Escape

I don’t know why I thought of this… maybe my mind was wandering along thoughts of escape – al to do with my stories! My father was a soldier in World War 2; he was called up before the war started in 1939 at the age of nineteen. Before he became a paratrooper he was a medical orderly and was in France at the time of Dunkirk,when the British troops had to evacuate by sea to escape the Germans. My dad was on a hospital train, loaded with wounded, and heading for Cherbourg, a sea port, to escape across the channel. The train came to a halt and with horror those on board watched as bombs fell on the port they were heading for, and with further horror saw the ship, H.M.S. Lancastria hit and sink, with who knows how many men on board. . My dad missed the evacuation and his mum, my grandma received news that he was missing, presumed captured.

However, the train made its way further north to a port which was as yet free, and together with the wounded he was tending my dad boarded a ship which headed across the channel back to England. They anchored off-shore and as they looked across the water to home, another flight of enemy aircraft came overhead and bombed the city of Portsmouth. Fortunately the ship my dad was on was untouched, and he and the wounded men in his care were safely disembarked, and I guess one of the first things he did, when he was able was to ring home to the pub where his parents lived to tell them he was safe.

This was in 1940, when he was twenty, younger than my son is now.