In this morning's paper, there's a story about the 70th anniversary of Dunkirk and how one member of Durham Light Infantry is to have a plaque unveiled in his honour in the French village of St Venant.

A couple of years ago I told how in May 1940, he was buried in an unmarked grave in a field beside the bridge he had died defending. Seventy years later, starting with a photo kept by his sweetheart, his brother pieced together all the clues and found his resting place.

We obviously couldn't tell the whole story for a second time in the paper, so I thought some might find it interesting to read it here: ================================ "I can still remember the day in 1946 when Lukey Wood came home to Wingate," says George Rodgers. "We were ushered out to play. When we returned, we could see that Dad had been crying - but he never told us what Lukey had said."

Lukey had brought James "Slogger" Rodgers news of his son, Tom. Lukey and Tom had been best friends since school in the colliery village in west Durham. They'd joined the Durham Light Infantry within a fortnight of each other in 1938 to escape the privations of the pit - Tom had had his thumb ripped off by a pony putter - and, two years later, Lukey had seen Tom die in the heat of battle.

Slogger - so called because he was the strongest hewer at the Wingate coalface - knew Tom had been lost trying to stave off the Germans while the rest of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was evacuated at Dunkirk. Slogger also knew that Tom's body had never been recovered, and this played on his own wartime experiences.

"My father had been in the DLI in the First World War, had been wounded on the Somme, half his lower right jaw was blown away," says George, who was just three years old when brother Tom was killed.

"Unbelievably they patched him up and sent him back out until he was wounded in the hip at Passchendaele.

"He didn't speak much, but he always said that under a white flag they would go out from the trenches and collect the dead and bury them behind the lines. Then the Bosch - he always called them the Bosch - would shell the graves, so on a night-time all the little bits of them that had come up had to be reburied.

"He believed that is what had happened to Tom."

One final indignity for Slogger Rodgers came from his own side. He was invited to the unveiling of a memorial to the BEF in Dunkirk on which was inscribed Tom's name. The cost of the trip would be £56, said the official invitation.

"It might not sound a lot now but it was a great deal of money in the early 1950s, and he threw his war medals, along with Tom's, out of the window into the garden."

George went outside and picked up the pieces. He also picked up the pieces of the story. "When Dad was dying in 1959, I made a promise to him to find out what happened to Tom."

The result is his book, In Search of Tom. The search had to wait until George - a mining surveyor who, once the pits closed, became a maths and science teacher - retired in 1999.

Then the search began. Regimental sources and veterans were spoken to, the scene in France - the village of St Venant - was visited. The first success was tracking down Tom's sweetheart, Annie Warriner. She had never married, but she still had his photo. It showed him to be surprisingly tall, a six footer, with a toothy grin and a distinctive gap between his teeth.

The biggest breakthrough came when Lukey Wood was tracked down. Only he wasn't Lukey Wood.

"The Woods had lived in the old cornmill in Wingate and his father worked in the pit lamp cabin, " says George. "One day, his mother's pinny caught fire and she died from the burns. Lukey didn't get on with his stepmother, so he left home and changed his name to his mother's maiden name of Bowden."

Luke Bowden was found in Hull, and was able to tell George what Lukey Wood had told his father back in 1946.

Lukey had been in D Company of the 2nd Battalion of the DLI, Tom in B Company. They'd last seen each other on May 15, 1940. Then the German assault had intensified - on May 16, Lieutenant Richard Annand in Lukey's B Company had won the war's first Victoria Cross for rescuing his batman in a barrow.

By May 26, the Battalion had been pushed back to the village of St Venant. It was running out of men (only 57 of its 740 made it home alive). It was running out of ammunition. It was running out of officers.

"They were the rearguard," says George. "Operation Dynamo (the Dunkirk evacuation) had started. They were expendable.

"On the afternoon of May 26, their last officer was killed. Within two hours, every gun emplacement was taken out by the Germans. St Venant was surrounded. They had no idea what was behind them or where they were or where they were going to.

"That night, the Germans lit bonfires so no one got any sleep. The artillery started at first light, followed by the attack."

Nearly 70 years later, you can feel fate conspiring as George tells Tom's story. B and D companies, haemorrhaging men, were driven into the fields, towards where the River Lys was crossed by an old humpback bridge near a farmhouse.

Lukey and Tom's Bren gun units arrived at the bridge at the same time. Under heavy fire, they swept diagonally over the bridge to set up defensive positions on the other side. "Lukey said: 'I saw your lad go down and I saw him stand up with his Bren gun on his hip still firing'," says George.

"Then a shell landed close by and Lukey was wounded in the leg. They were out of ammunition and the order was given: every man for hisself."

Now George had a location. With the help of the St Venant historical association, he located the location. The humpback bridge was still there, bullet marks still visible. The farmhouse was still there, shell holes still visible. The farmer's daughter was still there, and to her the battle scene was still visible in her memory.

She had hidden in the cellar while fighting raged around. Then her father had been ordered to dig graves for the five DLI men killed by the bridge.

"She showed me the exact spot," says George. "She said how she used to take flowers to it until the Germans stopped her."

In 1942, the bodies were exhumed and examined by the Germans and reburied in unmarked graves in St Venant cemetery. Members of the French historical association dug out the 1942 German mortuary records of the five DLI men.

They asked how tall Tom was. About 6ft.

They asked the colour of his hair. Brown.

They asked: "Did he have teeth at the front like one of your comedians?"

"Like Terry-Thomas?" replied another of Tom's brothers, Jim, referring to the gap-toothed entertainer from the 1950s and 1960s.

"Yes," they all cried, waving Annie's photograph of her never-forgotten sweetheart.

The records showed that the 6ft brown-haired gap-toothed DLI man killed at the humpback bridge was in grave 154 in the cemetery.

"You can't put it into words," says George. "It's a feeling of intense emotion and elation, almost joy, that you have found your brother after all these years. There will be parts of him in that grave. He's buried in that cemetery. I have fulfilled my promise to my father."

In Search of Tom by George Rodgers is published by Comorant Publishing of Hartlepool for £7.99. Details at www.riddlewrites.co.uk