Last post for Charlie

CHARLIE Coalbrook had decided to leave his leg iron back at the hotel. He was walking around World War II graves with me and he was not keen to look like an early candidate for one. An old soldier, Charlie is particular about appearances and a leg clamp does not do much for them.

Even at 75 years of age, Charlie stuck to the worldwide standards of the British working man going out ''in company''. He wore a pin-neat light blue suit, bought for and only worn on the annual Hong Kong trips from his Southampton home. The shoes shone; the tie was neatly knotted at the neck and the September afternoon sun brought the inside of my 10-year-old Mazda to tin heat in the vestigial air-conditioning.

Charlie was too preoccupied to notice the temperature. We were rattling around the south of the island towards the Stanley War Cemetery, which he had not seen for a very long time. His busy head, balding with furrows of white hair around the sides, lurchedback and forth from the edge of the rear seat. Charlie is pretty conclusively deaf in one ear. You have to keep very literally on the right side of him and, from the set circumstances of a right-hand drive car, this was not proving easy.

In the front seat was, of course, Jack Edwards, the prisoner-of-war rights campaigner and living proof that you can put Duracell batteries in an old soldier and he will go on and on, like the commercial's rabbit, beating his drum long after the others havekeeled over.

I met Charlie through Jack, the Lech Walesa of old soldiers and incomparable self-publicist. The decision to take his campaign of attritional complaint into the heart of dithering, self doubting Japan itself was a stroke which expensively trained and paid public relations executives should sit at the feet of. Jack's more bread-and-butter assaults in Hong Kong occasionally cause journalists to dive for cover. Barely an old soldier can clear Kai Tak without Jack slotting him into Media Plan A. I saw him in Central one evening of late chaperoning an old gweilo soul in too-tight, Sunday-best suit, clutching a small ''de-mob'' suitcase. I strode for the fortuitous cover of a nearby public loo.

He could have spat blood and bullets to the last in the hills above what is now North Point MTR station - or he could have been captured evacuating sausages with the Catering Corps near Kuala Lumpur. You never quite know with Jack's boys.