Eddie Eyres met his future wife Pat in wartime York in macabre circumstances that sum up the lives of Australian airmen in Bomber Command in the Second World War.

Eddie, a pilot from Queensland, walked into a coffee shop on Stonegate. His wife-to-be was then a WAAF corporal at 4 Group headquarters in York - at Heslington Hall, now part of the University of York.

Her job included sending telegrams about casualties to next of kin. As Eddie recalled: "It wore her down a bit."

Pat asked Eddie if he knew a Canadian by the name of Dickie Mock. He replied that he did - his use of the past tense prompted her to burst into tears. Had he been posted elsewhere? No, Eddie admitted, he had been killed in action.

To console Pat, Eddie took her for a drink. Romance blossomed, they married and Eddie took her home to Australia.

Eddie was one of the lucky ones. He survived the war and died only this year. He was among those I interviewed in Australia and feature in a new book, The Luckiest Men Alive.

About half of all bomber airmen were killed in action, usually within a few weeks or months of joining their front- line squadron, such as 102 Squadron at RAF Pocklington.

If you add the wounded, and those shot down and taken prisoner of war, the odds were against you lasting a full tour of operations - 30 missions.

Knowing their chances of living beyond the next few months were so bad, airmen lived a strange life.

Strange because they were 12,000 miles away from home. In an example of British Empire co-operation that is difficult to grasp today, these Australians volunteered to serve what they called "the old country". Their intensive training usually started in Australia, carried on in Canada, and was finished in Britain, at places such as RAF Marston Moor and Acaster Malbis.

A pilot could take two years to train. The nearer they got to a squadron, the more aware they became that

their days might well be numbered. Even then, they had comforts that men at sea or soldiers could only dream of.

One night they would be in the air for up to eight or nine hours on an exhausting mission against Germany, facing anti-aircraft guns and enemy fighter planes; the next night they might enjoy a movie or a dance in York - with dance partners from the local chocolate factory with chocolate in their hair, Eddie Eyres recalled.

Or they would stagger around the pubs of York, maybe bumping into mates, or women, or chatting with Canadian airmen from other RAF stations, making sure they did not miss the last bus back to base - because the only alternative then was to sleep on a York railway station bench.

Quite apart from whatever the enemy could throw at them, take-offs could be dangerous. Adelaide man Fred Papple survived operations and became a trainer at Marston Moor in the winter of 1944-5. Earlier, as a pilot at RAF Leconfield, once taking off he could not get his plane - carrying a full bomb-load - properly airborne. His wings sliced through a pair of telegraph poles before a crash-landing in a field. He and his crew escaped.

Despite such near-misses and the loss of so many comrades, and despite the (to them) cold and wet climate, the veterans look back fondly on their war service in Yorkshire.

Like many war veterans they are quick to recall the light-hearted side of life. Eddie Eyres remembers buying a car without a driver's licence only for a policeman to pull him over. The officer, however, reasoned that if Eddie could fly an aeroplane he was qualified to drive a car!

Sydney man Ross Pearson, who served as a wireless operator with an RAF squadron at Pocklington in 1944, tells the story of how he warmed his bed in his shared Nissen hut with a brick heated on the stove. "It used to sizzle the blanket a little bit but it was beautifully warm. And I said to the navigator, don't sit on my bed, and he sat four square on the brick. He got burned, the inscription of the brick company right across the backside. They tried to paint it with lighter fluid to ease the pain!"

The flatter parts of eastern and northern Yorkshire were dotted with airfields, used for training and combat squadrons. Some airfields, such as Leconfield and Leeming, are still used by the RAF.

Most - such as RAF Pocklington, and Holme-on-Spalding Moor, where Eddie Eyres was based - have returned to farmland or have become industrial estates. If you know where to look, you can find traces of those now-ageing Aussies. They are now in their 80s and their health is getting worse, but some are still returning to Britain to visit former crewmates and to revisit old haunts.

In the basement of the renowned Bettys Cafe in York's St Helen's Square, for example, is a mirror dating from the war. In those days Bettys had a licence and served alcohol and was a magnet for servicemen of many Allied nations. It was a tradition for men to scratch their names on the bar glass.

"Life was short and sweet," was how Ross Pearson put it.

The Australians' sense of duty brought them as young men to Britain, where they sought to squeeze the most out of life, never knowing how long they had left.

The title of my book therefore has a double meaning.

It took sheer luck for an airman to survive, but those survivors can now feel they were fortunate to experience the comradeship that helped to get them through.

The Luckiest Men Alive: Australians In Bomber Command In Britain In World War Two, by Mark Rowe, is on sale at Barbican Bookshop, 24 Fossgate, York; and at the Yorkshire Air Museum, Elvington. The book, 184 pages, priced £14.80, has more than 90 illustrations

Updated: 10:17 Monday, August 18, 2003