My father passed away, aged 92, the day before the 70th anniversary of D-Day, 5th June 2014. My little sister, Anne and I began the heart-breaking task of sorting his belongings into three categories. Mementoes. Charity. Dump. Amongst the items placed in the former pile were his many photograph albums. Dad was a keen amateur photographer, even developing and enlarging his own images.

Flipping open one volume caused memories to flood. Every Easter Sunday, he would take our portrait seated by the piano, chocolate eggs clustered behind us. These annual images progressed in chronological order to reveal toothless smiles, braces, new teeth. So many hairstyles, mine ranging from ‘short back and sides’ to punk spikes. Anne’s, tomboyish to bunches to flowing chestnut tresses. Had our home ever caught fire, this album would have been the first item bundled into a bag.

These snapshots reminded me of our downstairs neighbour. When we were kids, the elderly woman we only ever referred to as Mrs Annandale would bake Easter cakes. What sticks in my mind was her attention to detail, the icing always festooned with tiny candles, mini eggs, and decorative chicks. I pictured the quietly spoken, silver-haired woman who also knitted me a green and white bobble hat for my football team, Hibernian, but once phoned my mother to complain after overhearing loud swearing in my bedroom when friends were hanging out.

Mrs Annandale spent her final months in a care home, occasionally making her way back to her old house to stand shivering on the doorstep in slippers and dressing-gown, perplexed as to why there were strangers living there.

But seeing those Easter photos made me think of something my mother told me about Mrs Annandale after I’d scoffed at that phone call. As a young woman, she served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. May, she said, was amongst the first females to enter Belsen concentration camp after liberation by British and Canadian soldiers in April 1945. The horrendous footage of emaciated humans bulldozed into mass graves was disturbing enough in The World at War TV documentary. But to witness this first-hand?

I’ve shown that album to my own daughter and she giggles at our fashions. But I also think of Mrs Annadale’s cakes, decorated by the same gently purposeful hands that attended to nameless survivors, murmuring gratitude in a host of foreign tongues.

And if there ever is a fire, its safety will be paramount. The memories it preserves are priceless.