England and France: a tale of two coastlines
The landscape remains as it was then,” says Mark Worthington, waving across marshland and poplar trees laden with mistletoe. He stands beside Pegasus Bridge, across the Caen Canal at Ranville, Normandy, taken on 5 June 1944 by an allied advance party that arrived to clear the way for D-day, and the liberation of western Europe.
Worthington, curator of the Pegasus Bridge commemorative museum on this site, proceeds to the cemetery of British soldiers killed on, or soon after, D-day – rows and rows of lost lives. In the graveyard of the lovely church next door “are German graves, and that of the first man to die at D-day, on Pegasus Bridge, Pte Den Brotheridge” – of whom a statue was unveiled in Portsmouth during the week of our visit to Ranville, where it later went for display. This June marks the 75th anniversary of D-day, last of the commemorative five-year “big ones”, which will be attended by heads of state and veterans alike.
But there is this other thing hanging in the misty coastal air – Brexit, and its effect on the bond forged by D-day. This strangeness propelled a friend and colleague, Rémy Ourdan, of Le Monde, and I to travel both coasts – English south and French north – and report for our respective papers on their shared sea and history of interdependence and rivalry.
We had the idea in Bayeux last autumn, from where the tapestry of the Battle of Hastings will travel to England, on a date to be arranged. Aware of its history, distant and recent, Bayeux is a town strewn with union jacks, stars and stripes and Canadian maple leaves, plus flags of all countries in the European Union. I tried to imagine an equivalent scene on the English south coast, and could not.
Neither can Worthington, from a Royal Navy family in Dartmouth, married to Nathalie from France, whom he met through a twinning exchange, and who curates another museum at Juno Beach. “I look at Britain as a European now,” says Worthington, “with not a little despair”.
“I owe my marriage to town-twinning”, says Nathalie, “and coming from here, feel protected by Europe. Pegasus Bridge should be built between France and England.”
Ranville is one of 70 memorial sites and museums across Normandy that commemorate what in France is called the Bataille de Normandie.And here, visiting, are three British veterans, including Frank Prendergast, one of 600 soldiers of the 7th Battalion, Parachute Regiment, who landed on Pegasus Bridge – 400 were killed – and a freeman of Normandy. “Pegasus Bridge had to be taken and held,” he says, “to keep German tanks off it – otherwise, no D-day.” He returns every year: “I love France, so many friendly faces. It’s hard – I’m usually the first person to cry – but the welcome is amazing, and they take what happened so seriously.
On Brexit, Prendergast is tactful: “We all make mistakes, don’t we?” Questioned by schoolchildren next morning, he is more robust: “Britain managed without Europe for thousands of years, and can again.”
From left: Frank Prendergast, with fellow veterans Fred Glover and Bill Gladden
