‘Where would I find her?’
‘The old peoples’ home – Hobbs End Hall. Her name’s Miss Elizabeth Clark, and don’t forget the “Miss” or you’ll be in trouble,’ he said with a smile.
With a feeling that I had already divulged far more than I’d ever intended, I thanked the Reverend Davis for his time and promised to let him know if I found anything of interest to him. He stood, framed in the lighted doorway, watching me as I followed the path down to the lych gate. I heard the door close and permitted myself a nervous glance up at the statue as I hurried past it. This time, there was no feeling of menace – all I saw was an inert, harmless bronze figure, keeping its lonely vigil and watching the eastern horizon.
I crossed the road and followed the pavement that led the few yards towards the Rose and Crown’s car park. That’s when I heard it. At first I thought it was a bird fluttering in the hedge next to me, but then I realised the sound was more regular – it was the rhythmic crackle of animal paws over fallen leaves, keeping pace with me on the other side of the hedge. I stopped and turned towards the sound. As I did so I felt rather than heard a low rumbling growl. Two piercing red eyes stared at me through the tangle of branches and, not far away I heard a man’s voice laughing. In terror, I sprinted back towards the car, activated the remote the remote control as I ran and tumbled though the door, slamming it shut behind me. Then I turned round, kneeling on the seat to make sure nothing had got in with me – I knew nothing was there but after what I had seen I no longer trusted my own mind. Somehow I managed to get the car started and slammed it into gear before setting off, wheels spinning and swerving, way too fast, into Hobbs Lane in the direction of Lincoln and home.
Chapter Eleven
Not for the first time, I seriously contemplated suicide. For several hours, I sat at my kitchen table looking at the unopened bottle of Scotch and the three new packets of sleeping pills next to it. By the time the clock showed midnight, some of the horror had subsided and, by executing a strenuous logical back flip, I finally convinced myself that taking an overdose could wait until I felt less tired.
Then I thought about what Harrison had said and I weighed my options – an ignominious suicide in the present day or the chance to know what it was like to live as Bomber Command aircrew, knowing that until the 29th of March 1944, no harm could befall me. It was an easy decision to make.
I forgot to switch off my alarm and the following morning I had already showered, had breakfast and was about to leave the house when I remembered that I was signed off until after the holidays. With no work to occupy me, I tried to prepare myself for what I hoped would be a non-eventful evening by a cold, damp riverbank. I tried without success to banish the thought of what might be waiting for me out there in the darkness.
Spreading out the 1:25,000 scale map on my dining table, I sought distraction by trying to memorise the route to the spot where the Ferryboat Inn had once stood. Map reading at night meant using a torch and the last thing I wanted was to draw attention to myself. I didn’t fancy trying to explain to an angry farmer that the reason I was trespassing on his land in the dark was because I was looking for a pub that no longer exists.
With no work to keep me busy I decided to kill the hours that hung between me and my rendezvous with the unknown by following up on the vicar’s advice to contact Miss Elizabeth Clark. I phoned the old people’s home at Hobbs End Hall, explained that I was a journalist and asked if she would be willing to speak to me about her experiences at RAF Leckonby during the war. About thirty minutes later my phone rang and one of the staff, speaking in a heavy Eastern European accent, surprised me by confirming that Miss Clark would be delighted to meet and would I come for tea at half past three.
The sign by the roadside as well as the front of Hobbs End Hall was festooned with coloured lights and inside the overheated entrance stood a Christmas tree. The receptionist showed me into a room, separated from the residents’ lounge by a sliding door. Seated at the table, hands folded in her lap, was an elderly woman, her skin was stretched like delicate parchment across what in youth must have been cheekbones to die for. She sat ramrod straight, despite her years, pale blue, filmy eyes flickering left and right as she tried to bring her visitors into focus.
‘Mr Price is here, Miss Clark,’ said the receptionist.
‘No need to shout, dear. I’m not deaf you know.’ She paused and added with a laugh. ‘Well, only a little.’ The smile was infectious. From the Reverend Davis’ description of her, I had been expecting a battleaxe, not someone like this. The receptionist left and I introduced myself to my host. Her handshake was firm and I saw the pale eyes trying to find mine. I offered her my business card which she politely declined. ‘Not much use to me, I’m afraid. Nearly blind you see. Terrible nuisance not being able to read.’
I poured the tea and sat down opposite her. ‘It’s very good of you to see me at such short notice,’ I said. ‘I’m doing a series of articles on the history of RAF Leckonby during the war.’
‘Yes, so they told me. And now they’re going to build houses all over it. Doesn’t seem right somehow, but I suppose people must have somewhere to live, poor things.’ She paused. ‘It was all so long ago but it still seems such an awful waste.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘The war. All those young lives. It had to be done of course, but so many didn’t come back. So sad.’ She stopped again and the pale blue eyes seemed to stare back into a vanished past.’
‘You were an air traffic controller. Is that right?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I think that’s what they call it now. Back then I was a signals officer, I worked in the watch office.’
‘And nobody’s asked you about what you did? You know, journalists, writers, busybodies like me?’
That smile again. ‘Oh, yes. Some silly beggar wanted to write a book about me. Sent him packing all right.’
‘Well then I’m honoured that you decided to change your mind,’ I replied.
She thought for a moment. ‘It wasn’t really a matter of changing my mind. It was your name you see. I knew a young man called Bill Price during the war. He was killed in March 1944. His aircraft developed a fault after takeoff and crashed back on the airfield when he tried to land.’ Tears welled up in her eyes as she spoke. ‘Bill and I were very fond of one another. I was on duty in the watch office and I saw him die along with all his crew that night. That’s why I don’t like talking about the war.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I stammered. ‘If it’s distressing for you, I’ll leave.’
‘No, please don’t,’ she said, putting her hand on my arm. ‘I’m old now and not likely to be around very long. If people read about those boys, then they won’t be entirely forgotten. I think that’s important, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ I replied, trying to hide the fear in my voice.
‘There is one other thing,’ she said and then paused. ‘No, it’s silly of me to even mention it…’
‘Go on,’ I replied.
‘Well, the uncanny thing is that although I can’t see you properly, you sound so like the Bill Price I used to know. It really is quite a coincidence.’ She paused again. ‘Or perhaps I’m going crackers,’ she said with a laugh, trying to hide the tears that had once more formed in her eyes.
We spoke for over an hour. With Miss Clark’s permission I recorded the conversation, taking frequent notes to remind me to research some of the topics she covered. She had just got to the period when Wing Commander ‘Press-on’ Preston took over as commanding officer – a man she described as “a colossal shit” – when a nurse reappeared to chivvy me out before I tired Miss Clark too much. I stood up to leave. As Miss Clark took my hand, she said quietly, ‘You will be careful, won’t you?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I replied without thinking and it was only after I was on my way out of the building that the incongruity of her words struck me.
It was too early to set out for my rendezvous with Harrison, so I decid
ed to take another look at the airfield. The route to my usual parking spot was blocked by ‘road closed’ signs so I got out and walked the last few hundred yards only to find my way barred once more. A high, chain-link fence now surrounded the site where signs in English and Polish warned the public to keep out. Under the yellow security lights, I could see roads laid out across what once had been grass, and the walls of the first houses stood in neat rows. The control tower had been demolished too. I turned away, saddened by the sight.
I drove back to Lincoln, a sense of foreboding hanging over me. To provide some welcome distraction I decided to play back the recording of my conversation with Miss Clark. I pulled over and plugged the recorder into the car’s MP3 socket as I’d done a hundred times before, but what happened when I hit ‘play’ left me numb with disbelief. At first I thought I’d left it on ‘record’ at some point because, instead of hearing Miss Clark’s clipped tones, what I heard was a muffled conversation between a man and a woman with a third male voice butting in. I picked it up, checked that I was at the start of the recording and tried again. Once more I heard the same voices and, cursing my own stupidity at losing Miss Clark’s priceless reminiscences, was about to turn it off when I paused. What I heard simply wasn’t possible. It went something like this.
First, I heard a man’s voice saying, ‘O-Orange airborne at 2107.’
In reply, a young woman repeated, ‘O-Orange, Pilot Officer Price, 2107. I could make out a faint tapping and scratching, presumably the sound of her chalking the details onto a blackboard. Then came a pause followed by what sounded uncannily like aircraft engine noise. The man spoke again. ‘B for Beer airborne at 2108.’
The recital of aircraft and their takeoff times continued, punctuated here and there by radio transmissions from an aircraft that seemed to be having engine problems. I listened for about five more minutes. Further aircraft were announced as airborne and I was about to turn off the recording when I heard something that made me pause. Z-Zebra had just taken off, the female voice began to repeat the details when a burst of static cut her off and an airman’s voice, tinny and muffled as though from far away, broke through. It was the aircraft with the engine problems again. ‘Starfish, this is O-Orange calling. Request immediate landing. We’ve lost the port outer…’ then another burst of static. ‘Starfish, we can’t maintain height.’ The rest was too indistinct to make out but the exchanges between the pilot and the controllers in the watch office became more urgent over the next few minutes until finally a man’s voice said, ‘Oh my Christ, no,’ followed by a woman’s screaming. Then silence. I turned the recorder off. With what I might have to face in a few hours, this was the last thing I needed.
***
With no idea of how long I might be away, I returned to Leckonby by taxi. It was outrageously expensive and the driver seemed convinced he had a madman aboard when I insisted on being dropped off in the dark on a deserted lane a mile outside the village. I waited until the taxi’s lights were out of view, climbed over a five bar gate and walked the short distance across the fields to the dyke beside the Hobbs Bank Drain. There was no moon, and mist was rising by the time I reached the dyke. All I had to do now was turn left and follow it until I reached what I knew to be a patch of nettles on the opposite bank to the old station. The first few hundred yards were easy going with a clearly-defined path running along the top of the dyke. However, as I pressed on it became more overgrown until a painful encounter with a patch of brambles sent me sliding back down the bank and into the field.
That’s when I saw it. Almost as tall at the shoulder as a man, the creature was jet black and so close I could hear its breathing. Not daring to take my eyes off it for a second I attempted to back away but it moved soundlessly towards me. I tried to call for help but no sound came. So this is how it ends. Please, God, no, anything but this.
Harrison had warned me that Cavendish would take me and now his abominable familiar was right in front of me. This time there would be no escape.
To my right a movement caught my eye – half expecting to see Cavendish I was appalled to see the outline of another animal form in the mist. There were two of them. This wasn’t possible. I turned to run but a deafening bellow from close behind froze me to the spot. Then another to my right. Slowly the reality dawned on me and I fumbled in my coat pocket for my torch. I flicked it on and shone it at the shape in front of me. A jet black calf. Another bellow from close at hand and the harmless creature trotted past me to its mother. For the first time in my life I wanted to kiss a farm animal.
After I had recovered from the shock I continued on my way, sometimes on top of the dyke, but more often down in the field where the low-lying mist had reduced visibility to only a few yards. Within minutes it was so dense that I quickly lost track of how far I’d come, and after an hour of tacking up and down the bank to avoid brambles, nettles and barbed wire fences I was hopelessly lost. As I expected, there was no sign of the Ferryboat Inn and was inwardly cursing myself for once again being so credulous when I saw a brief glimmer of light ahead. As soon as it had appeared, it went out again so I moved into the cover of a clump of gorse bushes and waited.
After what seemed an eternity but was probably only a few minutes I saw it again. This time, I realised that it was close to. What I’d seen was the light from a door being opened. The silhouette of a man filled the doorway for a moment and I caught the sound of his voice as he turned to speak to someone inside the building. A feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach replaced my earlier complacency – no butterflies, these were jet black ravens. The door banged shut and as I inched forwards I could just make out the form of a two-storey building surrounded by a wooden picket fence. The hinges creaked in protest as I pushed open the gate. I shone my torch on the wall. On a wooden sign, faded and cracked by the elements, I could just read the words, “The Ferryboat Inn – Bateman’s Fine Ales.”
‘Put that bloody light out!’ a voice shouted from close by. I turned and saw a tall, spare-boned man in his mid-fifties, hands on hips and staring at me like I was something the cat had dragged in. He wore a collarless shirt covered by a grubby white apron. I recognised him as the man I’d seen rolling barrels down to the cellar – the pub landlord. He greeted me with, ‘Come in or we’ll catch our bloody deaths of cold out here.’ He opened the door and I followed him along the corridor towards a rising hubbub of beery voices. From his lack of surprise at seeing me I assumed I was expected, but then he turned through an open door to the left which led behind the bar. I stopped, confused and uncertain what to do next so I peered round the doorway to get a better view. Then the door leading into the bar itself opened and I saw a familiar figure. Harrison.
‘Pilot Officer Price, I presume?’ he said, offering me his hand. I shook it and, as I did so, saw that once more I was clad in RAF battledress. ‘Wait here, I’ll be back in a second,’ he said. Moments later he reappeared with the landlord who led the way back down the corridor, pausing only to take his coat from a peg by the door. I followed them round the side of the building and onto the planks of a low, wooden jetty that stuck out into the black waters of the Hobbs Bank Drain. At the end was moored the rowing boat I had seen before. While the landlord removed the tarpaulin, Harrison took me aside. ‘You do of course realise you can go back any time you like. Just go out of the pub using the same door you came through and keep on walking. It won’t make any difference of course, but you can come and go as you please.’
‘What do you mean, “it won’t make any difference”?’ I asked.
‘I mean, it won’t make any difference to what happens, that’s all.’
This was infuriating. Agitated, I tried to press him further but he refused to answer. The conversation was cut short by a voice from the darkness calling out, ‘Do you want me to row you across or not? I haven’t got all night.’
The landlord got in first and gave me a hand down. Harrison followed and joined me, sitting in the stern. At our feet was an RAF holdall. He
nodded to it and said, ‘Yours, of course.’
The landlord undid the painter, set the oars and pushed off. The rowlocks groaned and complained as he rowed through the mist towards the far bank which loomed black and forbidding above us. With a final sweep of the oars, he brought us alongside a flight of concrete steps and held the boat steady as we climbed out. ‘Don’t forget to pay the ferryman, Bill,’ said Harrison. Fearing a repeat of the penniless Tommy Handley’s embarrassment in the Snakepit I rummaged in my pocket and, to my relief, came up with a handful of heavy coins, some of which I thrust into a calloused hand.
The landlord glanced down at the money. I caught a note of surprise in his voice. ‘Much obliged, young man. No doubt we’ll see each other again.’
‘Come on,’ said Harrison, before I had time to reply. ‘I’ve borrowed the CO’s car. Better get it back before he misses it.’
The station buildings of Leckonby Junction were in darkness and only a think sliver of light escaping round the edge of the black-out curtains gave any hint of human activity. Outside the station stood an Austin saloon painted RAF blue and bearing a roundel and white serial numbers on the doors. I put the holdall in the back and got into the passenger seat next to Harrison. He turned on the ignition, pulled the self-starter and the car wheezed into life. The route was familiar to me now and the RAF Policeman at the main gate raised the red and white barrier to let us through and treated us to a crisp salute. Harrison chuckled. ‘Must’ve thought it was the old man himself driving.’
He left the car outside the officers’ mess and led me through the door. Inside, the building carried a strange aroma that I remembered from my school days – a mixture of floor polish and boiled cabbage. I followed him down a corridor and saw that the Nissen hut we were in had been divided into two-man rooms. Harrison stopped, checked the number on the door and stood back to await my reaction. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘All the comforts of home.’
Bomber Boys - a Ghost Story Page 16