Postcards From My Kitchen Table

Yesterday I had some precious childfree hours and chose to spend them watching Christopher Nolan’s much lauded cinematic epic ‘Dunkirk’. I wasn’t there for the supreme cinematography, soaring Hans Zimmer score ringing round excerpts of Elgar’s ever moving Nimrod, or indeed the, surprisingly good, appearance of Harry Styles. I was there to remember Major Rollo Ellis McClure (89734) Royal Artillery, my beloved Pappy.

Pappy was 30 when he ended up stranded on the beaches in Northern France. He had chosen to leave his stable job as a Chartered Accountant in Belfast to enlist in the war effort. Born in 1910, his memories of the Great War will have been few but knowing the intelligent and thoughtful man he was, I believe he will not have been ignorant to the potential horrors ahead of him but believed it was the honourable thing to do for his country. That was the sort of man he was.

I always knew Pappy had been in the war – indeed he received an MBE for his efforts. He often wore his Royal Artillery tie with its vibrant red zig zags and proudly displayed his medals on Remembrance Sunday. He liked to garden in his old sludge green scratchy wool army uniform – I have a vivid memory of it hanging on the wall on the lefthand side of his tool filled garage.

I first remember knowing that he’d been one of the 400,000 men on the infamous Dunkirk beaches back in 1990 – the 50th anniversary of the evacuation. Pappy was due to return to Northern France with the surviving men of his and many other regiments. They were to march to the beaches and pay their respects to the many friends and comrades who didn’t make it home. At then age 80, it must have been a huge decision to choose to revisit that godforsaken place. As a thirteen year old, I couldn’t comprehend the enormity of it all but now I see how difficult making that journey would have been. But, perhaps for the best, he never did return. His beloved Betty, my Gran, endured a prolonged stay in hospital and was not able to accompany him. My uncle offered to go with him but Pappy would’t return without his love. He managed to return to her once before against all the odds and perhaps the fear of not being so lucky again was just too great. Instead he sat by her side in a Belfast hospital.

I was shocked at the emotion I felt in the cinema yesterday. As I looked at the terrified faces of the soldiers on the beach waiting for salvation, I couldn’t help but place Pappy’s face there. He only spoke once of the war – of how he and some comrades had come across some sort of illegal brew or ‘moonshine’ as they approached the beaches back in the summer of 1940. Truly believing they were about to face oblivion, they gulped it down to ease the pain, getting hideously drunk in the process.

But oblivion wasn’t to visit him on those beaches, he made it back across the channel, he made it home. He was saved by one of the infamous ‘little boats’ which was tragically to meet its end after a bomb was dropped down its funnel as it was returning to collect more men.

As I sat motionless and emotionally wrung out yesterday as the credits rolled, I had the truly sobering realisation that if it hadn’t been for that boat that brought Pappy to safety, I wouldn’t be sitting in that cinema 77 years later watching the hell he undoubtedly went through. I realised that Dunkirk had shaped the history of my family.

My Mum saw the film last week on Pappy and Gran’s, her parents, 77th wedding anniversary – they were married as soon as Pappy returned to Northern Ireland on post-Dunkirk leave. I suspect the horror of the beaches drove him to want to experience the joy, happiness and security of marriage to his beloved – although his looming return to France must have somewhat marred the celebrations. My Mum wore Pappy’s dog tags round her wrist as she made the pilgrimage to the cinema. I can’t imagine the emotion she must have felt knowing that her Dad was there and feeling the cold metal of the dog tags against her skin and knowing that they had been there too.

Yesterday as I stood in the long post-cinema loo queue, I fought a desperate urge to tell people about him, to shout out, ‘My Pappy was there’. ‘He was one of those men’, ‘He was a hero’. I didn’t but I suppose that’s why I’m writing this now. Thankfully Pappy died of old age surrounded by his loving family but the memories of France must have haunted his dreams. Watching Christopher Nolan’s imagining of what he went through makes me love him even more. To me he was my lovely Pappy. Kind, loving, funny and oh so clever but now I know he was a true hero and I am eternally proud of him for that.

**the image above is of my grandparents, Rollo and Elizabeth McClure, on their wedding day – 27 July 1940 – just seven weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation.