Last month my father was the recipient of the highest decoration in France, the legion d’honneur. This medals were awarded at Yorkshire Air Museum as a way of honouring and thanking those who fought and risked their lives to secure France’s liberation during the Second World War.
I had always known he landed on a Normandy beach in 1944 and had heard some of the ‘funny’ stories of the war, perhaps because the horror of war was not a story anyone would want to tell. Even when I had watched Saving Private Ryan many years ago and Dad had said that he had been on the next beach, I had hardly wondered at how he might have felt, perhaps because the imagery in this film was linked to an American flag and an American story.
Only when our family sat listening and watching as five, frail British nonagenarians were awarded their medals and I saw the emotion in my father’s face, did the enormity of what they had experienced sink in.
verbalising 
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Reblogged this on Skat's Chat and commented:
Julie’s dad is a kind gentle soul and is always asking how I am. I guess we will never quite know what our parents went through in the war (hopefully). The memories will never quite fade completely. My mum was always sad when she remembered my uncle Wilf, her brother shot down in June 1940 flying back from a sortie over the channel. He was in his twenties and mum was a month before her 9th birthday…
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Extend my thanks to your father for his service. There are so few of his generation left.
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Thanks I will, and so true.
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which is your father in the photograph? Congratulations to him.
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The one in the pale suit. He said at his age he wasn’t going to buy a blue blazer!
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