TUESDAY MORNING By Nicki Benson For those who fell on June 6, 1944

The smudge on the southern horizon was getting nearer. Even at this early hour we could see it, dismal, grey and featureless.

We hoped it would stay that way. This morning the sun was our mortal enemy.

The ship’s engines changed in pitch. The tension rose. Some of us lit cigarettes. Others told jokes or made wisecracks. One bloke said he was glad the action was about to start, it would give us a chance to show the Yanks a thing or two. Nobody disagreed with him.

I fingered my rifle nervously. I’d spent most of the crossing cleaning it. We all had. It was tedious work, but better than sitting around wondering which of us wouldn’t be coming home.

There’d been times when I didn’t care if I made it or not. I’d lost Molly three years ago, when I was doing my basic training up in Northumberland. Like a fool I’d gone back to Stanley Road, stared at the rubble and broken glass where number 6 used to be, scrambled over piles of brick, charred wood and slate to the place where she’d stand in front of the mirror and ask me if she looked all right, shaken useless fists at the unforgiving sky…

Another memory came to me, of a trip to London on our third wedding anniversary and a slap-up dinner at a posh hotel not far from Piccadilly Circus. I recalled the waiter, just a young lad he was, and queer as a nine-bob note – at least that was what I’d assumed, seeing his eyes all made up and pink varnish painted on his nails. But Molly had got him talking, which was just like her. Live and let live, that was her philosophy. It seemed he wasn’t a pervert after all, he just felt he’d been born in the wrong body. I’d laughed, and hadn’t my other half torn me off a strip for that! Imagine you’d been brought up as a girl, she’d said, wouldn’t you move heaven and earth to prove you were male?

A runner was talking to the CO. We began edging towards the muster point, anticipating the order that couldn’t be more than a few seconds away. Overhead, the unmistakeable sound of approaching aircraft grew louder.

This was it.

The beach, fronted with barbed wire. The dunes studded with concrete gun emplacements. The wide fields behind them, with scarcely a tree or a bush for cover.

Somewhere in this foreign land I’d find my death-bed.

I stayed calm. I had to be a man, so that the boy who worked in that hotel could live in a world where he had the freedom not to be.

It was what Molly would have wanted.

“Good luck,” someone wished me.

“You too, mate,” I said.

Music: 'Warrior' by Wishbone Ash, from their 1972 album 'Argus'

http://youtu.be/U5X_Dd_6Czk