Many years ago, as a sneer-faced Goth wearing a bloke’s army surplus military jacket because that’s how ‘tough’ I was, the Remembrance Day service at Whitehall in London beamed from the television as a symbol of all things the ‘righteous’ must despise: war, religion, monarchy, tradition, conservative values and, like, fascist Imperialism dude. And then you grow up, realise the world is not black and white and The Grey Area rules forever.

Last Remembrance Day, for the very first time, a trip was made to Whitehall because, as the daughter of a Japanese Prisoner of War, it was about bloody time I did. We were many thousands, in the world’s most well-behaved throng, politely clapping as the veterans marched by in their Brassoed-up military finest – Air Force, Marines, cheery Chelsea Pensioners – or rather shuffled by on sticks, one keeling over altogether as a St John’s ambulance shrieked in the distance its inevitable oncoming presence.

Up by the Cenotaph, some people in charge of our modern wars laid the enormous wreath of poppies without any detectable irony and we stood under a perfect, minty-blue sky, this two-minute silence the very definition of Deafening – no sound of children, babies, teenagers, mobiles, music, traffic, nothing – until a lone commercial aircraft thrummed spookily overhead and everyone thought, surely, about what it actually might feel like when a bomb is dropping on your head. As some of the present knew too well.

At the top of Whitehall, there’s a pub called The Sherlock Holmes which is filled every year with veterans, bespectacled old fellers displaying rows of medals, most of them now in their 80s. Befriending three of them, they were a riotous cockney hoot, singing Roll Out The Barrel and We’ll Meet Again even as one of them noted, mistily, “every year there’s less and less of us”.

The oldest, at 91, a tiny, shaky, fragile chap who looked just like Arthur Askey, false teeth clacking up and down, shuffled over to sit next to us, aimed for the stool – and missed! – legs flying over his head as he rolled on the floor, teeth threatening to fly out altogether. He looked, momentarily, dead – a member of staff jumping over the bar, literally, to administer a hasty brandy. What war-time madness, you wondered, had ‘Arthur’ seen only to almost come a cropper over a seat in a London boozer? We’ll probably never know because Arthur, no doubt, was much like the other cockneys, any “tell us about the war Granddad!” probes met with a collective, singular silence. “We don’t really talk about what went on,” said one, “and we never have. My old man never talked about the First World War either. It’s just too hard. It’s just too hard, love.”

My dad, were he still alive, would’ve been 87 next month. Gone at 69, he was never likely to live particularly long because, as Mum would say, “Och, yer father never had any health!” A prisoner of war in Burma for three-and-a-half years, he was one of those men, kids mostly, who built the mythological Bridge Over The River Kwai, conscripted soldiers who arrived home as ghostly living skeletons in 1945 after years of malaria, cholera and the spectrum of tropical diseases.

Like the old fellers back in the Sherlock, Dad didn’t talk much about what went on but, with a few Grouse askew, snippets would sometimes emerge. His fellow prisoners, he’d say, would tap at the slop of rice at the bottom of their mess tins and say, “That’s your ticket back to Blighty.”

His cell mate was a Dutchman and the pair became good pals, teaching each other their languages and so Dad, sometimes, with a few more Grouse askew, would insist he was talking in Dutch. He’d never talk about him otherwise, though, a Japanese guard, one day, “for no reason whatsoever”, in front of Dad’s eyes, shot him in the head and killed him. You never heard him say that his war years were the most meaningful of his life, that what he fought for was heroic or that his suffering was especially noble. Our clues to his experience were in the billion-yard stare in his gigantic brown eyes, some kind of unspeakable pain, of monumental sorrow, that war meant total horror and he didn’t want, too often, to remember it. He also thought that John Cleese flailing through the Fawlty Towers dining room in the “don’t mention the war!” Germans episode was the funniest thing he had ever seen.

Today, I’ll be back at Whitehall, maybe already in The Sherlock Holmes, looking for the same old fellers and hoping Arthur’s got to “grips” with his teeth. It will have been, as it was last year, an exceptional human morning, one which wasn’t, as yesterday’s Goth assumed, some gung-ho “celebration of war” but a profoundly moving memorial service for the ones who didn’t survive, a tribute to the ones who did, a powerful reminder of the realities of war and how we go lightly into these things at our peril.

With a specific thought for the veterans of tomorrow: if the World War vets remain traumatised, how will it be for the ones, these days, who don’t even know what they’re fighting for? For the rest of us carefree saps, meanwhile, the old fellers’ silence is also deafening; the closer you’ve been to war, it seems to say, the less likely you are to believe in it. Unless of course you are psychologically unwell, the sort of person, perhaps, who ends up running the world.