He was proud to wear the uniform of a regiment with more than 200 battle honours to its name, even though he told Rose that all he was doing was “delivering water”.Throughout his tour of duty he regularly wrote or called home, always upbeat about life and making plans for his return. “He was involved in organising the local gala day, the annual football tournament .. in saving the local community hall from closure. He was involved in all the activities which make a community a community.”It was partly due to that same selfless spirit that, despite his first overseas posting being to a war zone, Mr Gentle had assured his family he was happy to go as it was “part of the job” and he accepted the risks. “He was a marvellous guy.” On Friday the body of the young soldier – the first Royal Highland Fusilier to be killed by hostile fire in 24 years – was flown back to Scotland for a military funeral this week at St James’s Church, which lies just around the corner from the family home.”I am confident that the Pollok community will turn out in their hundreds to pay tribute to Gordon Gentle,” said the Scottish Socialist MSP Tommy Sheridan, a family friend.Mr Sheridan, a childhood friend of Rose who knew the teenager all his life, described the soldier as a “delightful young man”.”He was at the very heart of everything that was good about the community,” said Mr Sheridan. They don’t care about him – all they’re worried about is the next election.”The garden of the family’s modest terraced home has been turned into a makeshift memorial to the soldier as friends and neighbours have draped flowers, cards, soft toys and Celtic football shorts over a wooden picket fence adorned with messages of condolence.A steady stream of well-wishers have called to honour the boy, who was well known and liked in the community.”All the kids in the street are devastated,” said Paul Montague, a neighbour. “Why don’t Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon send their own families out to Iraq? My son was just a bit of meat to them, just a number.

Family and friends have attacked the Government and the Army for sending such a raw recruit into a combat zone.”He shouldn’t have been there, none of our boys should be there,” said his tearful mother, Rose, who works as a cleaner. The Ministry of Defence is pleading “exceptional” circumstances.Since news of his death was broken to his family last week the tight-knit community of Pollok in Glasgow has been in shock. His parents condemned the lack of preparation.Yesterday it was reported that a number of servicemen have been sent to Iraq without undergoing training designed to help them deal with likely threats. But the teenager had the strength of character to ignore them, and enlisted with the regiment last year.On Wednesday, the same friends, who nicknamed him him “Soft”, will gather to honour a 19-year-old who joined the Army to see the world but ended up being the 60th and last British soldier to be killed in Iraq before the handover of power to the new Iraqi government.Fusilier Gordon Gentle died last week and two of his colleagues were seriously wounded when a bomb planted by the side of a road in Basra was detonated as their Land Rover passed by.His death caused outrage when it emerged that he had only just completed his basic training before being sent to Iraq. There was never any doubt what Gordon Gentle would end up doing when he left school. Both his mother’s brothers had served with the Royal Highland Fusiliers in Northern Ireland, and for the quiet, 6ft 2in Celtic fan it seemed there was never an alternative but to follow in their footsteps.
School friends teased him over his military ambitions, saying he was too kind and good-natured to be a soldier He was called Gentle, after all.

But opponents will now be able to argue that the assemblies are unnecessary.Others will say that, even if the gap has started to close, the North’s problems with unemployment and crime are still worse than the South’s.. “The gap between deprived areas and the rest of the country is starting to close … but we have got to go further.”The figures may, however, pose a problem for Mr Prescott, who wants elected regional assemblies set up in the North-east and other parts of Englandto create attractive conditions for investment and close the gap between North and South. It appears this is largely attributable to educational improvements. More than 41 per cent of the North-East’s working-age population now have diplomas or degrees compared with less than a third in 1997.Yvette Cooper, who is a minister responsible for urban regeneration at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, seized on the statistics as evidence that government intervention is working. But they are a comfort in a week when a study by Bristol University showed that London’s population is growing at an alarming rate because of people moving to where the better-paid jobs are.During the 1990s, the North-east had an average growth of 4.4 per cent a year, but recent figures show that in 2002 the economy grew by 5.6 per cent compared with 4.5 per cent growth in London, the South-east and the East.

For example, the region with the highest economic growth rate in England, according to the latest statistics, is the North-east, which has been associated since the 1930s with long dole queues.None of the figures can be said to prove definitively Tony Blair’s claim that England’s North-South divide is a thing of the past. Millions of pounds that the Government has spent trying to break the cycle of poverty in the country’s most run-down inner cities have started to have an effect, according to unpublished statistics compiled in John Prescott’s office.
The gap is closing as unemployment falls faster and educational achievement rises faster in the poorer parts of the country than in richer parts. The Attorney General’s office has, however, refused to release any further details about these cases.. They allegedly refused pleas from his family to take him to hospital, and he died.In the second case, a bystander called Qassim Hamid Nassir was shot in October when British troops opened fire on a demonstration He died in hospital. British troops have been accused of another two allegedly illegal killings of civilians in southern Iraq, according to legal documents seen by The Independent on Sunday. But yes, it is at the back of your mind,” he said.Zach Mesenbourg.