BILL Grime should not have been in the Army, let alone in North Africa. Bill was the original nine stone weakling and not in good health when his call-up papers arrived.

However, as he puts it himself: "I managed to get in and after that the Army helped to get me fit."

He then adds, with a twinkle in his eye: "Mind you, they then proceeded to try to get me killed a few times!"

As a signaller in the Leicester Yeomanry, Bill was on the front line at El Alamein -- and frequently slightly in front of the line.

He will never forget the opening barrage in which, as a signaller, he played an important part.

"It was the most fantastic sight and sound you could imagine," he says. "One of our batteries fired 600 rounds in the first day.

"Of course, then Jerry was after us because the guns were useless without us. Keeping your head down was a very good idea! I did get my hair parted by a bullet one time. That was as close as I wanted to get."

Bill, from Breightmet, shouldn't even have been in North Africa.

"We were on our way to India when Monty decided he wanted more guns -- and where they went, we went," he says. "Being shot at was one thing, but that wasn't all we had bothering us. We were all suffering from 'gyppy tummy', which is not pleasant at the best of times. And being in a hole trying to tell guns what to aim at is certainly not the best of times!

"I remember one night, when I was still suffering with illness, we were being shot at and the telephone wire went down.

"When that happened, someone had to crawl from each end of the wire looking for the break. So I set off, on my hands and knees from our end. I crawled for a half a mile until I got to HQ to find that the wire had just pulled out at their end and none of them had gone out to sort it.

"I said a few things that you can't tell your readers!"

For all his other problems, the young Bill Grime was blessed with good eyesight, something that came in particularly useful in the early stages of the battle. He says: "It was quite difficult to tell the difference between a Fokker Wolfe 109 and a Hurricane (fighter planes) when they came zipping along, close to the ground. That is, until they shot at us.

"But I could tell the difference, so when one appeared all my mates looked at me to find out whether to hit the deck or not.

"Mind you, visibility wasn't a lot better for the pilots so we ended up hitting the deck whoever it was because both sides would shoot sometimes."

Bill and his gunners moved a few times during the main battle, fighting first with a group of Free French from Central Africa -- "some of the best fighters I have ever met" -- before going into action in support of an Indian Regiment, which consisted mainly of Gurkhas -- "definitely the best fighters I have ever met!".

Bill has been a supporter of the Gurkha Welfare Trust since the war as a result of those few weeks spent with the men from Nepal.

In the last few days of the battle of El Alamein, when mopping up and mobility were the mainstays, heavy guns were not needed.

Almost before the battle had ended, Bill and his comrades who had survived were pulled out of the line.

"We were actually headed for Stalingrad after that. Can you believe the Army? They were now trying to get me killed from cold instead of heat!" jokes Bill.

However, a plan which saw Bill and his pals travel around Palestine, Iraq and Iran on their way to Stalingrad actually came to nothing when the war ended the following year.

So why did Bill "fool" the medical examiner? Why was he so desperate to go to war in the first place?

"I went to fight mainly because it was leaking out what the Germans were doing to the Jews," he says.

"Hitler wasn't going to stop. He was evil."