I never questioned why Mom and I went to church almost every day or why, when Dad drove us on Sundays, he just dropped us off and picked us up afterward.

My parents grew up in Birmingham’s inner city. Mom had been born in Liverpool, but when she was a toddler, her family, the Harts, moved to Birmingham, to Colemeadow Road, where they occupied a large detached family house on a corner. They needed the space: Mom was one of five, until her sister Nora gave birth to Trevor, who the family raised, which made six. Mom’s dad, Joseph, who died before my birth, spent his working life in labor relations; he worked for the shipbuilding union in Liverpool originally, but moved to Birmingham for a better job. The Lord Mayor of Birmingham would go to his funeral. Up the street from the Harts, the dwellings were smaller; tight Victorian terraced houses that were well built, small but proud, with the toilet out back.

The Taylors lived in one of these, at number 10.

My dad, Jack, was born John in 1920, which made him, age nineteen in 1939, prime meat for the Second World War. He was shipped out to Egypt, where he was given an administrative posting—clerking and driving trucks and officers around the base. One weekend, he was due to be on leave in Cairo but he traded his time off with another soldier. This good deed would not go unpunished. That weekend, the German army seized the base on which Dad was stationed and he, along with many others, was captured. The British prisoners were then transported up through Italy to Germany, where they were interned in Stalag 344.

Dad would spend the remaining three years of the war there. He was forced to live off raw potatoes, watery soups, and the occasional Red Cross food parcel. At least he didn’t smoke, so he could trade in his tobacco ration for a few extra spuds.

Mom used to say to me confidentially, “Your father had a terrible time in the war, but he’ll never talk about it.” Dad’s wartime experiences were the khaki elephant in our living room. No one could talk about it, but we were all living with it, still, twenty years later.

It’s clear to me now that Dad had post-traumatic stress disorder and what he really needed was some therapy—which he would get these days. The most anyone could ever get out of him on the subject, if he was pushed into a corner, would be: “I had it easy compared to George.”

George was Dad’s brother. Their father had died when Dad was five and George was ten, so George became like a surrogate parent. Dad idolized him. George did his soldiering in Burma and had been taken prisoner by the Japanese. George had been in a mine near Nagasaki, mere miles from the site of the atomic bomb, and felt the explosion.

When Dad got back to Birmingham after his war, amid the celebrations of VE Day, his mother, Frances, and his elder sister, Elsie, were of course overjoyed to see him. But anxiety still ran high in the household, as no one had heard from George or even knew if he had survived, and this cast a shadow over Dad’s return.

Almost a year later, in a scene that could have been directed by Steven Spielberg, Dad was waiting for a bus to take him to work, when he vaguely recognized a figure coming down the street toward him out of the morning mist. It was his brother George, free since VJ Day, but emaciated and exhausted not just by his captivity but also by his long journey home by way of the Pacific, then across the United States by train.

I’m sure Dad looked different to George too. But they were stoic, each with his overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and no tears would have been shed between these men. A handshake for sure, possibly a hug. Dad might have let a few buses go by, but I doubt very much that he took the day off work. Any tears shed would have been female tears.

This story was so hard for my father to tell that he didn’t share it with me until he was in his eighties and I was in my forties.

The Second World War was omnipresent growing up in England in the 1960s. It was this enormous event that had affected everybody. In spite of Dad’s reluctance to go there, nobody else could stop talking about it. It dominated TV and the movies.

Mom Jean, born Eugenie, had wartime experiences of her own, working on the Austin automobile assembly lines at Longbridge, which had been converted to manufacture parts for the massive Avro Lancaster bomber planes. Also in her twenties during the 1940s, Mom enjoyed the society and fellowship on the swing shift.

In 1946, the processes of life that had been interrupted by the war began again, and thoughts returned to the normal: jobs, marriage, and starting families. Hope returned.