I grew up surrounded by stories about the First World War. My dad's mum was a nurse, his dad a soldier who'd been one of her patients. My mum’s father was a pilot, and her mum, who was fourteen when the war broke out, told me about watching the newly recruited soldiers marching down the high street of the London suburb where she grew up, through the cheering, flag-waving crowds and past the shops selling toys and vegetables and ladies’ hats. One young soldier had a rose in his buttonhole which he threw to her. My gran never knew what happened to him, of course, but she kept that rose until it fell apart many years later. She also remembered going into the kitchen at home and finding the woman her parents employed to help with the housework crying over the sink. Her son was away fighting in France and she was washing the long all-in-one underwear which had been sent back to her in a bag of laundry. It was caked in mud right up to the armpits.

I always thought the strangest, saddest thing about that story was that these young men were fighting in the most terrible war the world has ever seen, miles away from home in a foreign country and in unimaginably horrible conditions - but they sent their washing home to their mothers....

Although these stories made the war feel very real to me (frighteningly real in some ways - for years I had a recurring nightmare that I was a soldier in the trenches), they were all second hand. They belonged to other people. I never heard the voices of the people who had actually been there.

Until a few years ago.

I’m very glad that Fred did write those letters and that somebody (I like to think it was his poor, worried mum) typed them out and preserved them so carefully.

Because Fred’s letters are the reason I became interested in the boy soldiers of World War One and found out about Valentine Joe.

Valentine Joe Strudwick was a real person. He was born on Valentine’s Day 1900, in Dorking, Surrey. His dad was a gardener and his mum made money by doing people’s washing. Joe left school at thirteen and worked for his uncle who was a local coal merchant. And then, in August 1914, everything changed. War was declared with Germany and, like my grandfather, Joe joined up.

The date was January 1915 and he was fourteen.

My grandfather was lucky. Before his regiment was sent overseas to fight he caught pneumonia from marching around in the snow in his kilt. The army doctor who was called out to see him realised he was underage and sent him home to London.

Joe wasn’t lucky.

After a few weeks’ training he was sent to Belgium where his two best friends were killed and he was gassed. After recovering in hospital in England he went back to the Front and on 14th January 1916, exactly a month before his sixteenth birthday, he was killed.