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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from Lincolnshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Pat Pilling and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Pilling fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

In July 1942 my father died helping to liberate Caen and so when I was 6 years old in 1948, my mother and I were sent and paid for by the Royal British Legion to visit his grave in Ranville Cemetery, half a mile from Pegasus Bridge in Normandy. After travelling down to Newhaven and over on the ferry to Dieppe we took a train to Rouen and were met very late at night being very, very tired and taken to a hotel.

As a six year old I had never been in a hotel and was amazed at the opulence. We even had a bidet in our room, even though neither of us knew what it was for.

The visit to the grave the following day was memorable, even though the person in it, meant nothing to me as I was only 8 months old when he last saws me, but the journey to the cemetery was unbelievable to me, seeing the destruction of the whole town of Caen with bullet holes in all the building left standing. We had nothing like this in the small Lancashire mill town where I lived. Also when breakfast arrived, we were offered eggs, bacon, fresh bread and real butter and jam — things we could not obtain at home due to rationing even two and a half years after the war ended. It was a further two years before rationing was withdrawn and life returned to some normality.

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