Riding my Triumph Bonneville home from Dunkirk last Sunday night, I was pretending it was a Supermarine Spitfire and thinking about my dad, who would have loved the movie. For the flying, and also for the miserable, bored, fearful, anonymous earthbound soldiers, one of which he had been in that war.
Truth was, I'd been thinking about Dad since Friday night, when I watched on a documentary, Norman Lear watch this clip of the show he made four decades ago, about Archie Bunker, who he has always said represented his own father.
Lear wept at the clip, I wept at Lear and it may be that my wife, over on the couch, wept at me.
My dad’s granddad was an officer in one of the last groups off the beach at Dunkirk. He only ever told my dad two things about the experience. One was that he literally saw the first German troops appearing over the dunes as his boat pulled away; the other was that he was still (in the early 1970s) furious about the fact that he’d had to leave his handmade French racing bike on the beach and “that some German bastard is probably still riding around on it today”.