Little more than six months ago we marked the centenary of the end of the First World War, and remembered those killed in the conflict. Less remembered are those soldiers who did not die, who carried back memories of carnage, and then tried to make sense of the future

Like so many who went off to fight, my grandfather had grown up in what now seems a kind of rural idyll. He spent his boyhood in Claughton, a tiny Lancashire village between the Calder and the Brock valleys, the youngest of eight children – four boys, four girls.

An album of old photographs evokes an apparently endless, carefree, Edwardian summer. Men with turned-up trousers and rolled-up shirtsleeves carry cricket bats and tennis racquets. Women in ankle-length skirts and pin-tucked blouses laugh from the shade of parasols. A farmer cuts a field of hay with a horse-drawn scythe.

Then we reach the summer of 1918. Cuthbert Fitzherbert, my grandfather, now 19, stands outside the family home, a young soldier, about to be commissioned into the Coldstream Guards. He looks straight at the camera, eager and smiling. So the next photograph comes as a shock. He is back in England, lying in an iron-framed bed, wounded. Again, he looks straight at the camera, but now his expression is faraway, haunted and desperately sad.