Just the one

Yes, I know there are four candles ( handles for forks ? for any Brits reading this ).
The Girl Guides and Brownies lit them as part of the Remembrance service this morning.

I'm thinking of a man whose existence I didn't know of until I started tracing my family tree. He was my paternal grandfather's cousin, David.

Just the one person in the thousands and thousands of members of the British armed forces who died in the second World War.
Just the one name on a war memorial on the south coast of England.

David was an air mechanic in the Fleet Air Arm. He died when his ship, HMS Avenger, was torpedoed near Gibraltar on 15th November 1942. Five hundred and sixteen men died. Just twelve men of the ship's crew were rescued.
He was just the one month past his twenty-first birthday.

I can't begin to imagine the terror he must have felt, or the awful grief of his parents who lost their only child.
Like me, they had just the one.

For my and her tomorrow, he gave his today.