When his troopship arrived at Liverpool on Boxing Day in 1943, Jim Bourne caught his first whiff of English air for nine years. Having joined the Royal West Kent regiment in Maidstone, he served in India, and what became Pakistan, and then Palestine, before the outbreak of the Second World War.

In 1939 he was posted to Malta, digging slit trenches at Luca Airport, before the Italians came in with massive air raids. “We were visited by General Montgomery,” he said, “and what I remember about that, was that he predicted Portsmouth would win the FA Cup. They did!”

Later Jim was trained to load bombs and ammunition onto aircraft, working with Wellingtons, Beaufighters, Blenheims, and Spitfires. “This went on until Montgomery pushed the Italians and the Germans out of North Africa. But even after that we got bombed,” he said.

He was later invited to join the paras, and fed up with life on Malta, signed up. It was a decision that would lead to him being wounded at Arnhem and taken prisoner.

“I was taken back to Palestine where I did my parachute training. You had to make eight jumps to win your red beret. One of the first actions was to capture the island of Cos in the Aegian. About 120 of us dropped on the landing strip at Antimachia at 2am one morning. There was no opposition because the Italians had capitulated.”

After arriving back in the UK, Jim reflected: “I had seen the world and the government had paid for it.” But he was to see a bit more of it before his time with the army was up.

“D-Day came but we weren’t involved in that,” he said. “But we did see the Dakotas flying back with the parachute bags hanging out of the side. We were put on standby 12 times, but it came to nothing. Then Arnhem came up and we thought it would be another standby. But we ended flying over to Holland.

“At that stage I was with the 11^th Batallion, Fourth Para Brigade, First Airbourne Divison. We went on the second day having been held up by bad weather. On the way across I saw a couple of gliders down on the sea. You could see where the Germans had flooded large areas of the country.

“Then the ack ack started but we wasn’t hit. The second in command Major Lonsdale was wounded in the arm and ended up being looked after by the Dutch. I came down on Ginkel Heath about 100 yards from the rendezvous. I got there it in two seconds flat I reckon. There was a lot of small arms and machine gun fire.

“Arnhem was about 60 miles away and we set off in that direction. But at Oosterbeek we met tanks. You can’t fight a tank with a rifle. We were told to take the high ground at the back of Arnhem but then got fresh orders to go straight to the bridge to relieve troops there. But it was hard going. A few of us got as far as the museum near the railway station, but then we met tanks again. An officer told us we had to go back to Oosterbeek.

“I got myself into a slit trench at the back of the church at Oosterbeek, but Major Lonsdale was there and called us all into the church. He got up into the pulpit, and with a bandage round his head he addressed everyone. He told us things were a little bit hard, but the Guards, with their tanks, had got past the bridge at Nijmegen, and were waiting for infantry to come up. We all had to do the best we could.

“As I was going back to my slit trench a shell caught up with me. I got shrapnel in the leg and the shoulder. Stretcher bearers picked me up and took me to the Rectory House, which had been made into a dressing station. There were some medical orderlies there but there wasn’t much they could do for you. It was crowded with wounded upstairs and downstairs.

“KateTer Horst, of the family who lived in the house before the war, would come at night and read the bible to us. ‘It’s the only thing I can do for you,’ she said. It was comforting and very brave of her as the only woman among all these men. The Dutch are first class people and what they did for the paras was amazing.

“I was on the ground floor. So many men died there and were buried in the garden. The evacuation from Oosterbeek had begun but we didn’t know that. All we could do was lie there. I had no treatment and the wound in my shoulder was getting bad. Shelling was going on outside and men were dying all around. We had no food.

“Eventually I could hop along, and a German lorry came up and took us to some Dutch barracks. We were prisoners of war. But they did do some work on my wounds. After four days we were taken to the railway station and put on cattle trucks and taken to a prisoner of war camp, Stalag X1B. Conditions weren’t too bad though my shoulder was getting worse.

“One night they marched us out. I realised they were taking us away from the front line. We had a guard with a wooden leg, he was vicious. One day four of us said we badly needed the toilet, and they let us go into some woods to relieve ourselves. We stayed there and eventually they marched on.

“We found our way to a village, and got into a cellar, where we slept. In the morning, we noticed a grill which was fitted into the pavement above. We pushed it up and I saw a Sherman tank. We all came out and began waving our red berets. The gun on the tank traversed round, but we kept walking towards it. At last, an officer’s head appeared above the turret. He realised who we were and that was that.”

Jim was taken back to Belgium and to a hospital, where after being fumigated, he slept his first night in clean sheets for a long time. They had me down as a stretcher case, but next morning they asked for two more walking wounded to fly back to England.

“I was out of that bed like a shot,” he said. “An American officer gave me a dressing gown and told me to keep it. I flew to Down Ampney and was taken to Whitchurch Hospital in Cardiff. But I still had the shrapnel in me until 1948 when it was taken out at Roehampton Hospital.”

After the war Jim did a range of jobs, but ended up as an electrician, working on diesel generators at Gatwick Airport.