For Twenty Years I Thought My Dad Was Photographing Concrete

He’d drive to the French coast, the Channel Islands, the British airfields. He'd come home with photos of bunkers and gun emplacements. He built a website called Atlantikwall to log them all. I assumed it was a retirement hobby. I was too busy figuring out my own life to pay much attention.

My grandfather was at Dunkirk.

He wrote a short memoir before he died, but I only read it properly when I started looking closely at my dad's site.

He describes the docks as "a drunken, frightened, ill-disciplined mob" before the Navy got there and imposed order. He describes a sailor pulling him over the scramble net of a destroyer, throwing his pack and rifle into the sea, saying they made room for one more man. He describes asking a fruit seller in Algiers to send oranges home to Wiltshire, and a box arriving every month until the war ended.

He came home, owned a garage, married my grandmother, lived his life. Royal Army Service Corps. Warrant Officer 1, MSM. T. Drew.

Twenty years on a coastline.

My dad spent two decades walking the coastline his father was evacuated from, documenting the structures the other side built to stop them coming back.

I'm fifty now. My own son is nearing the age I was when I dismissed all this. He'll probably dismiss what I'm building too, and he should. That's his journey.

But what I see now is that my grandfather wrote down what he saw because someone had to. My dad spent two decades documenting what remains because someone had to. The physical bunkers are eroding. The memoirs are being lost. The people who were there are almost all gone.

The custodian.

I'm stepping in now because I'm a builder. I know what happens to aging websites. They quietly break, the databases corrupt, the hosting expires, and the history on them disappears.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately rebuilding it. I took his twenty years of work and rebuilt the entire archive from the ground up so it's clean, searchable, and permanent.

I am the custodian, not the editor. I didn't change his vision. My job is simply to put the tools we have now underneath his twenty years of work so it doesn't disappear when an old server finally dies.

He built the archive. I'm just making sure it survives. We owe that to the people who were there. And to the ones who come after.