WE HAVE A NEW COFFEE BAR HERE AT The Times — aren't you thrilled to know that? I haven't drunk the coffee (I like to make my own) but one side-effect has been that I've looked again at the memorial plaques that commemorate our colleagues who died in the First and Second World Wars — they had to be moved to make room for the café and are now easier to see, as you don't stand with your back to them as you wait for the lift.

There are 36 names on the plaque that marks the Second World War; there are 65 on the plaque for the First. Perhaps they don't seem like great numbers; but in some ways, I've always thought, smaller figures, such as these, are more manageable to consider. A list of names that can be read, or read aloud, and not a vast, overwhelming collection of millions. It's possible to look at the board and wonder what their jobs were, and indeed it would be possible to discover the answers.

My own father survived the Second World War — he was a pilot — and I know how lucky he was. Others were not; Damian Whitworth's piece (see link below) arose from a conversation I had with my husband, who teaches at Coopers' and Coborn School. One night at supper last week he told me about a project he was working on with his students for a Remembrance Day assembly. He had pulled the school magazines from the time of the First World War out of the archive, and seen just how many of the old boys (Coopers' is mixed, now, but of course it wasn't then) had not survived that conflict.

His idea was to make the idea of loss particular for his students; and to make them more aware (as we can all be more aware) that when we say “old boys” it's somehow the “old” that seems to get stressed; but in truth the crucial word is boy. It still astonishes me to think that my father was 19 years old when he was flying a bomber over the Pacific Ocean; less than half my age, and yet would I ever consider that I was “grown-up” enough to do such a thing? I doubt it.

Novelists often set themselves the task of wondering how they might manage such a test; Sir Howard Davies, in his statistical analysis of this year's Man Booker Prize entries, noted that no fewer than 14 novels were set during the Second World War; another nine made up the category of “other wars” — four in the First. What stories lie behind the gold-painted names I see as I wait for the lift?

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