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My father, Harold Brown, was in Italy in March 1944, having gone there from North Africa. He was in the Royal Engineers. They heard Vesuvius rumble for a few days and then it erupted, and they watched people getting all their belongings and leaving their houses. His diary entry said It was pitiful to see the look on their faces. They had been bombed by the Germans, and now this happened. My father was driving machinery to clear ash and debris from the roads, and helping people. Then he followed the army up north to Pisa and Venice, clearing debris and building bridges.

My mother, Margaret Brown, worked in an ammunition factory in Newark on Trent. She had the choice of joining up or doing this, and she didn’t want to join up, so she went to Newark with her sister. They were in lodgings. One night a damaged RAF bomber was coming back from a raid in Germany; it was trying to reach the fields behind the houses, but clipped a poplar tree and crashed onto the house next door but one. There wasn’t much left of the house — they were big, those bombers. The mother and baby in the front of the house survived, but 6 children were killed. They were the Brompton family, and there is a monument to them in the graveyard in Newark. We went to visit the monument there, and went to the library to find back issues of the newspaper to read the account of the event. My mother is 85 now and has never been in an aeroplane.

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