WHILE looking through some old photographs recently I came across the enclosed print and it reminded me of a remarkable wartime coincidence.

In the space of a couple of weeks towards the end of 1942 when?I was based near Cairo for a couple of months, entirely by chance I met up with three former Lydney Grammarians.

The photograph shows Ron Strike, whose family home was in Hill Street, and Bob Ellison whose family lived in Forest Road. I lived in Grove Road so our homes were within half a mile.

The other old Grammarian was a Mostyn Dummer if I remember rightly, and I believe his family moved from Lydney to North Wales prior to 1939.

One of them I met in a Cairo cinema and you can imagine our amazement when I had only been seated for five minutes when some fellow in uniform took the next seat but one to me.

I looked across and for a moment it seemed like we were in the old Picture House in Lydney's Hill Street – the recognition was immediate.

My journey to that cinema seat in Cairo had been a long one by then and had taken me via South Africa and the Sudan so the amazement was understandable. However, it wasn't the end of wartime surprises for me – later, in?Italy, I was travelling by train through the Central Mountains of Italy from the Adriatic coast to Naples on the Mediterranean when, at a country crossing an Army convoy was waiting for the train to pass and the gates had to be lifted – at the head of that convoy was a brother I hadn't seen for three years! There was no stopping that train, of course, but we did manage to arrange a meeting later in Naples.

– Dennis J. Powell (ex RAF), The Gorse, Coleford.