I had been on day three of the four-day audit and I was driving back from the Carlisle office when I heard a loud ‘boom’. I was on the A69 at about 5.30pm so I wondered if I had kicked something up off the road that had hit the car, or perhaps that someone behind me had experienced a tyre blow-out or a mechanical problem. I couldn’t see anything and my car was still driving OK, so I carried on. I just wanted to get home.

It had been a long day and I blamed that for the ‘low’ feeling and whatever it was that was making me feel ‘not right’. The journey had not been too painful but I was glad to swing the car onto the drive and turn off the ignition. Home.

Ken was already there, which meant the evening meal would be on the go and a pot of tea at the ready. That realisation would usually be enough to ease my stress level and calm me down but that odd feeling was still in the pit of my stomach and I didn’t like it at all.

As I kicked off my shoes in the hall I noticed something that made me feel worse: the white orchid that Kenneth had given me for Mother’s Day had dropped a bloom. Not only that but the leaves were turning brown and some had already fallen. I accept that house plants die and orchids are particularly fragile – I should know as I love them and had kept them for years – but the thing about this particular orchid was that it had flowered so well and for so long. Kenneth had had to give it to me well in advance of Mother’s Day as he knew he would be in Afghanistan in March. Everyone who’d seen it had remarked on its beauty and staying power.

I stood looking at it for a few minutes and felt quite sick. I took it as a sign of change and from that moment I felt restless.

I was tired that night but I couldn’t sleep. I should have been ready for bed and some good refreshing sleep but all I could manage was lots of tossing and turning. Even when I dozed off I was awake in minutes, with my head spinning.

It was then that I saw the headlights at the bedroom window.

‘This is the lunchtime news from the BBC:

‘The Army dog handler killed in Afghanistan on Thursday has been named by the Ministry of Defence. Lance Corporal Kenneth Michael Rowe, of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, who was 24, and from Newcastle, had been due to leave the front line the day before he died. He and his explosives search dog, Sasha, died after coming under Taliban fire during a routine patrol in Helmand. Lance Corporal Rowe had asked not to leave on Wednesday as he worried about his base not having enough search cover. The death brings the total number of British service personnel who have died in Afghanistan to 112.

‘Lance Corporal Rowe’s commanding officer, Major Stuart McDonald, said, “This unselfish action epitomises his professionalism and dedication to his job. I feel lucky to have known him and gutted to have to say goodbye.”

‘Kenneth Rowe and his dog Sasha were the first Royal Army Veterinary Corps dog and handler to be killed in action since The Troubles in Northern Ireland.’

So it was real.

I remember, we were standing in the kitchen with my brother, Gary, when I heard Kenneth’s name on the television. There on the screen was the photograph of my son in his dress uniform. The photograph that, until a few hours before, had been hanging, in its frame, on the stairs. My handsome son. My beautiful boy.

That was the moment when I let go.

If someone asked me to tell them exactly what happened next I would have only one answer – I’ve no idea.

I had motored through the previous ten hours on auto-pilot, with a huge heap of denial thrown in, but when reality was eventually allowed in it took over. My sister Lesley came over and decided I needed tranquillisers to calm me down, but I didn’t want to leave the house and the medication couldn’t be prescribed over the telephone so, bizarrely, I found myself sitting in the doctor’s waiting room in floods of tears. There I was, patiently waiting for my appointment and wondering what on earth I was doing there!

I’m sure the pills worked, taking the edge off whatever I was feeling, but I don’t think anything could have taken away the anger that rose inside me when the press started knocking on the door. Waves of well-meaning neighbours at the door was one thing, but having the media parked outside on the lawn was something else. We are very close and keep everything within our family unit – we solve our own problems together – but suddenly the BBC News had exposed our loss, our soft underbelly, and we felt vulnerable. Ken and my brothers dealt with the press on the doorstep. A simple ‘leave us alone’ seemed to work effectively, at least on the decent ones.

Me? I just wanted it all to go away.

The awful thing is, just hours before our nightmare began, Kenneth was supposed to be on his way home to us.

The day I drove to Carlisle for the audit Kenneth emailed me at 6am: ‘Hi, Mam. Who will be picking me up and what time?’ I remember saying: ‘Don’t worry about that, son, you just get yourself home. It’ll be me or your dad. I’m off to work now so I’ll ask your dad to call you back later to let you know who will be there for you.’

That was it. I had visions of Kenneth finishing his duties at Bastion then packing and getting ready to catch the next Helmand Taxi (as they called the Chinook) out to start his journey to RAF Brize Norton where the military aircraft landed and … home. Friday was to be the last day of my audit, which was great because, once I had thought about the timings, I knew that I would be able to be with Ken when he drove down to Brize to pick up Kenneth. I wanted to see our son so much.

This was July and I hadn’t seen him since the Deployment Party in February. Kenneth had enjoyed being with his mates and his family and it was great to meet the people he would be spending the next few months with in Afghanistan. They would be his ‘family’ until he came home again and they had seemed a great bunch of lads.

I will never forget what Kenneth was wearing that night – a salmon-pink T-shirt. It wasn’t my cup of tea and he probably knew that. It was funny to me because Kenneth was always so smart; he thought about everything he wore and his thick dark brown hair was always gelled into place. He had told me that a lot of his Army friends had thought he had Mediterranean blood but he always said he was proud to tell them that his dark hair and olive complexion were thanks to his half-Hong Kong Chinese mother. I liked that.

The morning after the party there he was at breakfast – in the same T-shirt. I had to ask him if he had anything else to wear, which he knew I would at some point. But of course he was travelling light and was meeting friends later so I understood when he said, ‘Sorry, Mam, this is all I’ve got, but you won’t forget it, will you?’ It’s true, that shirt made a lasting impression on me. I sometimes forgot that he was 24 years old, but then he was always ready to remind me that he was no longer my little boy.

It was one of those mornings when we knew we would have to say goodbye to Kenneth later and I was keen to have some breakfast with him before he announced that he needed to be somewhere else to meet his friends. ‘What do you want for breakfast, son?’ his dad asked, as he was probably ready for something himself. The expected answer came back: McDonald’s.

It wouldn’t have been everyone’s choice but it was always going to be Kenneth’s, especially as he knew he wouldn’t be tasting anything like that for a few months. At breakfast I discovered that it’s difficult to eat when your throat is so tight you can hardly breathe, and then all too soon the moment had come – breakfast was over and the goodbyes had to begin.

Kenneth hugged all the family, then his dad and then me.

‘I love you, son,’ I said. He hugged me back. ‘I’ll write as often as I can and send parcels. Let us know if you need anything,’ I continued. He started to cry. ‘Now stop it or you’ll start me off,’ I scolded him. His hug tightened.

‘I just want you to know that I love you, Mam.’

I’m not sure if that last hug was tighter than normal or that’s a trick my mind has played on my memory of that morning since then, but if I think about that moment I can still feel Kenneth’s arms around me.

‘Now just don’t be stupid and volunteer for anything’ I said. ‘Promise me you won’t volunteer and you won’t put yourself up front. Promise me, Kenneth.’

I remember him walking away saying: ‘Right, Mam. OK, Mam …’ But as I watched him from behind I saw him drying tears, first with one hand then the next. My beautiful brown-eyed boy in his salmon-pink T-shirt.

It’s my lasting memory of him.

Of course, after that our contact was down to the usual and very welcome flurry of ‘blueys’. Those pale-blue airmail paper letters are still a lifeline in Forces’ families. I’m sure none of us knows what we would do without them. The emails and the phone calls are great – as long as they can be sent and received. As Kenneth said when he was in Afghan, ‘Emails … can’t get them in the desert. Still waiting on that terminal you plug into the sand!’

Letters were always precious and there was a massive comfort in seeing a bluey drop onto the mat. Kenneth’s spelling was atrocious and he knew it. But it didn’t matter one bit because, to me, receiving a bluey meant he was alive, able to write a letter and thinking of home. Parcels and letters to Kenneth often arrived around five days after sending and some wandered around following ‘the dog handler’ as he moved between camps, including the main base, Camp Bastion, and the various Forward Operating Bases (FOBs). But there was never any doubt that the post would be delivered to him somewhere and sometime.

Every letter was a window into our son’s world in Afghanistan and every anecdote came with a handful of sand.

I remember in one of his letters he told his dad about how he had to ‘dig in’ to protect himself and the bomb dog he was working with then, Diesel, against yet another biting sandstorm. He had told us before how, after the blistering heat of the day, the storms blew in fiercely during the night ‘… like a blanket of sand hitting you for about six hours non-stop. We woke up looking like something from f…ing Kentucky Fried Chicken!’

Kenneth was deployed on Operation Herrick 8 in March 2008 and whenever I read and re-read the letters, just to have him with me for a second, I realised that while I was here missing him he was there but always reaching out to home. If there was one thing Kenneth always made sure of, wherever he was, it was that we had his address. There were few letters that didn’t contain a shopping list but I soon realised that a shopping list was a way of guaranteeing that there would be a parcel to look forward to. Sweets, biscuits, baby wipes, boxers and … socks. I have no idea how many pairs of socks I sent to Afghanistan but then I had no real idea how important something as simple as a pair of socks could be out there.

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