This letter drove her so crazy with imagining that she made great efforts for clarification, resulting in a series of letters from the army, including two from the chaplain at 58th General Hospital who makes it clear that her son died instantaneously, and his body was, together with one other, unrecognisable. How dreadful a relief.

It is a terrible letter. It brings terrible news. It makes me cry. It makes my heart ache with grief for her and for him. And that is the feeling I have been living with for the last two days. I am on the train back to Venice. It was hard to be in Salerno, where I felt only homesickness, aching homesickness, which I believe was his relived in my own heart, and grief, knowing that he was here in his last days and here, or somewhere near here, when he died. It was hard to leave Salerno, for the same reasons. What remains of his poor body is buried in a site I now carry in my visual memory. To leave Salerno was to leave him there again.

And to leave was to leave behind, I expect, the intensity of awareness of him, the painful desire for England, the moments imagining him walking down this street or that, seeing the same expanse of bay as he saw, getting behind his eyes; to find relief, I hope, from this new grief which has time-travelled him into the present, or me into the past. It is like waking up after a sleep of many years to find someone precious has died.

A cold, leaden rectangle of death has been sitting in my chest since the morning of our visit to the cemetery. And a rush of anguish for my grandmother came with a rush of understanding. How could I have lived so long without imagining what she went through, without wondering how she bore it? What a gulf that was to cross. And yet we were great friends. She was so important to me. My heart bleeds for her now, and I weep when I think of her suffering.

And that cold rectangle speaks when I think of his ordeal in the terrible heat, the sleeplessness, the mosquitoes — the nature of the work he’d volunteered for — the fear and tension he must have lived with.

All he had to put up with: even to consider it makes one grow up and take a new perspective on life. Put up with things. Don’t complain. Be stoical. Think of oneself little. And at the same time, his endurance, his achievement, his sacrifice make me feel I am entitled, obliged even, not to hang back, to take my place at the table. He deserved that place. He fought for us all. He dignifies us. I will walk tall.

I love his face. It is a face of fine sensibility and gentleness, with lovely eyes. The touch of humour in those eyes in the photograph taken in the early years of the war, in a greatcoat, has been quelled in the later photograph taken perhaps in Africa, perhaps in Italy. In this photograph he is tanned, and there is a new, different kind of vulnerability. There is war in this photograph.