When I wrote in this column about Polish airmen who took part in the Battle of Britain a couple of months ago, I couldn’t even dream about meeting one of them. Well, miracles happen and I was recently put in touch with Stanislaw Kolczak and visited him at his home in Melksham.

This man is living history: although he is 97 years old, his memory is better than mine and he is an absolutely charming and adorable person, who told me how it really was during the Second World War.

Stanislaw Kolczak was born in 1916 in Warsaw. After senior school in Mazowsze (a district of Warsaw) he joined Polish Air Force Academy (Wyzsza Szkola Oficerska Sil Powietrznych) in Deblin (Sandomierz Voivodeship), specialising as a navigator.

Mr Kolczak finished at the academy three months before the beginning of the Second World War. He’d been allocated to Polish 216th Bomber Escadrille (216 Eskadra Bombowa), called the Escadrille of Losie, flying in a Polish twin-engine medium bomber, used in the defence of Poland against the Nazi German invasion in 1939).

He escaped from Poland in 1939, travelled through Romania to get to France, where he fought against the Nazis, flying on a Glenn Martin American aircraft. After France’s capitulation in 1940 he had to escape again. This time he travelled across the Mediterranean Sea, he reached North Africa and then Casablanca.

He said: “There were Germans everywhere, we had to escape. We were trying to stick together but it was really difficult. We managed to get on a coal ship, where the conditions were horrible, rats were everywhere, and they bit us.

“But later in Gibraltar there was a luxury passenger ship, which took us to Plymouth.”

In 1941 Mr Kolczak was assigned to 304 (Land of Silesia) Polish Bomber Squadron (304 Dywizjon Bombowy Ziemi Slaskiej im. Ks. Józefa Poniatowskiego), which flew alongside the Royal Air Force under Bomber Command and operated from air bases in the United Kingdom, as well as an anti-submarine unit in RAF Coastal Command and as a transport unit in RAF Transport Command.

Mr Kolczak added: “We flew on a Fairey Battle through the English Channel to sink German submarines. It was only an hour flight and then we were going back, loading the bombs and going out again.”

He later joined the 16th OTU (operational training unit), formed in April 1940 as part of No 6 Group RAF Bomber Command at RAF Upper Heyford, to train night bomber crews.

Mr Kolczak married his wife, Winifred, who he met in hospital, in 1942 and they had three sons, Andrzej, Krzysztof and Michal.

After the war, when he was only 29, he was told he was too old to stay in the air force, so moved to Wales and became a farmer.

Seven years later, he sold up and started to work for a dairy company as a driver. He became a director of that company before retiring.

I asked him if he ever missed flying, but he said: “No, I’d had enough. I don’t want to go back to the war times. So many people asked me throughout all my life about war, but I just simply don’t want to talk about it.

“I am a simple person who lived during the war, I had no choice. Although I have had British citizenship since 1963, in my heart I am a Polish person.”