Days of glory

The television has been advertising a series about the First World War on the National Geographic channel. The trailer is bone-chillingly realistic. I won't be watching the series at all because the trailer alone brings me to tears, especially when I see real pictures of dead bodies in dirty trenches, a soldier using a flamethrower and then a soldier with head bandages hastily applied.

The flamethrower, what a terrible weapon! Of course we can kill people much easier these days and throw their mangled bodies in a huge communal grave dug out by some JCB.

Yep, death arrives suddenly and for no specific purpose other than to fob a religion on a people who are probably more interested in how they are going to eat tomorrow than which way they should pray to God.

But this is all far away from us, is it not? And I am happy about that. The thought that someone could simply come and shoot me, throw my body away and take all the possessions I have worked all my life for, is a trembling thought.

The Second World War saw my 20-year-old father being trained to jump out of aeroplanes and ride a motorbike through the night without the aid of lights. He was a paratrooper and a courier of orders for the front line. Once he was captured and the Dutch underground were responsible for getting him back to England.

Of course, that is all I know because we never talked about the war in our house. My father returned six years later to his new bride of six and half years and his six-year-old son who didn't know him.

Within three years, he was a full-blown alcoholic who would have bouts of sitting on the kitchen step weeping.

What atrocities do that to a gentle man?

Life has not always been a bowl of cherries for me but I am certain that I have had the best years - the best generation. I played outside without adult supervision from the age of three; I had a great Grammar School education with the opportunity to go on to further education that would definitely have ended with me getting the job I was studying for; and my greatest worry as I did my on-the-job training at the local newspaper was 'would I be able to make it there in time'.

I was always ten minutes late. But I was good at my job and there wasn't a queue of other people willing to do the junior's job as a starter.

As my family started to break up, as the memories finally finished my father off and my mother followed him, dying three months later, it was that newspaper and the staff who became my family. Both my Mam and Dad were victims of the Second World War.

The wars of the world have been kept far away from me, only touching my emotions as I see pictures on the television news channels and photos in the press. I saw three photographs just recently that inspired me to write this:

The first photograph was of the IS 'soldiers' leading away a group of young men, men in jeans and T-shirts, sons, brothers, hardly old enough to be fathers, definitely none of them looking to be more than twenty-five years old.

The second photograph was of these men kneeling in a line. An IS man held a pistol to the captive's head. Of course the IS man's face was swathed in black cloth to hide his identity. The third photograph showed those young men who had been alive and walking just minutes ago now lying in a twisted heap in a large grave.

Awful! Horrific! And so very sad.

It is incomprehensible to me that young men brought up in Britain, educated in Britain and with British friends are leaving that haven of safety to take up arms and kill so indiscriminately.

What is wrong with them?! I wish they could have seen my father and what fighting in the Second World War did to him.

I have not been touched by war. Never lost a loved one to an enemy's bullet, have lived all my life in a free country and suppose that will not change for the rest of my life.

I am definitely one of the lucky ones.