Last week I decided to go back and discover for myself what exactly had happened. I went — in a borrowed Willys jeep with a historian called Jerry Whitehead — to the site where Dad had landed on September 18 in a Horsa glider. The field is unchanged and forms part of a farm on the outskirts of the village on Wolfheze, some eight miles from the bridge. Dad had been due to arrive the previous day but the line towing his glider had broken, ripping into the side of the aircraft.

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He’d apparently scrambled around until he was able to find another glider and managed to join the drop on the following day.

The gliders were made of wood and canvas; not much to protect against the fire from the Germans, who quickly realised what was happening. Those who survived the flight faced a further hazard when landing. Gliders needed to come in to land at speed, yet with so many landing in such a confined space quite a few collided with each other. Many of the pilots were crushed when vehicles and heavy equipment in the cargo holds of their craft broke their tethers and smashed into the cockpits. I saw aerial photographs taken on the day of the drop. They showed broken gliders zigzagged all over the field.

I loved the jeep — particularly its handling and its surprising turn of speed, the smell of dry canvas and the distinctive sound of the Go Devil engine that transports you immediately back in time. There it is, in every war film you’ve ever seen. If the Market troops (Market was the airborne bit of Market Garden) had had the jeeps they were intended to have, the Arnhem bridge might not have been a bridge too far.

From the landing site at Wolfheze, my father made his way, probably on foot, towards Arnhem to join his men, who were already in contact with a German counterattack. They could see the bridge and got to within 2,000 yards of it, when they met fierce fighting.

The enemy were attacking from the high ground to the left of them and from the river to the right. This was later described by my father in his diary as “the South Staffords’ Waterloo”.

He took 400 men in and came out with just 100. His next orders were to hold the high ground at a place called Den Brink. It was to prove suicidal; he lost a further 40 men in just 90 minutes.

Jerry and I visited these sites and reflected on what had happened as we sat in the gardens of the building that the soldiers had named “the Monastery”. It is now a modern art museum and has a serene calmness to its setting that belies its not-so-distant history.

We were unable to get to the top of the hill at Den Brink as it is fenced off and now houses a satellite mast, visible from all parts of the city. It is not hard to see why the British had wanted to capture such a great vantage point. We retraced Dad’s tracks as he was ordered to pull back with his men to the village of Oosterbeek, a few miles along the river to the northwest of Arnhem. It was here, in this now quiet and prosperous suburb of Arnhem, that my father won his VC.

As the British were forced to surrender the bridge, so the Germans were able to turn all their attention on the remaining allied forces that had pulled back to Oosterbeek. There followed a siege that lasted six days and ultimately resulted in a retreat over the river of all those who were fit enough to make the crossing. The wounded stayed to be taken prisoner along with a few brave medics and padres who elected to care for them.

My father had been badly wounded during his battles at Oosterbeek. His face and legs were full of shrapnel, his eyes blackened (he suffered temporary blindness when a PIAT anti-tank shell blew up in his face) and his eardrums were perforated. He apparently declined medical treatment (morphine was in short supply), stuffing pieces of field dressing in his ear to stop the bleeding. His trousers had been pretty much blown off. The thought of a man with a bloody and blackened face, a rag protruding from his ear, with shredded trousers exposing bloody legs, running around shooting at Tiger tanks from the hip with a PIAT, was taking me back to Hollywood. So why didn’t Harrison Ford play him in the film? Dad didn’t even have a walk-on part.

Despite my father’s unholy appearance during the battle, I am told he made his men find clean shirts and have a shave before they retreated over the river. He didn’t want them to retreat in disarray. I think it helped them to restore some pride in themselves.

As we stood in the quiet residential street at the site where my father had famously “bagged” his first Tiger tank — one of three that day — Jerry read out the citation that accompanied his VC.

As he did, I found tears rising and a lump developing in my throat. The citation told of my father’s boundless energy and bravery, motivating and inspiring those around him, putting any concerns for his own safety behind him while he took on an overwhelming enemy seemingly single-handed.

I wondered, had the people living here now in the new and shiny 21st-century architectural glass boxes any idea what happened here just over 60 years ago? Actually, quite probably they did. The battle sites around Arnhem are all marked with the Pegasus emblem of the airborne forces on the pavements. There are numerous plaques at the various sites, telling of the battles that were fought there. The cemetery and graves are maintained beautifully. Children from the local school look after individual graves which are tended with poppies and wooden crosses at each anniversary.

The old jeep looked weirdly incongruous, standing in this modern and decidedly civilian neighbourhood. I’d like to have taken it home but it would look out of place alongside the XC90s and Discos and Jeep Commanders — the modern descendant of the Willys — on the school run each morning. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t like modern 4x4s. It’s just that I doubt they will be looking as good as the Willys jeep does today, in 60 years’ time.

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