The calm monotone of Prentice’s voice put me to shame. ‘Airborne at 2016 and 15 seconds, skipper.’
With a thump that I felt rather than heard, the undercarriage came up and locked into place. I had no idea of our rate of climb, but we still seemed dangerously low and I tried to remember how high the Lincolnshire Wolds were. We had taken off from the easterly runway so somewhere not far ahead was, literally, our first hurdle and a very solid one at that.
As we got higher, the western skyline lightened and gave me another view of the pale reds and oranges of the sunset. All around us like a million fireflies I could see the navigation lights of other bombers – from Coningsby, Woodhall Spa, East Kirkby, Binbrook, Metheringham and from the airfields north of the Humber, the sky was alive with aircraft.
As we crossed the coast Brownlow switched off the navigation lights and only the occasional buffet of turbulence from another aircraft’s slipstream told us that we were not entirely alone in the darkness. Shortly afterwards we entered cloud and the skipper called the crew to check our oxygen masks which told me we must be at around 12,000 feet in the climb. Already, the discomfort was intense. The electrically-heated suit was burning my lower legs but the small of my back was freezing cold and my fingertips were already starting to go numb.
The feeling of isolation was overpowering. Outside was a dark impenetrable soup of cloud and the roar of the four Merlins, set at maximum continuous power for the climb, numbed my senses. I checked my watch. We had only been airborne for just over half an hour but already it seemed like a lifetime. Then, a flash of light caught my eye, then another. I had seen this before – St Elmo’s fire – I watched in fascination as bright purple, magma-like blobs formed on the top of my turret, ran forwards against the slipstream and disappeared out of view up the fuselage. To left and right, the aircraft’s fins were tipped with halos of lime green. The others had seen it too. Gilroy’s Aussie twang came over the intercom, ‘Glow Gremlins, skipper.’
‘Thanks, mid-upper,’ replied Brownlow. ‘We’ve got it up front too.’
Beautiful though it was, I remembered well that St Elmo’s fire meant we were either inside or uncomfortably close to cumulonimbus cloud. Aircraft and cu-nims as they’re known don’t mix. Another buffeting – slipstream? Possibly, but there it was again, more intense and longer-lasting this time. Then a stomach-churning sensation of weightlessness followed by a thump told me that my fears were justified. Another jolt threw me against the turret side. Turbulence is rarely strong enough to destroy an aircraft in flight although it can and does happen. That wasn’t the main threat though. Cu-nims have other ways of killing aviators and that was my big fear – icing. To get a better view of the fins I turned the turret as far as I could to one side and craned my neck in an effort to check the leading edge of the vertical stabiliser for ice but it was too dark. However, my ears told me what my eyes feared to see – a sound like a stone hitting a tin shed, a single metallic clang. Then another, and then a volley of blows. It was ice, the airman’s deadliest natural foe, forming on the propellers and then being flung off into the fuselage side. By now the turbulence had become so bad that the aircraft rolled and yawed like a skiff on the open sea. Bang, there it was again, bang, bang, bang – impacts right beside my head, regular now, bang, bang, bang.
I turned to look, my neck stiff and limbs aching. A malevolent giant seemed to be hammering on the Perspex just by my right ear. For a moment I felt like a spectator, looking in at myself from a distance, but then a blinding light brought me back to reality. I put my hand up to shield my eyes. Faces. Two of them peering intently at me from close to. This wasn’t possible. Warm now, not cold, but my neck ached abominably. With horror I realised that the roar of the engines had stopped – for a moment I couldn’t work out why. Then it dawned on me. I was back in my car, the engine was still turning over and a policeman was banging on the driver’s window while his colleague rocked the car in an effort to wake me. I opened the window.
‘Thank Christ you’re alive,’ said the first one. ‘We heard the engine running and thought it was someone trying to top themselves. Are you all right, sir?’
‘Yes thanks,’ I replied, my voice thick with sleep. ‘I must’ve dozed off.’
He thrust his head through the open window, putting his face uncomfortably close to mine. ‘Have you been drinking, sir?’ he asked.
‘No, not a drop.’
‘Then do you mind telling us what you’re doing, sir?’ I noticed the word “sir” positively dripped with irony.
I showed him my press card. ‘I know this is going to sound daft, but there’ve been rumours of hauntings at the airfield and here at the station, so I came to take a look. I left the heater on to keep warm and must’ve dozed off.’
They looked at one another in a way that suggested disappointment that they couldn’t arrest me for anything, bade me a grudging goodnight and returned to their car. I waited until their headlights had faded from sight, turned off the engine, got out of the car and walked over to the station. It was as I remembered it – derelict. No smoke rose from the stump of what had once been a chimney stack. I checked the time – half past ten.
Not for the first time since my accident I seriously doubted my own sanity. What I had experienced was too real to have been a dream. It was as though the hallucinations had breached yet another line of my defences and were now invading my sleeping world too. How could it have been so vivid? I wondered as I walked back to the car, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I got in, started the engine and put on my seat belt. As I did so, I felt a sharp pain as though something was digging into my chest. Fumbling inside my shirt, my hand closed round the cause. Slung around my neck on a short loop of parachute cord were two hard, flat objects. I slipped the cord over my head and turned the interior light on to get a better look. What I held in my hand left me numb with disbelief. One was circular and brick red in colour, the other, lozenge-shaped and dark green – RAF identity discs. Both were stamped with the same details: Handley W A, 923041, C of E.
My mind was a jumble of tangled thoughts as I drove back to Lincoln that night. The worsening of my hallucinations was something the doctor had warned me might happen, but how did that explain the two very solid identity discs that now sat in my pocket? Hallucinations are not supposed to take solid form and yet another one just had. First the cat’s paw, then a pint of bitter and now a set of identity discs.
When it came to opening the front door my hands were shaking so badly that I took several attempts to get the key in the lock. Once inside, I turned on all the lights, just like I used to when I was little. I hated the dark then, fearing the things that lurked unseen behind curtains, inside wardrobes and, horror of horrors, maybe under my bed. It was never any use the grown-ups telling me that monsters didn’t exist – what if nobody had thought to tell the monsters? Then what?
But now the rules of the game had changed. The monsters inside my head had indeed taken physical form and together we were locked in a crazy lovers’ embrace, clinging to each other like two drunks swaying across a dance floor. They were haunting me and I was haunting them. No, I shook my head and knocked back a glass of cold water from the tap, none of this was possible, but yet all the evidence in front of me shouted the opposite. Not only was it possible, it was horribly real. I had to find out more.
Sleep was out of the question. The need to understand what was happening to me was too great, so I switched on my PC and opened the web page of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. With trembling hands I typed the casualty search details: surname – Handley, service – RAF, date of death – between December 1943 and May 1945, service number – 923041, initials – W A.
Return.
An egg timer.
An eternity.
Then the result I was dreading, but knew deep down before I saw it:
Name: Handley, Walter Albert
Rank: Sergeant
Service Number: 923041
Date of death: 21 De
cember 1944
Age: 22
Regiment/Service: Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, 362 Squadron
Cemetery/Memorial Name: Runnymede Memorial
Additional Information: son of Francis George and Winifred Grace Handley of Oxford Avenue, Wimbledon, SW20.
So Tommy and his crew hadn’t survived long. I did a search for the other members of the crew. As expected, I found them. They had all died the same night and were also commemorated on the Runnymede Memorial to the missing: Brownlow, the crew’s skipper; Prentice the navigator; Unwin the bomb aimer; Greaves, the flight engineer and old man of the crew. Then came two names I didn’t know: Sergeants Thomas and Barker; one of whom was probably the wireless operator whose name I had never caught, but where was Gilroy? I did another search, widening the dates and found him straight away – Barry James Gilroy of Freemantle, Western Australia, date of death, 19th December 1943, buried at Leckonby Parish Church. Tonight was the 18th and however hard I wanted that to be a coincidence, an unpleasant feeling that set the hairs bristling on the back of my neck, told me it wasn’t.
Bleary-eyed from a lack of sleep and with my neck still aching from having dozed off in an awkward position in the car, I made my way into work the following morning and went through the motions of writing a piece on the opening of a new meat processing factory near Scunthorpe. The irony of forcing myself to complete such an eye-wateringly dull task after my experiences, if that is indeed what they were, of the previous night, weighed heavily upon me and I fretted and fussed to get the words onto the page, but with little success.
To take my mind off the news story I turned to the National Archives website and searched for the Operational Record Book for 362 Squadron, using the Lincoln Post’s credit card to pay the small access fee.
During my time in the RAF, as a young Flight Lieutenant it had been my task to write the Squadron’s monthly entry in the Operational Record Book, better known as ‘the Form 540’ or the ‘ORB’.
The Royal Air Force is a creature of habit and the format of the ORB has remained almost unchanged over the years. During periods of active service, the ORB is made up of two documents: firstly, the Form 540, effectively the squadron diary which I had written each month; and secondly, the Form 541, the record of ‘Work Carried Out’ on each operation. During the intense period of operations from 1939 to 1945, the ORB was updated on a daily basis. Luckily for me, 362 Squadron’s wartime scribes had been meticulous in their work and the results of every mission, together with the fate of each aircraft and its crew, were recorded.
I located the entry for the night of the 18th of December 1943 and, half afraid of what I might read, found confirmation that whatever had happened to me the previous evening, it could not have been a dream. As I read, I felt the goose-pimples spreading across my skin and my mouth went dry with fear.
‘Place – Leckonby. Date – 18.12.43. Summary of Events – Weather fair after earlier showers clearing to the east. Operations were ordered, 16 aircraft taking part (1 u/s after start).’ I scanned down the list of aircraft captains: ‘W/C Preston (a/c A-Apple), S/L Bates...’ then I found the name I was looking for, ‘F/O Brownlow (a/c Z-Zebra).’ I read on, a cold feeling of dread creeping along my spine. There it was, written over seventy years ago. All my worst fears – a detailed account of what I had experienced less than twenty-four hours previously.
‘Aircraft ED302 (Z). Captain F/O Brownlow. Duty – Bombing Brunswick. Time Up 2016/Time Down 2357. Severe icing over N Sea caused loss of height. Bomb load jettisoned inert. Fuselage skin damaged by ice flung from propellers. Damage assessed as CAT A (light, repairable at unit).’
Reading further down the list it seemed that Z-Zebra wasn’t the only aircraft to suffer from icing. D-Dog had ditched thirty miles from the Dutch coast. A later entry in the ORB showed that its crew had been rescued by a Canadian Navy corvette.
As I read on I saw that “Press-On” Preston, 362’s squadron commander, was well named.
‘Aircraft PA693 (A), Captain W/C Preston. Duty – Bombing Brunswick. Time up 2009/Time Down 0230. A/C encountered severe icing and was unable to maintain height. 4000 lb HC and 4x 250 lb GP bombs jettisoned over sea. Crew continued to target area using dead reckoning (10/10ths cloud with tops estimated at 30,000 feet). No target markers seen and H2S unserviceable, so remaining bomb load (250 lb and incendiaries) released on distance/time basis. Target photographs inconclusive.’
Whatever his crews thought of him, Preston was not lacking in courage. To carry on to the target knowing that other crews had turned back and the protection offered by safety in numbers had gone with them, took guts. By today’s standards he would probably have been criticised for taking unnecessary risks, pressing on alone, bombing on distance and time meant that he had endangered a valuable aircraft and its crew all for the sake of dropping a few bombs in open fields miles from the intended target. What really drove him? I wondered. Was this what courage looked like? Was it ambition for medal ribbons and promotion? Or was it the more prosaic and most common reason for bravery – the fear of letting your comrades down? Whatever it was, only Preston and two other crews managed to deliver their bomb loads that night and the C-in-C’s threat of having to return to Brunswick to finish the job would no doubt have been put into practice. What actually happened on the second visit to Prince Henry the Lion’s city in late March 1944, I will come to shortly, but there is much more I need to tell you first.
***
Settling to anything resembling work was beyond me so I left the office on the pretext of following up a story, called the doctor on my mobile phone and was lucky enough to get an appointment later that afternoon.
I sat in the stuffy, overheated waiting room for over an hour past the time the receptionist had given me. When eventually I got into the doctor’s consulting rooms, one look at his tired features told me that, on balance, his day had probably been worse than mine and my plans to deliver some well-chosen remarks about his time-keeping evaporated at once. He listened patiently while I told him how much worse my hallucinations had got and failed to show any surprise when I told him that solid objects from my hallucinations were still there after the visions had gone.
His answer to my last question was sympathetic. ‘No, Mr Price,’ he said. ‘You’re not going mad. I told you this could happen. The hallucinations are getting worse, that’s all. They can be very realistic. Just try to concentrate on what’s possible and what’s not.’
‘You mean the identity discs aren’t real?’ I took them out of my pocket and placed them on the desk in front of him. ‘Here, take a look.’
He picked them up, turning the two pressed fibre discs over in his hands. ‘No, they’re real enough. But there’s a far simpler explanation.’
‘Go on.’
‘They may date from 1943 as you say, but they didn’t come from someone in one of your hallucinations or from some non-existent spirit world. You’ve simply forgotten where you got them and your subconscious has very thoughtfully filled in the gaps.’
His tired, bloodshot eyes were fixed on mine, watching carefully for a reaction. I looked away, embarrassed. ‘Yes, that must be it…’ I heard my voice trailing away. ‘It’s just that it was so… ’ I hesitated.
‘Real? That’s exactly the problem, Mr Price. The kind of hallucinations you’re having can be incredibly vivid.’
Who was fooling whom? However much I wanted to believe him, a nagging voice told me that everything I had seen at Leckonby, and even here in Lincoln, was real. Impossible, but real.
‘So what’s the answer?’ I asked.
He tapped his pen on his prescription pad, never taking his eyes off me for a moment. A rare glimmer of winter sunlight through the dirty window panes showed up the dandruff on his cheap suit jacket. ‘I can give you a referral.’
‘To the funny farm?’
‘That’s not a term we use these days, Mr Price. You’re not mad, nor are you mentally ill. However, I think you need further asses
sment – first neurological and then psychiatric.’ I made to interrupt but he held up a hand to silence me. ‘As I’ve just told you,’ he continued. ‘You’re not mentally ill, but if we don’t get you the right care – and I’m not talking about stronger pills – you could end up that way.’
I nodded my acquiescence. ‘And then what?’
‘It all depends what the specialists find. But you may have to face the possibility that it may not be a good idea for you to carry on working full time.’ He looked down at my notes. ‘You’re fifty-six, Mr Price. I presume you have a Royal Air Force pension?’
‘I do.’
‘Well, with what you’ll get in sickness and other benefits, you’ll probably earn as much as you do now.’
‘I’d hardly call it earning.’
The doctor tutted and waved an admonitory finger at me. I noticed it was stained yellow by nicotine. He said, ‘There’s no stigma involved in asking for what you’re entitled to, Mr Price. I regularly see people far fitter and younger than you asking to be signed off so they can go ‘on the sick’ as they call it. Let me make a couple of phone calls, eh?’
I nodded once more, thanked him for his time and the repeat prescription, and left the surgery, pleased to be breathing fresh air again. However, the idea of giving up work somehow seemed immoral and as I walked up Steep Hill towards home, I felt ill at ease.
As soon as I got in, I phoned my editor and told him I was sick but would be in tomorrow. He made the right noises but I knew him well enough to detect the irritation in his voice. Derek Bennett was one of the old school, and unless you were dead or had recently lost one or more limbs, then he expected you to show up for work.
Bomber Boys - a Ghost Story Page 13