D-Day: My Best War Work

Burnage High School, Manchester, after the German air raid in World War II (Photo – burnageheritage.org)

D-Day always brings back a flood of memories of my boyhood in England.

By Reg Green

One is of the cold morning early in the war when I was eleven as I rode to school on my bike, kids were streaming not toward the school but away from it, all yelling excitedly. “What’s happened?” I asked one group. “The school’s been bombed, the school’s been bombed,” they shouted. And sure enough, during the night German planes had wrecked the hall, the gym and some classrooms.

I didn’t hang around. I rode back to my empty home (my mother was at work, my father in the air force) and climbed back into bed. While students at every other high school in England plodded on at algebra or Shakespeare, we got a week off as the worst of the damage was cleared up. Like every other right-thinking kid at that school I treasure it as my happiest wartime memory.

> D-Day is Tuesday, June 6, 2023.