyone to tell him where or how or what. He had at least 50 miles to go.

And this is what he told me, and all he told me when I asked.

There was a big grey horse, left alone in a field. From what the villagers could tell him, it was a horse abandoned by a Belgian cavalry officer. Dad liked it, it certainly liked Dad - it wanted company, he said, so he rode it nearly all the way to Dunkirk, and he believed it was the only reason he got there.

I never asked him how he managed it - was there a bridle and saddle? I suspect he just used a halter and rode it accordingly.

When he got near Dunkirk it was late in the proceedings - he left the horse in a field and somehow managed to get round the German lines to the beaches.

All my mother knows is that he left the beaches on June 2nd. The first big ship he got on was sunk. The second brought him home.

He'd seen enough of the army and navy by then and quite logically joined the RAF. Less logically, as a navigator. He says he wasn't the only RAF navigator to fly by railway lines, or even ask his pilot to drop down to read station names, though I suspect this is the apocryphal bravado of men who managed their jobs supremely well.

He served in India, Burma, Egypt. His last pilot was my mother's elder brother, Geoff Browning - who died in the last days of the war (1945) and is buried in Iraq. He'd always asked my father to look after his family - and especially his beloved sister.

So my father did.

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