Plucked from hell and haunted by Dunkirk
Dunkirk. Gunner Don Varnfield had never heard of the place and certainly had no idea where it was.
For the past 70 years though it's a word which has hardly left his thoughts.
He was one of the lucky 338,000 men plucked from the hell of the French town's beaches as the German army closed in for the kill in May 1940.
However, tens of thousands of troops did not make it and died in ferocious fighting either on the beaches or in the water as they tried in vain to be rescued.
Mr Varnfield was a 19-year-old member of the Surrey and Sussex Yeomanry serving with the Royal Artillery when his 'adventure' in northern France came to an abrupt end.
'I signed up in Brighton at the beginning of the war and when we were sent to France, I thought it was all going to be a big adventure.'
Now 89, he lives in a flat in South Parade, Southsea. It has a large bay window with panoramic views across the Solent.
Through binoculars he watches ships and yachts out in the English Channel, the same strip of water he had to cross while fleeing the hell of Dunkirk.
Very matter-of-factly he said: 'We'd been dug in in a gun pit on a farm when the shooting started. It was a bit lively.
'We were under constant machine gun fire and we were told to pack up and get going.
'My friend Bert and I started walking and we came across a young officer. We asked where we should go. He said: 'Dunkirk. It's that way'.
'We asked him how far it was. He told us 25 miles. We asked him how we would get there. 'You walk,' he said.'
Mr Varnfield added: 'I'd never heard of Dunkirk, but we knew where it was. We just walked towards the black palls of smoke.'
What happened next, he admits, was pure luck. 'We reached the town and we knew we stood a good chance of being mown by the Luftwaffe the next time they came over.
'So we took to the beach where, incredibly, we came across a naval cutter which was just floating there. No one was in it.
'We commandeered it, got as many other chaps on board as possible and sailed it out to a ship which took us to Ramsgate.'
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Wednesday 23 May 2012
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