Legendary family tale of VE Day meeting adds light to reality of war

My grandpa’s VE Day story is legendary in my family.

It’s exactly like one of those old black-and-white war movies that always had happy and uplifting endings.

My grandpa, Derek Gibson Mackie, joined the army when he was 18 n 1939. He fought in North Africa, tank training next to the pyramids in Egypt, then on to Italy, then back to Yorkshire, to train for D-day.

His regiment landed in France a day or so after D-day – “when a lot of the hoo haa died down”, he casually mentioned to my aunt once – and advanced into Belgium where he was shot.

He ended up in a specialist hospital in Wales where he was subject to penicillin injections, saving his arm and his life.

After two weeks of treatment, he was transferred to a hospital near London where he stayed for the rest of the war.

On VE Day, he leapt out of bed and made his escape from the hospital with a friend, commandeering a motorbike with a sidecar and heading for London, in his words “stopping at every pub on the way there”.

Finally alighting at a party at St Pancras, he bumped into a beautiful, tall and mysterious brunette, Lily – my grandmother. I asked Nana once, years after grandpa’s death, about that meeting.

My grandpa’s regiment would be sent to post-war Berlin to monitor the British sector, tearing him away from Nana immediately after securing her hand in marriage.

As much as this story plays out like a film or book you’d pick up at the airport, the reality was that grandpa carried his time in the army with him, not the black-and-white movies or the drunken parties in St Pancras.

The reality of war shaped who he was.