I was 17 and working as a dishwasher in Richmond, Surrey, London. I was paid ten pounds a night, cash in hand and I worked the weekends. For me it was a fortune. I had just broken out from a horrible childhood, left at 16 and was very focused on being 100% independent from then on.

Down by the Thames riverside, just by Richmond Bridge, was a concert locale. Playing that night was the band “Doll By Doll”. I didn’t know of them, but had a vague impression that they were worth seeing. They played in a darkened hall and there were about a couple hundred in the audience. I hadn’t heard their music before and it was different, strange, loud, sad. I drank a couple of pints or so and became immediately inebriated, being a cheap drunk at the time.

The band ended their concert by descending into a sonic nightmare of echoing and repeating guitars, seemingly without structure. It was very trippy and went on for a long time. The lead guitar was so choppy that I felt as if helicopters were flying over my head. The lights were strobing and the air was full of smoke and colours.

Eventually they finished and I went outside into the cold, embankment night, drunker still. Next to the hall I spied a column with two stone soldiers on each side, guarding it. On the plinth below were inscribed the names of the war dead. On the ground in front lay many wreaths of red paper poppies.

I had been a Cub and Boy Scout for many years, forced to attend twice weekly. I had so many badges my shirt sleeves had room for no more. I didn’t enjoy the Scouts but had no choice but turn up to all their different events. This included church services, especially in the season approaching Remembrance Sunday.

I would stand in the nave in my uniform holding a Union Jack flag and someone would play Last Post on a bugle and the priest would talk of the Glorious Dead and “lest we forget”. Having grown up on Irish rebel songs I never understood the English fascination for glorifying war and I felt that the pageantry surrounding Remembrance services did more to recruit cannon fodder than honour the departed.

This may have been an unfair interpretation, but I never heard anyone condemning war mongers from any pulpit, just a constant justification for a terrible tragedy.

Spying the poppy wreaths and being drunk out of my mind, I was seized with an awful vindictiveness and I walked forward and started kicking at them. They spun and rolled across the dirty, wet ground in all directions.

A group of passersby spotted me and started shouting. “Can you see that?” “How disgusting!”. I sobered up rapidly and realised what a stupid and dangerous position I was in. I can’t remember if I felt any shame, although I should have, but I remember knowing that for any onlooker I was doing the most shameful thing possible.

I took to my heels and ran into the misty dark, not looking back.