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...