ANNIE McCulloch was twenty-nine when she died.

Her daughter Sarah was one month old. The heat fused their bodies together and those bodies melted into the metal springs of the bed.

Her husband William died nearby as did Martha who was nine and Samuel who was five.

My grandfather, Bob Alexander, never forgot that image as he stood in silence over the bed. The bombs deafening. His fire brigade uniform soaking wet.

This was 6 Ingleston Street. It was the second night of the Greenock Blitz. The whole of the east end was alight.

The distillery on Baker Street, Dellingburn Power Station, the Sugar Refinery all alight. A bomb struck the mains on Belville Street. Water was being pumped from the Victoria Harbour. Tenements were being destroyed.

James Liddell died that night too, in a garden in Hillend Drive. He was the boss in the East End Co-operative. He left the shelter at the back of his house on Bawhirley Road to go out and have a look. His head was blown off. His son, Evan, was in the same fire crew as grandpa.

He got permission to go home. He sorted out what he could and then returned to the front line. The mourning would wait! Or so it goes!

Saturday past was a bright day. The last day of summertime.

As Provost I laid a wreath at the Blitz Memorial in Greenock Cemetery and then another, against the stone at the mass grave of many of the victims, further up the hill.

There was only a small group of us.

The Minister, the Rev Jonathan Fleming, spoke at both places as though addressing hundreds.

He gave us an historical background and readings to match. It was poignant, it was emotional, and it was personal.

When I was serving my time with my grandfather in the family’s butchery business in the 1970s there was pretty much an unwritten rule that at this time of the year you would be wearing a poppy on your white coat.

I can now see why grandpa wanted this.

It was certainly not any sort of political gesture or even an effort to be seen to be socially correct - like the way BBC presenters wear them on their shirts nowadays.

It was quite simply a tribute. A tribute to his friends that hadn’t returned from the war. A tribute to Mr Liddell who died in a neighbour’s flower bed. And, very possibly, a tribute to Annie McCulloch who died in her own bed holding her daughter tight.

‘And man, whose heav’n-erected face the smiles of love adorn. Man’s inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn!’ Those lines of Burns have loomed large recently.

Still it goes on. The industry of war. Some call it defence. The obscenity of war in Europe and in the Middle East. The young conscript of whatever nationality cut down. Face in the mud or the dust. The madness of it all. The collateral damage. A parent's tears. An advancement of the human race. Do you really think so?

Lest we forget!