AT about half-past midnight on D-Day, Lance Corporal George Price stepped out of the belly of a Stirling bomber and into the moonlight of the Normandy skies.

He was first out, and on his right, the RAF was giving the German defences around Ouistreham and along the beaches a fearful pounding. "It was just a hell of a noise," he remembers.

After a couple of seconds, he felt a tug on his shoulders as his parachute opened, and then, a few seconds later, he felt a tug on his legs and his kitbag sailed away. It disappeared into the darkness below, plummeting into an orchard.

George could just make out the trees in the gloom and managed to steer away from their ensnaring branches. He landed with a thump in a field.

"I lay there for a few seconds thinking what the hell am I doing here and that there was no truck coming to pick us up as there had been on exercise," he says.

"I had only a couple of hand-grenades in my belt. The rest of my equipment, including my rifle and ammunition, my Piat gun and my food were somewhere in the orchard. And, to cap it all, I was lost."

He had got himself in this predicament by going in search of adventure. He was born in Slough, in London, left school at 14 and with both his parents dead, had joined the King's Royal Rifle Corps.

After a couple of years he had been trained in flamethrower usage, but realised that driving around in a truck containing 400 gallons of highly inflammable jelly was not conducive with a long life.

At his home in Norton, Stockton, he said: "An incendiary bullet in one of them would not do you very much good."

Plus, aged 20, he wanted "some excitement and adventure". So he joined the newly formed Paratroop battalions (an increase in his daily wages from one shilling to two was an added incentive). After training in July 1943, he was sent to join the 12th (Yorkshire) Parachute Battalion.

It was largely made up of men from the 10th Green Howards, most of whom had been recruited from Teesside.

"Most of them were what I called 'Geordies', although I know now that they weren't," he says, having lived on Teesside for 40 years. "It was so funny: they couldn't understand us Cockneys and we couldn't understand them."

Twenty "Geordies" jumped with him early on D-Day from that Stirling bomber.

Because George was first out, he landed on the very edge of the drop zone, near Merville. His rendezvous point was three miles further inland at Le Bas de Ranville, near Horsa Bridge.

"Looking around me, I saw lots of figures all seemingly going in one direction," he says. "So I tagged along."

Such was the scattered nature of the drop that it is estimated that 60 per cent of the 4,800 parachutists who landed that morning were unable to participate in D-Day's fighting.

They were simply lost in France, wandering around wondering where their sections were.

George Price was not one of them. He made it to Le Bas de Ranville, where he met two fellow parachutists. Then as dawn broke, and as planned, a glider pilot and co-pilot turned up. They had just landed and their glider contained a jeep and an anti-tank gun.

"It was more by luck than judgement," says George, "and we set the gun up in a corner of this wood and after a while a ruddy great Tiger tank came hurtling out the field. We put two rounds into it and blew the damn thing up."

For the next few days, the 12th Battalion remained in position guarding the bridges and the beaches.

"We were being mortared, and doing little skirmishes in return," he recalls. "This young lad, only 18, was with us. I never knew his name. My mate Bill Worley and I dived into one slit trench and he dived into another, and he never knew what hit him.

"This poor little lad got blown to pieces. It really shook me up, it was terrible."

The big one came on June 12, six days after D-Day. Because of the disjointed nature of the landings, the Germans had maintained a foothold on higher ground at Breville, from where their guns peppered the British. The Yorkshire paratroopers were ordered to take the high ground.

They grouped at the village of Amfreville, three-quarters of a mile from Breville, and immediately came under heavy mortar fire.

"Bill got a lump of shrapnel in his right leg and went down in a ditch. I took his belt off him as it had four Piat shells in it and I had the Piat gun. I went into an orchard and a sergeant told me to hang on and he'd find someone to help me.

"I was stood under this tree and all of a sudden there was a big bang and a big blinding red flash and a cloud of dust.

"I woke up three days later being put on a train at Portsmouth harbour. It stopped at Farnborough station and these Canadian nurses got on and gave us sandwiches and coffee. The next stop was Newcastle."

George's war was over. The tree had been hit by a mortar, and although he hadn't suffered a scratch, the blast compression had knocked him and left him unable to speak or move properly.

The 12th were ultimately successful at Breville - although of the 160 who left Amfreville, 141 were wounded or killed.

It took George the best part of a year in Shotley Bridge Hospital, in County Durham, to recover.

When on a motor transport course in North Wales, he met an ATS girl called Edna, from Stockton. In March 1946, they married and in 1963, she brought him North to live among the "Geordies" of Teesside, who had been beside him as he stepped out of the Stirling bomber that night.