大象传媒

Our house was one of six attached to a storage depot belonging to a brewery. In front of the warehouse was a large parking area.
Something was up, and the Sherman tanks and army lorries with silent soldiers in the back rolled past the door on the Watling Street all day from early light towards, what we later discovered, were the Normandy landings. As children we waved and called out, ran alongside the lorries, collected sweets thrown to us. It was all very exciting.

Then, one by one, tanks whose tracks had overheated, pulled into the parking area and soon there were six, each carrying a crew of six. All Canadians.

My mother opened her cupboards, dug up potatoes, pulled salad and sent me across the road to Mr. Eales Dairy to see what we could have without coupons. I came back with tins of pilchards and loaves of bread ,and so those hungry, tired young men dined in an English household. Soon they had bedded down on the living room floor and the rest of us had gone to bed.

We were woken by screams, shouts, confusion, coming from downstairs. We ran down and switched on the light by the door to find my seventeen year old sister sprawled across several young men on the floor!

She had been out dancing straight from work and had come creeping in at past midnight hoping not to wake our mother. The light switch being across the room, she had crept into the sitting room and tripped over the first and found herself among strange young men sleeping on the floor. You could not blame her for screaming!

We thought it was very funny although she did not.

When I went to Normandy many years later, I went to the Canadian War Graves and wondered how many of those young men who had slept on our floor that night, had survived out of the thousands that were killed with the Landings.

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