You couldn’t blame the lads for having a drink or two. Letting off a little steam. If you couldn’t celebrate today – then when could you?

The sun was shining as it had been every day since I’d started this tour of duty. But even that seemed different somehow. A brighter, cleaner, excoriating light. I knew that was nonsense but it felt that way.

The excitement in the air was certainly palpable. I hadn’t felt anything like it since I’d been a very small child and my whole street had turned out for a party to celebrate the Queen’s silver jubilee. That had been a hot, glorious day too.

The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote some lines: ‘The world is charged with the wonder of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.’

Well, God’s grandeur wasn’t evident around us then, truth to tell. We were in a particularly devastated area on the western outskirts of the city. Blown-up buildings left, right and centre, their roofs and top floors shattered and cracked like a scattering of ruined teeth. The scars of incendiary bombs and smoke and ash and wreckage strewn all around.

The city had been literally smashed apart. But what was in the air that day was hope. Hope – maybe that was what God’s grandeur really was all along. Because without hope what do you have? The three other people in the jeep with me all had fixed grins on their faces.

In the front passenger seat was Captain Richard Smith. He was in his thirties, a husband, a father, my superior officer and a man I would have followed into the very fires of hell. And sometimes in the last few weeks it had felt as though that was just where we’d been.

Beside him at the wheel was Lance Corporal Lee Martin, in his twenties. An irrepressible practical joker, a man who never had a bad word to say about anyone and would give you the last pound in his pocket.

Sitting by me in the back was my fellow sergeant, Anne Jones. Cropped blonde hair, could drink pretty much any man in the unit under the table and beat most of them at arm wrestling – but had a secret passion for the romantic novels of Catherine Cookson. I’d caught her reading a copy of The Cinder Path one day and she had threatened to cut off my manhood with a rusty knife if I told anyone about it.