That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.

People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.

My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.

I'm a much better writer for being a father.

I wanted to look at the differences between how we fought then and how we fight now, because the current lack of closure generates a state of psychological unease that is interesting to acknowledge and examine.

We no longer need to show people being brave: instead, we can examine how they became brave. We can assume that they didn't start out that way. If we allow that they started out just like us, then their journey into courage becomes both more fascinating and more impressive.

My maternal grandmother was in London during the Blitz. Indeed, the man she was dating before she met my grandfather was killed beside her in a cinema, in 1941, when a bomb came through the roof - a tragedy in which she herself was badly wounded.