When my grandmother was still alive and both she and my grandfather were still together, she would tell us how Unpa would often wake her up in the small hours, limbs flailing about like a maniac to the sound of his ghastly moans and grinding teeth, some times for minutes on end before he came to his senses. As children we were told that this happened when he dreamt he had been chased by a lion. He never denied the dreams when she told us the story – again –  over a Sunday lunch. He’d just smile, complicitly.

My grandfather had a pretty “active” war. Later in life I remember him referring to friends who had had a good war or in some cases a rather bad one. By good I suppose he meant they had been spared, to a greater extent, most of the disturbing extremes of the conflict. Those he knew who had had it bad, in his and their eyes, must have seen things that others of us cannot begin to imagine. He enlisted on his eighteenth birthday in May of 1941 and was taken by the Royal Navy because the Royal Marines did not take him first. A sheltered middle-class public school boy until then, his induction as a rating rapidly opened his eyes as it threw him into a feral environment he had only ever seen from a distance. Pluck, balls and innate aptitude soon saw him rise from the ranks to accept a commission. He was a natural leader of men. He saw service in many of the major theatres of the war.

As a child I remember being so proud of him, my warrior grandfather. He might well have won the war all on his own, as far as I cared. With his service medals and other bits of memorabilia in that cabinet on the landing in Collingwood House, I must have pestered him relentlessly about it all, as little boys do. One day I asked him if he had ever killed anyone and his reaction was – I now understand why – quite verbally violent with me. It was only much later in his life that he ever alluded to any of that in my presence. On some combined operation, he once told me, he’d found himself stranded on a beach together with some of the commandos he’d helped to land.

“I’ve no idea if I hit anyone but I can assure you I fired the bloody thing!” he said of the tommy gun that had been in his hands.

Behind me on the bookshelf, as I write, is the White Ensign he left me that we’ve since had framed. It flew from the landing craft he commanded into Sword Beach at dawn on the 6th of June 1944. It is peppered with holes. He was only just twenty-one.

I have seen nothing of life, by comparison.