AMALIA and BERTIE LEWIS from Austria and the USA. Amalia is one of identical twins born in 1931 in a little village in the east of Austria, close to the border with Hungary. She grew up on a hilltop farm.

When the Second World War ended, Austria was occupied by the four powers - Britain, France, the USA and Soviet Russia.

Amalia remembers: "One day we were in the wagon, getting something from the village, and we saw the Russians coming up on their horses from Hungary. They took stuff from the farm and used to come back.

"It was a dangerous time. My sister and I, we were 14 then, had to hide to avoid being raped.

"We told each other when we grew up, we'd go to America. We had relatives in New York."

Amalia reached America in 1955. She met Bertie Lewis in a New York German club.

Bertie was born in 1920 in Chicago. His maternal grandparents had come from Macclesfield.

He grew up in New York City and was selling magazines around offices when he was only 10 years old. At 15, he left school.

He was 19 when the Second World War broke out in Europe in 1939. It would be two more years before America entered the war, but Bertie worked his passage across the Atlantic, shovelling coal on a Norwegian ship, intent on enlisting in the RAF as soon as he could.

One of few Americans in the British air force, he became a wireless operator and flew more than 40 missions in Halifax bombers.

He first visited the North of England when thousands of airmen were billeted in Blackpool boarding houses, and while on leave, Bertie would explore neighbouring towns.

When the war ended, he returned to America, and for 10 years he travelled back and forth between England and the USA. In the 1950s, he became acquainted with Bolton, selling cash registers in pubs and clubs around the North-west.

After he met Amalia, they married in 1961 and moved here. Amalia was a little less enthusiastic about emigrating.

She said: "I wasn't so much for it. It was awful when we came. It was dirty and cold. They still had coal fires and I'd got used to central heating and the American lifestyle. We were used to going out at night-time at 9 or 10 o'clock into the early morning. Here, at 11 o'clock everything finished."

She discovered an Austrian community in Bolton - some had arrived in the late 1940s, recruited to work in the cotton mills.

Bertie, in his 80s now, is a familiar town-centre figure, every Saturday brandishing his placard in Victoria Square, demonstrating against the war in Iraq or the threat of nuclear weapons. On Remembrance Sunday, at the foot of the Cenotaph, he lays his wreath of white poppies.