The tales were relayed at my father’s knee. From an early age, I heard of his WW2 exploits aboard HMS Wivern, a V&W Class destroyer escorting the Atlantic convoys.

Like many men of his time, there were some things he simply would not talk about. All he would say was that war is hell, particularly when it is fought in your own towns and cities. I often forget that, when he experienced being attacked by wolf packs of U-Boats, he was still a teenager.

Donald Edwards had passed long before there was another war on the continent of Europe. What he would have thought of the fact that I went to Bosnia and Kosovo to report on them as a journalist, I will never know.

Would he have been worried about me? Would he have been proud of me? One emotion I know he would have expressed was sorrow that another such conflict could take place just two hours flying time from these isles.

Once the Balkan crisis had been resolved, I would not have been alone in thinking that Europe had surely seen its last conflict, certainly of my lifetime.

When the 1999 Kosovo war started, Vladimir Putin was acting Prime Minister of Russia. When it ended, he was President. He has been in power in one office or another ever since.

My father sometimes escorted convoys across the Atlantic which were bound for Greenock, which is as close as he got to Faslane, now the home of the UK’s Trident nuclear submarines. And while he dreaded the prospect of another war, he was never shy to tell me he was happy about the way WW2 ended. He was not squeamish about nuclear weapons.

The Battle of the Atlantic won, his ship moved to the Pacific, where he and his comrades prepared for the invasion of Japan – a potentially attritional bloodbath ultimately obviated by the atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Had it not, he said, he would probably not have survived the war to come home.

Back to Putin and his invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.

There are enough people reading this who are closer to the Trident trigger than I, who know the postures and protocols and who know precisely what is happening at Faslane just now and on board whichever Vanguard boat is at sea.

Putin has put his nuclear missiles on high alert. The heat has been notched up. I am happy that my father is not here to witness the prospect of what ended his war starting mine.