It is almost 80 years since the Second World War ended. The youngest of those who took part in the conflict still with us are now approaching centenarian status.

Their ranks grow thinner with each passing year. Only a handful remain.

Which makes Peter Brown a rare breed.

He was only 13 when the Second World War broke out in September 1939. Within months, Hitler's armies — using blitzkrieg tactics — had overrun most of Western Europe, leaving Britain standing alone and under threat.

Like many teenagers of that era, the softly spoken grammar school student from Manchester, in the north of England, felt compelled to join the war effort — to “do his bit” to stem the tide of fascism sweeping across Europe from Germany.

"We all wanted to sign up — we felt it was our duty," the 98-year-old Paget resident said in an interview with The Royal Gazette recalling his school days.

Mr Brown had no need to rush. He turned 18 in May 1944 while the wars in Europe and the Far East were still raging. At the first opportunity, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force, having served in the force's cadet corps as a schoolboy. It was a natural fit and he was taken on immediately.

A skilled mathematician, Mr Brown was sent on a number of training courses to study electronics and the latest radar technology — the AI of its day.

In early 1945, after six months of training, Mr Brown was shipped out to India, a backwater of the war back then, but a hotbed of conflict and international crisis in the years to come immediately after peace was declared.

"I was sent there before anyone else — the forerunner of troops to come in India ,“ Mr Brown said.

He spent the next six months working at hilltop observation posts before the war in the Far East finally ended with Japan’s surrender in August 1945.

Typical of his generation, Mr Brown plays down his role in the conflict.

He pointed out that he never saw action or came under enemy fire, and that fear never influenced his decision to join the war.

He said: “You have to understand that we were young. We were teenagers. We thought we were invincible. We didn’t think about dying. Joining up was basically the right thing to do.”

But he acknowledged that when he did volunteer as an 18-year-old, he did not know what the future held.

He said: “When you sign up, you have no idea what you're signing up for. We were basically told what to do.

“I could have been sent anywhere. But I was one of the lucky ones.”

Mr Brown spent two years in India, traversing the continent, taking in a world so different from that of his childhood in England.

It was his return to Britain from India in 1947 that gave him his first contact with Bermuda.

Civilian cruise liners had been commissioned into the Royal Navy fleet to bring soldiers back home.

Mr Brown's mode of transport from India was The Monarch of Bermuda — a cruise liner that had sailed between Britain and Bermuda before the war in the days of luxury cruise ship travel.

Every soldier boarding the Monarch for that two-week journey home was presented with a black-and-white photograph postcard of the vessel berthed alongside Front Street during its 1930s heyday — a talisman of brighter days ahead.

Mr Brown still has that postcard, and an enlarged print of the image hangs on a wall of his study.

Back in his native England, Mr Brown qualified as an actuary before coming to Bermuda in 1964 to work for American International Group. Apart from a short stint back in Britain in the 1970s, he has been here ever since.

“It’s the people — and the weather,” he said of the appeal of his adopted home, where he has spent almost two thirds of his long life.

Twice widowed, Mr Brown was also predeceased by his two children, a daughter and a son.

Today, he keeps his mind sharp by playing word puzzles, reading and keeping up with technology.

He said: “Kindle is so useful. It has a backlight that makes reading so much easier. I have probably about 150 books on Kindle. Imagine how much space that would take up if I had to have hard copies?”

Watching sports — cricket, football, golf and tennis — is also another passion.

So what does Remembrance Day mean to someone who has lived through and experienced first-hand the most destructive conflict of the last century?

For Mr Brown, it marks an annual moment to look to the future — to pragmatically learn from the past and move forward from it, rather than stay stuck in it.

Drawing on today’s conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine, he said: “If there’s one thing the young have to learn from our generation, it’s the horror of war. That should never be forgotten. That’s what we should remember.

“I guess we still have a great deal of learning to do.”