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Jack spent much of the war living near an aircraft base called East Moor in Strensall, Yorkshire.

The Royal Canadian Air Force were stationed there from 1942 until they were disbanded in May 1945.

He was born in 1931, so he was 14 when the war ended. His father was based in Wiltshire doing armament research.

Jack remembers the base well. He and his friends spent a lot of their free time pretending to be Lancaster Bomber pilots. They would wear cocoa tin lids as ear phones with a wire headband and put cigarette packets on the brake blocks of their cycles to make the sound of Merlin engines.

He and his friends would cycle out to the base to watch the planes coming and going. They were often damaged when they came back; limping in, flying low over the road.

Occasionally, if they were badly damaged they wouldn鈥檛 make it. Sometimes, Jack recalls, there would be an explosion mid-air and the bomber would be no more.

For Jack, VE Day wasn鈥檛 as exciting as it might have been. He was confined to bed with an abscess in his ear so missed the celebration in the village.

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