Snapshot: Grandpa smoking on the beach

I found this picture in an album I inherited from my father when he died two years ago. It shows my grandfather, Edgar Wastell, my mother, Joan, and my Uncle Dick, on a seaside holiday in the late 1920s.

I did not know that my grandfather smoked cigarettes. In later life he always smoked a pipe. His favourite tobacco was St Bruno Flake. He would rub it on to a newspaper and then place it in his tobacco pouch. The day did not really begin until this little ceremony had taken place.

But I have seen that cigarette before, in pictures of soldiers in the trenches of the first world war. Grandpa joined the Royal Engineers in August 1915. He served on the Somme between May and September 1916 as a corporal in the "gas company" of his battalion. In September 1916, he was sent to Gretna to work at the munitions factory there. This posting undoubtedly saved his life enabling him to marry, have a family and eventually, grandchildren.

After the war he worked as an industrial chemist, making citric acid in Birmingham and Selby. He became a lay preacher in the Congregational church. Grandpa died in 1965 when I was 14 so I was never able to ask him about his war experiences.

Tantalising glimpses remain, however. I have a couple of photographs and some postcards, and I have his war diary. More tantalising still, Cecil Lewis, in his book Sagittarius Rising, writes about flying high over the trenches and seeing chlorine gas being released as he returned from an evening patrol. Was that Grandpa doing his job in the trenches below?

I will never know.

Simon Cochrane

Playlist: A shared joy of wandering outdoors

The Happy Wanderer by Florenz Friedrich Sigismund (1788-1857)

"I love to go a-wandering / Along the mountain track / And as I go, I love to sing / My knapsack on my back / Val-deri, Val-dera, / Val-deri / Val-dera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha / Val-deri, Val-dera / My knapsack on my back."

Dad's proposal to Mum was: "Would you like an engagement ring or a tandem?" She went for the tandem, but the inevitable happened and they married in 1947.

When I appeared on the scene, followed by my brother, the tandem was replaced with a motorbike and sidecar and at weekends we were taken on various excursions into the nearby Peak District and Yorkshire Dales to be introduced to the countryside they had discovered together on their tandem.

As bike-riding was off the agenda, we turned to Shanks's pony and so my brother and I (and our two dachshunds) were taken up various hills and valleys. One of my first memories is of being taken up Skiddaw in the Lake District, shod in my Clarks sandals and wearing a green plastic mac newly purchased from Woolworths in Keswick. No health and safety to worry about then.

Of course, we didn't always go along eagerly and these walks were punctuated with the inevitable cries of, "Are we nearly there yet?" At this point my mum would try to jolly us along and start to sing The Happy Wanderer, with Dad providing extra twiddly bits in the chorus.

Later, I found out that it was a popular song in the year of my birth, so perhaps I had heard it even before I was born. The song usually did the trick and we would be distracted for a while, just enough to reach a cairn or trigpoint.

The love of the outdoors has stayed with me, and my own children were soon introduced to the joy of travelling under their own steam with a knapsack on their backs. They have been fortunate enough to go a-wandering along mountain tracks in North America, New Zealand and other far-flung places, way beyond my parents' means, as well as places nearer to home such as the Jurassic coast and Snowdonia.

When Dad died five years ago, my brother and I had to go through the trauma of deciding the music at his funeral. We both immediately agreed on The Happy Wanderer. Not only did it bring a smile to the faces of the other mourners, it also reminded us of happy times together as a family under "God's clear blue sky", as the song says, and how it helped to make us all appreciate the countryside.

Margaret White

• We Love to Eat returns on 12 April

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