A ROMANTIC lunch for two pensioners celebrating the tenth anniversary of their extra-marital affair ended with gun threats.

Kathleen Ward, 63, stormed out of the restaurant after angry words with her long-standing lover Tony Bernascone, 69, who phoned her husband Roy, 68, to say: "Your little slut of a wife is on her way home".

Bernascone, a member of the academic board of the former Teesside Polytechnic, then turned up at the house with two guns, threatening to shoot the couple before police arrived to arrest him. Both weapons turned out to be imitations, said Robin Denney, prosecuting.

Both men were in poor health. Bernascone had suffered cancer and heart attacks, and Mr Ward had been treated for skin cancer and a stroke.

Mr Denney said: "The background to this rather bizarre event was that there had been a relationship between her and him for ten years. From time to time it came to the attention of her retired husband, but it continued."

He said that it came to a head in September, when Bernascone and Mrs Ward met in a restaurant in Middlesbrough to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their relationship and there were angry words before they parted.

Mr Ward recognised Berna-scone's voice in the phone call, but his wife denied seeing the defendant. Then there was a hammering at the door of the Wards' home, in Berwick Hills, Middlesbrough, and she opened it, Teesside Crown Court was told.

When her husband joined her at the door, Bernascone pulled out a pistol, which Mr Ward thought was real, and told him: "I've come to do you but I don't want to, I just want to talk."

The police seized Bernascone's guns, an imitation Walther PPK, as favoured by James Bond, and an eight millimetre blank firing self-loading pistol.

Paul Cleasby, defending, said: "He has been described as a man of wit and charm with a gentlemanly reputation. He had enjoyed a relationship with Mrs Ward for ten years, and that was known to all parties concerned. On the afternoon in question he drank too much and he behaved in a bizarre way."

Bernascone, of Westbourne Grove, North Ormesby, Middlesbrough, pleaded guilty to possessing imitation firearms with intent to cause fear of violence at the Wards' home.

He was given a six-month jail sentence suspended for two years