WE HAVE SOME undiscovered treasures in the constituency. I met one last week.

I received a request to call on an elderly constituent in Grantham. I regularly do this when people are too frail to come to my surgeries. I found a remarkably fit 88 year old, not entirely without some of the burdens of age, but bearing them with great patience, and living an independent life, alone now with his dog after the death of his beloved wife. His daughter calls in every evening.

After we had dealt with the issue he had wanted to talk about, I asked some casual questions about his life. As a result of his answers, I was glued to my seat for the next thirty minutes; it would have been for far longer had I not had other pressing appointments.

Mr Henry Rivers – I have his consent to name him – is not merely a veteran of the Second World War. He is a veteran of Changi jail in Singapore, of Japanese POW and work camps, of forced marches, and of the terrible ordeal of our imprisoned troops who were forced to work on the infamous China-Burma railway and the Bridge over the River Kwai.

He has survived war, brutality and beatings, starvation, cholera epidemics, and even an initial Japanese decision to shoot him as a cholera carrier.

Thank God he is alive and well and living amongst us.

I have no space for his full story here. I hope that schools or clubs or groups interested in history will have a chance to hear it for themselves. But I leave you with a thought.

Very few of us in my generation, or those younger, have ever faced, or can even easily imagine anything like, such ordeals. We have therefore never penetrated the depths of human fortitude. We have not seen the range of suffering, or confronted the life-deciding choices between self-sacrifice and selfishness, and between self-discipline and despair, which Henry Rivers went through. And saw others going through.

To talk to someone who has undergone that, and come through with honour, un-embittered and smiling, made me feel both humbler and encouraged by the inextinguishable capacities of the human spirit.