You could say that being caught up in this nightmare was a family tradition.

My grandfather was a soldier in London in the years following the end of World War II.

He'd been too young to fight in the war itself, but had joined up as soon as he could,

propelled by a spirit of patriotism that had been burning inside him while the conflict

raged.

As a serving soldier, he saw a side to the city, which the government had kept out of the

newspapers.

The beg is in the streets, the looting driven by poverty and hunger, and the outbreaks

of violence between former soldiers who'd returned home from war to find a society in

which they no longer fitted.

In the diary he kept, which I'm using for this account, he wrote of being out on patrol

and encountering grown men standing on street corners openly weeping.

The patrols, which were carried out in addition to ones by the police, to try and maintain

order, took him into some of the darkest corners of the city.

He was armed with a rifle he held, but the rifle he held was one which he'd never fired

in anger, and the soldiers he was on patrol with were either very inexperienced like him,

or older veterans.

These were better men he wrote, quick to anger and even quicker to judge.

He described witnessing was basically the summary execution of looters when his patrol

disturbed a gang rubbing a warehouse, storing tin goods, shot in the head for a kind of

beans as he put it.

Terrible though these things were, they were overshadowed by the horrifying experience

...