David Aukland, 80, was an infant during the London Blitz, the World War II German bombing campaign that targeted England in 1940-41.

“I wasn’t conscious of how gray the war made everything for everybody, and how people were deprived,” David Aukland says of World War II in England. (Photo by Cleo Aukland)

As a child, Aukland—now living in retirement in Irvington, New York—would not  know a life without war. He was a baby when his father had left England to join the air force.

When the war ended, as he recounts it in this AudioFiles feature, his father’s return revealed a family forever changed.