`I closed the front door, idly switched on the TV, walked into the kitchen and filled the kettle.

`Before it had boiled a grey man in a grey suit appeared on the screen and started relating even greyer news.

`If ever there was a harbinger of doom, civil servant Ian McDonald embodied it.

`At an excruciatingly slow pace - a tempo which has lived with me to this day - the man from the MoD somberly revealed that HMS Sheffield had been hit by an Exocet missile.

`For the first time the horror of war was about to affect me directly. As a reporter with The News, the previous four weeks had been a period of intense excitement.

`In Portsmouth I'd watched the mood of the city switch from despondency as dockyard workers were served with redundancy notices, to elation as the task force was cheered from the city helped by the same men whose jobs were about to end.

`Everyone thought it would be a walkover - the `might' of the Royal Navy and the other services against a ragbag bunch of Argentinian conscripts.

`No one really thought it would come to much.

`And then the nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror sunk the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano.

`Two days later Sheffield's life was ended.

`As I toured the city that night a palpable air of despair hung in the atmosphere.

`On the naval estates groups of wives huddled in rooms with the lights switched off not knowing whether their men were dead or alive. Many were too afraid to answer the door.

`Some spoke to The News. They were desperate for any information from the South Atlantic.

`Their stories were heart-rending. There was the wife from Southsea whose husband was just finishing his last tour in Sheffield. He had written from Gibraltar full of excitement at the good times ahead.

`But when she opened the letter some uncanny sixth sense told her it would be the last time she heard from him.

`As the war progressed the newsroom at The News Centre became a focus of attention for the world's media.

`Through our naval contacts we were able to establish much that was happening 8,000 miles away before it was officially released.

`It was like that on May 25 when HMS Coventry, another Portsmouth-based Type 42 destroyer was sunk after an air attack.

`For the second time in three weeks the city had the stuffing knocked out of it. We knew about it first and published the news before it was confirmed officially.

`Again the city was left mourning its war dead.

`For all the relief and joy across Portsmouth when the task force returned, there was always the memory of the men at the bottom of the South Atlantic who would never return. The wives and sweethearts who would never stand on a quayside again to welcome home their men from the sea.

`Seven months later I was privileged to fly to the Falklands with the relatives of those who died.

`The stories they told were as moving as the immaculate lawns surrounding the pristine graves at San Carlos war cemetery, hewn out of the rock by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

`As a journalist I was lucky to be intimately involved in covering a war even if it was not at the sharp end.

`But I was also able to see at first hand the dreadful futility of it all. The wasted lives and indelible physical and mental scars it leaves on people forever.'

Memories
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