Paul Holden's report on our great county regiment, The Royal Sussex (Argus, May 11), and the actions they were involved in, had me absorbing every word, as did his previous report on the regiment. Justly, we should be proud of every man who served in it and marched to that anthem of ours, Sussex By The Sea.

At last in a report about the horrors of war and the hell infantrymen go through, there was a mention of the suffering the wives and mothers go through. As an infantryman in the Second World War, being young and single, my thoughts and prayers in every action were for my mother, hoping that, if anything happened to me, she would have the strength to carry on.

My mother's story is typical of thousands. She was left to bring up a family of eight children under the age of 14 while my father was away for four years serving with the Royal Sussex and Hampshire regiments, being invalided out in 1919 after fighting in the Dardanelles.

Two decades later, her seven sons were on war service, four in the Army and three in the RAF. I served in the Royal Sussex throughout the Middle East campaign, another in Burma and two in Europe. Of the three in the RAF, one trained in Canada and served at Tangmere with the Czechoslovakian Squadron, one in Africa and one, a regular serviceman, an instructor in England. Two of us were wounded.

If anyone deserved a medal it was the mother and wife. Her reward was to see her seven sons walk through the front door and down into the kitchen when the war was over.

-Frank Edwards, Craven Road, Brighton