MY FATHER, THE WAR HERO

I started writing the book the day my father died, in 1986.

It was all very sudden and unexpected. One day he was there, the next he was gone. Pneumonia.

I sat on his bed, and idly started clearing his bedside table. And there it was, the notebook. Scruffy, ancient and dog-eared. I flicked through the pages. A diary of some kind, the pages filled with tiny pencil scribbles in my father’s inimitable and illegible handwriting.

Putting it to one side, to look at later, it was a couple of years or more before I returned to it. When