It was going to happen one day. We all understood β us Brits who have only ever known one head of state, one face on our banknotes, one constant in a fast-changing world. We knew she would one day breathe no more, yet still it came as a profound shock to realize that the Queen, the monarch of our entire lives, was not immortal after all. I shed tears as I heard of her death on 8 September. I was watching television in a silent hotel in England.
Her passing was also a reminder of how few from her generation remain. Thankfully, I managed to see my mother briefly before my odyssey began. She is close to the end of her life. Frail, in pain, yet resilient. She was not even a year old when her father, Neville Lee, died aged 23 in He had served in the Royal Navy for three brutal years as a telegraphist, in the cruel seas of the North Atlantic on convoy runs, in the Arctic, and in the U-boat-infested Mediterranean.
My mother had told me how his ship was torpedoed and how he had been pulled out of the water and placed on another ship which was also sunk. Wounded, he was lucky to be taken to a hospital in Malta. It seemed as if he would recover but, alas, he became one of the , members of the British military to die in WWII. To my mum, in her dying days, the war is not history.
It has shaped her entire life. Next stop - the American graveyard at Draguignan in Provence. It was a short stroll to the final resting place of Tipton. It was of blue and white flowers β the colors of the Third Infantry Division, to which Murphy belonged. Finally, we arrived in the Vosges Mountains, ominous, cold, drenched in rain. The closer we got to the German border, the more stories there were to tell.
It was here, in the Vosges, that Lt. Colonel Felix Sparks, subject of my book, The Liberator, lost all but two men from his battalion of several hundred, which had been surrounded by the SS, during that unending winter of Sparks would never fully recover from the grief.
