You ever meet someone who was part of history?

At one point in my life when I was renting with a friend of mine in Bristol, we moved into a new house in a part of Bristol called Easton, which has a fantastic mix of culture, cuisine and some great pubs.

We moved in on a sunny day. I remember it quite well. As we were to-ing and fro-ing from a van with various bits of furniture and boxes, our new neighbour, an extremely elderly gentleman, caught our eye and said hello. I paused, arms full of various bits of kitchen equipment, to say hello.

This gentleman (who I subsequently learned, about six months later, was called Graham) introduced himself in the following fashion; "I'm 87 and all my friends are dead".

As introductions go, it's a pretty strong opener.

At the time I was working as a freelance web developer, and also at the time my best friend (and flatmate) who I'd moved in with was in the early stages of a relationship with someone who would eventually become his wife. As such, I spent quite a lot of time in this house on my own, doing too many hours of freelance work and not enough socialising.

As a result, I ended up striking up a somewhat odd relationship with my new neighbour. He would habitually exit his property mid-to-late afternoon with a glass of whiskey and a small cigar and watch the world go by. I soon learned this pattern of behaviour, and because of my own workload and lack of people to talk to, established an ongoing and minimal relationship over the wall of our front garden.

Graham had lived in that house since he was 11 years old. He'd grown to be a man in it, he'd courted his wife from it. His wife had moved into it and sadly subsequently died many years later without them having any children.

He had not done anything more than live in that house and been a driver of timber lorries for his entire life. In an age where we are seemingly universally driven by the fear of missing out, he had what you would probably call 'a simple life'. He'd never been on a plane. He'd never been abroad on holiday. But he had been in a war, and this is where it got interesting.

For most of the war, Graham had been a driver, of lorries. As the war was ending though, he was apparently re-commissioned by the Americans away from the British Army. They had need of drivers in Berlin where things had suddenly become, as you could probably understand, fairly busy.

Now the thing that really blew my mind, and the key point about which this article is written, is the fact that Graham was appointed to be a driver of the lawyers who were prosecuting Nazis as part of the Nuremberg trials.

Now you have to bear in mind this piece of information took me approximately six months to slowly uncover from Graham's conversation where he used few words and was not especially forthcoming about his life. Mostly we'd just shoot the breeze, comment on the weather and the local gossip.

I asked him, "What was it like being involved with such a key point in history? Something which most people never even get a glimpse of, let alone be directly involved with." in an astonished tone but actually using the words "What was it like in Berlin then Graham?".

He said, "Well, the Americans were very generous - we got lots of cigarettes and lots of chocolate, and we also got silk stockings which we could trade with the girls, I had a great time."