I saw the photograph of Aylan Kurdi, 3, being carried by a Turkish gendarme, in the International New York Times on Thursday morning and at first I did not realise what it signified. Was the boy asleep? But no, he could not be, because they were near the water. I read the caption. He had drowned. His brother Galip, 5, had drowned with him, though he was not to be as famous in death because there was no photograph. I found myself crying – awkward, because I was surrounded by people. But I didn’t care. Something about that photograph had set off a switch for grief, and there was no stopping it.

Reading later issues of the international and London newspapers, I understood that others had been similarly affected. Journalists trained not to let their emotions show when writing news reports were using words like ‘heart-breaking’ and ‘sorrow’ and not tritely, either. It was clear from the particular construction of some sentences that they were written after tears had been shed. What was the terrible pathos in this photograph when we have all seen so many pictures of dead children, and have thought ourselves immune?

Three days later, and in busy working conditions surrounded by people constantly, I still find myself having to bring out the tissues (“Oh, this awful cold”) when that photograph springs unbidden to mind. It is because Aylan’s face is hidden and the focus is on his feet that it wrenches so terribly at the heart-strings. It is the shoes that did it; those pathetic, vulnerable ankles. It was the shoes and the ankles that had half the world sobbing, especially those of us who had, at some point in our lives, had the care of boys that age. Aylan was in his smart red top and his good trousers and the shoes with which he had probably been thrilled to bits – with boys that age it’s always the shoes and the T-shirt. And his parents had probably told him that they were going on a big trip on a boat, and made it seem like fun so that he wouldn’t be scared. And his brother, his equally small brother, dead too – they must have felt excitement and trepidation and then suddenly a nightmare and nothing but fear, followed by one of the worst sorts of death it is possible to have – by drowning. Their father’s description of what happened after the boat capsized, in Friday’s edition of the International New York Times – he spoke to them by telephone – is beyond description. I won’t even try, except to tell you that I was choking as I read it. He actually managed to keep both of them afloat for quite a long time while his wife held on to the upturned boat because she couldn’t swim either. He could. But as you know, you can only use one arm to hold up one child because you need the other arm to keep both of you afloat.

Every aspect of this story is too terrible for words. Those two boys were born into civil war, to parents who fled with them. Their father tried to obtain legitimate passage to Canada, sponsored by his sister who has lived there – a legitimate emigrant – for the last two decades, working as a hairdresser. She campaigned constantly with politicians, law-makers and civil servants to have her brother’s case considered favourably, describing his plight to them. Through all that time, her brother, his wife and their two little boys waited patiently in Turkey for positive word from Canada. It was only when their application was turned down definitely – Mr Kurdi’s sister was told that her brother and his family did not qualify as genuine refugees – that he sought an alternative way out, into Europe via smugglers who would take him to the nearest Greek island.

He paid $2,000 for their trip on a crowded dinghy, and the rest is world news. Now he has returned to Syria with the bodies of his wife and sons, and buried them, he says he will not seek to leave his homeland again. He is 40 already; he wanted to go to Canada or Europe only for the sake of his sons and they are alive no longer. I looked at the press photographs of his sons’ final resting-place and the tears came flooding back – more terrible pathos. What is it? Above all, beyond the obvious grief for them, there is an overwhelming sense of anger at the sheer injustice of it all, the rabid unfairness of life, the way it is so random, pointless and often senseless. Instead of the bright Canadian or European future that could have been theirs, those boys ended up dead, wrapped in a shroud and committed to the desert earth, clouds of arid dust rising up as their corpses were covered, while shabby men – the press reports described them as “casually dressed” – stood about among the concrete breeze-blocks that roughly marked other graves. As though it’s not enough that they were born into those conditions, but they have to be subjected to that terrible end by drowning and then the indignity of that burial followed by anonymity in the dust.

Those boys should have had a splendid grave and a permanent monument built to them. Their deaths – or more specifically, the photographs of the corpse of one of them – have changed public opinion on migration and refugees in our time. The truly callous and the indifferent carry on thinking the way they always did – nothing will change their opinion – but at least they now know better than to bother others by braying on with their unsavoury views, which means that the rest of us don’t have to listen to them. I’d say it also gives us licence to shut them up, with the requisite politeness that certain social situations demand. But quite frankly, at this stage, I’m not sure I’ll bother with the manners.

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