Songfacts®:

• A sensitive man, Oldfield wrote this song about his conviction that he is still living with the fallout of his grandfather's traumatic experience in the First World War. "I never knew him," he told the Daily Telegraph, "So I hired a company to find out about him. It turned out he was a great character before the war but came home a very different man. My mum was one of ten or eleven kids and all the children born after the war had problems like hers."
  
  " I wanted to see if I could spread my senses in the place he was," Oldfield continued. "I traveled around Ypres and the battlefield museums and I saw the graves of his regiment: the Royal Munster Fusiliers. And I could feel it. Still there. It's a blessing and a curse for those of us who have this extra sensitivity."