As the Last Post sounded, the old soldier died with his boots on at a Rememberance Day service last Sunday.

NORMAN Foster had grown old, as those who are left grow old. On Sunday, as on every Remembrance Day since his demobilisation, he stood with his medals and his memories before the war memorial.

"See to it," commanded the inscription set in stone, "that they shall not have died in vain."

Old soldiers, straight-backed and solemn, paraded shoulder to shoulder - now as then - alongside navy-cut grey beards and fliers long since grounded.

They wore red poppies and black berets, had sticks but no more swagger, carried nothing more vicious than a rolled-up umbrella though they, heaven knows, can be nasty enough.

Some - visibly and unashamedly - shed a tear.

Norman himself, wartime Sapper and subsequent TA sergeant, had a heart even heavier than usual on such annual occasions. Just a week earlier, his friend and cousin Dick Foley had been found dead in the road in nearby Norton after being knocked from his bike by a hit and run motorist.

Like Norman he was 79, lifelong friends born just a few days apart.

Many others liked Norman, too - outgoing, cheerful, vastly fond of music and of his extended family. He stood before the cenotaph next to a wonderful old man who looked like him who married Nora Batty and who wore his cap in the same crestfallen manner.

Most had British Legion connections, and truly a Legion of honour.

Led by a police van and by the Salvation Army band, younger members of the military had marched right left up Stockton High Street, already decorated for Christmas. Some seemed but bits of bairns, barely old enough to have left the Brownies; others had memories of war, and fresh fears of it, too.

Military precision, they formed up around the war memorial - the bishop, the mayor, the deputy Lord Lieutenant, the vicar and the MP all in their appointed places, the standard bearers ready once again to lower the colours, the melancholy moment as moving and as emotional as always it has been.

Then as bells ceased pealing and the bugler moved to the Last Post, as the parish church clock inched towards the awesome eleventh hour, Norman Foster fell where he had stood, dead with his boots on.

"It's the way he would have wanted to go. He'd have been so proud, thrilled to bits," says Maureen, the wife whom he married just two years ago.

"He'd gone out as always he had, determined to be on parade on Remembrance Day and as fit as a fiddle, so it seemed. We knew he had a heart problem but he took just one pill each day and seemed fine."

His cousin's death, thinks Mrs Foster, may have contributed to his own extraordinarily poignant passing.

Though at once beyond help, many sped anxiously to his side, animated amid the two minutes silence. Hundreds more accepted the invitation from the Rev Andrew Featherstone to attend church - "mindful of the highly dangerous situation in Iraq, to worship God on this Remembrance Day."

Among them was our old friend Arthur Stephenson - Fleet Air Arm man from 1947-49, Coundon village polliss and Stockton inspector, the man ordered to take kids to court for playing hum-dum-dum against the wall of Rinaldi's Caf.

After church parade, he said, they'd be splicing the mainbrace in the Navy Club. Nelson's Blood, added Arthur, though some of us prefer Strongarm.

St Thomas's church overflowed. Built in the early 18th century and said (uncertainly) to have been designed by Sir Christopher Wren, it now embraces what the Vicar calls the "social gospel" - from Internet access to welcoming asylum seekers.

A coach load arrives from the south at five o'clock every Tuesday morning. "It's not for me to talk about out of sight, out of mind," said Mr Featherstone, afterwards.

Sunday's service was entirely more traditional, familiar hymns like Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer and Praise to the Almighty, the King of Creation, prayers for the people if Iraq and of the US, a solemn address by the Bishop of Durham on the perils and grave responsibilities of war.

"We want you to know from the bottom of our hearts the debt that we owe to you," he told the old comrades. "We need, like our monarch, to shed our tears... and we need to consider very carefully whether we can tolerate war again."

Afterwards in the well-crewed Navy Club, even an old sea dog pawing about the place, there was a huge raffle - everything from a bottle of Purser's rum to a set of dictionaries, the former more greatly appreciated - though the atmosphere became more subdued as news spread of Norman Foster's death whilst doing his duty.

His funeral service, the day after his cousin's, was yesterday at Stockton Salvation Army citadel, his coffin draped with the Union Flag for which he so proudly fought and served, our photographer in attendance with the family's ready consent.

Donations in his memory may be sent to the British Poppy Appeal. On this day more than ever, we will remember them.