‘On every mantelpiece stand photographs wreathed with ivy, smiling, true to the past . . .’

      Dusty, bulging, old: they are all the same, these albums. The same faces, the same photos. Every family was touched by the war and every family has an album like this. Even as we prepare to open it, the act of looking at the album is overlaid by the emotions it will engender. We look at the pictures as if reading a poem about the experience of seeing them.

      I turn the dark, heavy pages. The dust smell of old photographs.

      The dead queuing up to enlist. Marching through the dark town, disappearing beyond the edge of the frame. Some turn up later, in the photos from hospital: marching away and convalescing, nothing in between. Always close to hand, the countryside seems empty in these later pictures, a register of absence. Dry stone walls and rivers. Portraits and group portraits. Officers and other ranks. The loved and the unloved, indistinguishable from each other.

      ‘Memory has a spottiness,’ writes Updike, ‘as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.’ Each of these photos is marred, spotted, blotched; their imperfections make them seem like photos of memories. In some there is an encroaching white light, creeping over the image, wiping it out. Others are fading: photos of forgetting. Eventually nothing will remain but blank spaces.

      A nurse in round glasses and long uniform (‘Myself’ printed beneath in my grandmother’s perfect hand). A group of men in hospital. Two with patches over their eyes, three with arms in slings. One

      in his ghastly suit of grey,

       Legless, sewn short at the elbow.

      A stern-faced sister stands at the end of the back row, each name diligently inked beneath the picture. My mother’s father is the second on the left, in the back row.

      Born (illegitimate) in Worthen in Shropshire, eighteen miles from Oswestry where Wilfred Owen was born. Farm labourer. Able only to read and write his name. Enlisted in 1914. Served on the Somme as a driver (of horses), where, according to family legend, he once went up to the front-line trenches in place of a friend whose courage had suddenly deserted him. Later, back in the reserve trench, he shovelled the remains of his best friend into a sandbag. (Every family has the same album, every family has a version of the same legend.) Returned to Shropshire in 1919 and resumed the life he had left.

      Worked, went to war, married, worked.

      He died aged ninety-one, able still only to write his name.

      Everything I have said about my grandfather is true. Except he is not the man second from the left in the photograph. I do not know who that is. It makes no difference. He could be anyone’s grandfather.

      Like many young men, my grandfather was under age when he turned up to enlist. The recruiting