IN HEROES' FOOTSTEPS

John Sootheran is Practical Caravan’s Consulting Editor and an experienced caravanner

Reclining on the deck of Brittany Ferries’ Normandie super-ferry in the early summer sunshine, I pondered how I might have had to make this journey 70-odd years earlier. Would I have preferred to travel by sea, in a wildly rocking landing craft, with freezing water lashing over the sides, and bombs and shells falling all around in a macabre lottery, where sheer luck, not talent or skill, was your only ally?

Or would I rather have made an airborne crossing in a wooden Horsa glider, towed by a four-engined plane and released to the vagaries of the unseasonal summer weather, to (essentially) crash-land in enemy territory?

I thanked my lucky stars these are options we’ve never had to contemplate, largely because of the sacrifices made in Normandy all those years ago.

D-Day (known then as Operation Neptune) is marked and commemorated on 6 June every year in northern France, and I recommend this as an event that everyone, adults and children alike,