It edged past old men who had brought out their medals for the day, the television satellite dishes, scanner vans and cherry-picker cranes. Another police car came behind it, a back-up hearse and a four-wheel drive for the Military Police. Some, he knew, had predicted that what they called ‘grief tourism’ would suffer from ‘fatigue’, that the crowds would dwindle – but they had been bloody wrong. The kid – the guardsman with a child’s face and a helmet too big for him – had been shown the same respect as any serviceman coming through six months and a year before.

Up the High Street, the hearse again stopped briefly. The funeral director and the driver gathered up what flowers had not fallen away and laid them inside with due but brief reverence. Then the party drove at growing speed, with the motorcycle escort, down the road and towards the motorway.

In the first minutes after the convoy had cleared the town, the standards were raised, then lowered, and the command was given for the old servicemen to fall out. A few words of conversation slipped between them but the appetite for jocularity and the recall of times past seemed spent. Hands were shaken and they moved off to start the journey home. The family and its party had returned to the room at the Cross Keys, where the management provided coffee and biscuits, but a few lingered outside to drag on cigarettes. Most of the crowd who had borne witness to the sacrifice of a young life in Helmand Province stood around on the pavements, as if unsure what should follow: pensioners, veterans, shop workers and the idly curious seemed reluctant to break the mood of pensive resignation and quiet… The traffic managed that. Petrol tankers, removal lorries, supermarket delivery trucks jostled to accelerate up and down the High Street. Doug furled his standard, collapsed the staff and threaded the parts into the canvas carrying bag. He said his goodbyes, almost stepped on a single red rose and went to look for Beryl.