STANDING ON A ROOFTOP in Chamchamal, a dismal ragged squab of a frontier town in northern Iraq, I first hear my mother talk of feeling “pain”.

The sky is the yellowish grey typical of Kurdistan’s early spring and the war has just begun: in the far, far distance comes the tremulous reverberation of a coalition air strike.

No stranger to the sound of background violence during our conversations my mother is unfazed, her voice clear and calm across the satphone. We are talking about goings-on in Somerset when the word makes its debut intrusion.

“Ant, something very odd has happened,” she says, after a pause. “I have had this intense pain in one side of my face. Strange. It’s gone now.”

She briefly describes a fleeting but severe succession of painful sensations that have occurred over the previous few days, sometimes stabbing, at others burning, that appear to move around her right cheek.

I am instantly uneasy.

My mother’s pain threshold is phenomenal. She was a war-generation child and experienced all that that involved: rationing, relative poverty. The home of her youth had been without electricity. Infrequent baths were taken in a tub by the hearth, using water hauled up in buckets from the stream. She can deal with hardship, she can cope with cold.

For a time in her life she had been a single mother bringing up two young children. Latterly, she had become a nurse specialising in the care of elderly and terminally ill patients. Tough, strong, selfless, but a very gentle person; “pain” is an anomaly in her self-description.

“Uh, well you’ve got to go and see the doctor, Mum,” I say finally, uselessly. “Promise me you’ll go, right?” (She didn’t do pain and she didn’t do doctors either.) We say goodbye. Little do I know how desperate a fugitive time will be.

OSTENSIBLY courage was a male-dominated preserve in my family. My mother’s father, a quiet biomathematician who had volunteered to join the RAF at the start of the Second World War, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross after a mission in the skies over Germany. Her grandfather, a one-eyed beau sabreur multiply wounded in a series of conflicts, won the Victoria Cross on the second day of the Somme.

My parents had divorced when I was 6, and in the absence of a father figure I grew keen to follow the precedent given to me by these men. I had wanted to see if I was brave in action and (if so) to be seen to be brave in action. Bravery was storming a machine-gun post. Bravery was being cool under fire. Bravery was going back to rescue the wounded.

Bravery was proved, exclusively, in war and made one a man.

Aged 18 I had joined the Army. Seven years later, unfulfilled by the experience of the first Gulf War, which had allowed me none of the initiation I desired, I hitchhiked to Sarajevo shortly after the start of the conflict in Bosnia and started to report. I had been loitering in someone or other’s war every year since and had never had much satisfaction from my quest, discovering my own bravery to be an irritating quarry, hard to hold captive , capricious and requiring new challenges, fickle to circumstance and with vaguer rules of its own.