ANZAC Day UK

As part of my research for Blimey! I’ve been trying to find out more about one of my grandfathers who flew with the RAF in the Second World War.

Sadly he didn’t make it back. He was shot down over Burma. Tracing him through his records has been a weird, sometimes emotional experience.

None more so than when I met an old veteran at a 1940′s Day at the foot of Nottingham Castle. He’d been badly injured during the D-Day landings and as he recuperated he worked in the flight tower on one of the RAF bases in Lincolnshire.

His job was to watch the bombers take off and, at dawn, direct the ones that survived back in. He was the first to know who had made it and who hadn’t. The sinking feeling that came with realising the guy he had dinner with in the mess hall wasn’t coming back haunts him to this day.

My mum still has her father’s medals. They are framed and hanging in the spare room. She just had a spare set of replicas made and my nephew Harrison wore them at the Dawn Service on the Sunshine Coast this year.

A Dawn Service is held at Hyde Park Corner here in the UK. But we’re out to the ‘burbs now so it’s not really practical to get in. There’s a memorial service held at Westminster Abbey too but the all the allocated tickets were gone by the time I found out about it.

So I’m going to commemorate Anzac Day like I always do. With a BBQ.

I’d like to think it’s kind of symbolic of what my grandfather fought for. Not the right to chargrill a sausage. But the right to friends, families and freedom.

And this year it looks like it’s going to be sunny.