Chris Cramer may not have seen eye to eye with his father in his younger days, as John Simpson notes, but the intense love and affection they shared in later years is undeniable.
Cramer’s father, James, was a police officer and a soldier, and later a student and writer. With Chris at his side as editor he wrote a moving memoir, Gone for a Soldier, which Chris published in 2004. It was released on the 60th anniversary of the D-day landings when his father, fighting with the 6th Airborne Division, landed at Ranville, a small village in Normandy that gave Chris his unusual middle name.
“I carry that name with considerable pride,” Chris wrote in the preface, “and I have edited this book as a labour of love to the bravest man I know.”
