Remembrances 2016 and the story of the Pegasus Bridge.

My growing understanding of the effects of war.

I grew up in the village of Aston, in the parish of Aston cum Aughton. Aston lies eight miles to the East of Sheffield and five miles from Rotherham, in the heart of the South Yorkshire Coalfield. We didn't have a war memorial until November 2011 and the two world wars were barely spoken of.
The record at the Imperial War Museum indicates that there is a brass plaque commemorating the First World War unveiled somewhere in All Saints church in May 1920. I have no recollection of seeing it. The plaque indicates that 158 members of the parish went to fight in the First World War and that of these exactly half were lost and half remained. of the half which were lost there appear to be no burial records, so their names may be amongst the thousands inscribed on the Menin Gate and the Thiepval Memorial.
Why so few? Our menfolk were underground hewing the coal or sweating in factories producing steel or in forges and grinders workshops making guns and other weaponry. The situation in World War Two was not dissimilar, so few of my school friends had lost anyone in the war and we never really spoke about it. My father, a talented mechanical engineer, with health problems, had been sent to David Brown Tractors in Huddersfield to work on the design of jet engines to power the planes, which delivered the bombs.

I grew up with pacifist tendencies which became stronger in adulthood. Other than watching the televised annual ceremonies of Remembrance from the Royal Albert Hall and  the Cenotaph in Whitehall, I eschewed all conversation about war and bought a white poppy as my annual protest against the loss of life.

Things changed for me when my children were small. We didn't have a great deal of money, but one of my husband's closest friends had bought a small estate in Normandy, Le Manoir de la Marefontaine at Ver sur Mer, close to the D Day beaches and less than half an hours drive from the ferry port of Ouisterham (Caen). At its heart was a semi derelict Norman Manor House, which we called Creepy Castle, complete with slits for shooting arrows and a staircase suitable for the resident Lord to ride downstairs on his horse with his sword ready in position. The house had survived the ravages of history as a convent. There was a former barn, which our friend called 'The Barracks', converted into dormitories, in which the nuns had taken care of 'needy young women'. It was complete with a swing and an array of posts for many washing lines. One can only imagine from more recent books and films such as Philomena ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philomena_Lee ) what might have been going on there.
On the opposite side, a cow shed with living accommodation above, had been converted into money making gîtes by whoever had owned the Manoir between the nuns and our friend. We stayed many times in the Barracks and once in the cowshed gîtes. It became our heaven on earth with its meadow of wildflowers, surrounded by a diverted defensive (moat) stream populated by fish (poisson), frogs (grenouille) and toads (crapaud). There were occasional visits from Hérisson the hedgehog.
We adored the endless sand of the Gold Beach at Ver sur Mer and the Juno Beach at nearby Courseulles with its summer beach playground, its friteries, fish market and supermarket. We made occasional visits to the more sheltered part of the Gold Beach at Arromanches les Bains, with visible remains of the Mulberry Harbour. There was a smaller beach playground at Asnelles, on the Gold Beach between Ver sur Mer and Arromanches which wasn't fenced off at night time, so we could go and play on the slide until the children's short weary legs could climb it no longer and we headed home to bed. Holidays at Manoir de la Marefontaine made for very happy children (we took friends as well as our own). After our friend sadly died we still visited the area for occasional weekends, short breaks and holidays, staying in a hotel in Courseulles, several gîtes in neighbouring villages and once in the newly refurbished Barracks gîtes. Later we took our tourer caravan to a nearby site.

The new owners of Le Manoir de la Marefontaine have restored Creepy Castle, which they run as a B&B, they've turned the Barracks into new well appointed gîtes and sold the Cowshed gîtes (which are now lived in as a family house). There are lots of photos online
 ( https://www.tripadvisor.com.ph/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g664069-d2167836-i31832062-Le_Manoir_de_la_Marefontaine-Ver_sur_Mer_Calvados_Basse_Normandie_Normand.html )

Inevitably spending time around the D Day beaches aroused the children's curiosity about the restored tank parked next to the carousel at Courseulles and the giant pieces of metal and concrete  (good for playing hide and seek or sheltering from the wind) sticking out of the beach at Arromanches. There was an excellent WW2 museum at Arromanches where I remember taking the nursery class bear, who had accompanied us on a weekend trip along with his diary which had to be completed. I think the school were somewhat taken aback to see him photographed sitting astride a canon. His more usual trips were to birthday parties or Clown Town. He wasn't keen on the sand but enjoyed the view out to sea from the restaurant table where we ate our supper.
The museum at Arromanches persuaded me that I needed know more about war, so one sunny day we packed a picnic and set out for the Pegasus Bridge on the Caen Canal. Bénouville, the village next to the bridge, had a much more extensive WW2 museum and a row of small shops which were amongst the first buildings in France to be liberated by Allied Troops on the morning of D Day. We stayed late to attend the Son et Lumière and got bitten many times by mosquitoes living in the wet land around the canal. It was a cold evening and the children snuggled between us on tiered benches facing the water. To our left, across the canal, half hidden amongst the trees, we could see a convent which had been at the heart of the carefully constructed plan to capture the canal Bridge at Bénouville and the nearby Ranville Bridge over the river Orne, as the essential first step to the D Day landings. If they had failed to secure the means of crossing the Orne and the Caen Canal, there would have been easy access for German troops to be rushed in to quash the Allied Invasion and no way for British, American and Canadian troops, arriving next morning on the Gold, Juno, Sword and other beaches, to move quickly Eastwards into France.

The Son et Lumière was utterly gripping. The convent was lit in muted camouflage colours and we could hear the terrified voices of the nuns and other members of the French Résistance with their Morse code and their radio. We could hear the conversations of the troops preparing to parachute down close to the bridge. It felt as if we could see and hear the real gliders coming into land, not on a smooth runway but in the rough field behind and to our right. The frightened British Airmen of the Ox & Bucks Division, advanced stealthily on the bridge, but found very few German soldiers at their posts, most were relaxing with French wine, completely oblivious to the arrival of their unexpected visitors. The Allies captured both the Bénouville and Ranville bridges.
In the convent, members of the Résistance radioed 'Ham & Jam' to England in Morse Code, meaning that it was safe for the troops, landing along the beaches to the East of Ouisterham, to progress towards Paris. Next day Lord Lovat and his troops, complete with a Scottish piper, liberated the village of Bénouville. The bridge was later renamed Pegasus (the winged stallion of mythology) in honour of the embroidered emblems on the épaulettes of the uniforms of the airmen who captured the bridges over the Caen Canal and the River Orne.

I changed that night. The fear in the voices of the nuns and the members of the French Résistance finally convinced me that the Allied Invasion had been necessary. I'd never previously believed that to be so.

Since then we've seen other museums, monuments and gun emplacements along the north Normandy coast and visited the manicured American Cemetery at Colleville sur Mer behind the Omaha Beach. Later on a holiday nearer to the Chanel ports of Boulogne and Calais we visited the British Cemetery at Étaples. This was the first time we'd seen one of Sir Edwin Lutyens monuments in France, which all look so much like the buildings and design of Central Square in Hampstead Garden Suburb, close to our home in Finchley.

In 2016 I visited the Menin Gate in Ypres and the pinnacle of all of Lutyens monument building, the towering edifice of Thiepval in the Somme, another experience which affected me much more than I'd ever expected it to do so. I've written about that elsewhere.

In this time of posturing and political uncertainty I fear for the future and hope that we can learn the lessons of the past.
(C) Jan Loxley Blount
Remembrance Sunday 13 November 2016
Revised Tuesday 15/11/16 with military information from Malcolm blount.