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On May 8, 1945, victory was declared over Europe and communities in Britain celebrated their relief and joy at the end of the worst conflict in human history.

But in a terraced house in Lythgoes Lane - a poor, working class street in Warrington - tough mum-of-six Jane Bishop sobbed at the breathtakingly cruel year she had faced.

First it was her brother; lost at sea when his ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine en route to Burma.

Worst of all, six months after that and only weeks before the end of the war, her precious eldest son who "loved to sing like Bing Crosby" was killed inside a tank in a German forest.

(Image: Liverpool Echo)

Caught between the gender roles of the time and the practical needs of the war effort, Jane worked at a munitions factory making shells for the front-line while running a household of five young children; Ernie, Flo, Tommy, Reg and Arnie.

I only have faded memories of my great-grandmother as serious, straight-talking old Nana Bishop, who once told my dinosaur toy obsessed three-year-old brother: "What are you playing with them for? They're extinct."

But the tragedies that blighted her life, which ended in 1994, remain in my family's collective consciousness thanks to her son, my grandad Reg Bishop, who is a lover of stories.

The fate of his oldest brother, Corporal Gilbert Massey Weaver of the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards, has drifted into dinner table conversation countless times over the years.

Ahead of Remembrance Day, I took the chance to sit down with Reg and have a proper chat about the day Jane's heart was broken by a gentle, but direct, handwritten letter from Gilbert's commanding officer.

Thinking back to 1945, when he was a 10-year-old schoolboy, he tells me: "The worst thing for me, when it was VE Day there were big celebrations, a bonfire and things like that. I thoroughly enjoyed all the celebrations, but then I went home and my mam was crying.

(Image: Reg Bishop)

"You never saw them cry. They were tough, they didn't really have a very easy life, working class women, then."

After being conscripted to the South Lancs Regiments as a 19-year-old in 1939, and reporting to Peninsula Barracks in Orford Lane, Gilbert later joined the Royal Signals and finally the Royal Dragoon Guards.

He survived the D-Day landings and the Battle for Caen in 1944, where he was wounded and later mentioned in dispatches for bravery.

His luck finally run out when he and his crew suddenly came face-to-face with a formidable German Super Panther tank, in the Kleve Forest area of Germany, on February 25, 1945.

When soldiers were killed in battle the protocol was for their commanding officers to inform the War Office, who would then let the families of the fallen know.

But it was common for officers to write directly to the families themselves as a mark of respect, and to short-circuit the bureaucracy of government processes.

(Image: Reg Bishop)

Reg says it was a chilly morning when the news of Gil's fate reached Lythgoes Lane.

He tells me: "All I know is that me mam, she was off work. She worked in munitions on lathes making shells, but she was off with flu or something, she was in bed ill.

"This letter arrived. We used to fight me and our Arnie, he would have been about five or six then, we used to fight to take the letter up to my mam, thinking it was a letter from our Gil.

"But it wasn't, it was a letter from his commanding officer, a handwritten letter.

"My sister, our Flo, noticed there was something different about it because it was a brown envelope. She said 'don't, give it to me that'.

"All I can remember is wondering what it was all about, because I knew our Flo was looking serious. It had on it 'Her Majesty's Service' you see."

(Image: Reg Bishop)

Reg recalls that he did not initially feel the shock and sadness you might expect - instead he looked forward to telling his friends.

He said: "At first it was something to brag about, lads at school were all my dad's this and my dad's that.

"You have got to remember there was no television in those days, very little radio, you only listened to certain things on the radio.

"Occasionally you would go to the cinema, but most things would happen around your family. And the supermen of the days were your elder brothers or your fathers.

"And I thought well, Derek Roberts, who I used to go to school with, has not had a brother killed in action. I told him, and to me it was something to boast about."

Predictably, after being bundled off to nearby St Anne's school, Reg says he was hit by the enormity of what that letter really meant.

He said: "It wasn't until a moment in school that morning, I remember suddenly realising, that I had never heard my mother cry before.

"It was something that working women were like, they were tough."

"I remember looking through the window in the roof of the school, and suddenly realising what had happened - he was dead, I wouldn't see him again."

(Image: Liverpool Echo)

In a sign of the stiff-upper-lip rigidity of the times, young Reg did not even think to tell his teacher what had just happened when she realised he was not paying attention.

He said: "When I was looking through this window in the roof I was miles away. And this teacher used to start off sometimes in lessons in arithmetic with the times tables.

"She would look at just one person and say 'two sevens'? then 'three sevens'? and so on, and then it got to me and she said 'seven sevens'? But I was away.

"And next thing I know she's rapping me on the knuckles and telling me 'what's the matter'? Seven sevens? You're not paying attention are you? Seven sevens?

"I remember saying '49', I will never forget that seven sevens is 49! And then she said come out to the front and she said 'now remember you have got to pay attention in class' and she gave me the cane, only one, and it hurt."

(Image: Liverpool Echo)

Another remarkable portrayal of the matter-of-fact way grief was treated then comes from how Reg's dad, factory worker George was told the news.

While the women, including Gilbert's young fiancé, Elsie, mourned at home, George was left to carry on his shift completely oblivious - because Jane did not want him to lose a day's pay.

Reg says: "My mother wouldn't let us tell my dad while he was working, because if they come home from work they wouldn't get paid. She said let him work, wait till he gets home.

"But the strange thing is, and my dad swore by it until the day he died, that when he got to the bus stop this man, somebody that knew him, said 'your son's been killed'.

"But they couldn't understand how he could have known."

Reg's memories of Gilbert are of a super-hero big brother who would come home on leave with a rifle and a bayonet, and chase his giggling little brothers around the kitchen table.

To the delight of his siblings, Gil would save his chocolate rations and take them home in his kit-bag to dole out.

But Gil knew the odds were stacked against him - telling his sister that trying to dodge that killer bullet was like 'dodging rain' - and he was a young man who had seen horrors the vast majority of people could not imagine.

(Image: Liverpool Echo)

Only a year before his death, Gil was wounded in the Battle for Caen after his troop of tanks was hit by a series of shells.

Reg says: "They used to call Sherman tanks 'Tommy cookers', because they were petrol driven and when you hit them with a shell they burst into flames and everybody inside got frizzled.

"The whole row of tanks were hit, one after another, and some men got out, some didn't. I remember him telling me one man, he tried to get out, he was in the top of the tank, and a piece of steel cut his legs off.

"Gil said 'I will get you out' but they all had side-arms, and the man shot himself."

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Gil rushed to help his other wounded comrades, and was trying to drag a man to safety when a bullet took a small chunk out of the back of his neck.

Reg says: "He was dragging this man and he felt something hit and he could see blood and he didn't know where it was from. He could tell his neck hurt, and he was dragging this man to a shell hole to get away from gunfire.

"He said all he remembered was a sergeant saying 'give him me Gilly, I will see to him, you look after yourself.' And the next thing he woke up in a field hospital."

(Image: Liverpool Echo)

Gil was sent home to recover, but despite some of his colleagues advising him to "bugger off to Ireland" he duly reported back for duty and returned to the frontline.

Haunting memories shared by Gil, that Reg only heard after the war, included the tragic mistakes during the D-Day landings that led to the deaths of hundreds of British troops.

Reg says: "He told a lot of tales that I didn't know until after the war. He would tell things to our Ernie and our Flo, about landing at D-Day (in a tank) and running over their own soldiers.

"The drivers were that scared that when a shell went off in front of them they went straight into reverse, and infantrymen were hiding behind the tank and they would run over them. He said 'I think we killed more British soldiers than Germans.'

(Image: Reg Bishop)

"And the first time I ever heard anybody else say that, because it would have been all kept hush hush, was men from his own regiment on the 50th anniversary of D-Day telling the same thing."

Gil never made it out of his twenties, but 74 years later there are still souvenirs of his extraordinary life.

Reg has a couple of faded old photographs. Two show Gil, youthful and boyish in his uniform, beaming at the camera.

The third shows what is believed to be the tank he died in behind four wooden crosses, marking the temporary grave site in Germany where his comrades buried him.

Perhaps most touching is the small, glass heart containing the metal Oak Leaf emblem awarded to Gil for his bravery in the Battle for Caen.

Reg says during the war, smashed glass from battered fighter and bomber aircraft landing at the nearby US air base in Burtonwood was often thrown on the tip by 'the Yanks'.

Locals found the toughened glass was good for making jewellery and trinkets, and Jane enlisted a work colleague to fashion the glass into a necklace.

Reg has a whole anthology of fascinating stories from his remarkable childhood.

He sits back and sighs, saying: "The things that happened, it's hard to explain to young people now."