My Dad passed away at 82 on the Bank Holiday immediately prior to our promotion to the Premier League.
He was an RAF veteran, 30 odd operations with bomber command , joined up in 1942 at 22 ....shot down in ’44....his 21 year old pilot sacrificed himself holding the stricken plane steady for long enough, so the rest of the crew could parachute out, the pilot was a young man from Kent, his widowed mother’s only child.
my Dad did the rest of the war in 2 POW camps ....the forced march of 170 miles from the first to the second camp in the teeth of a fierce East European winter was by far the worst thing he had ever been through. Over the course of this march many of his comrades died of exposure or were shot....murdered ....when hypothermia prevented them from waking/marching.
There was more...much more ....and I can remember when we were younger occasionally rolling our eyes when he recounted the same tale for the tenth time.....up to the point I was in my early thirties and realised a puncture on my way home from work on the M6 near Haydock Island was about the most traumatic incident I had endured thus far....and the enormity of everything my Dad had experienced and lived through when he was little more than a kid himself finally hit home.
They were made of sterner stuff !