Churchill

"Earliest memory of a news event?" said Polly from the BBC's Radio 4 Today programme. She is trying to get her squad of bloggers born on 28 October 1957 to come up with stuff that is worth publishing on the Today website.

How about Churchill's funeral, on 30 January 1965? We watched it on TV - we had one by that time. The dock cranes all bowed as his coffin went past - even though the dockworkers' union and Churchill did not get on with each other.

I knew who Winston was - my father had a set of his history of the Second World War books: six white hardbound volumes. I tried starting to read the first volume, "The Gathering Storm", several times, but the photos of tanks and battleships, and my father's atlas showing national boundaries before, during and after the war, were always more interesting than the text.

My father had been drafted into the Navy right at the end of the war, when he was 19. He never saw action, but the Navy shipped him across the Atlantic, then on a train across Canada to Vancouver, then on another ship across the Pacific and Indian Oceans to Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known). He served as a stores quartermaster in Trincomalee for two years, during which time the war came to an end.

My father has never talked much about his experiences, but they left lasting impressions: his love of steam trains (he still knows exactly what type of locomotive hauled the troop train across the Canadian prairie), and the fact that wherever I go, it seems he has been there already. Indonesia? ("We sailed through the Java Sea.") Sri Lanka? ("Do you mean Ceylon?") Egypt? ("We went through the Suez Canal on the way home.") He put together a scrapbook, "Around the World in 798 Days", filled with photos, tickets and other mementos. I hope he still has it - it would probably mean a lot more to me now than it did then, now that I've been to many of the same places.