I have a (paper) file, 'Strange But True', of stories that I pick up occasionally from newspapers and magazines. I've not really maintained this zealously online, but here's one that's too good to miss. Why do I sometimes collect these stories of extraordinary coincidences? Teaching literature, particularly novels (no surprise there), frequently leads to students saying — 'that's ridiculous/incredible/implausible', when it's "just" a matter of coincidence. Ours is a world where miracles are anything but extraordinary (apparently!), and these stories, whipped out and flourished before a disbelieving class, have a sobering effect. This one's from yesterday's Daily Telegraph:
A soldier's 60-year quest to return a fallen comrade's rosary beads to his family has ended - with his widow's next-door neighbours. After numerous searches and nationwide appeals, the relatives of Pte Tom Jackson, who died in 2000 at the age of 83, have traced Pte Stanley Cloughton's family. In an extraordinary coincidence, it emerged that neighbours of Pte Jackson's widow, in Darlington, Co Durham, were related to Pte Cloughton through marriage.
In an emotional meeting yesterday, two of Pte Cloughton's descendants, Tom Cloughton and Gladys Dodd, were presented with the beads and met Pte Jackson's widow, Vera, 83. The two privates served in the 8th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry in the Second World War and were stationed together in France in 1940. The rosary was thought to have been exchanged at Arras. Pte Cloughton asked Pte Jackson to keep it safe because he thought his comrade was more likely to survive. Pte Jackson never saw him again but kept up the search until he died. Mrs Jackson said: "Tom always wanted to find the family. I really couldn't believe it when we found relatives after all this time, but especially the connection with next door. …
The Jacksons later learned that Pte Cloughton had been killed during fighting in Tunisia on March 22, 1943, at the age of 24. He is buried in the Medjez-el-Bab war cemetery. When Mr Jackson died, his widow continued the search. After fruitless appeals through newspapers and magazines, a letter printed in her local newspaper was seen by chance by Mrs Dodd, from Darlington, a distant relative of Pte Cloughton. She contacted Mrs Jackson, who said: "I couldn't believe that her brother, Tom, is married to my next-door neighbour's daughter. All this time and the answer was on my doorstep.
It's worth repeating here what John Forster, Dickens' friend and biographer, wrote in his The Life of Charles Dickens:
On the coincidences, resemblances, and surprises of life, Dickens liked especially to dwell, and few things moved his fancy so pleasantly. The world, he would say, was so much smaller than we thought it; we were all so connected by fate without knowing it; people supposed to be far apart were so constantly elbowing each other; and to-morrow bore so close a resemblance to nothing half so much as to yesterday. (Volume I, Book First, V)
