Brave nurse Madeline Brown has relived how she was threatened at gunpoint trying to protect children on a mercy mission to Albania.

The 59-year-old grandmother, now safely home at Westbrook in Grove, near Wantage, was threatened by thieving gangsters as she tried to shield children's toys sent on a relief convoy from Britain.

She said: "It's completely lawless, and the mafia drive around in Range Rovers and Mercedes. There's no rule of law, just gun law."

Angry Madeline, who has worked at the Wantage Hospital for 22 years, shouted at the thug when he pointed the handgun at her chest.

Not realising the danger she was in, Madeline stood her ground, until an interpreter for the UK charity project, Operation Angel, told her quietly: "Don't argue, they'll shoot you!"

The ugly incident came during an amazing three-week visit to northern Albania.

Madeline was in a 25-strong team of women volunteers taking clothes and medical supplies to families forced to flee their homes during fighting between the Serb forces of convicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic and separatist guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Organiser of the trip, freelance aid worker Sally Becker, 37, is now serving a 30-day sentence in a Kosovo jail having been convicted of illegally crossing the border with Yugoslavia while trying to smuggle a Kosovo Albanian family back into Albania to escape 'ethnic cleansing' by the Serb militia. Dubbed the 'Angel of Mostar' by the media in 1993 when she rescued 25 wounded children under gunfire during the earlier Balkan conflict, Ms Becker has clashed repeatedly with official aid workers who accuse her of jeopardising UN operations in the unstable region.

Madeline, who joined the latest expedition after hearing an appeal for volunteers on the radio, was out of radio contact with her husband, Graham, a Grove parish councillor, and their four children and families for much of her time abroad.

She made the gruelling 3,000-mile round trip across Europe in an ancient coach, which was part of a motley convoy of retired ambulances and donated Ford Transit vans, all loaded to the ceiling with vital medical supplies and clothes for families forced back over the mountains into Albania by the Serb aggressors.

The worst part of the journey for the volunteers, many of them middle-aged, was a terrifying ride across the mountains on a rough track never made for motor vehicles, with huge drops into deep ravines just inches from their wheels. The ordeal was so horrifying that three of the group gave up the venture and had to be airlifted back home to the UK.

Madeline said: "Nobody has ever been over that mountain in a coach or lorry before. I shake with terror when I think of it.

"It took us nine hours, and the ground just broke away towards the edge. There are no roads as we know them, just a track cut out of the side of a mountain with craters, potholes and huge boulders. It made those scenes from the film, The Italian Job, pale into insignificance.

"I was nearer to God than the earth, and it was down to our fantastic driver Mary Banks, from Sheffield, who was ex-Army and a professional PSV driver, that we got through in one piece."

Madeline and her friends eventually operated from dilapidated army barracks in a town where, they discovered to their horror, that most of the men walked around armed with AK-47 assault rifles, regularly firing off bursts into the air in displays of macho aggression. "It's completely lawless, and the Mafia drive around in Range Rovers and Mercedes. There's no rule of law, just gun law."

Mrs Brown discovered this frightening fact of life During the journey, when three well-dressed men suddenly appeared in the doorway of their coach and began picking up and inspecting soft toys sent for the children.

"Our interpreter said not to argue with them because they were gangsters, but I was cross and tried to pull a toy away, and one of them just pushed a gun in my chest," she said.

"I was angry and thought 'stupid great men', but the interpreter warned me off., saying 'They'll shoot you.

"I've been a quiet person all my life, and I can't believe I've been there and done this."

The occasional fright and hardship was nothing compared to the deprivation and poverty of the Kosovan people.

Many of them live rough in the woods or are taken in by Albanian families, who were extremely grateful for any help from the British volunteers.

One woman, who did the laundry for the women for just £1 a day, was so grateful she knitted Madeline slippers and a shawl with the Albanian eagle on it.

"It was an incredible journey," said Madeline. "It was dangerous and the travelling was gruelling, but I've brought back positive thoughts.

"I know that I've helped make someone's life better, and made them realise there are people who do care."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.