A pall of secrecy surrounds my Uncle Trevor. As children we were never allowed to mention him in my grandparents presence, and my mother rarely talked about him.

All I remember of him is a pair of hairy legs stepping over me as i played on the floor at a family gathering. He was my mother's younger brother and was, and always had been, the apple of my grandmother's eye. She adored him with a passion which excluded all else including my mother who was, in effect, brought up by her maiden aunt Ada, her father's only sister. Aunt Ada was a very plain girl and had never married; not I suspect, because nobody wanted her for she was charming but because she was unable to bear children.

Trev, from stories I've been told, seems to have been very charming and totally reckless, drinking to excess and bingling his car with gay abandon. There is a story that he was engaged to be married. After the engagement was broken off my grandfather, true to the family tradition, said to him, "I knew that you would never marry her; she had thick ankles." He did marry, however, a very pretty, fragile looking girl who became my godmother.

I never heard that he had a profession but perhaps he was destined to carry on farming, taking over from his father who was not a very strong man, being subject to regular blinding migraine headaches which kept him confined to his room for about one day in every seven. On the day before the headache he was grouchy and we all walked as on eggshells and the day after the headache he was grouchy and we still walked as on eggshells and the day of the headache..........

At the outbreak of WWII Uncle Trev joined the army - a surprising feat since he was severely short-sighted - and became an officer, rank unknown but I think that it was lieutenant. He was sent to New Guinea and died there - shot by a Japanese sniper. He left a widow and a three-month old baby son who died shortly afterwards from a mastoid infection which ruptured into his brain. His distraught widow cut all connection with the family and eventually made a new life for herself.

From that time on he was never mentioned within the family for fear of upsetting my grandparents and anything Japanese was absolutely taboo in the house to the degree that I still feel guilty when I buy Japanese-made goods.

Only after the death of my grandmother was the real manner of his death revealed. General Blamey visited the troops in New Guinea and during a talk to them accused them of cowardice. Uncle Trev, reckless to the last and determined to prove that he, at least, was not a coward ran into a minefield and was blown to pieces.