D-Day veteran Tom bought his old gunboat for £1

By then she was laid up in a forlorn state and destined to be scrapped.

"I bought her for £1," said Tom, who is now 92 and lives at Craven Arms.

"She was going to be burnt."

The wooden MGB - motor gun boat - a veteran of combat with German E-boats and which had played its part in the mighty 1944 invasion fleet, had had a peacetime life as a houseboat.

Although Mr Watkins cannot remember clearly now, she seems to have been on the River Yare in Norfolk and to have been given the name Morning Flight - during the war she was simply Boat 56.

But time had taken its toll.

"She had gone pretty far," said Tom, who will turn 93 on June 11

"A chap came to me and said: 'Have you thought of restoring her?' I said: 'Don't be ridiculous.' He said: 'I think if we towed her up river we could have a go.'

"Of course, you couldn't save her. She was too far gone. We moored her at the back of a housing estate. The vandals got her. She was badly burned. The river authority said: 'We can't have this.'"

In the sad end to the story, Boat 56 was, in effect, cremated. Tom was not there to see the demise of his wartime mount.

"I remember somebody saying that it was a real Viking burning."

He still has a memento, the crest which he painted and designed himself, which Boat 56 carried on the bridge on D-Day.

"Big ships have names and crests and are called ships, but because we were smaller we were called boats and didn't have names, we had numbers. I dabbled in painting and mocked it up and when we were decommissioned they presented it to me."

His design shows a bird with a bolt of lightning in its beak, and carries a motto he devised of Facta Non Verba - Deeds, Not Words.

"Our ethic was lighting strikes - we were quick in and out."

From a Craven Arms family, Tom joined the Royal Navy in 1942 and served mostly on motor gun boats, as a gunner operating a turret with twin .50 calibre Browning machineguns.

"They called us the Little Navy. You can imagine in a battleship discipline is very strict, but on a boat with only 18 of you and you are falling over the skipper every five minutes it's a complete family situation."

Before D-Day they were involved in nighttime clashes with the E-boats, and at the time of the invasion he was based at HMS Hornet at Gosport. Their initial task was to protect the minesweepers sweeping the route for the invasion fleet.

"When you looked back on D-Day you could see 7,000 ships or something like that. You thought, they need not bother with ships - they could walk across. I think the overriding feeling was that we can't lose."

On the French coast they got a shock when there were a series of explosions sinking ships, and for a moment they thought E-boats had penetrated the screen, but in fact it was blockships being deliberately sunk.

"There was plenty of shot and shell going in, but it was in the background. You didn't seem to register that they were aiming at you. You were just doing your job. I don't remember having the feeling I was in danger. We were busy anyway. Obviously, people were being killed and wounded."

And he saw terrible things.

"That's stayed with me."

With the invasion well in hand, Boat 56 became a fast dispatch boat, during which it had some interesting passengers.

"We had a BBC film crew. I have the name Frank Brough in my mind, who I think was the main reporter chap. They had this disturbing habit of trying to convince the skipper to get closer having told us they had the finest long range cameras in the world. We thought: 'This is a bit iffy.'"

The boat's skipper, incidentally, was a Lieutenant Roberts.

"He was a great guy. His father was either the chairman or owner of the Caledonian Ferry Company in Scotland."

One of his invasion memories is that they didn't change their clothes for three days.

Tom, who was an Able Seaman, had a nickname on Boat 56, being called by his colleagues "The Baron." This was because at that time he didn't smoke and the cigarettes he was issued were much sought-after, and consequently he was viewed as a sort of cigarette lord.

After D-Day Boat 56 became a sort of high speed taxi service between the Normandy beachhead and Britain, taking a number of important passengers, including Commander Peter Scott, the son of the doomed Antarctic explorer.

And during a great storm which had to be ridden out in harbour, Tom found himself armed with a revolver acting as a guard to German prisoners of war ashore.

"Two things struck me. There were a great number who spoke very good English when they were begging for cigarettes or whatever, and the other was quite surprising, the amount who had transferred to the Atlantic Wall from the Eastern Front who were Romanian, Hungarian, or whatnot, and at the first opportunity put their hands up."

After the adventures of Normandy, their work became relatively routine and Tom left the navy in 1946 and forged a 32-year career in the fire service, becoming Firemaster of Fife in Scotland and then Chief Officer of Derbyshire, from where he retired. He was also a Deputy Lieutenant in Derbyshire.

Returning to his native Craven Arms, he was a town and district councillor.

He received the OBE for his fire service work in 1979, retiring in 1980, but it was only in February of this year that he received the French Legion d'honneur, which has been awarded by the French government to Normandy veterans to honour and thank them for risking their lives to secure the liberation of France.

"I was flabbergasted," says Tom.

"To receive the highest honour took my breath away."

These days he is a widower and sadly also lost his son. His old comrades have all passed on too. A keen bridge player, he is in four south Shropshire clubs and tries to play four times a week if he can.

"I was one of the very last sailors to receive prize money," he says.

At war's end, prize money - money awarded to navy men as a result of the capture of enemy ships - was given out alphabetically which meant that being a Watkins, he was at the end of the list.

"I got £19 and 10 shillings."

He wishes he kept the cheque as a souvenir.

A few years ago he returned to the French beaches with his family and, in an old fire service habit, parked with his wheels turned as if ready for a quick getaway, resulting in him being an inch or two over some white line - and he got a parking ticket.

"I was peeved," he said. Despite mentioning he was a Normandy veteran, he was warned that if he didn't pay up he would never come to France again. However, he was eventually let off.

"I was treated pretty fairly. I felt guilty afterwards. I thought 'here you go, bashing your war experience about. You're just an ordinary citizen.' But I was annoyed."