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I remember D-Day

Well, actually, no I don’t. I remember the run up to it.
I was a six year old boy living in the small north Cornish town of Bude. I lived in a terraced house in the middle of the town with a gran and a great-gran. The war had taken us over totally. The hotels had been requisitioned by the army or taken over by Clifton College — the Bristol public school. They borrowed our piano — it was never the same again. The buses had slatted wooden seats, the railings had gone — to make tanks they said ( but later we learned that the metal was far too impure for such critical engineering — I wonder what they did with all those ornate, pointed railings). Sometimes, in the silence of night, the house would be shaken by a mighty explosion - a sea mine hitting a rock, I was told in the morning. And the Americans had arrived.
They were so different. Big, easy-going, loose-limbed and light of tread in those soft brown boots, they were totally unlike our hard-edged, arm-swinging, iron-booted soldiers. Some were black — the first black faces I had ever seen. The significance of their being encamped separately from their white fellows escaped my six-year old mind. It didn’t matter to me. All were generous and friendly. I was given rides round the town in a Jeep and, most amazingly, large tins of tinned fruit. These guys punctured the tin, drank the juice, and tossed the tins to us. All that free tinned fruit…
In those days, we kids had no fear and our families had no fear for us — nobody had ever heard of paedophiles (though I am sure they existed). There was nothing unusual about a six year old wandering around alone, watching what was going on. And what was going on appeared devoid of any reason. Why would these Americans drive their huge lorries down on to our beach, leave them for the tide to come in and swamp them, then go back to retrieve them as the tide ebbed. Watch the newsreels of the Normandy landings and it becomes obvious why. Why would soldiers throw a temporary steel bridge across our canal and drive a lorry over it (I was terrified as it dipped alarmingly in the middle) when there was a perfectly good, and substantial bridge not fifty yards away? There was so much to watch, so much to wonder at.
Then, one morning, I woke up to see, outside our house, the longest line of military vehicles I had ever seen. Some vehicles were towing enormous guns, Long Toms I think they were called, and the guns had messages painted on them, messages about Hitler and the Nazis. Jeeps buzzed up and down the length of the column, like harrying sheepdogs. It seemed to take all day for the line to move, but move it did. And the next day all had gone - there was just utter emptiness. I don’t know what the date was but it was early summer and I am guessing that it was a few days off June 6th.

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