Bomber Boys
A Ghost Story
by Simon Leighton-Porter
All rights reserved
© Simon Leighton-Porter, 2015
The right of Simon Leighton-Porter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover artwork
Copyright © Berni Stevens 2015
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Mauve Square Publishing Ltd
www.mauvesquare.com
This book is respectfully dedicated to the aircrew of Bomber Command, over 55,000 of whom were killed during the Second World War.
Chapter One
My eyesight is fading – just like the rest of me. Darkness is closing in, its fingers pulling me ever deeper; so deep that no one will ever see or hear me again. Even writing these words is draining what little strength remains to me. No more access to a computer, just the agony of pushing a pencil stub across the pages of yet another exercise book. How many books on the pile now? Too many to count, but the fact that you are reading this means that someone has found and transcribed what I have written. Too late for me of course, but at least the truth will now be told. Not just my story – my passing won’t even make the footnotes of history – but the story of men who died for something they cared about, something that those who came after seem to have forgotten.
If this sounds like I am talking in riddles I quite understand. A few months ago I would have felt the same way. Logic, common sense and science tell us such things cannot happen. That’s what I thought too, until it happened to me.
Let me explain so that you can avoid the same fate as me.
My name is Bill Price and I am a journalist – or rather I used to be. The last time I saw a copy, The Lincoln Post had become a free sheet with a few pages of news bought in from an agency and the rest taken up by advertising. My former editor retired to spend more time with his drinks cabinet and most of the staff are on the dole – one is trying to write a book and the rest are driving taxis or stacking shelves until something better turns up. Lincolnshire’s like that these days. Unless you’re willing to compete with the eastern Europeans for farm labouring jobs there isn’t much choice.
It hasn’t always been like that, not for me, anyway. I came back here, stayed here really, for a very simple reason. It was a place where I’d been happy. I’m a Londoner by birth and until I joined the Royal Air Force, venturing outside the M25 meant visiting a strange, unknown land of mud, cowpats and shops that didn’t sell anything you wanted.
After university I went to RAF Cranwell for Officer Training and basic flying training, stayed there to do the multi-engine conversion course and was then posted up the road to RAF Waddington, only a stone’s throw from the city of Lincoln itself. That’s where I met Amy. We married and a few years later, our daughter Julia was born. The usual round of postings followed, including three years of living death, walled up in the Ministry of Defence Main Building in Whitehall. ‘It’s good for your career, Bill,’ they kept saying. ‘You’ll make Wing Commander before you’re forty.’ Trouble is, I didn’t want to be a Wing Commander. Flying a desk, or “mahogany bomber” as they’re known, didn’t appeal. I was happy flying aeroplanes, so that’s what I did. I stayed a Squadron Leader and went back to Cranwell as a flying instructor, put on weight, took up golf and watched Julia grow into an inquisitive and happy child. No heroics, no wars, no medals – but I was content with my lot. More importantly, we were happy as a family. I miss that terribly. The passage of time has never healed the wound, not for one moment.
In my second year of instructing at Cranwell I applied for my dream job. The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight – usually shortened to BBMF – at RAF Coningsby have one of the world’s few remaining airworthy Lancasters and at any one time there are three pilots qualified to fly it. All three have full-time flying jobs elsewhere in the Royal Air Force but volunteer to share display duties during the summer months. One of them, an old friend who had taught me to fly on Jet Provosts when I’d first joined the Service, was retiring and now the trawl was out for volunteers to take his place. I applied and along with the other half-dozen hopefuls went through a series of check rides: first in the Chipmunk, and then in the BBMF’s 1940s-vintage Dakota, to see how we managed the unfamiliar challenge – for those of us who’d only flown tricycle-undercarriage aircraft – of flying what are known in the trade as tail-draggers. I must have done something right because I got the job.
That summer was one of the happiest of my professional life. Although it meant more nights away from home, particularly at weekends, the chance to fly the Lancaster, to be entrusted with such a precious and special aircraft was every Service pilot’s dream come true. Not only that, but I had the privilege to meet some of the surviving veterans of Bomber Command.
A few months later, everything I held dear was snatched away from me.
***
Friday evening. Happy hour at RAF Coningsby and a last drink with friends and colleagues before the Christmas break. My mobile rang. ‘Have you seen the weather?’ I could hear the anxiety in Amy’s voice.
Clamping the phone to my ear to blot out the roar of a hundred beery voices, I moved out into the corridor, leaving behind the alcoholic fug of the Officers’ Mess bar. ‘I can’t hear you properly, darling. Did you say something about the weather?’ I did my best to enunciate properly, but I knew that after all these years together Amy could tell to the exact pint how much I’d had.
‘Take a look outside,’ she said. ‘It’s chucking it down with snow.’
I wandered through into the deserted foyer and peered out into the December gloom. ‘Just a few flakes here,’ I replied. ‘But if you’re worried about driving in the snow, why don’t you come and get me now before it settles?’
‘You know I hate driving in snow, Bill. Can you do the drive back?’
‘Sorry, no. I’ve already had four pints.’
I heard her swear under her breath. We rarely argued or fell out, but I knew her well enough to expect long periods of chilly silence for the rest of the evening.
Twenty minutes later I climbed into the rear passenger seat of our old BMW and did up my seatbelt. Julia sat in the front next to her mother, chattering excitedly about her part in the Guide troop’s Christmas pantomime. Amy said nothing but stared grimly ahead, tense, her back held away slightly from the seat, hands gripping the wheel as though it were a lifebelt. I remember looking back as we turned out of the main gate towards Coningsby village. Snow had begun to settle on the road and was already covering our tyre tracks as Amy slowly eased the car up to twenty mph.
Tyre tracks and snow lit yellow by the sodium lights dotted along the security fence. Those were the last things I remember.
Then cold, desperate cold all over and a man’s voice talking into a radio. Blue flashing lights reflecting in the snow. Sitting on the verge with a blanket round my shoulders and a desperate longing to curl up in the snow and sleep for ever. Then someone shone a light in my eyes, piercing, bright and painful, adding to the agonising throbbing in my head. A mumble of voices. People talking about me, but not to me. Then nothing.
They call it an artificially induced coma. I found that out after they woke me two weeks later. Tubes, pain from the developing pressure sores and a terrible throbbing that felt like my head was about to explode. ‘Hello? William? Mr Price? Can you hear me? Say something, please.’ Nobody’s ever call
ed me William, not even my parents when I was little. Who were these people? Why would I want to say anything to them? All I wanted was to go back to sleep.
Slowly, the world swam into view. Blurry at first. Lots of white and a hum of voices. I understood this had something to do with me, but couldn’t work out what I was supposed to do or say. Some of the white detached itself and moved towards me. Another light shone in my eyes. A disembodied voice said, ‘Good papillary light reflex.’ Then, ‘How many fingers am I holding up, Mr Price?’
I blinked and squinted. It was a stupid question, I couldn’t see any fingers, just a blur. ‘No idea.’ Speaking was painful and my voice sounded slurry and drunk. My throat was dry and hurt in a way that made me want to retch.
The moving blur of white gradually coalesced into the form of an earnest young doctor, peering at me over the top of her half-moon glasses. To me she looked barely older than Julia. With a huge effort I managed to force the words out. ‘I’m in hospital, aren’t I?’ It wasn’t my voice, but that of an elderly wino, slurring and croaking on the edge of incoherence.
‘Yes, Mr Price. You’ve had an accident. You’ve been very ill.’
‘Does my wife know I’m here? She’ll be worried sick.’ I saw the doctor look away. Neither of the nurses by the bedside would make eye contact. I half guessed what was coming next although my mind wouldn’t entertain it as reality.
‘I’m afraid your wife and daughter are dead, Mr Price.’
***
The weeks that followed passed in a haze of misery and pain. Not only could I remember nothing of the accident, but it became clear to me, if not to those treating me, that there were huge holes in my memory. It didn’t really hit me until I received my first visitors. Two strangers were shown into the side ward that I shared with three other “head cases”, as we had christened ourselves. A man and a woman, smartly dressed, both in their mid-forties, a few years younger than me, smiling and calling me by my first name. ‘We’re so sorry about Amy and Julia, Bill,’ said the woman, placing a hand on my forearm, just below where the drips were attached. The young doctor with the half-moon glasses hovered nervously in the background.
The man stepped forward and placed a hand gingerly on my shoulder as though afraid I might break. ‘We’re all so sorry, Bill. Just glad you’re in one piece.’
It was too much. I tried to choke back the tears, but without success. Now the woman was speaking again. ‘We’re so sorry, Bill. You know, if there’s anything we can do…’
‘No, it’s not that… Well yes it is that but…’ still the slurry, borrowed voice, not mine.
‘But what, Bill?’ she said, dabbing away the tears for me.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ I sobbed. ‘It’s clear I should, but I don’t know who you are. I can’t remember.’
They shot a nervous look at the doctor who stepped forward. ‘I did warn you this was possible,’ she said.
Then the stranger stepped forward, introducing himself as my commanding officer; in reality a man whom I’d known and respected for the last three years, but whose existence had been wiped from my memory. He then introduced his wife who apparently had been a close friend of Amy’s and a regular visitor to our home.
That night I lay awake, staring at the ceiling and listening to the bedlam chorus of howling from the geriatric ward further along the corridor. However hard I tried I had no recollection of ever meeting my two visitors before. With time, people around me got used to my patchy memory, but it embarrassed me enormously.
***
Cranial trauma, they call it. Cognitive impairment is another term they use. ‘Why don’t you just be honest and tell me I’ve got brain damage?’ I asked them, but never got a satisfactory answer. ‘Will I get better? How long would it take?’ Again, their non-committal evasion and lack of eye contact told me all I needed to know.
Then, a day before I was due to be allowed up to start physiotherapy came nature’s cruellest twist of all. It was in the sleepless watches of the early hours that it happened. A figure stopped in front of the frosted glass door separating the side ward from the corridor, silhouetted by the dim night-lights illuminating the nurses’ station. Without opening the door the figure moved through the solid glass and into the room. I screwed my eyes shut and then reopened them but the figure was still there, its outline less blurred as it began, to my addled mind, to take on familiar human form. This wasn’t possible. It was too dark to make out the face but the shape was unmistakeable. ‘Amy!’ I screamed. ‘Amy!’ and tried to sit up, nearly tearing the catheters from my right arm. I cried out in pain and turned to try and disentangle them so I could go to her, but when I looked back, the vision had gone. The sound of running feet in the corridor and then the door burst open. I don’t remember what I said or did and all I can recall is the sharp stab of the needle in my right hip as they sedated me.
The following day a jolly little Scottish neurologist came to see me. Tufts of red hair sprouted from everywhere. His ears, nose, his shiny head, completely bald on top, and his forearms were covered in a thick mat of it. He took the best part of an hour and used a series of very long words to describe what had happened to my brain. Even in my fuddled state I could summarise it as, “major bang on the head, brain damage, might get better, might not, no idea which bits will work and which will stay off-line for good.” His version explained that damage to my temporal lobes, brain stem and a bleed affecting my hippocampus, were all going to take a long time to heal. He warned me that while the brain was sorting out the rewiring process, hallucinations such as my visit from Amy were likely to occur at any time. Peduncular Hallucinosis he called it, but the way he spoke he might have been discussing an annoying bout of hiccups. However, to me, the vision had been horribly real and I was terrified. I ached to see Amy again, but at the same time knew that wasn’t possible – I’ve always been the world’s biggest sceptic when it comes to ghosts and the paranormal – what I’d seen was a result of my own mind playing cruel tricks on me and I wanted it to stop.
The staff at the neurological unit did their best, but my progress was frustratingly slow. I’ve no patience at the best of times, but this was torture of the cruellest kind. The random gaps in my recall of the past were a constant source of frustration – I could remember infants’ school, but not my primary school, bits of my time at university, but next to nothing of my degree course. Oddly, my short-term memory didn’t seem to have been affected.
Part of my problem was motivation. The other patients had visitors: parents, husbands, wives, children and friends to help jolly them along. I had visitors too. Lots of them at first – Amy’s parents were regulars. My parents are no longer alive and I saw no point in dragging my older brother all the way back from Vancouver just to sit at my bedside. Cousins and other relatives are thin on the ground – procreation doesn’t seem to be high on the Prices’ list of priorities. The visits I looked forward to most were from my RAF colleagues – noisy, good-natured, flirting and bantering with the nurses. Looking back, I suppose I recognised about half the people who came to see me and had to explain to the others that the bang on the head from the car crash had randomly wiped parts of my memory – just like a faulty hard disk. No one took offence but I was conscious of one thing in all of them – knowing what to say to the recently bereaved doesn’t come easily to the British, and the embarrassment of trying to find the right thing to say about Amy was a constant problem that kept down the numbers coming to my bedside.
The embarrassment and the fact that people have their own lives to live meant that the stream of visitors dwindled to a trickle over time – I’ve no complaints. They did their best, but none of them could take away the terrible void left by the death of Amy and Julia. With them gone my motivation to get better was close to zero. What was the point? Who was I doing this for?
Next came the coroner’s inquest. Unable to walk properly I was wheeled into court, a tartan rug over my knees like some octogenarian invalid. I sat t
hrough the proceedings in a daze of disbelief, an unwilling spectator at a play that I neither understood nor wanted to see or hear. That the people being discussed were my wife and daughter was horribly surreal.
***
After a year of rehabilitation, endless tests, a daily diet of pills, plus two more operations on what was left of my brain, I was declared well enough to live independently once more. My neighbours in Lincoln kept an eye on me in a very British way, hoping I wouldn’t notice their little acts of kindness and cause embarrassment by thanking them, but I did.
The hallucinations still came and went and it got to a point where they became just a fact of life to which I paid no heed. The nib of a pen would suddenly detach from the page and bend through ninety degrees while I was writing. I could still feel its pressure against the paper and the words would appear correctly, but it was disconcerting none the less. Sometimes my coffee cup would seem to float around the room. I worked on the rather eccentric premise that it was attention-seeking and that if I took no notice, it would return to the table. It always did.
Then there were the voices – nothing I could make out, more like the hubbub of a cocktail party in the next room. Just like the errant coffee cup, I found that if I ignored them long enough, normality would eventually resume and the voices would go away. Although Amy appeared to have stopped haunting my waking hours, both she and Julia haunted my dreams – always fit and well, fully recovered, saying there’d been a mistake, they weren’t dead, no car crash, the coroner had got it wrong and they were coming home.
One of my unexplained visitors during waking hours was a ginger cat that made a habit of walking along the kitchen worktop only to disappear through the wall next to the microwave and out of sight. In a funny way, I looked forward to his visits as a form of company. Levitating coffee cups and white walls that turned from purple to green and back to white again were alarming, but somehow the cat seemed less threatening.
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