Chapter 489 Big Girls Don't Cry:>20

• Min disappeared after a while, and I came upon her crying in the upstairs sitting room, weeping for her baby brother, my dad; of course, this really was the end for her, she would never see him again; she was too old, and her heart was too frail for her to fly, so today had been the final farewell for her, something I'd forgotten or never considered, I was so wrapped up in my own loss. Now it was my turn to hold Min and to comfort her. Eventually she stopped crying, but I could see the loss in her eyes, the pain of the permanent separation she'd undergone as well, and it helped to put my own loss and loneliness in perspective.
• We chatted, haltingly, at first, about their lives when dad was a small boy, how she and Doreen, teenagers themselves, had brought him up after their mother had died when dad was still just a toddler; his father had died in Korea just before dad was born, killed in the action at Imjin, Hill 235, during the valiant but doomed stand of the Gloucester Battalion, 'The Glorious Glosters', encircled, vastly outnumbered and eventually decimated. Dad's father was one of the thousand men killed or missing in action in just one night of fierce hand to hand fighting against the Chinese; of such last stands legend is made. I never knew this, and I felt a burst of pride that my family had played a part in such a famous and evocative battle...
• She told me how, after she'd married my late Uncle Alfie, they had become dad's surrogate parents, and how she and Doreen had been so angry with him when he joined the Royal Air Force and had been posted to Cyprus, because they both thought he was far too young to be separated from his family like that. I was fascinated, hearing family history for the first time, about dad and Elizabeth's mother, my grandmother, how she'd disappeared, and then turned-up one day with the baby girl and just left her with him, and disappeared again, never to be seen or heard of again; how he'd struggled to bring her up, a young man barely out of his teens, then meeting mum when Elizabeth was a teenager, and finally, how it had taken me, and then Lena, to heal the rift and bring them back together again.