Let me tell you a story...

In the mid nineteen thirties, deep in rural Kent, a pretty young woman lived with her young son. The woman was unmarried, a terrible crime then - she was lucky not to have been sent away. She certainly considered herself lucky to have kept her child.

Presently a young man came across the young mother. He loved her, and adored the son. He couldn't have loved that son more if he had been his own flesh. To that young man, the small boy WAS his son.

The young man and the young woman were married. The small boy finally had a father.

The war started. The new father became a soldier, was sent away. He was stationed in the middle east, near a small town in Mesopatamia called Basra. He wrote long, long letters to his young son, who loved to hear about the places he had been and the things he had seen. The son new his father was coming home soon, because that's what his father promised him.

One day, while swimming in the River Euprates, the new father saw a man struggling with the current. Without hesitation, the new father helped the drowning man to safety.

But the Euphrates was too strong, and the new father was swept away and drowned.

Now the drowned man had a twin brother - they used to call them the giant and the dwarf because the drowned man had been so tall, and his twin so short. Between them, the twin and the mother wrote letters to the son, so that he would not know he'd lost his new father.

Eventually he knew his father had died, but he never knew where, or how.

The son became an angry child, an unhappy and rebellious youth, and, at length, with God's help, a loving husband, and an adventurous father of one son, and one daughter. The son grew up tall, and strong, and the daughter was clever with words, and people who loved her called her beautiful.

Many, many years later, another very different conflict started, and that tall, strong grandson of the drowned father was called to war. He went to Iraq, and built water pipelines for beleaguered towns.

He swam, one day, in the Euphrates, just outside Basra. It was very hot, and the water was very cool.

And over a year after the grandson came safely home, the family finally found out where the drowned father died, and how.

That grandson is my brother.

We only found out yesterday that it was Basra where my Grandfather died, saving another man's life.

How small is the world. And how beautiful.