I WAS really proud recently that my other half was one of the volunteers who started to help the ceramic poppy art installation at the Tower of London come to life.

He and some colleagues from Vodafone travelled to the capital and spent the day assembling the flowers and inserting them in the dry moat at the Tower as part of artist Paul Cummins’ World War One commemorative work, Blood Swept Lands And Seas of Red.

The installation will gradually increase in size until a total of 888,246 ceramic poppies (which can be purchased individually, with proceeds going to charity) have been planted, each one representing a British and Colonial death during the conflict.

The final poppy will be planted on November 11, 2014.

Working on this project caused my husband to reflect on the war and to contemplate how hard it us for us, in our relatively peaceful times, to appreciate the struggles and sacrifices of the past.

It is very difficult to fully understand what it must have been like to be sent away, as a young man, to participate in what turned out to be a long and horrific war, all in the name of King and country.

My grandfather was in the Royal Navy in World War Two, but it was not something he discussed with his grandchildren at any length.

We grew up in a conflict zone – Northern Ireland in the 1970s, ‘80s and 90s – but it didn’t bear comparison to what happened to those millions of young recruits in the first half of the twentieth century.

I think that the first time that I recall really thinking about WWI was during English lessons at secondary school. The war poetry module has been taught for many years, obviously as a way of introducing this topic to young people today, so that they can try to empathise with the sacrifice of people not much older than themselves.

I will never forget my first reading of Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum est, his description of witnessing the effects of a gas attack on a fellow soldier.

The lines imprinted themselves on my mind and never left, and even though I grew to appreciate the different approach of other war poets such as Sassoon and Brooke, it was tragic young Owen who’d always remain my favourite.

Later at university, I chose to study Pat Barker’s peerless novel Regeneration, which deals with the work of the real psychologist W H R Rivers, who treated shell shock in an Edinburgh hospital during the war.

And again, it proved to be another way in to this period of the past.

It may always be impossible to fully grasp what went on, but art and culture really can help to initiate and sustain a degree of appreciation for the immense sacrifice.