I must have been about 3.

We lived on the 2nd floor of what were then newly-built 5 story flats in Walthamstow, East London and I was lying in the hallway by the front door.

I was by the little door to the 'coal hatch' which had another little door outside on the landing and coal could be delivered, shovelled into the coal area from the outside and then re- shovelled into the flat from the inside.

As a fairly diminutive 3 year old I could actually climb through from the outer door to the inner door and into the hall which was something that I was occasionally asked to do when keys were embarrassingly left inside.

However, this day had other memories.

I was lying on the floor in what I thought must have been some sort of bed that my Mum & Dad have given me as a pressie although I don't know if they had made it, been given it or it was a hand-me-down.

But this wasn't a bed – it was a little Red Indian wigwam and this 3 year old had obviously missed the point and had no idea that a wigwam was a tent and not a damn uncomfortable bed with an irritating pointed end for your feet.

And this was the earliest memory I have of my Dad as he stepped over me on the way to the loo mumbling something rather rude about Indians.

I was the youngest of 4 children and I probably got away with murder and certainly at that age I spent far more time with, and was much closer to, my Mum, in a loving way, but differently close to my Dad, in a fun way.

We were a very close-knit family and all mucked in happily whenever it was called for.

As I grew older I have immensely fond memories of my Dad, trips to the seaside, impromptu games of cricket and particularly my first visits to a football ground, being Walthamstow Avenue FC, which was a few minutes walk from home.

I remember the Percy Dalton's peanut stall that I visited 3 or 4 times during the match and the terrace was knee deep in peanut husks by the final whistle.

It was also with the great Walthamstow Avenue that I had my first wonderful day at Wembley Stadium (the old one with the towers) for the Amateur Cup Final and it was the greatest day of my life (up to then!) We beat Bishop Auchland 2-1 and my Dad, me and my brother, Ron cheered all the way home.

In my teens in seemed that he was always there for me, giving me lifts, helping me with a couple of quid and I'm sure it never seemed as if I appreciated it but I really did – more than he ever knew.

But if I regret anything, it was my ignorance of the affect that the War had had on both my parents, in very different ways, and this is a story that I'm sure was repeated in thousands of post-war homes.

My first inkling of this was in 1985 when my wife Sue and I invited the pair of them to our home in Harrow for a long weekend treat, dinner, theatre and a visit to the newly re-opened Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall - an underground complex that had been used as an operational command and control centre throughout WW2.

My Dad had spent over 6 years away from his home and family fighting for his country and we thought that he'd love to see the secret bunker where Churchill ran the show.

The War Rooms had been converted very much into a museum and replicated as close as possible to its 1940s appearance. As we entered and slowly strolled along the bleak corridors I could see that we were right and my Dad was fascinated by every sight, sound and smell.

At every turn there was another tiny office containing lifelike models of wartime officers and staff, the sounds of military voices and radio transmissions.

Then something happened that shook me rigid.

We turned a corner and there was yet another office to the right with lights flaring out in the corridor. Inside was the man himself, Churchill, and 4 or 5 others seated around a table studying war plans.

And then in the distant darkness came the haunting sound of Dame Vera and the ubiquitous "We'll Meet Again" and I have to admit that it was extremely moving.

I stood there beside the office entrance watching the War Cabinet planning the imminent invasion, looked up to say something to my Dad, but stopped, as the look on his face stunned me to silence.

He had an expression of a child at Christmas. It was a mixture of excitement and wonder but with a tinge of sadness as he stared at this extraordinary scene probably remembering that, while he was in Africa or France he was following orders that ultimately may well have originated in this very room.

I'll always remember his face at that very moment – and he was my Dad!

But that feeling was so short-lived as I turned to my Mum, probably to say something foolish about Dame Vera and her face shocked me even more. She was visibly shaken, frightened, had a tear rolling down her cheek and I had to quickly move towards her and give her a real cuddle.

At the time I had no idea what had caused this and she wasn't going to tell me and she quickly pulled herself together and walked on in true British style.

It was some years later that I began to understand what had happened that day and the more it unfolded the more horrific it became – and I suspect this story has happened a million times in all wars and in all countries

Imagine the situation.

You have a happy home with 2 young kids, a stable job with enough income for food and clothes and the odd day trip to Southend. Then, events happen in lands hundreds of miles away and a man on the radio tells you that "as of today, we are at war with Germany", within weeks your whole world is tipped upside down and the man of the house, my Dad, is plucked away perhaps never to be seen again.

The Mum has to carry on, still with 2 kids but every minute of every day you know that he is somewhere, possibly in danger, possibly even dead.

Every few months he comes home, just for couple of days, and is different. He's quiet, frightened to tell of the sights he has seen and struggling to talk to his nervous and tired wife or to his 2 confused kids who just don't understand why their Dad doesn't want to live at home anymore.

And this goes on for 6 years.

Apparently, when he did eventually return home in 1946 he was, probably like thousands of others, a very changed man. He was quiet, introvert and I'm sure inwardly very sad, and many of the reasons for his sadness I didn't discover until years later.

But at the time I never saw any of that and I was totally oblivious to the frightening life that they had both endured for those years and I never saw him cry until an evening at the theatre in 1990.

The show was Andrew Lloyd Webbers 'Song & Dance', a heartfelt two-part story of an English girl's experiences in America – some funny, but mostly very sad.

The first half was a one-woman show by the wonderful Marti Webb, and the penultimate song came right from the heart, this woman had had enough, she was on the verge of suicide and her intense performance was going to take the audience with her.

She sang her last, long note, there was a couple of second's pin-drop silence followed by thunderous applause and as I looked to my right my Dad's eyes were filled with tears.

Naturally, this sort of behaviour is catching and I too soon had a few sudden pieces of dust in my eyes that I need to clear. However, I found that very moving and yet it was some time before I realised that this heart-warming, joyful incident was probably linked with memories of those sad times so many years ago.

And perhaps he was watching Marti Webb, but he was really seeing my Mum.

But it was towards the end of his life that the war years really surfaced when a local newspaper asked for stories and anecdotes of wartime experiences and my Dad went for this with vigour and virtually wrote his autobiography.

Out came his ancient Remington typewriter (where on Earth he found the old ribbons from I'll never know) and he two-finger tapped away for weeks and eventually completed his 30,000 word memoirs called 'In With a Bang' ironically a reference to his own first memory being the sound of a bomb exploding that had been dropped from a Zeppelin over London in an earlier war.

Reading such detailed, intimate thoughts of someone so close can bring about real mixed emotions – memories, warmth, surprise and sadness – and I found his writing fascinating (and I could hear him reading it aloud) but it was the chapters on his wartime experiences that I found the most harrowing.

It was these stories that made so many other thoughts and incidents become clearer, including that strange day in the Cabinet War Rooms.

He talked of his initial army training days, his spell as a Special Police constable in The Blitz in London and then later in Northern Ireland, and it was clear that the rush to turn normal civilians into ready-to-kill soldiers, in a few weeks, was hardly efficient.

Then came D-Day in 1944, The Longest Day, and his deepest thoughts on that terrifying crossing to the Normandy beaches with the knowledge that tomorrow may never come – and for many, including some of his friends, it didn't.

(The chilling events of this day led to a snippet of humour when, years later, on a weekend trip to Normandy we were nestled in a seaside restaurant and my Dad said to the waiter in his finest Franglais "the last time I was here I walked ashore!").

His stories talk of the long march through France, Belgium and into Germany with so many battles and incidents along the way – but the real horror was yet to come.

As Germany collapsed and the Allied Troops took final control of the Reich, there was still much work for the army to do, other than fighting, in the arrest and containment of thousands of prisoners-of-war, the distribution of food and medical supplies, the search for known war criminals, the demolition of unsafe buildings, unexploded bombs and mines and the opening of the concentration camps.

And it was these camps that ultimately shocked the world – and my Dad's unit had been seconded to act as guards at a large concentration camp near Bergen in the Saxony region of north-west Germany.

It was called Belsen.

When the British and Canadian troops approached the area, the stench of Belsen hit them from afar, and on entering the camp they found thousands of unburied decaying corpses and over 50,000 starving inmates, many of whom died within days or weeks.

They rounded up the surviving SS guards (many had already been executed by inmates) and forced them to dig deep pits to bury the decomposing bodies, more so for immediate health implications than for any consideration of the dead as typhus was already rife.

They also had to protect the remaining Germans from the few camp inmates who had any remaining strength as they were needed for work - but they were also needed as witnesses against war crimes as in all wars there are innocents, even amongst the guilty.

Belsen, together with Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka, Dachau and perhaps 15,000 other camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe were responsible for the deaths of over 5 million human beings and became the most shameful scar in the entire history of humanity.

Even without the benefit of the gas chambers over 100,000 people died at Belsen between 1943 and 1945; Jews, Czechs, Russians, Homosexuals, Gypsies, anyone considered anti-Nazi and many more died in the months after its liberation from starvation and disease.

And my Dad was there and witnessed the sights, sounds and smells of horror, the cries of and screams of desperation and it was not surprising that he, like thousands of others, came home from the war a different, quieter, slightly broken man before I was even born.

I now understood the brief, cold atmosphere in the Cabinet War Rooms that day and also, rightly or wrongly, why to her dying day my Mum hated both Germany and Japan refusing point blank to buy any manufactured goods or produce that emanated from those lands – mainly because of the devastating affect those 6 years had on her husband, her family and her world.

Yet most of this I really wasn't aware of until much later in his life and perhaps if it wasn't for that local newspaper's article which subsequently spurred him into memoire action I would never have known.

As my parents got much older they both had progressively failing health My Mum, who I loved equally, developed Alzheimer's rather quickly and needed increasingly more care, something that my Dad struggled with partly because he had extremely poor sight and hearing but also because both of them had very little patience.

I had always had immense respect for my Dad as he had met his bride-to-be when she was 13, they later married and he vowed to love and protect her until death and he did.

They were together for 66 years.

She fell ill one Christmas Eve, the day before their Wedding Anniversary, and was taken to a nearby hospital where she slowly drifted away and died a few days later.

When my Dad was told I thought his life would end that day but he seemed to almost accept the inevitable, sadly of course, but with incredible dignity.

We had previously arranged to hold a large family dinner party for the New Year and had naturally expected to cancel it, yet he insisted that it went ahead "in her honour" although postponed for a week because of the funeral.

I prepared the table in my sister's huge living room for 22 people and had naturally seated my Dad in the centre of one side so that he could be near to everyone and he insisted that I used, as a central flower arrangement, the long display of deep red roses that he had bought for his beloved wife's funeral – just 2 days before.

As everyone was seated and I delivered the first course, he asked if he could say a few words and for just 2 or 3 minutes talked quietly, with total control, of his lovely departed wife, how much he loved her, of his promise to her when she was just a young girl and with his calm, theatrical voice, proposed a toast.

He did all this without a stutter yet I know that inside he was a broken man.

It was so characteristically typical of him as he rarely showed emotion - and I sincerely wish he had, as he'd lived through so much in his 80 years.

It came as little surprise to me, but with great sadness, that he too deteriorated quickly as Alzheimer's again took its toll and he was soon living in a nursing home where he received constant care – and eventually even recognition of his family left him.

Only those who have experienced a loved one slowly drifting away, as happens with advancing dementia, could possibly appreciate the devastation it creates, to see your once proud and lively Dad in such a condition.

When he died, naturally I was heartbroken, as indeed I was just a few years earlier when my Mum passed away, yet strangely less so than I would imagine and because of this I felt rather guilty.

I think the reason was that I really felt that he had died months earlier, when he began to lose recognition, and when I stopped recognising him as my Dad.

But he was one in a million and I only wish that I'd told him that.

So Dad, wherever you are, I hope you're still looking after Mum, as you promised.

I bet you're still bloody arguing!

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From the 'never to be published' book, THE RAMBLINGS OF AN ORDINARY BLOKE