For one York grandmother, the anniversary of Dunkirk brings back painful memories. STEPHEN LEWIS reports.

IT was a Wednesday, the day Alfred Knight died. Wednesday May 29, 1940. His daughter Wendy Fox knows that, because one of the family heirlooms is a letter giving an eyewitness account of what happened.

Every year, at the end of May, the TV news is filled with images of the “little ships” as the nation celebrates the anniversary of Dunkirk.

The evacuation of 338,000 British and French troops from the harbour and beaches of the French town has become an enduring symbol of triumph over adversity.

But for Mrs Fox, the yearly anniversary is a poignant reminder of the father she scarcely knew, but has missed all her life.

“I watch it every year, and it breaks my heart,” she said.

“I just think war is such a waste.”

Mrs Fox is a 74-year-old grandmother now. She was just four when her father, Troop Sgt Major Alfred Knight, of the Royal Hussars, was killed at Dunkirk.

“But I’ve missed him all my life,” she says. “You always think what might have been, you know?”

On that fateful day her father, a career soldier of 38, had been driving a British Army colonel and a lieutenant – she knows of him only as Lt Walker – through a wood towards Dunkirk.

In a letter to her mother written later, Lt Walker described what happened. “They were driving through a wood, trying to get to the beaches to get taken off, and they were shot at,” Mrs Fox says. “My dad was shot in the head and chest, the colonel in the eye and chest.”

At her home in Foxwood Lane, York, Mrs Fox, whose second husband died more than 20 years ago, has some old sepia photos of her father. There are two showing his wedding to Mrs Fox’s mother, Sarah Jane Bell, known as Jenny. Another shows him standing in the garden of married quarters at Tidworth in Wiltshire, with three of his four small daughters. There is also a photocopy of a 70-year-old telegram: the one Mrs Knight received three weeks after Dunkirk.

It was addressed to the home in Cemetery Road, York, where she was then living.

“Priority,” its says. “Regret to inform you that No 532777 TSM Knight 1F and F Yeo was killed in action, 29/5/1940.”

Mrs Fox doesn’t remember her mum receiving that cruel telegram. But she does remember her dad.

He was a big man, a strapping six-footer with big shoulders. Her mum was tiny, she says: five foot two and seven-and-a-half stone. But they made a handsome couple. A friend once told her they were the “best looking couple they had ever seen.”

Alfred was a career soldier. He had enlisted as a teenager, and by the time he was killed at Dunkirk had already been in the army more than 20 years – ten of them in India.

The son of a Sussex gamekeeper, he met Jenny Bell when he returned to Britain and was stationed at Imphal Barracks.

Her mum, who was nine years younger than him, worked at Terry’s.

Being a Hussar, he father was a horse soldier. “He taught soldiers to ride, by the racecourse there,” Mrs Fox says. “He used to go and meet my mother from work on his horse.”

He was very much a man’s man, Mrs Fox said. And though her mother married again, he was always the love of her life.

“She used to say ‘when my time comes, I will be back with Alf, and Jack (her second husband) will go back to his first wife.”

A couple of years ago, Mrs Fox made the journey she had always planned, across to Dunkirk. Her father’s body was never found, so there is no grave. But his name is engraved on a plaque at the entrance to a war cemetery just outside the French town. Seeing it was an intensely moving experience, she said.

“It felt horrible. Ooh, gosh. My daughter took me. It was lovely, but very sad. But I’m so glad I’ve been.”

The tour organiser told her that if she ever came again, he would try to find the wood where her father was killed.

She looks at the wedding photo of her father, and the wedding ring on his finger.

“That would be nice. I might find my dad’s wedding ring. He had a beautiful wedding ring.”