Thanks Dad

My Dad died in September aged 87. This Sunday will be my first Remembrance Sunday without him.

I have always been a great believer in paying tribute to our veterans. This is, I think, due to my Dad who was as typical, and special, a soldier as any.

My Dad, Colin Lucas, left school at 14 and joined the British Army in 1943 when he was 19. He was in the Royal Signals, an indication, I think, that he was quite sharp intellectually, though he never had an academic qualification in his long life.

Colin was a gentle man, who came alive with young children. He did not talk about his army service much and it was only little by little, over many years, that my big brother and I came to know how extraordinary that service was.

Dad landed at Arromanches on Gold Beach in Normandy on D-Day plus 3. He did not return there until 2003 when my brother and I took Dad and Mam to Bayeux for an extraordinary weekend. Dad remembered Normandy and talked to us about it in a way he never had before and never did again. We heard from him how he stayed at West Ham Football Ground in the days before D-Day. We learned how terrible the things he had seen were in Normandy and a little about some of the comrades he had lost.

My generation grew up in the shadow of World War Two, though I did not have any real understanding of its horrors until I was very much older. As a child, my generation gained perspectives from the worthy but sanitised image of films such as “The Great Escape” and I recall being shocked by stark images from “The World at War” in the 1970s, which I watched with my Dad. It was only years later, when I saw films such as “Saving Private Ryan” that the scales fell from my eyes.

I learned why Dad did not talk about “the war” as he always called it. I extracted from him that he was at Nijmegen on the Rhine in 1944 and he told me how hard it was. I think my generation assumed that things were somehow straightforward after D-day in Europe but we got that badly wrong.

And my Dad’s war did not end in 1945. He travelled to Palestine and served as a young British soldier in the years up to the establishment of the State of Israel. He always had strong political views and a strong sense on the need for two states in Israel and Palestine. He was proud of the work he and his comrades did there which we thought had been forgotten.

Dad left the army in 1947 and moved back to his and my home town of Gateshead to work in the cable factory where he had worked before the war. He worked there for a further forty years before he retired. He believed always in the power of formal education, though he never had any himself and I am a Member of Parliament today because of the determination he showed and the support he and my mother gave me over many years.

So when I present my wreath this year to remember our veterans, I will think, as I always do, of Dad. But it will be tougher on Sunday. I will remember the terrible things Dad saw, the bravery he showed and the sacrifices he made to allow me the privilege of me being elected the Member of Parliament for Wrexham.

Thanks Dad.