By a cruel twist of fortune, even by wartime standards, my wife's sister learned after VJ Day that her husband, who had been taken prisoner of war in Singapore and sent to Japan, had been killed in an accident in the railway yard in Tokyo. The young widow was left to bring up her one child.

My wife and my sisters had all had children during the war. They were just a small part of another generation of war babies.

My thoughts wandered around a great deal as the realisation of peace began to be felt. In particular, perhaps because there was a child of my own to think about, I remembered the Tamil children of Penang as they bathed naked in the river on the day of Thai Pusam. Then there were the children of Kuala Kangsar, particularly Avuly and his friends who visited me often in my bungalow garden. There was my Chinese cook-boy, Ah Chang, his daughter Ah Lin, and the baby - I never discovered his name. The beautiful, graceful teenage wife of my sais Hussein, and all the other lovely young girls who glided past my bungalow, some of them giving me shy smiles as I acknowledged them, they stirred my memory. Then there was the wedding celebrated in the Sultan's Istana Iskandariah, where the young - very young - couple sat motionless all day long, dressed in fairytale exotic costumes, whilst the guests filed slowly past. My recollection of the evening when I paid homage to the couple was prompted by the fact that I wore an English full evening dress suit, white tie and tails, European weight, in the hot tropical night made hotter by the heat of burning torches and wick lamps. There was a young Malay mother who dropped her baby from its sling, somewhere in Johore, and the poor young mother's cries were accompanied by scoldings from the crowd. There were the children stranded in the flooded coolie lines on the Kulai Road in Johore, and those we had to rescue from their homes on Singapore Island on the day the Japs landed only a few miles from their kampong. There was two-year-old Jenny, coming to England with her English parents when they got away from Java.

The teenage schoolboys from Muar on the west coast of Johore, who served in the Medical Auxiliary Service and who had volunteered to fill their vehicles with medical equipment and evacuate to Singapore for further orders, reached the Island just before the Japanese invaded it. If they went to Alexandra Hospital they could well have been amongst the victims of the Jap wholesale massacre there on 14 February 1942.

There was some grim satisfaction to read in 1946 that Tomoyuki Yamashita, Commander of the Japanese 25th Army, who had observed the seige of Singapore from the tower of the Sultan of Johore's Istana, had been convicted of war crimes and was executed in February.

The discovery of the German concentration camps, notably Auschwitsch, Buchenwald and Belsen, revealed the unspeakable horror inflicted on women and children. One child kept a diary, and her name will live for ever in World History. Her name was Anne Frank.

Anne Frank was the daughter of a German Jewish couple who moved to Amsterdam before the war to run a spice manufacturing business. The family were amongst the first to leave Germany in 1933, when Hitler was coming to power. In 1937 they moved into an old canal house which had a workshop on the ground floor. Anne was then only eight years old.

As Nazi persecution of the Jews gathered pace, the Frank family moved into the attic of the tall canalside building, and for two years during the war they lived there in hiding during Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. They were eventually betrayed, and were sent to concentration camps. Anne, her mother and sister, went to Auschwitz, and later she was sent to Belsen. She died there in 1945 at the age of sixteen. Only afterwards was her diary published - a record of her period of hiding in the attic in Amsterdam. The diary was translated into English, and a play was written based on the diary. Many years later that play stirred my emotions, and it will probably span the years as a timeless piece of drama evoked by the courage and inspiration of a child of the war.

The rundown of operations had started on the East Anglian airfields by the time the Germans had surrendered, and after VE Day preparations were put in hand for closing many down. Another posting took me to Fakenham in charge of yet another assortment of fields and depots. Only through first-hand experience of the wartime occupation of East Anglia by Army, Navy and Air Forces could one possibly appreciate the extent to which the area had been covered, virtually saturated, the agricultural land requisitioned and overlaid with sprawling acres of concrete, with shabby corrugated hutments and with T2 hangars - great barns clad with thin corrugated iron sheets, tall enough to cover four-engined bombers. Every two or three miles or so there was an airfield with its bomb storage compound, its dispersed hard standings on which stood the huge bombers, and the living sites dotted around the perimeter. All this was to be cleared away or put to other use. Some very good farmland must have been destroyed over the six war years. At Halesworth the Hall, which became an Officers' Mess, boasted an asparagus bed and some mature fruit trees. I often wondered about Halesworth House and its grounds after I left. At Attlebridge the task of restoring the fields to the farmers and smallholders must have been a daunting one; and I know that much good land was contaminated by weed-laden soil brought in for airfield construction.

Innovation and experiment had caused excitement and danger in the build-up to the saturation bombing of Nazi-occupied Europe. There was FIDO (Fog, intensive dispersal of) - a highly dangerous but effective method for dealing with East Anglian fog when aircraft were coming in to land. Pipes were laid along the edges of a runway, and fuel was run along to flare points. At the time when touchdown was imminent the flares were lighted, and the bombers had to land and run in between two lines of flame and black smoke. I cannot recall any aircraft being caught in the line of ground flares, which says a lot for the nerve and skill of aircrews returning from a night's operation. Then there were the black, paper-thin gliders, which were used for mass airborne landings towards the end of the war; one-way tickets only on those craft. There were the small brick cubes of RAF hush-hush radar installations, with odd rectangular curved aerials turning slowly on the roof; commonplace now, but exciting and mysterious in those days.

Soon it was all to end. The Americans left, departing almost as quickly as they had arrived. They left memories, lots of broken hearts, some memorials, and a lot of mess to be cleared away. The RAF did a bit of the tidying up, but they too were in the process of rundown. In the Officers' Mess it was at times distressing to hear the conversation between senior officers. These much-decorated heroes were trying to come to grips with the future, but there was no future for them. It was the same of course for the civilians. The humble labourers, the girls from the village, the dispossessed smallholders, all faced redundancy, and the future was unknown. The euphoria of being part of a back-up force for triumphant airmen was over. The rest was anticlimax.

The mundane and desultory job of shutting shop was soul-destroying, but for me at least there was a chance to return to local government, and in 1946 AMWD let me go.

The return to local government was traumatic. Staff levels were low, and standards were not good. Until the lads were demobbed there was not going to be much that could be done, and when they trickled back they were like fish out of water. After a few months in a town near my home, another opportunity came for me, and my wife and I took our baby daughter to Buxton.

Buxton went to sleep every winter, except that there was a good Operatic and Dramatic Society, and an excellent Repertory theatre. During the all too short summers we could play tennis on the courts in the lovely Gardens, with open tournaments to attract national players. In those postwar days a small orchestra played in the Gardens tearoom as one ate toasted teacakes or sticky buns. We were regular playgoers, with a Hawtrey company of actors whose names were soon to be famous when television came within the reach of all. Our life in those days was all far removed from war - except for the austerity. There was still rationing, accompanied by price controls. The Labour Cabinet even looked austere.

One of the demobbed soldiers to work under me at Buxton was a big, bluff young ex-Major, who had had his leg blown off in the Middle East. He had been a TA officer, and so was called up early in the war. Pete Smith was his name, and his artificial leg was crude and heavy and ungainly. No doubt the lighter and more sophisticated appliances of later years improved his lot, but when I knew him Pete was in constant discomfort and even pain. On the frequent occasions when frost glazed the steep Buxton streets, I helped him home to his flat, and he fell often as his dummy leg slipped under him. He never complained.

The first priority in those days was new housing, including all the infrastructure of roads, sewers and utilities. At least we were creating something for the future. Local authorities banded together at Housing Association conferences, pressing for relaxation of financial and material controls - even timber was rationed at that time - and in those days there emerged the disastrous programme of non-traditional house construction. There were not enough bricks, timber was in short supply, and so ugly utilitarian dwellings came on the market, made with precast concrete panels, even storey-height insitu concrete walls, aluminium and steel, slabs of gypsum plaster - all were pressed on local councils by manufacturers and the Government, in an attempt to reduce the housing backlog. Looking back, it was a sort of madness.

As a young family we were introduced to the marvels of the Welfare State, a wonderful concept which suffered at the hands of the unscrupulous. The children were well provided for, there being free concentrated orange juice and all manner of essentials. There was also the Child allowance, amounting to just a few shillings a week - but only when the second child was born. Like all good ideas, it was flawed, but my wife and I benefited from the National Health Service emphasis on caring for mothers and children. It was the Prime Minister himself, Clement Attlee, who virtually created the word - he certainly brought it into common usage - the word which became part of our vocabulary, when he attacked the scroungers and spoilers of the system. He described them as spivs.

Free prescriptions, generous rates of unemployment benefit, all sorts of allowances - these were easy and rich pickings for the spivs; but even today one can only admire the vision and political courage which led to the implementation of the 1942 Beveridge Report; Beveridge stressed that 'organisation of social insurance should be treated as one part of a comprehensive policy of social progress.' The result was the launching of the Welfare State. That was the measure of courage and of confidence in the future. Only people flawed it - people it was intended to help.

The problems facing the politicians and the population were gargantuan. There was no aspect of life without need of urgent and massive reassessment and restoration. Industry, food production, education, housing, reconstruction, the economy - all were of pressing urgency. Men and women returning from service life had to be returned to civilian activity; merely kitting them out in demob suits and paying them a service gratuity was not enough. Circumstances were very different from those following the 1914-1918 war. No sticking an old tank on a plinth in Colne's Hyde Park this time; emotions and heroics were for the past. The world was war-sick, and the one thought was for a new and better life. Winston Churchill was piqued when he lost power to Labour under Clement Attlee - but the people wanted to get away from the past; they wanted a new start.

Younger readers could find some difficulty in imagining the scale of the problems facing servicemen returning to civilian life after the war. Jobs had gone, men and women were being unloaded from the services on to the labour market, with small gratuities and demob clothes, but precious little else. For instance, there was Stanley Peek. He had been a weaver, but he was called up at the age of 19, in December 1939. He served no less than 6½ years in the Army, the most significant part of his service being with the 13th Anti-Tank Regiment in the 2nd Division. He was wounded in action in Italy, and his unit travelled just about everywhere where tanks were in action - Europe, the Middle East, Africa - name the war zone, and 13th Anti-Tank had been there. He was demobbed as an NCO. Stan knew a lot about soldiering, and he had to put it behind him when he returned to civvy street. He did so by going into a small firm in Colne, on the clerical staff.

Stanley married my wife's young widowed sister, to become the devoted stepfather of the little girl whose boy soldier father was his cousin, and a friend and fellow footballer in prewar days.

Oh yes, there were a few happy endings even in those postwar days.

In retrospect, looking at the whole broad picture of postwar reconstruction, it seems to me that Britain made a pretty good job of it, spivs and racketeers notwithstanding. The Government aimed for full employment, and houses, hospitals, roads and major industries became part of a massive programme. Education was reshaped under new legislation, and soon it was realised that stronger planning control was going to be needed if expansion and development were not to get out of hand. Party politics were really nothing to do with what was going on; in fact the parties were trying to outdo each other with promises of more houses, factories, hospitals and schools. Britain this time was really going to be a land fit for heroes to live in.

Certainly living standards are different today; for when TV and video, washing machines, fridges and freezers are regarded as essentials, and a wide range of foodstuffs is available - conveniently packaged and even pre-cooked according to preference - it would be difficult for many people nowadays to imagine British prewar life without tea bags, granulated coffee, tumble driers, washing liquid, sliced bread, paper hankies and other disposables, kitchen rolls, credit cards, ballpoint pens, plastic bags or nonstick cooking utensils. Pre-war Britain had no motorway system. There were no supermarkets, no shopping trolleys to dump in the river or by the roadside. There were no aerosols - my first encounter with an aerosol was at Halesworth US Air Base, and that was a khaki-green army issue Freon aerosol fly killer. Self-adhesive plastic tape was unknown. Frozen packaged food had not been thought of; in fact the launch of frozen food took place whilst we were in Buxton, when a firm entertained important people to a lunch at which every course was deep frozen. Pre-war Milk was sold loose or in bottles, but not in cartons. Cartons capable of holding liquids had not been invented. There was no gas central heating, there were no electric fridges or freezers, no electric kettles, no tumble driers, not even rotary clothes lines. Prewar television was confined to a few thousand sets in the London area - a crude pioneer scheme which was closed down on 1 September 1939. Transistor radios had not entered the scene, because transistors had not been invented. No ghetto blasters in those blissful days; the beaches and the countryside were quieter prewar than they are today. All those wonderful things, plus personal stereos, computers, discos, hi-fi and jet planes took their places in the brave new world over a period of something like 20 years after war ended. Yes, life was quieter, less complicated, in prewar Britain.

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Meanwhile, all over the Empire on which once the sun never set, the people of those lands were seeking change also. In spite of protestations to the contrary at the time, the Axis conquests in the Far East and in Africa - though short lived - put paid to the British Empire. One by one the lands coloured pink on the World Atlas changed into a patchwork of large and small independent states. It would not be too unfair to say that few of them were ready or able to run their own affairs. They had insufficient resources of political skill, education or finance to enable them to meet the challenges of independence. From being parts of the Empire, many merely became part of the Third World, and so they have remained, with extremes of climate, inadequate natural resources, disaster-prone, and without the protective umbrella of Empire, for all its faults.

Outstanding as an exception was Malaya. Before the war there had been a strong base of business and commercial expertise, and the Chinese and Indians must be credited with this. Apart from the need to partition the country, and the decision to include Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo to form Malaysia, with Singapore a separate state, and in spite of a period of communist insurrection, all of which delayed the process of self-determination until the early 1960s, Malaysia and Singapore emerged as a success story. Rich in tin and other minerals, in rubber and other natural resources, and strategically placed at the gateway to the East, Malaysia and Singapore must be the envy of many of their partners in the Commonwealth.

Whilst the peoples of the British Empire sorted themselves out, with varying degrees of success, the European countries were split up as the result of the defeat of Germany by the Russians, Americans and British. The Russians under Stalin took absolute control of the eastern half of Germany, and within the new East Germany was Berlin, itself split in two as former wartime Allies set up armed watch in the Cold War. The Nazi War criminals were tried and convicted, and Germany tried to come to terms with life under occupation by the former Allies. Germany was very much a melting pot of power politics in the four years or so following VE Day, and there was a tense test of strength between the Western Allies and Russia when the Russians began a blockade of Berlin in June 1948. Only the massive airlift of essential supplies across Russian-occupied East Germany to Berlin's Tempelhof airport demonstrated the determination of the Allies to beat that blockade; the Russians gave way, and the parties stepped back from the brink of War.

After a few years the war-weariness gave way to a new optimism, but for many the scars would remain for ever. It was over that period that I developed an aversion to the celebration of anniversaries. The feeling became clear to me when Victor Smith sent a telegram of greetings to mark the anniversary of our escape from Singapore. Then, as the years passed, others expressed their feelings about anniversaries of wartime events. We had Battle of Britain Sunday, D-Day, VE-Day, VJ-Day, and many others, adding to Remembrance Day. November 11th, the Feast of St. Martin the Soldier, gradually diminished in observance. No longer did everything stop for two minutes at eleven o'clock in the morning; in fact Remembrance Day itself was moved to the nearest Sunday to November 11th, and the solemn occasion was left to the churches to observe.

The impressive War Memorial in my home town of Colne was built to honour the dead of the 1914-1918 War. The Roll of Honour contains some 679 names. After 1945 the Roll of Honour for 1939-45 was added. There are just 117 names on that. One can only guess why; but it seems to me that many grieving relatives saw little purpose in seeking to perpetuate publicly their private memories. On the other hand, perhaps they were sick of war. In any case, many servicemen - and women - have died in other conflicts since 1945. So have Police and emergency services personnel, and civilians, particularly those caught up in terrorist incidents.