Buck passed through postings on non-effective duties and returned for a time to 75 Squadron, then based at Mepal.  In August 1943 he joined a repatriation draft with two other New Zealanders, Flying Officer Woodward and Sergeant Garty, an armourer who had been in Britain since 1939.  The three men travelled together, sharing meals and the long waits between stages of the journey.

On 18 August Buck embarked from Britain aboard the Aquitania, which reached New York six days later and berthed beside the capsized Normandie.  To see the great liner’s hull from the boat deck, he had to lean out while holding on to something solid.  After the sunken masts at Greenock it was another striking sight, though New York itself impressed him with its bustle and abundance of yellow taxis.

The three New Zealanders were quartered at an army camp in Brooklyn, but with no firm departure date they answered an advertisement for workers and spent two weeks on a farm in upper New York State.  There they cut ten-foot maize wet with morning dew, filled a silo, carted potatoes and handled timber for winter storage, taking their meals with the family.  Buck relished the chance to return for a while to the physical work he had known before the war.

Recalled by telegram, they spent a long week crossing the United States by train, then waited at the bachelor officers’ quarters on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, close to Alcatraz.  Military police guarded against men going absent before sailing, while Buck watched the island’s quail and took an interest in the strong currents around the supposedly inescapable prison.

The Pacific was still a war zone, and when a cargo ship they sighted turned and sped away, Buck knew that Japanese forces might be anywhere.  His rank nevertheless made the crossing more comfortable than it was for many aboard: he ate well as an officer while enlisted men queued for meals.  He noticed the difference and freely admitted that he accepted the privilege.

When the ship berthed at Auckland, the returning men opened a bottle of champagne.  At Mangere, steak and plentiful onions were served. “We knew we were home then.”

He had travelled out through the Pacific and Canada, crossed the Atlantic by way of Iceland and reached Scotland before heading south through Britain.  Leave and postings had taken him into Wales and Somerset and back to Scotland, while operations had carried him over the Low Countries, Germany, France and the Alps to Italy.  Another Atlantic crossing, the width of the United States and the Pacific had finally brought him back to Auckland, though Southland was still a train and ferry journey away.

Even that last stretch took some organising.  North Island men were sent on leave while the South Islanders seemed to be forgotten, until Buck took charge, arranged the required X-rays and got the draft onto a Sunday-night train to Wellington.  There he and a companion spent too long at the bar of the Occidental Hotel and reached the ferry with moments to spare, carrying the kit they had accumulated across half the world.

At Dunedin station, while Buck was wondering where he might find a room, a woman approached and asked whether he was Harold Price. She turned out to be Hone’s mother and took him in for the night, an unexpected welcome through his connection with the crew.

His father had died on 6 December 1942 while Buck was operating from England, and his mother had since moved into Invercargill.  Davie met him at the station, and after a few days he was taken out to Waianiwa, where within a week it seemed as though he had never been away.

The return to familiar surroundings was unsettling as well as welcome.  Farm life had continued while he was away, but he missed his crew and the constant succession of different people he had met overseas.  After months in which five men’s lives could depend on a single shouted command, settling back into the old routines came hard.

He received a small daily pension and a sixpence-a-day decoration allowance, but medical boards required repeated trips to Wellington.  On one of these, the Chief Military Policeman for New Zealand challenged him in the station concourse for wearing his battledress collar turned up over boils on the back of his neck.  Buck replied that he had come for a medical board and would request his discharge.  The official grew quieter and urged him not to, but Buck had made up his mind.

The medal offered an official conclusion: service recognised, courage named, a uniformed past brought into ceremony.  Buck’s own ending was quieter and less complete.  He had left New Zealand as a farm worker who had struggled over correspondence lessons late into the night.  He came back a commissioned officer and decorated air gunner who had been wounded by shellfire, crossed Europe on operations thirty-six times, survived the destruction around him and lost the flying career he had fought to enter because his feet froze in a Lancaster turret.

He did not claim to have returned fearless or ennobled.  His recollections preserved fear, anger, cruelty, boredom, rough humour, professional pride and luck.  They also preserved the later judgment of an older man, able to recognise that some things laughed at during war ceased to be funny in peace.  He understood the distance between doing one’s job under conditions designed to destroy ordinary standards and living afterward with an undamaged conscience.

The central fact of his survival was not that he had been untouched.  Metal remained in his calf.  Frostbite ended his operations.  His father died while he was away.  Friends and fellow airmen vanished into phrases such as “missing” and “the chop”.  The crew whose voices had filled his headset dispersed almost at once when his flying stopped.

Yet he survived, and survival returned him not to a transformed landscape but to the same one he had left.  Waianiwa had not shared his velocity through the world.  It had waited.  The extraordinary years ended among familiar people and familiar work, where the difficulty lay in accepting that the outward world could remain unchanged after the inward one had been remade.

“Not a thing different,” Buck Price wrote of coming home. “Just me.”