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D-Day memories pass into history
By Kevin Connolly
BBC correspondent in northern France
As the number of veterans gathering for the D-Day commemorations in northern France falls every year, Kevin Connolly hopes that their stories will still be told and retold by
those of us who are listening now.
The polish on the medals is as bright as ever, the march-past to Tipperary just as jaunty, but you cannot help noticing that every year
the ranks of the D-Day veterans in Normandy look a little thinner, as their numbers slowly dwindle.
World War II is gradually becoming a different kind of history: less and less a tale we hear from the men and women who saw and did it all,
more and more a story found in text books or on headstones in the neat graveyards of north Africa and northern France.
There will come a time, of course, when the last living links with World War II will be those of us who merely met the veterans, rather than the veterans themselves.
Meeting the past
It set me thinking about how far back into the past a single meeting can take us.
For me, it is 200 years, if you allow me to count someone having met someone, who met someone who saw something extraordinary.
Twenty years ago as a young newspaper reporter, I was sent off to interview a woman on the eve of her 100th birthday.
It is the kind of job you get as an office junior because no-one higher up the newsroom food chain wants the task of interviewing someone
who may turn out to be hard of hearing, as their last job on a Friday afternoon.
I was only meant to collect enough information for a picture caption but ended up spending hours in the old lady's company.
I had ended up just two steps away from the great struggle against Napoleon
In fact I had the rare experience for a young man of clearly outstaying my welcome with someone who was 99 and living alone.
She told me that as a young girl in Berkshire she had helped to ring the peal of church bells that announced the relief of Mafeking in the Boer War.
And when she saw that I was impressed she recounted being brought, again as a very young child, to meet a man who seemed to her incredibly old.
She was told that as a little boy, he had seen the injured of Waterloo being brought by barge along the canals at the end of the field near her village.
I had gone out to do the most routine of interviews, and ended up just two steps away from the great struggle against Napoleon.
Living history
Ever since then, I have been fascinated by how far back into the past it is possible to go with just one or two living links.
Many years after that first encounter, I was in France to interview Jeanne Calment who was at the time, famously, the oldest living human.
I was hugely encouraged by the cuttings from various tabloid newspapers which had sent reporters to meet her over the course of the previous year.
Jeanne, it seemed, was not above a little flirting, or even leaning forward roguishly and putting her hand on the knee of a visiting journalist to emphasize her point.
She was, I think, 122 at the time.
Maybe it is just me, but I did not bring out the coquettish side in Mme Calment's nature.
The care workers who basked in the reflected attentions of the world's media on their famous client more or less carried her into the chair opposite mine.
One of them leaned forward and shouted "Jean, you're sitting down now," in a voice you would expect from the captain of a whaling ship
going round Cape Horn, and that was the signal for us to begin.
It was not a meeting of minds.
She had, in short, lived through so many news stories herself that she'd finally become one
I put my first question and then there was a pause as the care worker put her lips to the side of Mme Calment's head and bawled the gist of it into her ear.
Still, slowly, and rather haltingly, a fascinating story emerged.
It could hardly fail to.
This was a woman who, after all, was 39-years-old when World War I broke out and was already collecting her pension at the start of World War II.
She had met Vincent Van Gogh when they both lived in Arles - "rude and smelly" apparently - and she had visited Paris when they were
starting to dig the foundations for the Eiffel Tower.
She had, in short, lived through so many news stories herself that she'd finally become one.
The most interesting aspect of her life, incidentally, had nothing to do with my point at the moment, but here it is anyway.
When she was already very old, a sharp local lawyer tempted her into a curious deal whereby he would buy her house and hand over the
money immediately, but allow her to live in it until she died.
She of course outlived him by nearly 20 years and local legend had it that the deal almost ruined him.
Past's urgency
And so, there you have my two longest reaches into the past - unless you count the day I was given a glass of cognac bottled in 1804,
before either the Battle of Trafalgar or the invention of Stephenson's rocket.
If you can reach further back in one or two steps, I would love to hear.
Now, of course, there are video and sound archives which will give stories a sort of life many years after the last D-Day soldier has gone.
But there is a different kind of life to the stories we hear at first hand which can still make us thrill to the danger and urgency of the past.
So, as long as their stories continue to be told and retold by those of us who are listening now, the history that the D-Day veterans made will
remain alive - even after the last of them loses the one battle we all lose in the end.
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 5 June, 2004 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3777029.stm
Published: 2004/06/05 11:42:11 GMT
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