From: Peter Hitchens - In Memoriam
Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’.
By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid.
I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it. I don’t have much of this myself, so I recognise it (and envy it) in others.
I have a memory which I cannot place precisely in time, of the two of us scrambling on a high rooftop, the sort of crazy escapade that boys of our generation still went on, where we should not have been.
A moment came when, unable to climb back over the steep slates, the only way down was to jump over a high gap on to a narrow ledge.
I couldn’t do it. He used his own courage (the real thing can always communicate itself to others) to show me, and persuade me, that I could.