IN a couple of months’ time a flotilla of little ships will slip their moorings off Ramsgate on the south coast and sail across the English Channel to the port of Dunkirk in northern France.

It will be a pilgrimage of intense poignancy as these are some of the actual boats that took part in the evacuation of Dunkirk of British, French and Belgian troops after they were cut off by the German army in the Battle for France in 1940.

Seventy-five years ago this year, over a ten-day period, a hastily assembled fleet of more than 800 boats rescued almost 340,000 soldiers.

Thousands upon thousands of them were ferried by the famous little ships of Dunkirk, a flotilla of hundreds of merchant marine vessels, fishing boats, pleasure craft and lifeboats, to larger destroyers and ships anchored offshore.

The evacuation, code-named Operation Dynamo, was dubbed the Miracle of Dunkirk, because so many of our troops made it back thanks to the intensely brave efforts of those ordinary folk like you and me who took to the seas without thought for their own safety to bring our menfolk home.

But for one family there was no miracle of Dunkirk. Weeks before, four children had waved off their dad from Darlington Bank Top station as he joined the British Expeditionary Force sent to aid the defence of France.

He had fought in the First World War and was now doing his bit in the Territorial Army, taking time out from his job as the composing room overseer at The Press’s sister paper The Northern Echo, to do his duty for king and country.

It was the last time his wife and children would ever see him as they waved madly at him hanging out of the window of the fast disappearing troop train as it puffed its way south towards York and beyond.

Weeks later, the children’s mother was back at Bank Top station, meeting the returning exhausted soldiers to see if her Jack was among them, going back again and again as a new troop train came in, living in fervent hope that he had made it safely out of Dunkirk.

He hadn’t. Gradually over time as the hope dimmed, the story was pieced together. He’d somehow managed to get to Dunkirk and was able to get on a paddle steamer, the Gracie Fields, which until she was commandeered for the war effort as a minesweeper, had been plying between Southampton and the Isle of Wight.

The Gracie Fields had already made one successful trip to Dunkirk and back, and took on nearly 750 troops on her second trip, among them printer Jack. As she turned for home she was hit by a bomb, but still she managed to struggle on. But her rudder was damaged and she was just going round in circles.

Two small boats managed to secure alongside and take off some of the injured, then later that fateful day HMS Pangbourne – herself holed on both sides above and below the waterline – took the Gracie Fields in tow to try and bring her home. But hours later, the paddle steamer was sinking and the Pangbourne slipped the tow, took off the crew and had no choice but to abandon her.

It’s supposed that Jack was one of those killed when the bomb hit, for his body was never found. Now his name is on the Allied memorial at Dunkirk, just one name of many, but every single one of them telling a poignant family story.

Behind the name of Corporal John Thompson Reed of the Royal Corps of Signals is my family’s story. For this is the granddad I never knew and one of those four children was my mother.

She was just 13 when she waved her dad off to war 75 years ago and last week we – my brother and me, together with our spouses – took her back in time on our own poignant pilgrimage.

We walked by the beach at Dunkirk where so many men lost their lives before they even had chance to make it to one of the little ships, struggling to imagine what the horror, fear and carnage must have been like on what are now beautiful wide open sands.

We touched his name on the stone plinth at the memorial, read his entry in the register of war dead that’s held there, left a posy of flowers with written messages of love and regret, then wondered at the futility of war and the heartbreak it brings.

Jack was just 44.