At the time of writing the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War is rapidly approaching. Notwithstanding the often tumultuous events of the twentieth century, the war still enjoys a unique status as a watershed in modern British history, and interest in it shows no sign of abating. On the contrary, not least as a result of the continuing growth in family history, interest in grandfather's war and great-grandfather's war ensures that it lives on in contemporary society. And yet the Great War has become a part of history in the sense that the passing of the last men to have fought in it means that direct links have been severed. Indeed, time is taking its toll among the succeeding generation, the children of the Great War survivors who, with varying degrees of awareness, were witnesses to veterans’ ongoing engagement with and redefinition of that totality of events and emotions so glibly summarized as ‘the war’. When Rifleman Sydney Cadman was demobbed his first response was to catch up with the ‘normal’ pleasures and pastimes that he had missed out on in his late teenage years; he also vented his anger and frustration at what the war had done to him. But like the majority of returning soldiers, he was able to lead a more or less normal civilian life. Returning to Tottenham, where much of his family lived, he became the epitome of respectability in the inter-war years with his family and clerical job. There was little serious talk of the war in the Cadman household, but his wife and children saw two very different versions of it. The first was a farcical pantomime in which bullets were batted back with frying pans. In part this was for public consumption, a reassuring image for a wife and children who had no awareness of the realities he had experienced in France. In part, however, it was for his own consumption; an image that diminished the importance of the war, thereby allowing him to build a normal life, but also one that counter-balanced the appalling nightmares that haunted him throughout his life. The nightmares were part of a largely unspoken war of horror and loss, a war that was unacknowledged in Cadman's day-to-day life but one that never left him.