Bomber Boys - a Ghost Story

by Simon Leighton-Porter

  The manager’s expression remained non-committal. ‘That seems to be what a lot of people who’ve met him believe,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘And what about those of us who don’t believe in ghosts?’

  ‘I presume they come up with other explanations.’

  ‘From that I take it you fall into the camp of the believers?’ I asked, hoping to get some sort of reaction from him.

  ‘Like you, Mr Price, I was a sceptic. But, also like you, I’ve met Colonel Cavendish, and now… now, well, let’s say my scepticism isn’t quite as solid as it was.’

  I made no reply and carried on leafing through the photographs. Whatever the truth of my meeting yesterday, the album was a fascinating glimpse into a bygone era, a last look at a world where upstairs was divided from downstairs by the green baize door. As I turned the pages, a bookmark fell out and I leant forward from my chair to pick it up. It was a calling card, exactly the same as the one Cavendish had given me on the airfield the day before. With trembling fingers I slid it back between the pages and closed the book. The citadel of my logic was in danger of crumbling.

  By the time I left Hobbs End Hall it was almost dark. Instead of heading straight home, I turned right in the village and made for the spot where I had parked the previous day. Cramming my waterproof waxed-cotton hat onto my head – Amy hated that hat and said it made me look like a child-molester – I turned up my coat collar against the slanting drizzle and retraced my route towards the dark whaleback of the blast wall which stood out on the horizon against the fading twilight. Scrambling to the top, I gazed across the airfield towards the outline of the ruined control tower which stuck up like a black, decayed molar.

  By now, rain was trickling down the back of my collar and I decided to turn back. Then, something caught my eye. At first I thought it was a car’s headlights, but squinting into the twilight I realised that couldn’t be possible. The light seemed to be coming from the base of the control tower, faint at first and then flickering as though someone was using a torch to find their way around. There had been plenty of reports of unexplained lights on the airfield before. To me they were perfectly easy to explain. Kids usually, scaring themselves silly by getting into places they weren’t supposed to – I’d done as much myself at their age – and as I squinted into the mist and rain, permitted myself an indulgent smile at the memory.

  The light seemed to be climbing now, following the wall of the tower as it rose. That made sense because the concrete steps leading to what had been the visual control room at the top, ran up the outside of the building. Now it was inside, and the skeletal remains of the controllers’ greenhouse were silhouetted like the ribs of some long-extinct creature. I was about to turn away when I heard a muffled pop, borne on the south-westerly wind, and a red Very flare arced into the night sky, tracing a livid parabola, bouncing twice on the remains of the concrete taxiway before going out. I stared, open-mouthed, not able to believe what I had seen. I knew from studying the history of bomber operations that this was the signal to the waiting crews that operations were cancelled for the night. A green flare was the instruction to start engines.

  Then the light in the tower snapped off and I stood rubbing my eyes in disbelief. It had to be one of my hallucinations, but normally I get a bit of warning – headache, flickering in my left eye with a slight loss of peripheral vision, that sort of thing. I reached into my coat pocket and levered the lid off the pill bottle, swallowing one of the blue and white capsules, just as the doctor had instructed. For a moment, I stood watching the tower, waiting for the light to reappear, but all was black once more, leaving me with only the sighing of the wind and the gentle pattering of the rain for company.

  If someone was trying to frighten me they had picked on the wrong man. Stumbling over the tussocky grass in the dark, I made my way back to the car and fetched my own torch from the glove box. The batteries were past their best and gave a weak, yellow beam but it was enough to keep me from falling down the potholes which pocked the old taxiway that ran past the control tower.

  Crunching over a carpet of rubble and broken glass I went through what had once been a doorway into the shell of the building. Inside, the smell of damp, mould and urine was foul, and, as I shone my torch around the interior, I noticed without surprise that the walls were covered with the usual graffiti and the floor strewn with cans, broken bottles, and the twisted remnants of old metal window frames.

  I snapped off the torch, listening for any sound that might betray the presence of whoever had fired the flare, but all was silent and black as the tomb. Then, an uncomfortable feeling of being watched came over me. I gave an involuntary shiver and immediately cursed myself for being feeble. Not like me to get the wind up in the dark. Even so, I quickly turned the torch back on, thankful for its comforting glow, and made my way round to the concrete steps leading up the outside of the building. The treads were worn and in some places had crumbled away so I hesitated before going up. If I fell and hurt myself, it might be days or even weeks before anyone found me. Worse still, I was on my own, and a nagging inner voice kept asking what if someone was lying in wait for me up there – not ghosts born of someone’s over-fertile imagination, but real-life flesh and blood with no desire to have their silly games revealed for what they were?

  Common sense too told me not to go up. So did the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach – fear was a better name for it. So, being the stubborn cuss I am, the need to prove to myself that I wasn’t really frightened drove me up the wet, slippery steps.

  Level with the first floor of the control tower, a black oblong marked a doorway. I shone the torch. Inside were only the remains of the concrete floor joists. Continuing up to what had been the controllers’ eyrie, I stopped on a broad terrace which ran round the top floor. The presence of the metal balustrade which was still in place took away some of my fear of falling. Although I spent most of my professional life as a pilot, I’ve never had much of a head for heights.

  Then I heard it. My blood froze. A tapping sound, footsteps on the concrete. Two voices, one male, one female, indistinct, but close at hand. The wind picked up again and the voices disappeared, leaving the steady tap, tap, tap that had set my nerves jangling. I fumbled with the torch and it dropped to the concrete at my feet, its beam extinguished. Frantic now, I fell to my knees and scrabbled in the wet. The cap had come off allowing one of the batteries to drop out. Tap, tap, tap. Louder now, it seemed to be getting closer. Come on, it has to be here, it has to be, but the second battery still eluded me. I made to stand up but stumbled and half fell, putting my hand down in a filthy puddle that soaked me to halfway up my forearm. Crawling, incoherent with fear, away towards the greasy, three storey drop that were the steps I’d so recently climbed, my knee bumped against something. It rolled away and I grabbed it. The battery. Thank Christ for that. With fumbling hands, I pushed it back into the barrel of the torch and jammed the lens cap back on. It cross-threaded. Tap, tap, tap: louder still. Come on, work, damn you. This time, the welcome yellow beam sprang back to life and I swung it around me, desperate to see in which direction the danger lay. A gust of wind. Tap, tap, tap. Coming from behind me. In a sweat of fear, I spun round and pointed the torch in the direction of the sound.

  The beam revealed a scene of decay and devastation similar to the ground floor – rubble, broken glass and graffiti. Worryingly, there was no sign of the owners of the voices, just the intermittent tap, tap, tap. Trying to take the initiative, I called out. ‘Come on out. Stop mucking about. Who are you?’ I had meant to sound confident, masterful, the man in charge. Instead, my voice was reedy, the piping sound of my younger self whistling in the dark. Clambering over a pile of broken concrete on legs rubbery with fright, I focused the light into what had been the corner of the visual control room. Hanging from one rusted hinge was a metal window frame, boarded up long ago with plywood and flapping about in the wind, banging against the brickwork with each gust. Tap, tap, tap. Thank God for that,
I thought.

  My relief was short-lived. There were the voices again. A man and a woman, laughing, but no longer close to. Moving as fast as I could over the piles of bricks and twisted metal, I found my way back out onto the balcony and shone the torch into the rain-swept gloom below. Whoever it was must have got past me and down the steps while I was looking for the battery. Then I saw them – two indistinct forms, laughing and running across the grass towards what had been RAF Leckonby’s operations block. They stopped and looked back at me. I could just make out two pale, upturned faces before they vanished through the black rectangle of a doorway and into the building itself. Whoever it was had led me a merry dance and I cursed myself for falling into their trap so easily.

  I turned to retrace my steps and it was then that I saw it, glinting in the torchlight, lying on the ground near the top of the stairs. I must have walked right over it without noticing. Bending to pick it up I knew at once what it was – a cartridge case. From my limited knowledge of these things, it looked too big to be from a shotgun. It had a brass base and seemed to be made out of reinforced cardboard rather than plastic. If it was indeed from a Very flare pistol, it would prove that what I had seen was real and not, as I had feared, one of my hallucinations. I put it in my coat pocket and, keeping as close to the wall as I could, heart thumping, slithered and scrabbled back down the steps.

  Still fizzing with adrenalin and angry at having been taken for an idiot I decided to have one last look for my tormentors. A concrete path, cracked and overgrown with weeds, led from the base of the control tower across to the operations block, straight to the doorway through which they had vanished. The entrance was protected from the elements by a small concrete porch from which hung the lopsided carcass of an enamel lampshade. I shone my torch into the recess. What had once been a doorway was now bricked up with breeze blocks, completely impassable. Once more I doubted myself but my hand in my coat pocket closed around the solid, tangible evidence that was the Very flare cartridge. Someone was clearly going to a lot of trouble to frighten me. I hated to admit it, but for a while they had succeeded.

  By now I was wet through. My trousers were soaked from crawling around looking for the torch and my sleeve clung to my arm, clammy and cold from its immersion in the puddle. As I walked to the perimeter track to head back to the car, the wet grass wrapped itself insistently around my legs, soaking me still further, so when I finally reached it my mood was foul. Starting the engine and putting the heater on full, I turned into the lane, heading back towards the village to pick up the Lincoln road – the other direction is a dead-end, leading to the halt at Leckonby Junction. The station has been closed since the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. However, it seemed that my misfiring brain hadn’t finished with me for the evening, because as I rounded a corner I came face-to-face with a single-decker coach of the kind I had only seen at vintage car rallies. Bracing against the inevitable impact, I stamped on the brakes and swerved up onto the verge, the looming bodywork flashing inches past my right ear. As my car slithered to a halt, I seemed to get a glimpse of blackout masks on the coach’s headlights and a white stencilled serial number on the side of the bonnet.

  Hyperventilating with shock I turned to look back down the lane in the direction of the station, but there was nothing but blackness between the tall hedgerows. The coach had vanished. My hands shook as I grasped the wheel. What I had seen on the airfield was real. This simply couldn’t be. Perhaps it was time to come clean to my GP about how much worse the hallucinations had got even if it did mean losing my licence.

  About a week or so later I was at my desk, writing a story for the Lincoln Post about a charity rowing event on the River Witham. At first, I put the headache down to tiredness and the eyestrain that comes with spending too long staring at a PC screen. Then the symptoms became more familiar and I realised that I could no longer read what I had written. A temporal lobe seizure the doctors call it – for me it heralded the onset of one of my hallucinations. I gripped the side of the desk, hoping no one would notice what a state I was in.

  The letters started dancing and changing places at will. As ever I offered up the same silent prayer to the void, a mute scream of anguish. Please no, not again, but the symptoms were nauseatingly familiar. From something that happened every six weeks or so, this was the third attack in almost as many days. Pain nagged at my temples and the screen slid in and out of focus. With fingers that felt fatter than marrows I tried to type once more, but my hands fell silent on the keyboard as the words in front of me dissolved into a meaningless blur. I was aware of the letters so I suppose they formed some kind of image on my retina, but it penetrated no further into my consciousness. With these fingers borrowed from a clumsy giant, I fumbled to lever the top off the pill bottle, washing down two capsules with a gulp of water. I closed my eyes and waited, counting slowly to myself. Ninety-nine, one hundred… I opened one eye. The frame of my PC screen shimmered, turned purple and multiplied itself around the walls of my office cubicle like electronic wallpaper. It wasn’t real, it would pass, it always did and I once more screwed my eyes tight shut, cursing, but the dancing oblongs were still there. A deep breath, the sound of my own blood thudding in my head and a rising wave of panic. Try to control your breathing, the doctor had said, hyperventilating will only make it worse – something about carbon dioxide levels. Bugger carbon dioxide, just make it go away. I put my head in my hands and waited. An hour? Minutes? A lifetime? Time itself seemed to bend and stretch as I waited for normality to return, hating this thing that had taken over my life and the accident that had taken away my family.

  Tentatively, I opened one eye. The patterns returned to grey and now sat as shimmering outlines round the screen, slowly fading one by one. I opened the other eye. Almost back to normal now and the pain in my head yielded its place to a dull ache like the last dregs of a whisky hangover. Through a grey mist of nausea I tried once more to concentrate on the article. Young farmers pulling a tractor along a high street for charity, that was it. No, hang on, that was before lunch. I read what I had written as though seeing it for the first time.

  The peripheral vision doesn’t work very well in my left eye, so I didn’t notice his arrival until he was almost in front of me. I looked up from the screen. My editor’s features had all gathered in the middle of his pudgy face, clustering around his boozer’s nose. From experience I knew this wasn’t a good sign.

  ‘Are you all right, Bill? Give me a break and please don’t die at your desk, I couldn’t face the bloody paperwork.’ I’d heard it a million times before and tried to smile at the gallows humour, but even smiling hurt. He continued. ‘Got something right up your street, my lad. Your old mob have been causing trouble again.’

  I looked away and briefly closed my eyes. On reopening them, to my disappointment, Derek Bennett, editor of the Lincoln Post was still there, features puckered into what always reminded me of a pug’s arse.

  ‘Which old mob, Derek?’ I asked.

  ‘The RAF, Wing Commander, old boy,’ he replied, attempting to mimic my southern accent and twirling an imaginary moustache.

  I tried to smile. ‘I was a Squadron Leader. It’s very kind of you to promote me, but I think it’s a bit late. Anyway, what’ve they done?’

  Bennett consulted his notepad. ‘The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight Lancaster nearly took out an Anglia Airways flight coming in to Humberside Airport yesterday afternoon. Couple of passengers hurt by falling luggage and a stewardess with a broken collar bone.’

  My head cleared a little. Bennett had his facts wrong. ‘A Lancaster? That’s not possible. The BBMF don’t fly during winter.’

  He shrugged. ‘That’s what the RAF are saying too, but the airline reckon they’re telling porkies. Both pilots got a very close look at it. Too bloody close by the sound of it.’

  I shook my head. ‘Still doesn’t make sense. Everybody knows the Lanc spends the winter in bits while they get it ready for the display season.’

&nbs
p; Bennett shrugged. ‘Well someone’s either telling fibs or they’ve got something to hide. Whatever it is, I’m sure there’s good copy to be had.’

  ‘Where do you want me to start?’ I asked.

  He handed over a printed sheet. ‘You all right to drive these days?’

  ‘Fine now, thanks,’ I lied, taking the piece of paper and pretending to read the words which stubbornly refused to stay in focus. ‘The doc’s got me on a new line of happy pills.’

  ‘Good. Get down to RAF Coningsby and check the BBMF’s version of events. See if the Lancaster looks like it’s being serviced or whether they just started taking it apart this morning.’ I stood up to leave but the editor called me back. ‘Have a word with the Anglia Airways people too. They’ve got times, positions, heights and so on. Even got the Lancaster’s serial number. They seem pretty sure of their facts.’

  Bennett waddled off, leaving me in peace. Gradually, my head began to clear and the printed words became readable once more. The crew of the Anglia Airlines turboprop had certainly got a good look at the aircraft that had nearly hit theirs. Their report described it as an Avro Lancaster bomber with squadron letters CD-O on the side of the fuselage and serial HK807 stencilled in smaller writing near the tail. Out of curiosity I looked on the web and found that CD were the battle letters of 362 Squadron, based at RAF Leckonby, and that HK807, O-Orange had been lost on operations in March 1944.

  I made a few calls and managed to track down the airline crew. We arranged to meet at Humberside airport the following afternoon. I also put in a call to my old friend, Squadron Leader Harry Riggs, commanding officer of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight at RAF Coningsby.

  ***

  ‘There’s your suspect.’ Harry Riggs turned to me and smiled. With two of its four engines removed and the front turret mounted on a stand in the corner of the hangar, it was clear that the BBMF’s Lancaster was in the midst of its usual winter overhaul. On its black flanks it carried the battle letters AJ-G, the markings of the aircraft used by 617 Squadron’s most famous commander, Guy Gibson, on the Dams Raid in May 1943.