Recording their finest hour: last surviving member of France's Battle of Britain pilots

Henry Lafont jokes that he should be treated like a piece of old porcelain or a precious cut-glass vase, as the last, living Frenchman to have fought in the Battle of Britain. The fewness of The Few was literal. A few hundred pilots won the battle (arguably one of history's most important) in the skies over southern England in the second half of 1940.

Within that company, there was an even smaller group, 10 French fighter pilots who had "deserted" and joined the RAF near the end of the Battle of Britain. All are dead, except M. Lafont, 83.

He has written a book, Aviateurs de la Liberté, a brief history of each of the 413 French airmen who died fighting with the RAF, and later the Free French air force, in 1940-45. M. Lafont, who changed the spelling of his name from Henri to Henry when he joined the RAF, says: "I fought in the Battle of Britain but I never knew there had been such a battle until the end of the war. To the British pilots, and to the pilots of many nationalities who flew with them, it was a series of alerts and patrols and skirmishes.

"Sometimes nothing would happen. Sometimes there would be brief fights with German aircraft. Pilots, our friends, would die. Other pilots would come. We knew we were in a war and we knew we would win that war. But we knew nothing about something called a 'Battle of Britain'."

M. Lafont, who had just turned 20, flew 150 missions in Hurricanes of 615 Squadron, based at Kenley, Surrey, from early October 1940. He was awarded two victories over German fighters. "There was nothing glorious in what I did," he said. "On the first occasion, a Messerschmitt 109 that shot down our squadron- leader passed across my sights and I fired. On the second occasion, I was over the Channel and an Me109 dropped a bomb near a convoy. I fired and I saw smoke coming from the German aircraft. Years later, after the war, I discovered I had been awarded two kills."

M. Lafont, who lives in a Paris penthouse, retired as a colonel in the French air force and became director of the international aeronautical and space salon in Paris.

In June 1940, when France surrendered, M. Lafont was stationed in Oran in Algeria. He and five other pilots stole an aircraft and landed on a racecourse in Gibraltar. Days later, M. Lafont and the nine other French pilots were rapidly retrained on Hurricanes and pitched into the battle with the Luftwaffe over southern England.

Two of them died within weeks; six were killed later in the war and one died after, leaving M. Lafont as the last of the French Few. "The Hurricane was a good plane, very steady, very strong but it was no match for the German fighters," he said. "Even the Spitfires were often outclassed. The Germans could get much higher than us."

After the Battle of Britain, M. Lafont was injured in a plane crash in Libya. He returned to Britain and married an English woman in 1943. They had two children but divorced in the 1960s.

So which side does he take in the cross-Channel argument on war in Iraq? "I have such marvellous memories of Britain in wartime I always tend to take the British side," he said. "Although I saw enough of war to want to avoid war at all times, I also remember in the Thirties we wanted to avoid war with Hitler so desperately we ended up fighting him too late."