DOROTHY Appleby remembers rushing to her husband's bedside."The sister said that they hoped he was going to come round and be sane because he had such a bad head injury," she says. "She didn't say that he had lost half of his brain.

"I sang to him We'll Meet Again and eventually he raised his hand a little bit. He knew I was there."

Private Melvyn Appleby had joined the Durham Light Infantry in 1940 from the wagonworks in his home town of Shildon. He'd already fought his way across the desert and, after victories in places such as El Alamein, many in the 50th Division thought they'd done their bit.

However, General Montgomery was so impressed by their fighting spirit that he wanted them in the frontline for Operation Overlord.

This meant that Melvyn was home on leave for a month. In the fortnight before D-Day, a family friend lent the Applebys a cottage in Devon so he could be near his camp on the south coast.

"We did some walking and that was the last time we could walk together, and we did some talking - the last time we could do that for a while, too," says Dorothy, who is now 85 and lives in Redworth, near Darlington.

"He said he didn't think he would come back, he didn't know why, and if he didn't I had to look after our son, Brian, for him. He'd never said that all the time he was in the Middle East."

"I remember I was on my own standing at the cottage door," she says. "It was an eerie, awful feeling listening to the drone of hundreds of planes going overhead knowing that my husband was also going that way to Normandy."

Around her in the darkness, the wood came alive - US voices started shouting, and meals were being cooked. These must have been the second wave of troops preparing for the Omaha and Utah beaches.

About three weeks later, in Shildon, Dorothy got a phone call. "He'd been injured. We went straight down by train to the Royal United Hospital at Bath and found him lying there in bed," she says. "He couldn't speak, couldn't do anything."

It was then that she sang the Vera Lynn song to him.

"He had 12 bullets in his head," she says. "The doctors told me he'd been hit by a Spandau machine gun - they could tell by the bullets. He was lucky to be alive."

With their son with his grandparents in Shildon, she stayed in Red Cross lodgings for two months.

"He cried a lot because he couldn't talk, and I cried a lot, too," she says.

Melvyn was transferred to Dryburn Hospital in Durham City, and for two years the only word he could manage was "ens-oui". Dorothy never understood what it meant.

Speech gradually came back - "but if he got excited it left him completely" - but he was still paralysed down one side and was never again able to read or write.

Slowly, and only partially, the story came out of him. He'd been in a Bren gun carrier, probably near Falaise, and an officer had told him to get out and walk. Five minutes later, he was hit.

Dorothy says: "Two Germans picked him up and left him by a tree for our lads to find."

In December 1946, the Applebys were given the keys to the first of the prefabs - the homes fit for heroes - built in Shildon. Their local MP, Hugh Dalton, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, helped them through the doorway.

"I had to talk to him because my husband couldn't," she says. "Mr Dalton said 'I hope you will be very happy here', and we were, but in a way we were sad because he had come back the way he had."

They had a second son, Clifford, and Melvyn found great pride and joy in his allotment and garden.

"He fought on as he had all through the war," says Dorothy. "Remembering our wedding vows helped us through years of heartbreak and tears. Joy in our two sons and later two grand-daughters softened the pain, and we made it to our golden wedding in 1989.

"A year later, my husband died, but I am left with a lot of fond memories of taking him for long country drives in an Austin Mini provided by the Ministry for Pensions."

She pauses, and then adds: "It certainly changed our lives, D-Day."