The Bombardier was always there. I looked at the photograph on the wall as I lay between my grandparents while they luxuriated in the hip-hooray-it's-Saturday morning lie-in. 'There he is,' one or the other would say, with a sigh lurking behind rueful laughter. 'The Bombardier.'
My grandfather, a serious lad of 23 dressed in the uniform of the Australian artillery, gazed into the room: the photograph had been taken before he left for France and Belgium in 1915. He'd thought himself bound for Gallipoli, but military and political plans changed while he was still at sea.
To the end of his life he regretted that he had missed out on Gallipoli, despite the fact that he must soon have learned the details of that hell on earth.
As a child of six I capered along the passage of my grandfather's house, chanting bomb-bomb-bombardier. I had no clue as to what the noun meant, just that it was a wonderful word to say aloud. In between times I registered the fact that Billy-Next-Door had made it safely back from a mysterious place called Korea, and that everybody of course was glad.
For children of my generation the word war was a part of life. Not that we understood what it meant. To me it meant a very little information from Grandfather, and the knowledge that my father, a veteran of the Second World War, had a Japanese sword stashed in the hall cupboard and his Glengarry cap wrapped in mothballs in a certain drawer.
Like most ex-servicemen, father and son never talked much about their experiences. I suppose such people realise nobody can enter, let alone share, such a fractured world, even via the imagination.
My imagination certainly failed when I was 15. An old teacher at my school, unwell and deaf, was another First World War veteran. The smart alecks gave him hell. But when the teachers brought along their early photos for a guessing competition, his showed him mounted on a camel. The Pyramids were in the background, and the face under the slouch hat was young, eager and alive.
'Hard to believe, eh?' he commented. And grinned.
That same year I saw him on television during the Anzac Day parade, marching at the head of a straggly line of similarly old men. 'He's MC and MID, you know,' said my father. I didn't, and when he died not long afterwards I felt deeply ashamed that my