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Sailing gently along the Thames under tranquil skies, Dunkirk veteran Ted Oates relaxes on deck.

It is a far cry from the first time he found himself on one of these Little Ships escaping from the fearsome German war machine.

Nazi planes overhead raining down death, cold Channel surf to his waist, and feelings he usually prefers to keep at bay. “I have dreamed about it,” he says.

It has been a week of remembering and reunions for Ted.

The release of director Christopher Nolan’s movie about the Second World War evacuation has brought back memories of the chaos and fear on the French shores Ted escaped as a 20-year-old sergeant .

(Image: Tim Anderson)

The film’s premiere led to him meeting other veterans of the 1940 evacuation. Then there is the get-together with a diff­­erent sort of veteran... the Riis 1, or White Heather as she was called then.

She is one of the Dunkirk Little Ships – the roughly 700 civilian vessels, including fishing boats and pleasure steamers, that helped the Royal Navy rescue nearly 340,000 stranded Allied troops over those exhausting days from May 26 to June 4. Ted, now 97, and Riis 1 witnessed hell on earth together.

This unassuming pleasure yacht, then a wealthy family’s plaything commandeered by the Navy, rescued upwards of 200 troops from those battered beaches, their bodies – some fatally injured – sprawled across her.

Ted made his escape on another member of the plucky Little Ship armada, a now-lost ration boat filled with canned fruit and cigarettes.

(Image: Western Mail)

Pointing to Riis’s stern, Ted – just two months older than the vessel – says: “We’ve both been through the mill. I remember seeing boats like her there.

“There would have been men all over her, on the decks, on the roof, inside.

“Boats were being bombed. I remember seeing a bomb fall down the funnel of a destroyer.

“It could not be more different today,” he adds, suddenly snatching himself from his reverie.

We sail serenely past idyllic meadows, a universe away from that chaotic Channel crossing 77 years ago, but Ted’s memories continue to be thrown into sharp relief.

(Image: Mirrorpix)

Recalling his escape, he explains he trekked for days to Dunkirk. When he got there, he offered his help as a stretcher bearer.

“I only got on this ration boat because I had taken a man on a stretcher on to a hospital ship and they told me to get off via this one.

“I just stepped down on to it,” he says, staring across the water.

“There were tins of pineapple, piles of boxes of cigarettes.

“I was stuck in the corner of the open hold, on the floor with my back to iron girders. My trousers and boots were soaking wet.

(Image: Tim Anderson)

"We had waded out to sea but couldn’t get on any of the boats, they were all full. It was chaos.

"I recall a destroyer sending out a rowing boat with a couple of sailors which sank because so many tried to get on board.

“The man next to me yelled for ammo to fire up at the Germans and somehow I had some, in my soaking jacket pocket.

"It was boiling hot as I’d spread my jacket on the boat’s boiler to dry. He took them anyway and fired into the air – but he didn’t hit one. Do you know how hard it is to hit an aircraft?”

He adds: “I hadn’t eaten for days so I opened a tin of peaches but I was immediately sick. Then I went to sleep.”

Finally, like the troops try to do in our main photo – a black and white image, colourised to mark the release of the film – he had got on to one of the boats.

(Image: Tim Anderson)

Beside him on Riis 1 today, another veteran here for the trip, George Purton, 98, becomes increasingly quiet. His stepdaughter, Louise Hamer, says he went silent too as he watched the premiere of Hollywood film Dunkirk, alongside Ted.

Starring Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy and Harry Styles, there were names aplenty there to warrant applause – but it was rightly given to the handful of

remaining veterans.

It is echoed today by visitors lining the river for the Thames Traditional Boat Festival in Henley-on-Thames, Oxon, where Riis 1 and a flotilla of surviving Little Ships have gathered. George, from Reading, Berks, who served with the Royal Army Service Corps, was evacuated from Dunkirk in a frigate, but not before he had been terrified beyond imagination.

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“When I came back I had no fingernails, from digging trenches in the sand to get down every time an air strike hit,” he says.

It is hard to believe these two stoic men saw that hell. It is hard to believe that Riis 1 did too.

She is a boat built for pleasure. The original wooden decor below deck includes a cocktail cabinet. It is difficult to picture men, some in pain, crammed like sardines in her genteel saloon.

Her current owner, Alan Jackson, a member of the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships, says: “She did three trips of the Channel. They could have squeezed 60 or 70 on board.”

A month later the plucky boat, which travels up to just 11 knots – nine miles an hour – evacuated part of the 51st Highland Division from up the French coast.

“She was even used to ferry secret agents across the Channel to France under cover of night.”

On her deck, Ted, of Wendover, Bucks, his Royal Army Ordnance Corps badge glinting, is comfortable, a glass of wine in hand.

Two children, five grandkids and seven great-grandkids later, he says he has put Dunkirk “behind him”.

But he hasn’t minded this week of memories.. “It was interesting to see it all again,” he says of the film.

Today, chugging down the river with a brother in arms, he insists: “I’m enjoying myself.”

And looking across the summer-green British countryside, which he so very nearly gave his life to save, he says with a smile: “We are safe now.”