Living memory

Of course, there's a convention to these things. Two smiling photos - a big one of now, a smaller one inset of the happy couple on their big day; a few anodyne paragraphs about how they met, the number (but not names) of their descendants, the give and take that makes for a lifetime's bliss; the Golden Years logo, and a headline like "They never went to bed on an argument". For colour, perhaps, there will be a fact-file of 1928 - Lister discovers penicillin, Lady Chatterley's Lover first published, George V on the throne.

Mention "fought in France in World War I" if you must, perhaps name regiment and list any medals - though even these are likely to be blue-pencilled by an editor perhaps old enough, just, to have heard the sirens and crumps of Hitler's war, but too young to have understood them then or to remember now.

Albert remembers. In the dustless, air-freshened room with its doilies, chintz and china dolls, his teacup rattles in the saucer as he remembers.

What was it really like: what do you remember most? Too young, too naïve, to understand the enormity of the question, or just really wanting the answers, even while knowing it will never be for publication.

She looks up over the Victoria sponge she is proffering, you catch a brief look of distress passing like a momentary cloud across her puffed and powdered features, her glance, anxious, at her Albert.

A pause. "Mud," he says. "And cold. Hard and horrible when it were cold. Wet and worse when it weren't."

"You weren't there long, were you, love?" she says. "He wasn't there long. Seventeen he was, younger than you are, dear." The cup rattles again in Albert's saucer.

You want to ask, Did you see any Germans, did you kill any, what was the noise like, the smell?

"Fetch them pictures, love." Albert's voice is something between a scrape and a croak - age, or something older? "Them ones of the boys."

Gladness at the change of subject overcoming her anxiety at leaving you and the old man alone, she puts down the cake she has been holding on her lap, gets slowly to her feet.

"Two boys we got," says Albert. "Grandsons. And our first great-grandchild on the way. " Then, abruptly, as the creak of her steps reaches the top of the stairs, "It were a while before she and I met, she wouldn't know. Knows I lost some toes, a-course, in the bloody mud. Thinks that's what upsets me, nights, sometimes still.

"But the thing about mud ain't how it gets in your clothes, your boots, your skin, even your bloody bumhole (a scraping laugh here, comradely), it's what it hides, what's in it that you can't see. So you don't know if you're walking on dead men, though knowing sometimes you are, on their faces and their chests. Or if you're going to grab a hand when you reach out to steady yourself against the trench."

The rims a little redder around the distant blue of the eyes. And you ask: "And that happened to you?"

Quite a startling blue, the pupils tiny - an effort to focus them back in the room, in the present.

"I was pushing a limber and we was putting down bits of bricks under the wheels to stop it sinking too far in the mud. And I slipped over. Well, I put my hand out to break my fall, and went right in up to my shoulder.

"The wheel went over my leg and broke my ankle - it was after that they had to take the toes off - but what bothered me was this hole my arm had gone into. It was some poor bloke's chest, that's what it was, right through his ribs, his heart and lungs and everything, my arm had gone. Closest I ever got to a bloody German - bout as close as you can get, I reckon."

It's a rasping laugh she hears as she returns with the photo album, and it brings a smile of relief.

"That's our Tom - he's in Leeds - and his wife Ellen. That's their boy Stuart, he's on the school football team."

"He's at university now, love, remember?"

"Oh, that's right. Leicester. Studying sociology or whatever it is."

"And that's David, our other grandson."

"In Australia. His wife's expecting, but we haven't met her. We've never been abroad you know, dear."

"Do you have a photo of your own wedding we could borrow? For the paper."

She says: "No, dear."

He says: "Yes we have, love, a-course we have."

She says: "Well, it wasn't a white wedding, you know, dear. Not a church one."

"It were just as good as," he says. "A proper wedding. To us it was."

In the hallway she says, conspiratorially, "He was married before, you see. When he came back from France. Too young really. I expect she just wanted any man, with so many gone, including her own sweetheart I daresay. Anyway, she ups and left him for another one when he was only 21. You won't mention that in your article, dear, will you?

"It was years before he met me, I'm a few years younger, you know, he was working in the docks then. Forty-four years he was in the docks, on and off, good times and bad. That's what you should ask him about, not the war. He was only a boy then. And he never talks about it, you know. Never has. Never will now, I expect."