I grew up a generation away from the War. What this means is that I have some experience through my parents account of what total war is. They tell of the night when Sheffield was blitzed. They tell of what it is like to be in a building which has suffered a direct hit, knowing that their only refuge was the street outside.... in the blitz itself.

It is dramatic stuff, but for me what is far more poignant is when they tell of the loss of a friend of theirs, Frank, who died in a low level bombing raid over Brest. He was Canadian, his parents' only child, nineteen years old, and caught in an obscene conjunction of circumstances from which he was not going to escape. It is poignant because of his youth, and the knowledge that all their generation were young then...

and now they are old, whereas Frank will never be older than nineteen.

My generation were caught for a while in the romance and heroism of it all; Battle of Britain, The Few, the Desert Rats, D-Day, the Liberation. It seemed so glorious, and I'm afraid stories of daring do in wartime often are to kids. These heroes were our parents, our uncles and aunts and their friends. For years I regarded remembrance as a patriotic duty.

In due course when young men's minds turn to the glories of rebellion instead, I dismissed it as a morbid preoccupation with the past. All became associated with a glorification of war, and all my prejudices were buttressed by the utter futility and waste of Vietnam.

And then I started listening to the stories of life with the blitz, the loss of friends, and the arbitrary nature of war. I tried to project myself into the same situation as the young men and women of that generation. There was no question about having to fight the aggression of a totalitarian fascist state. It had not been presented as a matter of debate, as the troops who liberated Belsen and Auschwitz found out. Boys in their late teens when beyond the state of exhaustion climbed into battle scarred aircraft not out of choice, but out of a complete absence of choice, because the consequences of not doing so where so appalling. For the most part they were tired and scared witless.

Then I understood the motivation for remembrance. It was the duty of those who had come through the most dangerous and savage lottery of them all to reflect. The bullet with their name on had never been fired. They had never been in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had survived when dear, dear friends had not. There was no sense to it. There was gratitude to have come through alive, and guilt that they had and others had not. Remembering was not just the least they could do, it was all they could do.

With recent deaths in my family I am reminded that direct experience of this part of our national history is passing from us.

It is not through any strong sentimental or patriotic motive that I've written all this. I want to register my gratitude to a bunch of people who were given no options but to participate in this part of our history, but nevertheless saved us from fascism, and in doing so carried the scars with them for life.