Vicky's Story

When D-Day arrived I was already dealing with, or trying to, an overwhelming grief. Three months previously I lost my dear husband on another beach, Anzio. It was work as usual doing my job as a secretary at the local cinema, leaving my mother to care for my four year old, Peter. I felt by then that my war was over.

The struggle to raise my son, to be both mother and father, was only just the beginning. I do remember feeling deep sorrow for the families who were about to receive that fateful letter with that opening line, "We regret to inform you...." So many lives to end, so many thousands of heartaches to come. At that time I wrote the following poem which appeared as my epilogue,

The Widow

My weeping now is a silent thing
Rung from my heart with tears of blood.
Would that the gun had killed me too
The gun that killed my love.
I turn my head, and see my child,
Bonny, happy, unaware,
Too young to feel the loss of love
That fathers feel for son and heir.
He too may cry his silent tears,
In later years - on Parent's Day
when fathers play the team
And only mother's there - he will compare
And conjure up a father of his dreams.
Not killed I, just wounded - such a wound!
There will be no repair,
This ache for him will be forever there.
What will the future bring?
How will I raise his son?
With God's help, to this I cling
And now - my learning must begin.

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