Robbie Burns was a Cameron Highlander who joined up as a teenager and survived the Western Front. A friend of mine knew him and arranged a meeting at the Special Forces Club in London. Mr Burns was 103 years old.

I was full of questions which – boiled down – amounted to: ‘What was it like?’ Mr Burns was lucid, smart and in full possession of his faculties; he was also charming. But he didn’t want to answer my questions. He politely changed the subject to one that really interested him: his career in cinemas since 1918.

My friend had foreseen this outcome and gave me a facsimile copy of Mr Burns’ autobiography: ‘Once A Cameron Highlander’. Signed by the author, it is a treasured heirloom. The book has since been published and is available from Amazon. Modestly and without dramatics, it tells how a Scotsman just out of school dealt with the mad world into which he was flung.

Robbie Burns’ reluctance made me wonder how people deal with memories of events which are abnormal - so far outside anyone’s ordinary expectations. I thought of my paternal grandfather, who had fought on the Somme and at Ypres: he said nothing at all to his grandchildren about the First World War, but instead taught us to recite ‘Three Blind Mice’ in Hindi.

For him, there was little worth remembering about the battlefields but much worth passing on from his days in India. He had been a ‘rough rider’ with the Royal Horse Artillery, breaking in new horses. This was what he loved – just as Robbie Burns loved cinemas – and he would talk for hours about horses he had known.

My mother’s father also survived World War One in the Canadian infantry. He said little about it, but spent the post-war years designing military cemeteries in northern France. This told us how he felt about his experiences in the trenches.

His daughter spoke not a word about her activities in World War Two. In her eighties she admitted that she worked at Bletchley Park, where thousands of code-breakers had all been sworn to absolute secrecy. With hardly any exceptions they took it seriously, even decades later.

My father talked about his RAF experiences non-stop. World War Two had interrupted his youth and changed the course of his life, as it did for millions, but it also provided him with a storehouse of yarns and quirky tales. He, too, said next to nothing about the war itself; he gave the impression that it was one long string of amusing incidents.

I have met many other ex-service-people – teachers, friends, colleagues – who have shown the same reluctance to re-visit their experiences of battle in conversation. It’s probably necessary, for most of us, to bury such memories or edit them into a form we can live with in later years.

Fortunately, there are exceptions: the authors, the writers of memoirs, and the old soldiers who consent to being interviewed for radio and TV. Without them we might be led to believe, yet again, that war is noble and heroic.