Beach

Watching today's D-Day commemorations, it is sobering to think that seventy years has passed: a lifetime. And to think that the veterans returning to Normandy today were once young men in their teens and early twenties, thrown into the maelstrom of battle: some to meet their end on the beaches; others to survive and live out their remaining years haunted by the memory of those days.

My own life seems so uneventful, cosseted, in comparison: never being called upon to put my safety on the line, never being in a position where everything I know is crumbling away before my eyes. Looking through old wartime papers and photos belonging to my parents, I sometimes glimpse that world, but it is so far away from the life I lead. And all I have are scraps of clues, which hint at what once happened but leave out so much detail.