AS his father came from the South Wales mining town of Mountain Ash, there was some irony in the fact George Hammond was in the shadow of an Italian mountain when it belched hot ash all over its neighbourhood in 1944.

In places, the acrid dust from the volcano Mount Vesuvius lay three feet deep and red hot rock rolled down its hillside in a molten river, rather putting the wind up George and his American friends, who had travelled up the funicular railway up to peer over the lip of the smouldering giant only the day before.

The Americans were big-headed, kicking rocks down into the volcano as if they didn't care, he recalled.

But you could hear it rumbling and I just felt something was likely to happen. It was very hot up there and I was rather glad when we came down.

The following afternoon, George, now an 86-year-old from Newport Street, Worcester, but then a young gunner in the British Army, was sitting in an Italian village barber's shop about two miles from Vesuvius having his hair cut, when there was suddenly great excitement outside.

The volcano had erupted.

Flinging the cloth from around his neck, he dashed outside to catch the spectacle.

The barber, rather more prepared, grabbed a camera and began taking pictures.

One of them, a small, by now dog-eared, little print has pride of place in George's old photograph album.

The barber gave me one of his pictures, he said. And I've managed to keep it safe all these years.

Considering there was a fair bit more fighting to be done before the war ended, that has been no mean feat.

Although born in Wales, George moved with his family to live in Worcester before the First World War.

Dad was a driver on the trams and my mother was a conductor," he added. But dad was killed in the war in 1915."

George became a gardener, working for the Cadbury family at Lower Wick House, and then joined the Territorial Army in 1935, attached to the artillery battery in Southfield Street.

In 1942, after a spell in Ireland, his unit sailed for India aboard the Windsor Castle. A virtual tour of the Middle East followed Iraq, Iran, Syria and Palestine before he landed in Sicily in June 1943.

We were under heavy fire with the Stukas and heavy artillery shelling us, said George.

In the first hour one of my gun crew was killed (there was a four man crew and George's job was loader) and I was hit in the left leg and then the left hand by shrapnel.

After I got hit in the leg, I put my hand up to hold my tin hat on and got hit there too!"

Field dressings were wrapped around his wounds and he carried on.

The gunners acted as artillery support for the foot soldiers of the Green Howards, the Yorks and Lancs and the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and were given the nickname The Flying Fifth for their ability to cross country quickly and be where they were needed in a hurry.

Slowly the enemy were pushed back, but then in the four days fighting at Messina, George had a shrapnel wound to his right knee. Again he received a field dressing and carried on.

On September 5, 1943, the mainland of Italy was reached and soon the gunners were pounding the defences of the massive monastery at Monte Casino, which has been turned into a fortress.

By then we had been on active duty for 11 months without a break, George added.

But even worse was to follow at Anzio, where there was a tremendous firefight.

We were using both our own guns and the Americans, he went on.

They didn't want to go out and fire them, so we went instead.

'I'm not going out there, bud,' they used to say. 'It's too dangerous.'

But our officers expected us to go, so we did.

The trouble was, our guns were 25 pounders, while the Americans were 155 pounders, much bigger.

We didn't know how to fire then, so sometimes an American would come out with us to show how. Other times we just stuck at it until we worked it out for ourselves.

The Americans would rather have stayed in their trenches where they organised beetle races or bet on just about everything, usually on where the next shell would land.

That happened for quite a while until their officers put a stop to it.

Eventually a combination of George's injuries, plus a bout of malaria and dysentery laid him low and he was on recovery when he visited Mount Vesuvius.

Fortunately the dysentery had relented by the time the volcano went up.

That would have been the last thing he needed.