'We'd talk about the weather, the harvest, normal things,' a white-haired Mr Pierson told me six decades later, 'anything but where I was going with my crew that night.
'In some ways that was the hardest part. One minute you were leading an ordinary life. Then we were off to drop bombs on Berlin or the Ruhr valley in the middle of the night, and knowing we might never come back.
'There must have been many times when that farmer chatted to men he never saw again. But he never asked what happened to them, never mentioned it. No one did.'
That was what it meant to fight in Bomber Command in the World War II. Very much alive one minute, in the prime of life; very dead the next, shot down, wiped out, obliterated. The courage needed was breath-taking.
'You came back from a raid,' Mr Pierson recalled, 'and seven beds in your hut were empty. Seven friends gone — an entire crew — men you had been laughing and joking with a few hours earlier.
