D-Day +65years: personal connection

This year’s 65^th anniversary of D-Day is a couple of months away, and sadly, will probably be the last significant anniversary where there will be more than a handful of survivors able to attend. My own father is 88 this year, and there are now only one or two of his former comrades from the RAF still around.

He will be coming to Normandy, as usual, this summer for a visit. He did not land in Normandy in 1944, but in the south of France in August, near St Tropez, in what was called the D-Day of the South, but which is now almost entirely overlooked. He had been fighting in Corsica before, so it was an obvious outcome as the northern invasion was making progress. It was no easy trip: landing on a beach under fire. His best mate beside him was shot dead as they ran; could have been him.

As the participants fade away, the facts become increasingly lost in the fog of Hollywood films and inventions. Few people, for example, seem aware of the tremendous importance and breathtaking innovation of the floating Mulberry harbours, which made the invasion possible, or know that of the five landing beaches only one was not an immediate success.

For the 60^th anniversary of D-Day, we took my father to the extraordinary and moving Memorial museum at Caen. This is dedicated to peace not war, and puts the emphasis on the people and not the hardware. When the staff knew he was an ancien combattant (veteran), we were all given free admission, and the constant help and attention of the incredibly soignée hôtesses who are the guides and attendants.

At one point, one of them kneeled beside him – he has to use a wheelchair these days – and said ‘Merci, merci pour tout vous avez faites pour la France’ – thank you for everything you did for France. As she said it the other people around were in tears, she was in tears, and though he tried hard not to let it show, so was my father. Later he said that this was the first time anyone had ever thanked him personally, and it was the first time he had realised that no one ever had.

Many of the exhibits in the museum are around the occupation, not just D-Day and its aftermath, with documents such as death sentences for resistance members, photographs of events, people and hardship – everything from death to starvation, and the resistance. My father also said later that this was the first time he had ever had to think about the occupation and the lives of the people they were invading, effectively to rescue.

We now rarely think of the reality of those days, or of the people, particularly civilians, who died during the occupation and the liberation. The photo at the top of this page is of the war memorial at Ouistreham, where all the western crossing ferries now land. It is outside the wonderful Romanesque church that you can see at the end of the road to the centre of the town as you drive out of the port. The names are categorised: soldiers, deported to the concentration camps, shot, and just ordinary civilians killed (this group of names is continued on the other side of the memorial).

I hope that those who visit Normandy for the anniversary will see the events for what they were, and not just the raw material for another wretched shoot-em-up computer game. There were no second lives, no-one got up and had another go. The dead from the invasion and the war overall are still dead.

The Caen Memorial is off junctions 6 or 7 of the peripherique nord, the northern ring road, and there are good public transport links from Caen. It is imperative if you want to understand the reality of war and D-Day.

My father has written his memoirs – not badly, as it happens – and there are copies in the Imperial War Museum and the RAF Museum. The memoirs  have been published on Kindle as an eBook from Amazon, and more details including chapters to read on this website.

Funerals, Easter and France

Traditionally, Easter Sunday is when everyone goes to the cemeteries to visit the graves of their deceased relatives and friends. It is a time to tidy up the tombs and graves, lay new fresh flowers, and replace plastic ones. Often, because now families are distributed all over the country rather than staying in the same village generation after generation, it is also an opportunity to catch up with old friends and neighbours. And, being France, a day of very large family meals which last all day and evening.

Graves and cemeteries are still very important, particularly to the older generation – and not just because they might soon be there themselves. Keeping graves tidy, visiting for may years, is part of the way of life. In most rural cemeteries, at any time of day or season of the year, there will almost always be people tidying up, walking around looking at tombstones, and often with cars registered in other departments.

This can sometimes become a bit of a fetish. One little old lady, a frail birdlike creature reaching her eighties - Tante Denise, the aunt of a neighbour – visited the grave of her husband, often for hours at a time, every day since he died over 50 years ago. There are many others who spend more time than most of us would regard as entirely healthy at the grave sides of spouses, parents and sometimes children.

The need for a grave, with a headstone, is imperative for most French people. Being British, this seems to me faintly odd, as does the American way of death, with burials in expensive coffins. Every small French town has its memorial mason business, with exemplars of all sorts of headstones displayed. As with everything else, there seem to be fashions. 30 years ago, headstones started to become more curvy at the top, with swirls, cut outs, and many varying details. They also became more ornate, with carved illustrations of not just religious themes, but aspects of the life of the deceased; not as special as those seen in the non royal tombs of Egypt, but sometimes quite fancy. The last few years have seen the introduction of colour to the carvings, letterings and other details.

Our neighbour and very good friend Robert died a couple of years ago. His was the first funeral I had experienced in France. Unlike in England, most people turned up in ordinary clothes, rather than dark suits and ties. Because Robert had served in Algeria, he had a guard of honour from the veterans' associations – les Anciens Combattants. Around the department, there are still many local associations, who have enough active members to be able to produce a reasonable showing at funerals. The secretary of the local society organised it, discussed all the details with the widow, including how to display Robert's medals (he wanted a closed coffin, and the nature of the anciens combattants' participation.

At the funeral, there were two rows of anciens – and sadly increasingly ancient – combattants in military uniform, with regimental flags which they lowered in unison as the coffin passed between them. Quite touching, and unexpected. Like all Algerian war veterans, Robert never discussed or even mentioned that time. Both sides did some terrible things, and it is probably right that there is now not much to be gained by revisiting the details on an individual basis.

The other aspect of strangeness was that there was no equivalent of the British hearse, which is normally a black stately limousine (ordinary not elongated absurdly), or horse drawn carriage favoured by East End gangsters, followed by close family in other black limousines. Instead, the coffin turned up in a standard Renault Espace people carrier – pale grey, with the funeral company's name in discreet print at the bottom of the door.

Robert did not want his wife and other family members to mourn and mope over his grave for years to come. He therefore requested that he be cremated. This is very, very unusual. In the event, it turns out that there is no crematorium in the whole of the Manche Department. The nearest is in Caen, which is in Calvados. Toe enable a manchois to be cremated in Calvados required permissions from the prefects of both departments, and as always, revealed the thoroughness and implacability of French bureaucracy. The funeral took place in the local church, after which close family went with the coffin to the private ceremony at the crematorium.

I have been to number of funerals in the UK, all of which involved cremations, including one jolly humanist ceremony, and one for an uncle who would have enjoyed it if it had been someone else's. He had been a lifelong active socialist, but had a church funeral, but with a wicker and cardboard coffin.. He had become quite large in his last, very ill, years, and it was very difficult for the four pall bearers to lift his coffin, especially as they were not that young themselves. As they carried the coffin, its flimsiness became almost too obvious, as the whole thing began to buckle in the middle, and then sag at one end. The quick intervention of a couple of other – younger - mourners avoided the complete disintegration of the coffin, and the dropping of Ray on to the church aisle. He would have loved that.

Franglais et Anglish

Here are a few more strange usages of English words within France. A common development is to take English present participles and use them as nouns: le camping, le parking, le shampooing and le brushing (wash and blow dry hair) and le pressing for dry cleaning. This also means that they can have plural forms, such as les parkings and les campings.

Recently, I have seen two such words. The first was in a fashion magazine – where else – where at the end of features the 'where to buy' section was called Les Shoppings. The same magazine was divided into sections with names ending in Book, such as TrendyBook, for new fashions. It also described adding a belt and a scrap of tartan to an outfit as making it punkifié. The other example was the use of the word 'lifting' meaning having a face lift, in the headline of a local newspaper article about a corner of a town left damaged by a fire some years ago now to be improved: 'la vielle ville attend son lifting.'

At one time, the verb flasher meant to fall in love suddenly, but these days it has another meaning as in '20 vehicules ont été flashés pour des excés de vitesse', although it does not exclusively mean by a speed camera: any radar or other equipment counts.

Finally, for this time at least, the word 'snob'. As a noun, it means the same as in English, that is 'posh', someone who looks down on those less fortunate. As a verb, snober, however, it means the same as the English 'snub', to ignore or reject. Here is an example: 'Obama snobe Sarkozy: en plusieurs occasions,,,Obama est passé devant Sarzozy sans le saluer, et Sarkozy a reagit par une frustration visible' (Obama snubs Sarkozy: on several occasions O. has passed in front of S. without greeting him, and S has reacted with visible frustration'. So much for US gratitude to the French for winning their war of independence for them in 1776.