Harvest time in a village in England, 1942. Raymond Peace and his friend Ronald Williams were on leave from their wartime duties with the Royal Air Force, staying for a while with the Williams family at the vicarage along the lane from the church where Ronald's father had been the incumbent Anglican priest for some twenty years. It was a beautiful day, hazy with warmth, and the two friends decided to drive the few miles to the local market town. Unusually, and in breach of wartime regulations, they also decided to make the trip wearing civilian clothes. They had sufficient petrol, an eye-catching motorcar and were many miles from their airfields in the eastern counties. Leaving behind their uniforms probably meant they thought they could further distance themselves from the increasing strains of the war. It was a difficult time for them: they were pilots attached to different bomber squadrons and had been almost constantly occupied with that summer's flying missions to continental Europe.

In the summer of 1992 I met an elderly lady at her home in the village in question. We sat for a while in the kitchen of her perfect country cottage. She complained mildly about how the area had become ‘full of strangers’, commuting to nearby cities, but her eyes sparkled as she recalled earlier times; and she described vividly the impact the two airmen had made during their occasional wartime visits.