STANDING before the bronze plaque set into the gravestone, Rosemary Hopkins dabs away the tears.

Oblivious to the flurries of cherry blossom that are blowing across the Yokohama Commonwealth War Cemetery, she reads out the brief message beneath the name, rank and number of a man she never met and is only now beginning to learn about.

"A beloved son and husband. Not my will, but thine will be done."

Kenneth Cope was 29 years old when he died, on 25 March, 1943, of acute pneumonia in a prisoner of war camp in Mukaishima, near Hiroshima in southern Japan. Cast alongside his name is the badge of the RAF.

"He was my mother's greatest love," says Mrs Hopkins, of Highfield Road, Malvern. "She never spoke about what happened during the war and I have only recently begun to piece together the story after finding the letters that they wrote to each other."

Her mother, Vera, married Mrs Hopkins' father after the war and died in 1983, still bitter at the way the Japanese had treated her first husband.

An aircraftsman with 100 Squadron, Cope was captured in Burma shortly after war broke out in the Far East and was put to work on the infamous Burma Railway, where one prisoner died for every track sleeper that was laid. Later put aboard one of the "hell ships" bound for Japan, he was held captive in a spinning mill and used as a forced labourer at Mukaishima dockyard.

Of the 100 British troops held at the camp, 23 died of malnutrition, ber-beri and heart failure, made worse by the beatings to which they were subject.

Memorials for each of them make up one corner of the well-tended cemetery in Yokohama, the last resting place of more than 1,800 British servicemen.

"When you think of all that he and his friends went through, the end may well have been a blessed relief," said Mrs Hopkins, 55, a speech and drama teacher at Malvern Girls' College.

"They were only married in 1939, after he received his call-up papers, and my mother never forgave the Japanese. The rest of my family was astounded when I told them that I would be coming over here," she said.

"But I made this pilgrimage because I feel that somebody has to. This person is all alone here, a long way from his home and I'm glad that I've just been able to see it for myself."

Accompanied by her husband, Stephen, Mrs Hopkins arrived in Tokyo on Saturday and left for Britain on Tuesday.

"Because he is not my father, I'm removed from him in a way, but we have to realise that he and the other prisoners went through this awful ordeal and I know from talking to my mother that he was such a good and decent person," she said.

Tragically, Cope's two brothers were also killed during the Second World War, and Mrs Hopkins intends to continue her research into their deaths.

"I shall go away to think about it and remember this as his last resting place and I know it will affect me," she said. "It's all just such a long way from England."