AS the old shoemaker sat in his armchair, the weight of 80 years at his back, who could tell what thoughts he was lost in?

His arthritic fingers curled over themselves like bananas and his legs had stiffened like oak.

Nothing unusual, no different to millions of other elderly people across Britain.

Yet if anyone was interested they would have known that one of those ageing legs was pocked on the shin with a bullet wound received in Palestine during the Great War.

Behind every person there is a story, if we only bother to look.

Here’s the shoemaker’s story.

In the threadbare days of the 1930s the First World War veteran found himself out of work and with no prospect of ever finding a job in his native Midlands. So, like others, he uprooted his young wife and family and went looking for employment.

He eventually found work in a shoe factory in the north country.

Tired of moving, and with five young mouths to feed, he and his wife rested their weary feet in a sturdy limestone council house.

The shoemaker was a ‘clicker’, his job to expertly cut the shoes’ component parts from raw sheets of leather. It was considered one of the most skilled occupations in the factory.

The role was so called because of the noise the tool made as it snipped through the hide.

The years slipped by, the children grew up, the shoemaker and his wife got on with life. It was hard, but they didn’t complain. They didn’t see relatives in the Midlands for 12 years, relying on the postman, instead, for family news.

In the blink of an eye retirement was upon them. Weary from their years of toil, they looked forward to seaside holidays and days in the garden.

But life can be cruel and the dazed shoemaker found himself standing by his wife’s grave, a solitary future unfurling in front of him like a carpet.

The shoemaker was my grandfather.

I’m told my arrival and that of subsequent grandchildren eased the pain and he found solace in his final years.

For now Chancellor George Osborne says he will not touch the state pension as he seeks to cut his welfare bill, although he is to scrap winter fuel payments to pensioners who live abroad in warmer countries, a move I cannot argue with.

But we must not allow anybody to raid the hard-earned benefits of our older population in the future.

There is always a danger that blinkered politicians view the elderly as some faceless mass.

We should remind them that behind everyone is a unique and personal story.

Just like the shoemaker.

Nicola Priest is on holiday