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But then an accompanying fighter-pilot came low over the beach, and strafed it with machine-gun fire. My father threw himself over my mother and myself, so that my mother was looking upwards. She told me that she could actually see the face of the young German pilot, because the plane was so low. And she said to me that if she had been able, she would have strangled him. This stuck in my mind as an image of war. My mother was a very mild person, but she told me that she would at that moment have tried to do another person to death, had she been able.
I do not quite know what to think about the young German pilot. There were no casualties on the beach, though it surely would have been easy to inflict them. Perhaps he just thought: ‘I’ll give these English a fright!’ In any case I survived to hear and now retell the tale.