LAWRENCE McIntosh heard the war in Europe was over on a home-made 'illicit' radio in a German PoW camp.

Lawrence, now 86, former headmaster of West Malling primary school, was a 26-year-old corporal with the 1st Battalion, The Scots Guards, on VE Day, 1945.

He had been wounded and captured in bitter fighting on the Anzio beachhead in Italy which practically wiped out his battalion. After hospital treatment in PoW Camp Stalag 1VB, he was transferred to a Heilag, a repatriation camp for sick and wounded PoWs, which was liberated by Russian troops in April ,1945.

At his home in Chattenden Court, Maidstone, Lawrence recalled: “An Asiatic division of the Russian Army liberated us and looked after us well, though food was in short supply.

"By some mischance, Tom (his friend) and I had a German rifle and a few rounds of ammunition and we went hunting.

"We stalked and shot a deer – the first fresh meat any of us had had for at least two-and-a-half years. When we got back to camp, with the deer slung around my neck, the news that the war had finished was coming over the camp radio."

The PoWs watched as the Russians 'went wild with excitement' and rode around the village on bicycles and ponies. They fired their rifles in the air, shooting down all the overhead electricity cables which had given the PoWs power, of sorts.

"The deer was soon in cooking pots and we had the meal of our lives," Lawrence said. "We, the walking ex-prisoners, were invited to a Russian party that evening and it is here that my memory begins to fail me.

"We were supplied with all sorts of food and with glasses of Russian Army vodka – so much so that I came round two or three days later to stare blearily at faces all as ghastly as my own. So VE Day passed into folklore as the day that disappeared."

The walking-wounded looked after their sick friends until they were fit to march back to American lines a month after hostilities ceased.

The first thing that Cpl McIntosh did as he left the Lancaster bomber which brought him and his fellow soldiers back to England and Worthing in Sussex, was to gratefully kiss the ground.

"As a veteran, VE Day seems but yesterday – the older one gets, the sharper the memories," he said. "After all, the war was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me and thousands like me.

"My experiences on the battlefield and as a PoW undoubtedly helped me enormously in my teaching career."

After demobilisation, Lawrence taught in Bexley and Bromley, in Services’ schools in Germany from 1959 until 1964, and was headmaster of St Stephen’s Primary School, Tonbridge, acting head of Wrotham primary school, and head of West Malling primary from 1972 until retirement.