About the contributor

I am english born (Barnsley 1929) of english father and french mother. My mother returned to France with me when her mariage broke up in 1933 and we spent the war there putting up with four awful years of german occupation. Our house was a safe house for British evaders and escapers until my mother was arrested. Luckily there were no evaders in the house at the time and she was eventually released after three months in prison. For this help to our soldiers she was awarded a Certificate of Gratitude by Air Chief Marshall Tedder after the war. I have many memories and recollections of events of those dark years as lived on the other side of the Channel if anyone is interested: how the Dieppe fiasco was such a blow to our morale, what D-Day meant to us and our fears after what had happened before and finally Liberation Day, an unforgettable emotional experience that has to be lived through to really appreciate what it means to be free. The jubilation at the end of the war was nothing compared to this.