In my previous post about my mother's death, I showed my father's year of birth as 1923. I had a good reason for doing that - documentary proof, no less.

I still have my father's Army paybook. I was aware that the date of birth shown is incorrect - the day and month are wrong, which I know from so many years of celebrating my father's birthday. But that wasn't a surprise. He told me that he'd lied about his age in order to get into the Army. I assumed he'd just shifted the date a few months.

He had to try three times to get in: the first time the recruiting sergeant booted him out for being obviously too young. The second time he was rejected on medical grounds (a stomach problem). The third time, and under the watchful, but this time more tolerant, gaze of the same recruiting sergeant, he succeeded.

He joined on 19 Nov 1942, signing up for seven years with the Colours and five in the reserves.

According to the Army records, he was 19.

I found it intriguing that even the Army wasn't that sure. His Certificate of Service, given to him on his discharge from the Regular Army shows a different date of enlistment - 14 Oct 1942 - and his year of birth as 1924. I also have a Release Leave Certificate, issued in 1949, that shows his date of enlistment as 19 Nov 1942, which has been struck out and rewritten as 14 Oct 1942.

And so I decided to do a little digging.

Annoyingly, most of the services available online for checking birth records demand a fee. Although they are exploiting government records, paid for by our taxes, they want you to pay for accessing information that should be freely available. The UK Government, in the form of the General Register Office (GRO), is working towards making many of these records available online. In the meantime, there's an admirable effort in the form of FreeBMD (where BMD means Births, Marriages and Deaths), which has already put millions of records online for free. The information may not be as detailed as the paid-for services, but it did allow me to pin down the year of may father's birth - 1925.

So, when he joined up he was actually 17. At that time, the minimum age for conscription was 18 (and had been 20 at the outbreak of war).

No wonder he looks so young in all his army photos.

My mother died last night. And I have a lot of work to do in deciphering what that means for me - none of which I intend to share here.

But it did make me think about what we take with us when we go. All that unrecorded history.

My mother had a lot to say, and never said it.

We know a little of it: her memories of seeing Hermann Göring drive by in his open-top Mercedes; of the Gestapo turning up at her doorstep demanding to know why she wasn't in the Hitler birthday parade; of the bombing of Hamburg.

And there were painful memories of the early years living in a London suburb, babe in arms, her British husband posted back to Germany, surrounded by hostile people with fresh memories of the Blitz.

Yet there must have been so much more, now gone forever.

The picture shows my father, John (19231925-1991*), mother and my eldest brother Harry (thankfully still with us). I think it must have been taken in 1947 in Hamburg.

  * UPDATE: My father's year of birth has been somewhat clouded in mystery - see 'Lying about one's age'.

One of the things that sold us this house was its age. Our fantasy was to live in a castle — ideally, St Mawes in Cornwall. We didn't quite achieve that, but our house was built around 1500, using massive granite blocks in many places, so that parts of it have the feel of an ancient fortress. Indeed, local legend has it that the building was used as the village stronghold in times of trouble.

The massive size of many of the granite blocks, particularly around the doors and windows, suggest that the original owner of the house was wealthy. This is supported by the amount of carving — again, around and over the doors and windows — and the size of the fireplace, which is about 2.5m wide and nearly a metre deep.

In fact, we've sort of met the original proprietor. On each side of the main fireplace is a carved head — one of our favourite features of the house. At least, the carving on the left is of a head. We thought the carving on the right was unfinished — there are no facial features and the corbel above it is also cruder than that above the head on the other side. Then a local historian put us right.

The head on the left of the fireplace is that of the 'seigneur', the master of the house, which is why his corbel gets the more ornate treatment. Once there would have been a phallus beneath the head, but this has typically been removed in a later, more prudish time. The carving on the right commemorates the lady of the house — not by portraying her face but by representing a lower, more intimate part of her anatomy (see second picture, left).

We've always known that there were two more carved heads in the house. They are in the bedroom, again either side of a fireplace (though most of the rest of the fireplace, including corbels and chimney, is now long gone). But, in the eleven years we've owned the property, we'd only glimpsed these carvings. That's because they were behind a massive bed with built-in wardrobes that came with the house.

Yesterday, we dismantled the bed, prior to selling it and got our first good look at the two characters who've been sharing our home for more than a decade.

The head on the right, complete with beard (see first picture, top of page) is the best original feature in the house. And his phallus seems to be intact! We presume that the face on the left (bottom pic) is the mistress of the house. It's actually a face this time, so it's hard to tell, especially with the nose missing. I suggested to Trish that we can tell it's a female because her mouth is open. This wasn't well received.

In 1966, the Royal Mail (or was is still the GPO then?) issued a commemorative set of stamps showing the Bayeux Tapestry. It took pride of place in my stamp collection, not because of rarity or value — it had neither of those — but because I was entranced by the vividness of the story it told.

I longed to see the real thing, but knew it would never happen. The tapestry was held in a foreign country, far away.

Now I've lived in that country for several years, just a two-hour drive from Bayeux, yet somehow never got around to fulfilling that ambition. Until today.

We had the excuse of visiting friends, holidaying in Bayeux. So we bought the tickets and joined the August queues, steaming not from the heat but from the torrential rain that has been the signature of this miserable summer.

And then we entered the dim, cool, U-shaped room to be guided through the story by the recorded voice of a man who sounded like he worked for the BBC in the 1950s.

And, 41 years later, I was entranced again. The tapestry is cruder than I expected. My only prior experience of it had been in the concentrated form of postage stamps. It had none of the richness I associate with tapestry. But the story is driven by that blunt vivacity, that bawdy enthusiasm that so enlivened medieval life and art. There is no shying away from the ugly reality of combat: the tapestry is almost exultant in its depiction of mutilated bodies. Nor is there any pseudo-liberal conscience. It is, after all, the earliest depiction we have of refugees and what might arguably be called a war crime (civilian bystanders having their house torched).

As an historical record, it is unashamedly partial, a 70-metre propaganda piece. As entertainment — and its annual exhibition in medieval times must have served that purpose, at least in part — it is the best comic strip I've seen.