Bomber Boys - a Ghost Story

by Simon Leighton-Porter

  I settled down in front of my PC and tried to carry on with the research I was doing on the planning application procedure. Having lost their battle against the building of the housing estate on the airfield, The Lags had now turned to tilting at the turbines of the wind farm, and their futile struggle was back in the news. However hard I tried I just couldn’t settle to the task and my mind wandered back to the previous night. I knew it wasn’t a hallucination, so who was I trying to fool by telling my doctor about it?

  A grey winter’s afternoon merged imperceptibly into darkness and I sat down in front of the TV, trying to force myself to watch the seasonal inanities that all channels were showing in the run-up to Christmas. By nine o’ clock my head was nodding and so I decided to have an early night. For some reason I decided that a glass of whisky before turning in would be a good idea. One glass became three and then a fourth. Whether I fell asleep or passed out is debatable, but at least I managed to do so without any visits from whatever it was that was haunting my subconscious.

  At just before midnight I awoke with a start. My mouth was dry and a thin band of pain had wrapped itself round my forehead in a way that only whisky can induce. Sleep was now far away and my mind inevitably drifted back to RAF Leckonby and the events of the previous evening. Screwing my eyes tight shut I tried to think of other things, but even through closed lids I was aware of a cascade of bright, coloured lights, not unlike the St Elmo’s fire I had seen dancing on the fuselage of the Lancaster – I knew the symptoms well by now. A hallucination was on its way.

  I got up and turned on the light. Clearly, sleep was out of the question for now so I decided to read more of 632 Squadron’s Operational Record Book online. As I shuffled towards my desk, it seemed to be tilting at a funny angle and then slowly rocking back to lean the other way. I swallowed two blue and white capsules washed down with a tumbler of water, and by the time the log-in process was complete, the desk seemed to have stabilised.

  Even more awake now and nerves jangling, I needed a drink. The tumbler I had drunk from earlier was engraved with the name and logo of a whisky distiller. It’s a drink I used to like, but I had found out the hard way that it didn’t like me. However, to borrow Kipling’s words, “the burnt fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire,” and I poured myself half a glassful, on the feeble pretext that it would help me get back to sleep. Once more, it did nothing of the sort. I took another, promising myself this would be my last and final glass. After all, the doctor had warned me not to mix drink with the pills he had prescribed. Still I didn’t feel drowsy – far from it, I was buzzing. Self-delusion can be a powerful temptress and she guided my hand to the bottle again. Just one more.

  I squinted at my PC screen, trying to bring it back into focus. I still couldn’t read it properly and my head began to ache. Why weren’t the pills working? A movement caught my eye and I started in fright. To my relief, it was just a hallucination, in the familiar form of the ginger cat that walked along the kitchen worktop. This time, instead of continuing and disappearing through the wall, the cat stopped, sat down and looked at me. I put down the whisky glass and slowly made my way towards him. As I got closer, he stood up and turned towards me. I reached a hand out to stroke him, but faster than I could react, a paw full of needles lashed out and tore the back of my hand. I swore, and jumping back, raised my bloodied hand to my mouth. The cat took one last disdainful look at me, sauntered across the worktop and disappeared through the wall.

  Badly shaken, after washing my hand under the cold tap, I went to look for the box of plasters which I seemed to remember lived in one of my desk drawers. It was too dark to see properly so I flicked on the desk lamp. The bulb gave a loud pop and all the lights in the house went out. Bloody great, that was all I needed. Fumbling in the darkness I managed to find the right cupboard and my hand closed around the torch. I turned it on. Nothing. The batteries were as one with the Dodo. As my eyes grew more accustomed to the dark I could just make out the pale rectangle formed by the moonlight shining through the kitchen curtains. I didn’t fancy navigating the stairs down to the cellar and the fuse box in the pitch dark, so I opened the curtains. What I saw made me recoil in horror.

  What was left of the man’s face was blistered and red. Below an empty left eye socket, his skin hung down in sheets. The rest of his head was covered with a tight-fitting leather helmet. I staggered back, hitting the kitchen table and tumbling, off balance, to the floor. When I had picked myself up, the apparition was standing no more than two feet in front of me. He was dressed in a bulky one-piece suit with what looked like a parachute harness over the top of it. The cloth was charred and I saw, as he turned to face me that he had no arm from the left elbow downwards, a small length of bone protruding from his torn flesh glistened white. A powerful stench of burning and decay filled the room.

  In spite of his injuries, I realised with horror that I knew him. It was Gilroy, the Aussie mid-upper gunner. Through a charred, lopsided gash of a mouth he spoke to me. ‘Oh, wide awake now, are we, Tommy? Bit bloody late, isn’t it?’

  I turned to run but tripped over a kitchen chair and sprawled across the tiles. He picked up my whisky glass, holding it to the light. ‘Skipper told you about this, didn’t he Tommy? Keep off the sauce and you’ll stay awake, he said.’ With that he smashed the glass to the floor and took a pace towards me. ‘But no, you wouldn’t bloody listen. Hope you’re proud of yourself.’

  I tried to crawl away but with muscles petrified into inaction, all I managed was a few feet towards the kitchen door. ‘Leave me alone,’ I whimpered. ‘You’ve got the wrong man. My name’s not Tommy…’

  ‘You answer to it quick enough when it’s someone else’s round.’

  This had to be a nightmare, but the pain that stabbed through my leg as I knelt on a piece of broken whisky glass told me otherwise. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Want?’ he replied. ‘I want you to stay off the booze. Then maybe you won’t fall asleep on the job and six other poor buggers won’t end up like me.’ Then, he turned away from me and walked through the wall not far from where the cat had made its exit moments before.

  Half stumbling, half running, with tears coursing down my face, I launched myself down the cellar stairs, pushing the door open with my elbow. My hands scrabbled against the rough brickwork until, after what felt like a lifetime, they found the plastic casing of the fuse box. I pushed the master switch back up and was rewarded with a pool of light shining across the foot of the stairs.

  I put my foot on the first step but my legs gave way from under me. No sooner had I managed to crawl to the top than the fear, combined with the stench from the apparition, overwhelmed me and I only just made it to the lavatory in time before being copiously sick.

  The rest of my night was spent curled up in the foetal position on the bathroom floor, with my back hard up against the bolted door. At around three in the morning, merciful sleep found me at last, but at the slightest sound I snapped awake. By six thirty the pain from lying on the cold, hard tiles and the throbbing of the cuts in my knee and hand were too much to bear any longer and I forced myself to get up.

  Outside it was still dark and the glare of the kitchen lights combined with the after-effects of last night’s whisky to produce a bilious, griping ache that clamped my head like a vice. Cupping my hands to the pane, I risked a quick look out through the kitchen window into my small courtyard garden. All was as normal, and the only reminder of my visitor was a lingering smell of burning and putrefaction. I picked up the kitchen chair and swept up the pieces of broken whisky glass – just catching a hint of the high-octane spirit made me retch, a good reminder of why I had sworn off it in the first place.

  The antiseptic stung as I slopped it onto my cuts, the pain distracting me momentarily from the horrible reality of what had happened during the night. Hallucinations do not, cannot physically harm people, but two of mine just had. I considered going back to the doctor. And then tell him what? That a c
at that wasn’t there had scratched my hand? That a burned and maimed airman had walked into my kitchen through a solid wall, stopping just long enough to call me “Tommy”, warn me off the demon drink, smash a glass on the floor and then go out the same way he’d come in? That way lay a visit from the men in white coats and a lifetime wearing clothing that fastens at the back with straps.

  Somehow, I made it into work. I had considered phoning in sick again but the need to get away from the house was stronger.

  I was just about to open the doors into the lobby of the newspaper’s offices when I heard someone calling my name. ‘Bill. Hey, Bill. I need to talk to you.’ The voice was familiar and I turned to look. What I saw, froze me in my tracks. It was Harrison, wearing his RAF battledress, a whistle attached to his collar and his chip-bag hat at a rakish angle. ‘You look dreadful,’ he said.

  I made no reply. The fact that his appearance in 1940s uniform at ten to nine on a twenty-first century work day told me that nobody else on the bustling Lincoln street could see or hear him.

  ‘Coffee,’ I said and carried on past the Lincoln Post signs towards the café we had visited before.

  Harrison quickened his pace to draw alongside me. ‘Can’t have been much fun the other night,’ he said.

  I grunted in reply. Already three-quarters certain of my own insanity I did not relish the thought of confirming it to everybody else by being seen to talk to myself in the street. When we arrived, I pushed the door open and didn’t bother to hold it open for him. Harrison showed no concern and caught the handle in order to follow me. Once again, somebody who could not possibly be there was none the less solid flesh and bone. I ordered a coffee and sat facing the wall, with my strange companion opposite me.

  ‘Gilroy’s not happy,’ he said. ‘He’ll be back.’

  A wave of despair swept over me. ‘So what do you suggest I do?’

  ‘Come back to Leckonby.’

  ‘And have the same thing happen to me as happened to Gilroy? You must be out of your mind.’

  ‘Let me finish. I can help you.’

  I snorted. ‘How? Tommy Handley and the rest of Brownlow’s crew die on the night of the 21st of December. That kind of help I can live without.’

  He shrugged and looked down at the table, fiddling with the corner of a paper napkin. ‘Come back as Bill Price or take your chances with Gilroy. How well do you think you’ll cope with a couple more nights like the last one? I don’t need to tell you, do I? That way madness lies.’

  ‘And this is sane, I suppose?’

  ‘Funnily enough, it is,’ he replied. ‘I warned you to stay away but you wouldn’t listen. What you’ve started, you’ll have to finish. I can help you.’

  I scoffed. ‘So you keep saying.’

  He wagged an admonitory finger at me. ‘If you don’t take my advice, Gilroy will take you somewhere that’s no place for the living. Remember your little encounter with Colonel Cavendish and that creature of his?’

  ‘All too bloody well,’ I replied with a shudder.

  Harrison’s expression was grave. In hindsight I would have said he looked frightened. ‘Well, you’ll be seeing a lot more of them if you don’t take my advice.’

  I felt the goose pimples rising on my arms and a feeling of dread, far deeper than I can describe, came over me. ‘So what do I have to do?’

  ‘Meet me at the Ferryboat Inn at seven thirty tomorrow evening.’

  ‘Then what? How do I know I won’t run into Gilroy and Cavendish? And anyway, the pub’s not there any more.’

  He shook his head and then looked me in the eye. ‘You’ll just have to trust me, Bill. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. You’re haunting a group of people in the winter of 1944. Some of them are haunting you now. There’s only one way to end it.’

  My mouth opened and closed like a goldfish, but no words came out. Eventually I found my voice. ‘But, but… how do I know I can trust you?’

  ‘You don’t, but believe me, if you don’t the alternative will be far worse. I’ll see you tomorrow evening.’ With that, he got up and instead of opening the door, walked out through the wall next to the counter and disappeared.

  So it had come to this. I put my head in my hands and stared down into the dregs at the bottom of my coffee cup. My last toehold on the rational world, all my smug assurance that such things were impossible, had finally crumbled. All that remained was the unthinkable.

  I was late for work and, as I hurried back along the crowded pavement, I had already resigned myself to the prospect of facing Derek Bennett’s sarcasm. My hopes of sneaking to my desk unobserved were dashed and I had to endure the public humiliation of explaining myself to him in front of the rest of the office. ‘New medication,’ I mumbled, hoping no one else would hear. ‘Leaves me feeling spaced out half the time. Not sleeping well. The doc told me it might happen.’

  Instead of ranting at me as he usually did, Bennett looked at me with what might, in a bad light, have passed for compassion. ‘Come into my office, Bill. We need to talk.’

  He cleared a space for me in an office that was only distinguishable from a council refuse tip by the absence of seagulls, and offered me a seat. ‘Look, Bill,’ he said. ‘I know you’ve been having a rough time of late.’

  Here it comes, I thought. Thirty seconds’ of feigned concern for my wellbeing and then a P45. However, Bennett hadn’t lost his powers to surprise. My cynicism was misplaced. He continued. ‘You do realise the quack would probably sign you off as unfit for work if you asked?’

  I nodded. ‘My GP said exactly that. He wants me to see a neurologist and a shrink. The hallucinations are getting worse. Even the pills can’t stop them.’ I wondered as I spoke to whom I was lying when I described what was happening to me as hallucinations – just Bennett or to myself too?

  ‘So why don’t you take his advice, old son?’ The pug features crinkled into a smile that reached all the way up to his eyes.

  I paused, trying to find the right words. ‘Because, odd as it may seem, I actually enjoy this job. Swapping it for a life of daytime TV and living off benefits doesn’t really appeal.’

  ‘How would you feel about going part-time? I’d have to pay you less, of course,’ he added.

  I nodded. ‘That might work.’

  We spent the next half hour haggling over my new hourly rate and the key features of the contract he said I’d have to sign, but in the end we came to an agreement that suited both sides. In the interests of his not declaring me insane on the spot, I thought it best not to mention that there was an outside chance I might not be alive if I didn’t survive my next rendezvous with the past.

  At lunchtime, I risked a visit to the bookshop that now occupies the site of the old Saracen’s Head Hotel – infamous to me as “the Snakepit” and my embarrassing episode with the manager. Today, the past seemed content to leave me alone and I managed to buy a 1:25,000 scale Ordnance Survey map of the area around Leckonby without any mishaps. Where I was going tomorrow evening, my car’s GPS would not be of any help. As I walked back to the office, the streets of Lincoln were busy with people doing their last minute Christmas shopping – some clearly hating every minute of it, others smiling and happy. Everywhere, the shop windows were bright with Christmas decorations. Normally, at this time of year I can suspend my natural cynicism and go along with the tide of sparkly tat and 1970s Christmas chart-toppers blasting from every shop doorway. Now, I had other things on my mind and I couldn’t get into the mood – however implausible the Christmas story might be, I was faced with something even more unbelievable but none the less real. I was used to Christmases on my own by now, but the gloom and foreboding I felt surpassed anything I had ever felt since that first Christmas without Amy and Julia.

  Back in the office, I spread the map out on my desk. The disused airfield at Leckonby and its runways were marked in dashed lines. Even the ruined station buildings of Leckonby Junction were there alongside the dotted path of the disused railway line.
However, when I looked for any signs of a building on the other side of the Hobbs Bank Drain, all I found was a line of dashes indicating a farm track running parallel to the dyke and stopping some 200 yards short of where I knew the Ferryboat Inn used to stand. This was going to take some finding.

  It wasn’t until later that afternoon that I realised that in my haste and confusion I had failed to answer two important questions.

  The fate of Sergeant Gilroy was my first concern. I went to the National Archives website and found 362 Squadron’s Operational Record Book, paging forward to the entry for the 19th of December 1943. Fourteen aircraft had set out on operations that night. The report on the one I was looking for was blunt and brutally short:

  Aircraft L7585 (F). Captain F/O Brownlow. Duty – Bombing Frankfurt-am-Main. Time Up 2143/Time Down 0312. Target markers clearly seen to west of aiming point. Target photo shows good results. A/C suffered light flak damage in starboard mainplane over target, holing No. 3 tank. Later attacked by night fighter near Coblenz. Sgt Gilroy RAAF killed by enemy action. Damage to port inner engine and fuselage. Enemy A/C driven off by rear gunner. Fire in region of bomb bay extinguished by wireless op and rear gunner who both put up a good show.

  So did Tommy Handley miss the approaching night fighter, or did it sneak up on F-Freddie from below, using the gunners’ blind spot? Given what I knew about German tactics and weapons of the time, the latter seemed far more likely and Tommy seemed to have done his best. If only I could tell Gilroy.

  Harrison had told me that if I came back to Leckonby again it would be as Bill Price. My next concern was to discover what the winter of 1943-44 held in store for my namesake. I logged on to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site and entered the search details. The results that came back froze me to the spot in horror.