There was a definite autumnal feel to leaving Weert this morning – a chill, a crispness. Through fields – asparagus, spinach beet, maize – to Roermond and then, once over the border, on a very stony path through woods that took all my concentration.

I hadn’t quite realised – I mean, fully taken in – how long the liberation of Europe took. From the D-Day landings in June 1944 to VE Day on 8 May 1945. That’s a very long time to wait for a war to end. We crossed the border east of Roermond and came across a memorial to men in this still-occupied part of the Netherlands shot for evading the forced conscription of labour by the Nazis in December 1944. I recalled visiting Otterlo, where the last battle in the Netherlands between the Allied forces and the Nazis took place in April 1945. It also links to the former Javelin barracks that we passed as we left the wood: an RAF base in the decades after the war.