Video, Droylsden, April, 2004. (42mins DVCAM)
(watch 'The Lost Boy' on flash video)
It’s early morning on 6th June 1944 and the newly formed 6th Airborne are crossing the channel to ‘prepare the ground’ for the Normandy ‘D-Day’ landings that will come later in the day. In an eerie engineless glider full of fresh young faces clinging to rifles and the hope of staying alive we join the Droylsden detachment. Their mission is to make a night landing behind enemy lines, take a vital bridge, and keep hold of it until the invasion force arrives.
Like everyone else that day they know it’s a very tall order but they accept their mission and their fate. This seems to be sealed when they’re blown off course, crash land, and are quickly pinned down by heavy enemy fire. A desperate bid to break out fails when each soldier sent forward to attack the enemy bunker simply ‘disappears’. Missing in action, killed or deserted, no one knows, but the small unit is cut off with no ammunition or hope and the mission is doomed to failure.
Sixty years later in the British Legion Club, as the survivors prepare for the last big celebration for which most of them will be alive, the mystery remains unsolved. Then appears a visitor from the past. Bradley Armstrong (Phil Donnalley), dressed for the wrong party and mistaken for the glass collector, Elliot, meets Old Frank doggedly thumbing through his fading photographs
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refusing to believe that ‘the fine young men’ of his youth would ever have deserted him. Caught on the wrong side of the generation gap Bradley has to find the way back to his comrades before it’s too late.
‘The Lost Boy’ project successfully brought together the young and old of Droylsden, (many of these were World War Two veterans). To say that they were all left with a vastly improved understanding of each other’s worlds would be a gross understatement. (Synopsis by Paddy Wagon)
‘The Lost Boy’ premiered at the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester on 3rd June 2004.
