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A sense of defiance in the face of evil has never left Mrs Danson.
?This was our land. It was awful, but we were all very patriotic. That was the wonderful part about it, we were as one. Sadly I don?t see it today,? she says.
?We all stood together to protect this land and it meant something to us, Britain. It didn?t matter whether you were Liberal or Labour, you stood together.?
Major Basil Heaton, farmer of the Rhual estate near Mold, played a key role in the Normandy landings on D-Day in 1944.
He was the first off his landing craft on Gold Beach amid sniping and machine gun fire from defending Germans. It was the start of a long, exhausting but successful day in which his men helped secure the beachhead.
But five years earlier, Major Heaton, now 85, was a schoolboy in his mid teens. He was back home from boarding school enjoying a summer holiday on September 3.
?I remember it quite clearly. It was a lovely, sunny day. We heard the announcement in the library. We all said good Lord, we were frightened the bombs would come straight down.
?That afternoon, my father and mother started packing. My father went back to the Royal Navy in Liverpool, from which he had retired.
?My mother went to Prestatyn to command a company of the Woman?s Auxiliary Territorial Service and my brother and I were rather left on our own. We were at home because it was the summer holidays but we then returned to boarding school.
?Within a few days or weeks around eight to 10 evacuees arrived from Liverpool, although I think they went back after a few weeks. They didn?t like it at all. They weren?t country people, they wanted to go back.?
But the Heatons? large farmhouse wasn?t left alone for long. It soon become a land army hostel with Army girls living there for the rest of the war ?taking over half the house,? recalls Major Heaton.
?I had no doubt I would follow them. When I left school I joined up straightaway. I felt positive about it. It had to be done. The country pulled together. Whether it would pull together now I don?t know. There was a terrific feeling of comradeship.?
Derrick Pratt, a North Wales historian now living in Welsh Frankton, grew up in Wrexham.
His first memory of the war as a youngster of 12 is that of his father leaving and going off to fight.
His dad was wounded in the arm during the D-day landings, but at least he survived, many school pupils were to lose their father in the fighting.
The Wrexham area was relatively unscathed but the fear was still strong, and Mr Pratt recalls how some would leave their homes to go out into open countryside to sleep under the hedgerows at night, where they believed they would be safer.
?I became the man of the household and had to cope with official instructions ? stuff that came through the letterbox on how to make your house gas proof, and how to strengthen bedroom ceilings.
?It was completely unrealistic. There was great joy when we got our own gas masks, but we had a lot of problems with the baby gas mask for my younger brother.
?I learned to dig for victory in the school gardens, and everybody had allotments. The back gardens were dug up and I remember planting out our back garden.?
Mr Pratt helped out building an air raid shelter near his home. We didn?t have a wheelbarrow of our own so I sawed my sister?s pram into half and used it to move the bricks from a cottage demolished in Market Street, Wrexham. In the end we only used it a couple of times.?
Looking back on a conflict which began 70 years ago now, Derrick Pratt expresses some surprise that we managed to win.
?We had a First World War mentality,? he says. ?It took a long time to get our act together.?
Perhaps it was, in the words of Roosevelt?s secretary of state Cordell Hull, the British ?indomitable spirit? which ultimately ensured our victory.
Source:
Daily Post North Wales
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