I had an interesting package arrive in the mail today. It was not
totally out of the blue because the sender had contacted me by email
last week because he had come across some of my father's things while
cleaning out his late aunt's home.

He was vaguely aware that his aunt's brother had been killed in the war
but she never spoke much about it until the last few months of her life
and she told him that there were some paper's about her brother in a
drawer upstairs. It turned out that the brother had been the tail
gunner in my father's plane. They were shot down over Denmark in April,
1943. My father was the only one who got out of the plane before it
crashed and the rest of the crew were killed. Dad managed to escape to
neutral Sweden and eventually back to England and then home to Canada
for awhile before returning to England. He had written the family a
letter telling them how their son had been unable to escape from the
rear turret and had fired at the night fighter all the way down.

Some of Dad's things had been sent to Jack's family in error. Among them
were Dad's diary and a bunch of family photos.


This stuff had been sitting in a drawer in a spare room in this woman's
house for 66 years, and this fellow, after reading Dad's letter to the
family, was kind enough to track me down and send it to me.