‘Do make an effort, Frederick,’ my mother snapped. ‘Do at least pretend to be enjoying yourself, even if you are not.’

‘Leave the boy alone,’ my father growled, but he waved away the offer of a second bottle of Montebello.

All I could think about were birthdays past, when George had made me laugh and brought me presents and transformed an ordinary day into something special. A red and white top when I was five. A bow and arrow at nine. His final gift to me, a first edition of Captain Scott’s The Voyage of the Discovery Vol I, with its blue embossed board cover, sent from France in December 1915, tied up in brown paper and string.

That was it. The memory of that book. Having fought the truth of his death for six years, I gave in. There, in that plush and velvet restaurant, my mind came undone. Everything started to unravel. I remember how I put down my champagne flute carefully, deliberately, on the table in front of me, but after that, almost nothing. Did I weep? Did I disturb the fossilised ladies and military veterans by raising my voice or rolling my eyes? By breaking the porcelain or some other such pantomime? I can’t recall. Just the comforting haze of the morphine and the snow falling on London and the rattling journey by car as I was taken from Piccadilly to a private hospital outside Midhurst.

In the sanatorium, Christmas and the New Year of 1923 came and went without me. Only when spring came and the mistle thrush outside my window began its fluty song, did the world shyly come back into focus. An hour a day, walking up and down in the airing court accompanied by two starched nurses, then only one. Then, outings that lasted a little longer and were undertaken alone, until, at the end of April, the doctors considered I was strong enough to be released into my family’s care.

I was sent home. Father was ashamed of my lack of backbone, and was rarely there. Mother was no more interested in me now I was an invalid than she had been prior to my collapse. These days, I understand where her antipathy originated. I feel some pity for her. Having provided my father with a son, she had found herself obliged to go through the whole business again five years later when she’d thought all that kind of thing was over. At the time, when I was growing up, I just took it as read that there was something unlikeable about me and tried not to care too much about it.

Nonetheless, during the summer and autumn of that year, I recovered. But each tiny improvement in my health took me further from George, and in truth, his remained the only company I wished for. It felt like a betrayal to learn to live without him.

Life went on at its steady pace. The shadow cast by the War grew weaker. All those months and years, sliding by, one much like the other. And still, despair at the break of another dawn. Each morning, as light gave back shape to the futile world, a stark reminder of how much I had lost.

But in the Grand Hôtel de la Poste in Tarascon, at the fag end of 1928, I woke at ten o’clock, having slept right through the early-morning horrors, and without a weight pressing down upon my chest. I flexed my fingers, my shoulders, my arms, feeling them as a part of me, not something separate. Not something dead.

Again it is possible that it is only with hindsight that my thawing emotions are evident. Or that, having stepped back from the edge that previous evening, I see there had been some significant change in me. But I want to remember that I rose from my bed with a certain energy. Outside in the street, I could hear a girl singing. A folk song, or some tune of the mountains, which touched me by its simplicity. I flung wide the shutters, experiencing the snap of cold air on my arms, and felt, if not precisely happy, then at least not unhappy.

Did I smile down at the girl? Or did she, aware of my scrutiny, look up at me? I cannot recall, only that the old-fashioned melody seemed to hang heavy in the air long after she had stopped singing.

I was the sole occupant of the dining room. A plain woman served me warm white rolls and ham, with fresh butter and a coarse plum jam that was somehow both sweet and sour. There was coffee, too; real beans, not chicory ground with barley and malt. I had an appetite and ate with pleasure, not solely for the purpose of keeping body and soul together. I took my time with my pipe, filling the salle à manger with clouds of smoke that danced in the December light, and was tempted to stay another night. In the end, a certain restiveness within me demanded I keep moving.

It was a little after eleven by the time I had settled my bill, retrieved my Austin from the garage and put Tarascon behind me. I headed south towards Vicdessos. I had no particular destination in mind and was content to see where the road took me. My Baedeker recommended sites with splendid caves at Niaux and Lombrives. It was hardly likely they would be open to visitors in December, but I felt a stab of interest nonetheless. Enough, at least, to make me journey that way.

I followed the line of the river through a magnificent, archaic landscape. Mostly, I had the road to myself. I saw a wooden cart drawn by oxen, then an old military truck rumbled past. Its engine wheezed, its green tarpaulin roof was ragged, splattered by mud, and one of its headlamps was missing. An old warhorse, not yet put out to grass.

The mercury was falling but there was no snow, although the higher I drove, the heavier the canopy of frost that covered the plains. But I could imagine that if one came this way in late summer, there would be fields of yellow sunflowers and olive trees with their silver-green leaves and black fruit. On the terraces of the few houses scattered on the sharp hillsides, I could picture earth-coloured pots filled with white and pink geraniums the size of a man’s hand, and vines of red and green grapes ripening in the noonday sun. Twice I pulled over and got out to stretch my legs and smoke a cigarette, before continuing on.

The lush winter beauty of the river valleys of the Ariège, through which I had motored the previous day, here yielded to a more prehistoric landscape of caves and plunging cliffs. The rock and forest came right down to the road, as though seeking to reclaim what had been taken from it by man. The clouds seem to hang suspended between the mountains, like smoke from an autumn bonfire, and so low that I felt as if I could reach out and touch them. On every peak was a limestone outcrop that drew the eye. But rather than the romantic, crumbling chateaux or the remains of a long-deserted military strongholds I had seen in Limoux and Couiza, here were jagged clefts in the mountain face. Not the echoes of habitation, but something more primitive.

My mind was alive with memories of my classroom at prep school. Chalk dust and the yellow light of an October afternoon, listening to the master tell the bloodstained story of these borderlands between France and Spain. Of how, in the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church had waged war against the Albigensians. A civil war, a war of attrition that lasted more than a hundred years. Burnings and torture and systematic persecution, giving birth to the Inquisition. And to us boys of ten and eleven, who had not seen death, did not yet know what war meant, it was the stuff of adventure. The sunlit days of childhood, nothing fractured, nothing spoiled.

Later, a little older, the same master’s voice, telling of the sixteenth-century battles of religion between the Catholics and the Huguenots. A green land, he called the Languedoc. A green land soaked red with the blood of the faithful.

And in our times, too. Even if this corner of France had suffered less than the Pas de Calais, than all the ravaged villages and woods of the north-east, the war memorials at every crossroads, the cemeteries and plaques, told the same story. Everywhere, evidence of men dying before their time.