Sir, – Reading James Porter’s Farm View last week, reminded me of my maternal grandfather, Jimmy Bain Moir, a Caithness man.

As a Cameron Highlander, he fought in some of the major campaigns of the first world war, before being wounded, captured by the enemy and after treatment in a German field hospital, spent the rest of the war on a German farm. My grandfather had nothing but praise for the Germans he came across at that time. He felt they were decent, hard working people.

He was demobbed in 1920 as a sergeant and returned to Scotland still a young man and settled in west Glasgow, a city he grew to love. He got employment in Glasgow Corporation working in the docks. He married and had two daughters, the oldest one being my mother.

When the second world war started, my mother and her younger sister were evacuated to a farm in

Dumfries-shire and my father, who was then in his teens, was growing up on a neighbouring farm, which was how my parents originally met. My grandparents had an Anderson shelter dug in to their back garden and I remember playing in it with my sister, as children, in the late 1950s.

I have often wondered, as the docks started to get more frequently bombed resulting in my grandparents having to retreat in to their Anderson shelter, what kind of emotions my

grandfather must have felt, as the German bombers droned overhead, then the thunderous explosions as high explosive bombs rained down on the docks.

I wonder what his thoughts were as he would have remembered the hell of shell fire in the trenches during WW1 – the war that was supposed to end all wars and then to have the madness of another total European war rain down bombs on he and his wife on their home territory.

If it did trouble him, you would certainly not have known. As children, I remember him as being great fun. He would show us the busy docks, have some fun dodging the trams and we visited museums and the beautiful parks – even in the late 1950s, Glasgow was a wonderful city.

One can only guess at the feelings of our European friends who suffered the humiliation and brutality of having their sovereign territory over-run by warring neighbours and their very real desire that it must never happen again. They will do whatever it takes to make the EU succeed and understandably so. As far as I can see, the only real flaw the EU has is that the nations have tried to make it run even before it had learnt how to walk.

The nations of Europe who were over-run by warring neighbours will do their utmost to make sure the lunacy of total European war stays confined to the history books.

John Maxwell

Soham,

Ely,

Cambs.