My father in law, who was a Guernseyman volunteer in the 2nd Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, endured several days in the dunes at Dunkirk. He felt that he owed his life to the soft dune sand's muffling effects on bomb blasts, and was very fortunate to survive to be one of the 338,000 troops rescued by the little ships.
I have good reasons to be grateful for his salvation from capture or worse, because he was then able to serve on in the British Army, and to be reunited with his wife, who had been evacuated from Guernsey just before the Germans occupied the Channel Islands. The result of their happy reunion was my dear wife, born in 1942 in Eastbourne, and in later years our three bonny children, and more recently our seven splendid grandchildren.
On a family holiday in the 1970's, my wife and I felt drawn to those blessed beaches, and spent a quiet and thoughtful day with our young children in the Braye-Dunes region adjacent to Dunkirk. We sent a postcard to 'Grandad' back home in Guernsey, depicting the golden dunes which held such significance for us all ....