The war ended, but it never left him: Lesley Sharp on her father's quiet courage

Over the next five years, he was stationed in Damascus, India, Lebanon and what was then called Persia. He saw major campaigns such as the Battle of Anzio, during which 10,000 British and 24,000 American soldiers lost their lives.

By the time VE Day was declared, my dad had risen to the rank of Major and was sent to Germany, where he would be responsible for German prisoners of war. After his work there was done, he left the Army, despite entreaties from his superiors to stay. He wasn’t yet 30.

When I was young, he talked about the war a little. He was humbled by the loss he had experienced; he nearly lost his own life a couple of times. A lot of the trauma he witnessed he didn’t talk about at all. He kept that in. He was grateful too, despite the circumstances, that he got to experience parts of the world that a working-class lad from Scotland would otherwise not have experienced.

As I grew older, he told me more. Once, he relayed a story about a Polish officer who, unable to cope, drank himself to death over the course of a single night. The casualties of war weren’t confined to the battlefield.

As Dad grew older, I could see for myself how significant his war years had been. He kept in touch with his colleagues and whenever one of them died, he always went to the funeral. He would be tipped back into a place where he remembered being young and what they’d been through together. That comradeship was a mainstay of his life, until the end of his life.

After he died in 2007 at the age of 91, I had to go through his things. Along with his medals and letters and photographs from the time, I found old maps with his writing on, labelled “Top Secret”. He’d been in intelligence and, as I combed through his papers and mementoes, I learned more about my dad, about the war, and all the planning and analysis he’d done. He shouldered huge responsibility, seeing it not as a burden but as a duty.

As it slips from living memory, ossifying into an historical event, the Second World War can be seen in abstract, academic, almost antiseptic terms. A global geopolitical conflict. A clash of ideologically opposed coalitions. A nadir in international relations. While it was undoubtedly all those things, for those who fought and their families, it was also deeply personal.

For six years, the war cast a shadow across Britain – not one corner or community escaped its grim calculus or was spared its brutal consequences. Every day for six years, the country lived on its nerves, mourning its dead, fighting a war that it didn’t know it would win.

There are many ways to commemorate VE Day, to honour the sacrifice and offer thanks for the service of those who fought for the country in the Second World war and in subsequent conflicts. There are events to attend – in village halls and mighty cathedrals – and many hours of television to watch and radio to listen to. Or, eschewing pomp, pageantry, prayers and fly-pasts, there’s the simplest of all acts of remembrance: the telling of someone’s story.

Someone like my dad. He was a quiet, dignified, dutiful, beautiful man – one of the millions of quiet, dignified, dutiful, beautiful men and women who helped the Allies to victory in 1945. And for that, I remember him – Jack Sharp.

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