David says that the book idea germinated from a visit he and his wife Barbara made to the Beach-Head Cemetery at Anzio near Rome to see the grave of Royal Scots Fusilier George ‘Geordie’ Kane. The soldier was the brother of Barbara’s mother, Betty Huxley, and he had been killed on 18 April 1944. A photograph of Geordie was displayed at the Huxley family in High Hurstwood, near Uckfield but nobody from the family in Sussex or in Scotland had ever been to Italy. ‘In the late Eighties, Betty began to talk more and more of Geordie and my wife and I decided to take a weekend break in Rome and make the excursion to Anzio. We found the grave and took pictures and brought them back to show Betty how well Geordie’s memory was preserved in that far-off corner of a foreign land. Betty herself died just a few months later. ‘It’s one of the ironies of war that Geordie’s widow went on to marry a released German prisoner-of-war at the end of hostilities.’

Other local links in the book include stories about Lewes residents Len Sullivan and Peter Theobald, the latter an Eighth Army veteran that David and Barbara took back to the El Alamein battlefield two years ago. ‘One thing I quickly discovered when seeking stories was how close to home so many of them could be found. In Peter’s case I went to school in Lewes with his daughter Pauline but it wasn’t until we met up again through our shared enthusiasm for Lewes Football Club that I found out about his six years in the army in the Middle East. Just chatting to him on the terraces led to a story.’