As the 60th anniversary of D-Day approaches, Chris Lloyd meets a couple who are celebrating their own diamond jubilee on the Normandy beaches.

Sixty years ago, D-Day veteran Dickie Atkinson's colonel branded him "a very selfish young man".

The invasion of France was imminent, but Dickie had suddenly applied for emergency leave from the Durham Light Infantry (DLI) - to get married.

"You could make a young lady a widow within a couple of weeks," raged Colonel Humphrey Woods, of the 9th Battalion DLI.

But yesterday, Mr Atkinson was back on the beach where he landed so long ago. And with him was Joan, the woman he married 60 years ago and later returned home to.

"Joan was lucky because I got wounded," said Mr Atkinson, now 83. "I could have been killed."

The two of them clutched a card from the Queen, congratulating them on their diamond wedding anniversary.

It coincided with a tour of the Normandy Battlefields, organised by the DLI Association.

Mr Atkinson was able to surprise his wife with the card yesterday. He secretly brought it over with him after it arrived at their home in Whitley Bay just before they left.

"It was a lovely surprise when he gave it to me when we woke up," said Mrs Atkinson, now 79 and a great-grandmother.

The pair had met in January, 1944, in Essex. Mr Atkinson and the Durhams were back from the Middle-East and Sicily while Joan, a London girl, was on the searchlights. They became engaged on March 13 and then the Durhams were sent to Southampton to prepare for D-Day.

As April came to an end, Mr Atkinson hit on a cunning ruse to get some extra leave. He told his colonel he was getting married. But Colonel Woods was suspicious. "If you don't put a marriage certificate on my desk you will be banged up in a glass house for three years," he said.

Mr Atkinson said yesterday: "So I had to phone Joan to tell her to organise a wedding - and to pay for it."

Looking back, Joan is philosophical. She said: "It was funny during the war. You just took things as they came. My mum had met him once and liked him and said that, anyway, I could always kick him out when he came back."

So they were married hurriedly in Marylebone Register Office on April 27, 1944, and on June 6 - D-Day - Mr Atkinson landed in his quartermaster's truck on Gold Beach.

Behind the Green Howards from North Yorkshire, the Durhams had it comparatively easy, until they reached a village called Lingevres, in mid-July.

Amid fierce fighting Dickie was shot in the back and hospitalised.

As he recovered, he realised he had made a major matrimonial mistake.

"I'd forgetten to tell my mum." he said. "The Army stopped sending home my pay and she only found out that I'd got married when I came home on leave that Christmas. She said: 'I've been fighting them for months for your pay. Have you been in prison?' She didn't even know I'd been wounded because they sent that letter and my married man's allowance to my new wife."

And the Colonel? "I never did meet up with him again because he was killed at Lingevres. As I said, Joan was lucky.