"We’d slept in our uniforms, our buttons were tarnished with sea air, our hair frowsy. In fact, we looked like so much scruff, but we were the boys coming home. This meant the war was really over.

In Montreal we got a huge welcome, and in all the little towns in Northern Ontario, and a band played on the platform in Winnipeg and people stood by the tracks in little towns in Saskatchewan and waved and cheered, and in Edmonton there was a great big reception there for the home-town boys who got off the train.

When we got on the Streetcar in Vancouver, the conductor took one look at me, my bag and ribbons and he said, ‘Welcome home, son’ and he wouldn’t let me pay my fare... I guess that guy saying that was about the nicest welcome home anyone ever received."