Canadian Second World War air gunner Pat Brophy never spoke to his three children about the terrible night in 1944 when his best friend, Andrew Mynarski, died trying to save his life. His daughter, Colleen Bacon, told Sam Strangeways how she pieced together the details of the fateful mission to France.

WHEN Colleen Bacon was a little girl she often wondered why reporters would come to her home to speak to her father.

The conversations took place behind closed doors and she and her brother and sister were never invited in to listen.

Aged nine, she plucked up the courage to start asking questions, but the answers were far from forthcoming.

Now aged 46, Colleen is talking to journalists and historians and it is through them that she has learnt the full story of Andrew Mynarski's incredible bravery as he desperately struggled to save the life of his best friend, her father.

"I came upon the story basically because as a young girl I asked my dad why he didn't have any hair and he said 'go and talk to your mom'," she says.

"I don't think at that age I was even that aware that my dad was in the armed forces. The fact that dad was in the war to a nine-year-old didn't mean that much. It wasn't a topic of conversation.

"I spoke to my mom and it was through speaking to her that I came across the Readers' Digest version of the story."

As she discovered, Pat Brophy's baldness was a result of the shock of a plane crash that he miraculously survived on June 13, 1944.

The night before, he and his fellow crew members had set out on a mission from the Royal Canadian Air Force base at Middleton St George, near Darlington.

Their Lancaster bomber was hit by enemy fire over France and Pat became trapped at the back of the plane.

Pilot Officer Mynarski crawled through the flames to try to save him but was eventually forced to bail out, his flight suit on fire from the waist down.

He died from extensive burns but Pat was thrown clear of the plane and lived to tell the tale of his friend's courage, ensuring that Mynarski was eventually awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

At home in Canada, it was a different story. "Dad didn't speak about those things when we were children," says Colleen.

"I remember my mom telling me that he had terrible, terrible nightmares for months after he got back home.

"My sister, Sherry, was first born in the family. I came along 12 years later, then my brother, Patrick, four years later.

"I think there was a gap of time between Sherry and me coming along when my father would have been working through what happened."

Over the years, Colleen, a divorced mother-of-two who runs a school for special needs children in Ontario, pieced together what had happened to her father.

From reading books and articles, she slowly came to understand why there was a black box full of secrets on top of his closet and why he kept in such close contact with his friends from the war.

She thinks he was a master at masking his feelings, at hiding the impact of the horror he had seen.

"Can you imagine seeing your very best friend on fire from the waist down?" she asks. "You can only imagine the trauma.

"I don't know how anybody could recover from what they saw. I know it had a profound effect on my dad, but he was a very private man. There was a piece of my dad that we didn't go to."

Colleen's father died, aged 69, 13 years ago. Her mother, Sylvia, died three years later.

A moving letter, from Pat to Mynarski's mother, which was passed to Colleen after his death and is reprinted here, has given her the most insight into his feelings.

"My father rarely wrote letters," she says. "Therefore, when I came across this one, I was particularly touched. He had a beautiful way with words and I think this expresses how he felt."