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IN THIS memoir of his father and his father's father, Cole Moreton sets out to lay bare his own family's secrets and in so doing ends up debunking many of the myths of a generation.
The question, 'What did you do in the war, Granddad?' opens up a whole can of worms.
His grandfather Bert was born in 1918 into a large East London family impoverished not only by its size but also by his father's drunkenness.
Bert's escape from the depressing squalor at home was not drink, but the teetotal Salvation Army.
He met and fell in love with a girl from a better social background named Violet and they were married in haste at the start of World War II, with Bert almost immediately going off to serve in the Royal Artillery.
Bert's war service touched on some of the great moments of the war. Though under questioning from his grandson, his role in them is revealed to be less than heroic. He is with the British Expeditionary Force in France but misses being evacuated from Dunkirk because he falls asleep and is separated from his unit. He escapes only by the skin of his teeth from St Nazaire in a coal barge, witnessing the aftermath of the sinking of the cruise ship Lancastria, with perhaps as many as 11,000 evacuated troops on board - one of the many big secrets that the British government kept as it set about the legerdemain of turning the disaster of Dunkirk into a mythic victory.
Back in England, Bert manages to wangle a leave that is brief, but long enough to impregnate Vi with their first child, Arthur, the author's father.
If the history of Bert's war challenges our myths about heroism, the account of his return home questions our notions of victory.
Finding Vi suffering 'the family curse' of bleak depression, a debt-ridden spendaholic, dwelling in utter squalor, Bert preferred to live down the road, passing his abandoned children on the way to work each day.
Growing up in such a family, Arthur, the author's father, had a deprived, difficult childhood and adolescence, and it is his life that demonstrates true heroism, overcoming his squalid home-life and his inherited depression to climb the career ladder in the Post Office and then Telecom and to become a well-respected and successful local Labour politician, confident enough to defy his employers by refusing to shake the visiting Margaret Thatcher's hand.
Cole Moreton's own triumph is not simply in summarising these two lives in a very moving personal account that also includes some wonderfully evocative pieces of social history - swimming at the Brockwell Lido in the 1950s, for example, or the wonderment of a working-class child at the 1951 Festival of Britain - but in persuading these two wounded personalities to break their lifetime silence and talk about difficult things.
It seems that it is not just that they are men that has caused their reticence, but the damage passed down from one generation to the next, what you might call the trickledown effect of war, perhaps - something we never hear about from the politicians who so blithely take us into it.
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