Priceless moments of love and affection during horrors of war

Maurice O'Brien • Published 11 Jun 2009 13:00 0 Comments

MY UNCLE Bob was on HMS Belfast on D-Day.

He heard her six-inch guns open up on the German positions in Normandy to signal the start, but didn"t see a thing because he was far below deck keeping her mighty steam turbines running smoothly.

Bob, who"d run away to sea as a boy and had to be brought back from South America, spent pretty much the whole of the war on his beloved Belfast; Arctic convoys, the sinking of the Scharnhorst and ultimately in the Far East.

But from the first minutes of D-Day, supporting the British and Canadian landings on Gold and Juno beaches, until the land battle moved beyond the reach of her guns five weeks later, Belfast"s guns were in almost constant action.

Occasionally, without warning, Belfast would slip out of the line and head back to Portsmouth, staying only long enough to re-arm and refuel before returning to the fray.

At Bob"s funeral in January his granddaughter told us how, on one of those brief visits to Pompey, he went up top for a rare breather. Whatever might have been in his thoughts, one can only imagine the emotions when he looked down on the dockside to see his wife, my Aunty Chris, waving and blowing kisses.

Bearing in mind the security restrictions in force around the Channel ports, the limited wartime transport network and the straitjacket of military secrecy, she"d not only found out what he was doing but managed to arrive in Portsmouth from Southampton right on cue for those few, fleeting, but absolutely priceless minutes.

Just one episode in a heck of a love story which lasted their whole lives; but had Hermann Goering"s spy network had the intelligence-gathering talents of my Aunty Chris it might have altered the entire course of the Second World War.

- AT LAST we can confirm why the New Labour zealots never quite had the guts to do away with the House of Lords altogether.

So many rats have deserted our negative equity Prime Minister that Old Prudence is running out of elected MPs and is stuffing his Cabinet with any old Tom, Dick and Glenys prepared to don fancy dress and take root in a place Real Labour used to tell us was an undemocratic haven of unspeakable privilege, unearned wealth and unmerited power.

Give or take the odd by-election, and the increasingly influential presence of Dr "Mandy" Faust, not all that different to the Commons really.

- IF PROOF were needed that last Thursday"s expensive sideshow, and the European Parliament itself, are utterly irrelevant, I"d defy anyone with less than 20-20 vision to decipher the 10 names listed against each party on the ballot paper.

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This blog appeared in Reading Chronicle 11 Jun 09

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