大象传媒

My father, Raymond Bryan,(pictured holding me), was killed at sea on the 8th June 1944 during the D-Day landings. He was by then an Army captain and a member of 17 Advanced Ordnance Depot.
I was only three and a half years old when my father was killed and sadly do not have any memories of him.However I do remember a number of incidents around that time which may be of interest.
Due to the heavy bombing in Plymouth, Devon, where I was born, we moved to a house in Sutton, Surrey and it was here that I have my earliest memories.
My mother and I were walking along the pavement outside our house when what I now know to have been a V1 flew over.You could hear the mechanism propelling it and my mother said to me that if the motor stopped we should lie on the ground.However, on this occasion it flew on out of our area, no doubt to cause devastation somewhere else. This was the first clear lesson, on any topic, I can remember being taught.
Men of the Canadian Army and their vehicles were parked in our road and to my delight, and no doubt of all the other children in the road, we were given rides around the block in the said vehicles.
Being only about 4 years old I had no understanding of the war and because I had never known peacetime, the sight of so many bombed out houses seemed quite normal, and something that was not open to question.
Here again the adventure of having to get quickly into our Morrison shelter, which was in the corner of our sitting room, became a matter of routine. To my knowledge none of the houses in the immediate vicinity of our home were hit, and eventually the terrible war came to an end.

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