There was a sadness in the commemoration of the D-Day anniversary this month.  The undeniable truth was that in a few years’ time there will be no-one left who remembers.  There will never be the possibility of the verification of strange stories.

Strange stories I heard related to the summer of 1940.

First, there was the story of Jack, a member of the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force that had gone to France at the beginning of the Second World War.

When hostilities began on 10th May 1940, the British forces were immediately driven back to the English channel. Jackhad been with his unit at Dunkirk, but the invading army had closed in and they had been forced to move south  to avoid capture.

‘They went to Dieppe. A ship was meant to rescue them. It was commanded by the queen’s cousin. What do you call him? Mountbatten. Yes. He tried to get into Dieppe, but he hadn’t a chance. He had to sail on – he went to Malta’.

‘Anyway, Jack and his men went to Saint Nazaire, but he didn’t make it onto the troopship doing the evacuation, which was a good thing, because it was sunk. There was nothing they could do. They went out into the countryside. He spent the summer making hay with French farmers. Eventually, they got him onto a coalboat going out of Saint Nazaire – there were so many German submarines in the channel that the boat had to sail halfway to America before turning back and heading for England’.

Jack fared better than Jimmy, who was at the centre of the second odd story, a man who saw no action but suffered a far worse fate.

‘Jimmy was over in England. He had gone over there for work and was in the air force police. Anyway, he heard a rumour that they were going to have to train for fighting and he said that he had joined up to be a policeman, not to be a soldier’.

‘He was home on leave and told the sergeant about this and the sergeant and the doctor would have had a pint in a snug. The sergeant told the doctor the story and they agreed a plan. If Jack was told that if the rumour was true he was to write home in an ordinary way and put two dots over the letter ‘i’ and the doctor would write a letter saying his mother was seriously ill and the sergeant would confirm the letter.

Anyway, Jimmy came home, but, sure, there was nothing for him here, so he went back to England under his mother’s name and got work in an armaments factory. He was working there and there was verdigris on the copper and it got into his bloodstream through a cut on his hand. The poison went through him; they had to keep on removing ribs to do operations. Eventually, he came home, but he was never able to work again. He would have been better off doing the training’.

Though the escape through France matches historical facts and verdigris can be a poison, the memories are unverifiable. Yet even if they are not true in every detail, such tales sometimes hold deeper truths than the pages of history books.