So landing in France it’s just a case of working one’s way to where you want to go – unless of course you have a SatNav. Then it’s a case of arguing whether it’s actually right or not.

I can see that I am going to get very irritated by Lady SatNav, she believes she is always right and much to my utter disgust she invariably is – unless of course you deliberately disobey and then she takes total umbrage, sighs and forces you to redirect. She won’t shut up until you do as she says and then she positively purrs – personally I think she gives females a bad name…

My husband is utterly besotted!

Our destination is Dunkirk – why I have no idea but I must not complain as I did promise NOT to interfere with the plans. All I know about Dunkirk is  the fact that there was an ignominious retreat in the Second World War involving lots of boats and lots of soldiers.

First find Dunkirk.

We did eventually – once we turned on Lady Sat Nav.

Next it was park – with me mindful of the Foreign Office’s warnings that Dunkirk was high on the list of areas where Road Pirates frequent. It was nothing short of a miracle to physically tear me away from the car.

Muttering and forewarning doom and gloom before we had even started, we trotted across to Dunkerque Neptune Marina stopping briefly to brush up our French, or rather lack of it, at a fairly nondescript tourist poster which I rather think was all about the old market which used to sit there right up until 1940.

From what we could work out the covered market was the first one in the town with a metal roof and sold everything there from meat, vegetables, fruit and of course fish. It was as we were trying to decipher the text before us that a chap stopped to listen. Now nothing on earth upsets me more than someone stopping to listen to me when I know that I am NOT actually really knowing what I am doing but trying (for the kids of course) to pretend that I am totally au fait with everything.

Rather than laughing at the stupid “ros biffs” for knowing nothing at all. This gorgeous man commended us on our skill, in fluent and idiomatically perfect English (God I love French men; they make spoken english an art form not forgetting utterly mesmerising) and started to engage us about our visit to Dunkerque.

Before we knew it he had told us all about his town, proudly but at the same time with humility and endless passion. Did you know about Jean Barr at C16th Century Corsair who swashbuckled his way round the world and caused no end of trouble for us Brits? He made the town, you could say, and his rather splendid figure gazes out across the main square surrounded by the names of all the ships he captained. He is buried in the Church – a wonderful edifice whose clock tower became separated by a road in the C19 century for reasons lost in translation. You can climb to the top and have the most wonderful view of the port and out across the North Sea.

We should have asked Monsieur Crockey to join us for coffee but we did not know his name at the time and in the fog of tiredness forgot to ask. He told us his wife had been the deputy mayor of the town and that she had  installed Boris Bikes.  (Google helped us with the rest!)

He told us about the Carnival where the mayor throws fish to the thousand strong crowd from the balcony of the resplendent Town Hall. How it was something not to miss and urged us to explore more than just about Operation Dynamo – where British and French troops were rescued from the advancing Germans in May/June 1940.

With the time remaining we found out more about Jean Barr and explored a little of the town centre before sloping off to the a little known museum dedicated to Operation Dynamo – Memorial du Souvenir.

Oh WOW. If you get the chance you have just got to go there. It was brilliant and so was the amazing guides/volunteers. I think Jaques, was his name, again passionate about his subject  and totally up with the kids. Before we knew it he was suggested we first  listen to the short film they had all about the lead up to the evacuation of Dunkirk.

The film was made up of excerpts from contemporary footage some of it quite harrowing, all of it totally absorbing. I don’t know what the kids thought but for me it was all too real and I found myself wondering at the Allied stupidity and naiveté. For heaven sakes we were building trenches like this war was just a continuation from 1918 while Hitler was ordering Blitzkrieg! No wonder he stopped in surprise! Just as well he did it gave us a bit of breathing room…

My head still spins with all the facts and figures…340,000 rescued in just 8 days from the 27 May to 4 June 1940, 5,000 dead, countless injured and too many imprisoned not least the 140,000 French soldiers who held the vanguard allowing the British to escape.

The boys were mesmerised but not unduly traumatised; guns and bullets and large pieces of metal which I was reliably informed came from Hawker Hurricanes and Lancaster Bombers, inspiring awe on a grand scale.

The story that caught my eye was a far more prosaic; about the amazing Madame H who desperately attempted to rescue her children after the building they were sheltering in was bombed. Of her seven children she rescued three, two daughters and a son while terribly injured herself. So intense was the heat that it took two years before all the calcified bones from the victims were able to be extracted and buried.

A sombre note.

While all this went on the evacuation continued right up until there were just the French to go; I am sure it would have gone on longer but after one defeat the thought of losing even more ships was probably more than the British High Command could bear – no one gave up.

Not the Captain who grounded his ship in order to create a bridge for soldiers to escape on to those ships further out, to the Isle of Mann ferry that boldly hurried back after rescuing 1380 souls only to be blown up within sight of rescuing more, to the doctors and nurses at the infirmary and to those in Dunkirk who never gave up even during the long years of occupation.