A Perfect Day To Remember
A Perfect Day To Remember by Ed Owen
It’s 5.40 a.m. Saturday 15th September and I’m standing on the pavement in Sevenoaks High Street in the glow of the brightly-lit window of Moben, the kitchen and bathroom showroom shop. Looking towards the Dartford Road in the direction of Otford. I see headlights of an approaching car: they dip twice; the driver has seen me and is on time for getting us to the Folkstone terminal for the 7.15 a.m. Channel Shuttle. The car comes to a halt directly in front of me and the front passenger window glides away into the door.
‘Mornin’ Dad.’ My son Jonathan greets me pleasantly. The air is sweet and the sky, though still dark, is clear.
‘Looks as if we’ve got a good day for it, Johnnie’, I reply.
‘Forecast’s good’, says Jonathan, boosting my belief it will be a fine day for our 430 mile round trip to La Frenaye in Normandy. There, in the village churchyard, is a grave for three World War Two airmen, one of them my brother: on the headstone there is an inscription Their Name Liveth For Evermore.
Jonathan last saw Reggie’s grave when we had visited as a family motoring back through France returning from our Spanish holiday in Calafel Playa: that was in August 1975 when Jonathan was one month short of his tenth birthday. Could thirty-two years have passed since I last stood by my brother’s grave? Yes, I had checked the number earlier in the summer at the time Jonathan first mentioned he wanted to drive me to La Frenaye: a father and son day for Reggie’s younger brother and his posthumous nephew to respect the sacrifice he had made for them. My feelings at the time of my son’s invitation; a confusing mix of sadness and guilt, yet strangely thrilled that my bankruptcy, a cause for more recent neglect, was to be overcome by Jonathan financially sponsoring and planning this day.
Visiting the grave all those years ago and with my family around me, I could not then show the anger I felt at his loss and the tears had remained within. Proud of course of my brother’s bravery, the sadness never leaves: over the years the inner pain seems to have worsened because totting up the years I’ve lived are the years he didn’t have. I wonder that had he lived, what my relationship and that of my family with him would have been: whether I would have been a different person – a better person.
Reggie was a pupil at Sidcup Central where he played football for the school and captained the cricket team. He did boxing at the Sidcup Working Man’s Club. In His obituary, Mr. Clark, the then school headmaster, described Reggie as a hardworking and popular student who was also a fine sportsman. When I’m home on my own, I think about those things knowing I can cry without causing any embarrassment; sometimes having to wipe tear-wetness off the glass before hanging the photograph of a young airman back on the wall. These are my very private and special moments with a brother I adored. In my heart he is still alive, still adored.
Jonathan, I know, is doing this day for me, yet I sense he also wants to see the final resting place of a revered uncle he has seen only in photographs; whose life he has come to know only from his father’s reminiscences heard through the years. Reggie’s life of 21 years 6 weeks, ended during the early morning darkness of August 8th 1944 when a Lancaster aircraft with it’s bombs unreleased, crashed in a wood near Trigueville*, twenty-five kilometers from La Frenaye. The remains of the three-crew member who had not parachuted out of the plane, placed in two empty ammunition boxes and given a military burial by the Germans with the mayor and other dignitaries of La Frenaye, in attendance.
Marlborough Park, Sidcup, Kent - 1934. Reggie wearing one cricket pad is halfway to being Captain of the cricket team at Sidcup Central Boys' School
* Subsequently discovered to be Touffreville-la-Carbeline. Had we gone in search of the crash site, we would not have found Triqueville. Nor would we have found the church where the young Levesque son is buried. Also there is a Triquerville a couple of miles south east of la Frenaya.
