In the 1960s my father owned a number of shops in Wiltshire and Somerset

These ranged from a couple of newsagents to a pet shop in Frome and a hardware shop in Holt

He employed a number of people whose names I cannot fully remember

However I clearly remember two who I only knew as Stratford Phillips and Wilson Davis

They were both military in the bearing having served in the last war

I later learned that both had been officers with distinguished service records

This puzzled me as my father employed both these men in modest positions

It was then that I began to think about war and its consequences

My father told me that both Wilson Davis and Stratford Phillips had seen things that few would ever see or forget

They were both at Dunkirk and Stratford Phillips was one of the first ashore during the D Day Landings

They both had untidy wars as did my father who served in Burma and India

Although I richly wanted to question them about their wartime exploits I never did

As I could see that both these brave men and my father craved the obscurity of their peacetime lives

Wars to me are split into two categories necessary wars and unnecessary wars

World War Two was a necessary war but World War One was an unnecessary war

I cannot think of many wars since then that have been necessary really not one

Last week I was in Margate on business and I took time out to look at a statue near the railway station

It was called April is the cruellest month and comes from Eliot’s poem The Wasteland 

Which was written in part at the adjacent Nayland Rock Shelter

It is based on a war veteran who served in Iraq in 2003 and is the first in a series of coastal statues

What makes this statue different is that it points towards London instead of out to sea

The accusation is clear as the soldier points towards Parliament where the decision was made to go to war

It is a powerful piece and questions the dishonesty of the Prime Minister and others at the time

Many years have passed and the generations of Stamford Phillips and Wilson Davis have faded

But their message and the message of my father is still clear and for as long as I can I will continue to write

As I was about to leave I decided on a whim to sit in the dilapidated shelter and read as I often do

The book that I reading was a biography of Wilfred Owen and peacefully I finished the book

It was as I was learning about Wilfred’s death near the Sambre and Oise Canal

That a very small leaf fell onto the final page as if by accident but I knew the real reason

A fancy perhaps but I have retained this small refugee in the pages of his book