Contrived Row Over D-Day Junket

 

I found the Rishi Sunak D-Day row a bit hard to take. I know where my father was eighty years ago this month: he was a gunner, so was on the southern coast along with most of the artillery in anticipation of the Germans launching a raid to try to disrupt the D-Day landings. By the end of the month, with all the beachheads linked up, the heavy guns crossed the channel and Gunner Charlie Bell helped blast the way through France and into Germany with a minimum of finese and a maximum of high explosive.

He was demobbed in late 1945 and put the whole wretched war behind him. He never went to the local cenotaph, nor did he join any veterans association. I claimed his medals for him years later as he had no interest in doing it himself and when I told him my plan he replied: "You'll have to pay for 'em! You don't get owt for nowt in't bluddy army!"

Actually, they were free and his Second World War Medal, his Good Conduct Medal, along with his France and Germany Star duly arrived in the post. He stuck them in a sideboard and forgot to tell me so I found them by accident.

Forty years ago when the politicians last used D-Day as a vote grabbing opportunity I asked my parents why it was forty years and not fifty, and my mother who had been conscipted to work in the Avro factory to work 12-hour days building Lancaster bombers, replied that it was so that there would be enough old men around for the politicians to be photographed with.

Both my parents are long dead, but I just know that my dad would not have given a tinker's cuss about Sunak leaving France early, so on his behalf, I don't either.