大象传媒

I suppose my interest in World War 2 is because I was born in January 1941, and so my early, formative years were spent in what would nowadays seems very strange circumstances. For the first 18 months of my life, my mother (married in March 1940) and I followed my father as he trained as a Royal Marine Commando in a variety of places throughout the UK. We usually lived in a room in a Boarding House, or in a room let out in someone's home. My mother always seems to have taken this nomadic 'homeless' way of life as just the way things were then. I, of course, have no memories of this except for stories my parents have since told me, and that have become part of our family history.
In 1942 my father took part in the raid on Dieppe. He reached the cliffs they were supposed to scale, but the fire-power of the Germans made it impossible. He ordered his men back to try to get away. They tried to scramble aboard a landing craft, but on finding it full of wounded men, he ordered them off and back to the beach. Moments after he and the others had got out of the landing craft, it was blown out of the water. Various witnesses had seen them board, but had not seen them get out again, and he was presumed killed in action. We still have letters of sympathy sent to my mother by fellow Marines - friends, as well as an official letter. She waited for three months for confirmation of his death, and then came the news via the Red Cross that he was a prisoner of war. Many years later, I saw a terrible i.d. photo of him, with a great coat slung over his shoulders to conceal the fact that his hands were in chains as a reprisal.
From then on my mother continued the war without him. She shared rented houses with sisters and sisters-in-law in various places. All the husbands were either away fighting, or POWs - my father's elder brother had already been killed by the Japanese.
One wonderful thing that has resulted from those years, is that all the young cousins I shared that life with have been almost like brothers and sisters ever since. It was a very special time of family closeness which we have never lost. However, I didn't really know what a 'Daddy' was....but perhaps more of that another time.