MEMORIES of the Second World War are as clear as the vivid scar and pain from Richard Hall's legs.

He has just returned from his last trip to the beaches of Northern France where he and thousands of the British Expeditionary Force were snatched with their backs to the sea.

The visit was especially moving for Mr Hall, 82, because his leg wounds, sustained in northern France, and his age mean he will not make a return visit.

This year was the last time the Dunkirk Veterans Association re-enacted the famous Little Ships armada rescue, again because age and illness meant too many ex-servicemen could not attend.

Mr Hall missed the re-enactment of the famous flotilla because of his legs. His brother Ron, also a Dunkirk veteran and former national chairman of the association, died two years ago.

Both men, from Redcar, were eternally grateful to the brave amateur and professional sailors who set sail in the motley collection of boats.

Mr Hall, of Warwick Road, said: "It was very sad going back to the beaches and thinking about all those people who I last saw there in the war and what dreadful things might have happened to them when they died. I'm so glad I made that last trip, it was in memory of everyone who took part."

The former painter and decorator and ex-chairman of Teesside magistrates' bench was whisked from Athies, Arras, to a Dunkirk hospital ship after a piece of mortar shrapnel pierced both legs.

He did not have to cope with the ordeal of standing waist-deep in sea at the mercy of German plane machine gun fire.

Mr Hall said: "I was one of the lucky ones in that respect. My brother had to wait for the little ships to take him off the beaches."

Mr Hall produced a set of war-time memoirs this spring, after pressure from his daughter, Janet Roberts, of Normanby, Middlesbrough.

Rather more painful memories, which he recorded in great detail, come from his return to conflict in the Middle East. Fighting Rommel in Libya was nowhere near as traumatic as being taken prisoner and made ill by Italian forces.

He said: "I don't know whether they were cruel or just didn't have a scrap of humanity, but it was pure hell in the Italian Camp 53, in Tolentino.

"I was ill and then they put me in the hospital, which was like a concrete tomb."

Throughout the war, the two brothers were in the Green Howards and were rarely far apart