At the outbreak of the First World War, Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, told a journalist: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

It may sound now like a Brexit message – let the countries of continental Europe resolve their own conflicts, decide their own future relationships. Britain would stand aside and do its own thing. Such a notion was quickly shattered in 1914, as the enthusiasm with which volunteers sang their way to Flanders’ fields followed by conscripts slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands so cruelly demonstrated.

This week, Theresa May will join other European leaders (and President Trump) to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-day landings in Normandy; 6 June 1944 was the beginning of the end of the Second World War in which Britain was also actively engaged from the very start. The landings began on the day I was born. I described at an earlier D-day celebration how, just before going into labour, my mother heard about the Normandy landings on the radio news. She said she remembered seeing “all the planes flying very low overhead with special Allied markings on the wings”.

My mother added: “I was worried, though, as the matron kept coming in to inquire what I was going to call my son. I thought that something must be wrong with the baby – but the press had been calling to see if any boys had been born that day and was I going to christen him Bernard [after Montgomery] or Dwight [after Eisenhower]?”

... Let the countries of continental Europe resolve their own conflicts. Britain would stand aside and do its own thing. Such a notion was quickly shattered in 1914.

What a burden that would have become. My mother took the safe and easy way out and named me after her brother, Richard (who, by coincidence, had that day bumped into my father in Rome where they were celebrating the newly liberated Italian capital).

The parents of another baby born on D-day were rather more adventurous. They named him Dee-Day. “My father on his way to the registry office stopped at five pubs to catch up with the news on the wireless, which was all about the D-day invasion,” Dee-Day told me. His father, Bert White, a Hastings fisherman and lifeboat crew member, accepted a bet that he would never give his son that name. At first insisting no one could be called after a military operation, the registrar finally conceded.

Thus “Dee-Day Rodney White” is the name on my contemporary’s birth certificate – Rodney after the battleship whose guns bombarded the Normandy coast during the invasion and on which his uncle served. (The former Fulham, QPR, Manchester City and England footballer Rodney Marsh, born later in 1944, was named after the battleship on which his father had served.)

Dee-Day White has run an antiques-cum-bric-a-brac shop in Hastings for many years and frequently crosses the Channel to buy secondhand furniture and other artefacts. His latest enterprise is the restoration of a Hastings lifeboat, the Cyril and Lilian Bishop. The boat was engaged in the evacuation of Dunkirk and he will take it to the French port next year for the 80th anniversary of an operation whose contrast with the D-day landings could not be more striking.

I will be marking my D-day birthday this year with fellow alumni of the College of Europe in Bruges, a postgraduate nursery for budding Europhiles. It is not far from Dunkirk, where my father was evacuated in 1940 and not far from Ypres, where his father’s legs were blown off in 1915. All of this explains my conviction that, Brexit or not, the Channel will remain more an umbilical cord than a barrier.

• Richard Norton-Taylor writes on defence and security