Bomber Boys - a Ghost Story

by Simon Leighton-Porter

  ‘No. I did it playing mess rugby, if you must know. Off flying for a whole bloody week.’

  ‘Now, now. No need to be grumpy. Come and have lunch. I’ve got some news too.’

  I struggled to my feet and with the aid of my hated walking stick, hobbled along towards the dining room. A barrage of catcalls followed me and I did my best to smile and go along with the joke. Betty was invited to join one of the A Flight crews for lunch and so it wasn’t until later that I managed to catch up with her.

  ‘So what’s the scoop?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve got the whole of next weekend off. Imagine that. A whole weekend.’ Her face wore the look of a child who’d just been told Christmas had come early.

  ‘We could go out somewhere,’ I said. ‘That is, if it wasn’t for my stupid leg.’

  She laughed. ‘It doesn’t have to be a hiking trip. They do have things called buses and trains these days. Where did you have in mind?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘How about a day out at the seaside? Skegness is supposed to be “bracing” – according to the posters anyway.’

  ‘More like freezing at this time of year,’ she replied.

  There are times when my mouth becomes completely decoupled from my brain, and something else, often far baser takes over. ‘I’d keep you warm,’ I said. ‘We could go for the whole weekend.’

  For a moment I thought I had completely overstepped the mark and that she was going to slap me, but instead she looked me in the eye and asked, ‘Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?’

  I gulped. ‘Yes. You were the one who quoted Marvell, remember. The grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. That was it, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You do realise they’d court martial us if we were caught?’

  ‘That’d be a blow,’ I replied. ‘You mean I’d have to give up being shot at over Germany every night?’

  ‘No,’ she said, her features suddenly grave. ‘They’d remuster you as a private soldier in the PBI and send you off to get killed somewhere else like they do with the LMF cases.’

  And so it was that on a clear but bitingly cold Friday evening we caught the train to Skegness. I had managed to find one of the few boarding houses in the town that had not been requisitioned for military use. The landlady of the Dunnottar Castle Hotel was a fearsome Scot who eyed us with a suspicion born of many years’ successfully thwarting the plans of would-be fornicators and adulterers. Betty had taken the precaution of slipping her signet ring onto the third finger of her left hand and twisting it so that the thin part of the band was uppermost. This and her oblique references to “my husband’s leg wound” seemed to do the trick and the hotel’s blue-rinsed Cerberus was well and truly duped. So much so that as a special treat she found us an electric fire to heat our room, but on strict instructions not to put both bars on at once. ‘There’s a war on, you know,’ she chided us.

  ‘So they tell me,’ I replied, earning a dig in the ribs from Betty and a look of Siberian froideur from the landlady.

  Our bedroom was equally glacial. In a wrought iron grate we found a small pile of cheap coal splinters. Had it not been for a page from last week’s Skegness Standard, the fragments would have all fallen through the bars into the ash pan. We plugged the electric fire in and defiantly switched both bars on, huddling together to keep warm. Neither of us spoke. Finally, Betty broke the silence. ‘I’m nervous,’ she said, her eyes downcast.

  ‘You needn’t be,’ I said, stroking her hair and kissing her on the cheek.

  ‘So you’ve done this with lots of girls then?’

  My ignorance of how this game was played by 1940s rules left me scrabbling for an answer. The best I could manage was, ‘No I haven’t. And how would you feel if I asked you how many other men you’ve been to bed with?’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘I know. I was only joking.’

  She helped me to my feet and we kissed, just as we had done on the way home from the dance in Boston. We stayed pressed close together for what seemed a delicious eternity until, by an unspoken mutual consent, we made our way to the bed where I gently began to undress her.

  At first, Betty proved to be a timid and almost passive lover, but by the time we finally turned off the light, it was clear that the shock of the new was no longer a restraint. We clung together in the darkness.

  ‘This is wonderful, Bill,’ she whispered, nuzzling my neck. ‘I never want it to end.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ I said as a tear rolled down my cheek. ‘Nor do I.’

  The following morning, after breakfast, along with the other guests, we were chivvied out of the Dunnottar Castle Hotel with strict instructions not to return before five o’clock. Our collars turned up against the wind we walked along the sea front. A squad of recruits from the nearby naval base, HMS Royal Arthur, marched past, with cold-blued hands trying not to lose hold of the heavy rifles sloped over their shoulders. On each face was etched a picture of abject, frozen misery. We waited for them to pass and then crossed over to where the railings above the beach had been reinforced with coils of barbed wire.

  My ankle was feeling a little less tender, so with Betty holding my arm and with the aid of my stick, I managed to hobble the hundred yards or so to the entrance to the pier only to find it barricaded and its steel doors welded shut. A sign proclaimed it, “Closed for the duration of hostilities.” From the roof of the ticket office, a seagull turned a beady yellow eye on us, squawked and then flew off.

  ‘I think he was laughing at me,’ I said.

  Betty laughed. ‘Well then, run him over next time you go flying. That’ll teach him.’

  Our naive hopes of a walk on the beach were dispelled by the presence of more barbed wire and the fact that the sand was littered with anti-invasion obstacles, hung with mines, even at this late stage of the war.

  The cold drove us to seek shelter in a café where we found a corner table and made one pot of tea last us until lunchtime while we talked about everything and nothing.

  ‘You’ve never told me what you’re going to do when this is all over,’ said Betty, tangling her fingers with mine.

  I looked down into the tea leaves at the bottom of my cup, but as to my future, they remained mute. ‘I don’t know any more,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  Betty wasn’t to be diverted so easily. ‘Try me,’ she said.

  The pain of having to lie to her went deep. ‘Well, before I joined up I had all sorts of ideas. Thought I’d try Australia or maybe somewhere like Kenya. You know, see the world, get my knees brown. Do something a bit different.’

  I felt her pale blue eyes see right through my charade. ‘So what’s changed? Why did joining up put you off the colonies?’

  ‘A couple of things really,’ I said, again, failing to meet her gaze.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as the fact that my chances of surviving thirty ops are about nil. You know that as well as I do.’

  She wagged a finger in my face. ‘Now stop that at once. The bloody Germans won’t get you… they won’t… they can’t… I won’t let them…’ she broke off and turned away, dabbing away a tear with the corner of her handkerchief. I took her hand and held it tight while she composed herself. ‘Listen, Bill,’ she continued. ‘If you do come through this and you do go off to Timbuktu or wherever, could I come with you?’

  The tension eased a little. ‘Of course. How are you with lions?’ I asked.

  She snapped her fingers, ‘Putty in my hands.’

  Not for the first time since my arrival at Leckonby, I inwardly flinched at the unforeseen consequences that my deception was having on others.

  ‘I’d love to see Africa one day,’ she said, putting her hand on my arm. ‘And when you’re back on ops, you will be careful, won’t you?’

  “You will be careful, won’t you?” Hearing those words again cut through
me like a knife and I hastily changed the subject.

  We had lunch – Brown Windsor Soup followed by gristly lamb – at the Grand Hotel on North Parade and then spent the afternoon in the cinema, leaning close together in the flickering darkness, our fingers entwined, lost in a make-believe world where the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys black ones. For a few brief hours we were travellers in a land that didn’t smell of floor polish, carbolic soap or stale sweat and where the curvaceous Jane Russell could pass herself off as a gunslinger. No flak, no nightmares, no empty seats in the briefing room, just wonderful escapist nonsense where the hero gets his gal and they ride off into the sunset together on the same horse.

  At just before five, we joined a huddle of our fellow guests in the lee of the privet hedge outside the hotel, stamping our feet and blowing into cupped hands in an attempt to keep warm. The nets twitched. The old bat knew we were out there but still took what was probably only a few minutes – but seemed like an eternity – to open the door.

  The temperature inside our room was almost indistinguishable from that outside on the sea-front, so we turned on the forbidden second bar, lit the pile of coal scraps and huddled together under the sheets fully dressed until we were warm enough to take our clothes off.

  ***

  Whoever christened Skegness’s Ritz hotel after its namesake in London’s Piccadilly clearly had an over-developed sense of irony. Dinner was even more indigestible than the lunch we had suffered at The Grand and we were insanely grateful to swap the smell of drains and overcooked cabbage for the biting cold of the Grand Parade.

  The Locarno ballroom had seen better days. Inside, dark blue Royal Navy uniforms outnumbered RAF blue and the atmosphere around the bar seethed with menace. Outside, the presence of uniformed police patrols from both services gave warning that come throwing-out time, the rivalry between the two services was likely to boil over.

  Despite the nagging pain in my ankle, I managed to hobble round in circles on the dance floor while propped up by Betty.

  ‘When the war’s over we can do this every weekend,’ she whispered as we danced.

  This sounded like a bad case of wedding bells in the ears. ‘I hear the Locarno in Timbuktu is quite the place these days,’ I said, trying to lighten the tone.

  ‘I don’t care where it is, so long as we can be together.’

  I so longed to tell her I felt the same.

  Tired and happy, we made it back to the Dunnottar Castle Hotel just before the ten thirty curfew. The landlady fixed us with a Presbyterian scowl and another admonishment not to put the second bar on.

  All night we talked and loved. Sleep could wait. These moments were too precious to lose.

  ***

  The following afternoon we caught the train back to Leckonby. We found a compartment to ourselves and Betty dozed, her head on my shoulder, while I gazed at the flat monotony of the Lincolnshire countryside. As the train clattered over the points just after Little Steeping station, Betty woke up and slid her hand into mine. Then came the words I’d been dreading. ‘Bill, you do know I love you, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I wish you didn’t.’ I saw her features crumple and the tears well up in her eyes. I pulled her to me. ‘It’s not that I don’t care for you, Betty. I do. Desperately. I just don’t want you to be hurt when one night I don’t come back.’

  ‘But you will come back. You will. I know it.’ Her tone was petulant, like an angry child.

  Once more, my moral courage failed me. ‘Listen, the last thing I want to do is hurt you –’

  She pulled away from me. ‘You’ve got another girl, haven’t you? That’s what it is.’

  ‘No. There’s no other girl. Just you. If I finish this tour in one piece, then we’ll talk about the future. I just don’t want to see you hurt.’

  ‘A future together you mean?’ She was persistent, if nothing else.

  ‘Yes. Together. For always.’ I hated myself for what I had just said.

  Even now, I can recall almost every second of those first weeks of operations at Leckonby – the fear, the night fighters, the six uncongenial strangers with whom I shared an aircraft on those nights, and worst of all, the searing red fireballs that marked the loss of so many young airmen, so many hopes and dreams snuffed out before their time. It all jarred so horribly with the few precious hours of solitude that Betty and I managed to snatch – furtive, desperate couplings and evenings spent close to one another on the dance floor, savouring her touch and the smell of her hair as she buried her head into my neck.

  Back on the ground it was impossible to explain to anyone just what it was like to be on operations night after night – not even the intelligence staff who debriefed us after every trip could ever come close to understanding the reality of our words that they so patiently transcribed into official terms. How could they possibly know what ‘heavy flak’ or ‘vigorous night-fighter opposition’ actually looked and felt like? Not even Betty could realise what the bomber boys went through, waiting in line, dry-mouthed, stomach full of butterflies, for the green light from the runway caravan that told you it was your turn to take off, possibly for the last time. And in my turn, I could never fathom the depths of courage shown by the aircrews who did not share my blessing, or if truth be told, my curse, of knowing when they would die.

  Whether as close friends, crew-members or mere acquaintances that war had thrown together, all bomber aircrew faced the vast gulf between two realities – on one hand, the nightly terror of violent, agonising death in the skies over occupied Europe, and on the other, the prosaic rhythm of life on a hastily constructed airfield in rural Lincolnshire. Some sought solace in drink, others in dances, socials and similar distractions, whereas a few turned in on themselves, reading, walking alone and shunning the noise and sweat of the crowd. The members of this last group were usually the first to die.

  After our weekend together in Skegness, the relationship with Betty had turned into something neither of us had planned. I longed to stay with her, yet I knew that I would be returning to the twenty-first century before the end of March – something that I could not explain to anyone without being certified insane.

  So it was with some relief that in February, along with the rest of my crew, I was granted a week’s leave. I told Betty that I would be going down to London to see my parents, then I broke the news to Harrison. ‘I suppose you want to go back?’ he asked. I nodded in reply. ‘Well, that’s fine,’ he said. ‘Just so long as you don’t get any silly ideas about going AWOL.’

  ‘Perish the thought,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Just let me know when you’re leaving and I’ll come to the Ferryboat with you.’

  ‘Tomorrow evening.’

  ‘I’ll see you outside the station at seven,’ he said, as though the prospect of arranging my return was no more than popping down to the corner shop. And then he added ominously, ‘You never know, we might bump into one another in Lincoln.’

  Harrison was waiting for me the following evening. At first, all I could see was the glow of his cigarette as he sheltered from the raw east wind in the lee of the station building. Without a word, he emerged from the shadows and nodded towards the bank of the Hobbs Bank Drain. As we clambered to the top I could see that the landlord of the Ferryboat Inn was already waiting for us, his boat nodding and rolling on the waves stirred up by the wind. Without speaking he motioned me to sit at the stern while Harrison climbed aboard. Hard pellets of sleet peppered us as we rowed across and followed the path from the jetty. Leading the way, the landlord opened the door and pushed aside the blackout curtain. As he did so, a warm, soupy fug of beer and cigarette smoke welcomed us and I stood blinking in the unaccustomed brightness. He motioned me to the door next to the counter and I followed him down the same corridor I remembered from my arrival. My God, that seemed a lifetime ago. Then, he paused by the back door, looked towards Harrison who nodded in reply, opened it and ushere
d me outside into the cold and dark. The door closed behind me with a bang. All was black as pitch. I turned back to look at the pub – nothing, no Ferryboat Inn, just a vague mound in a field beside the canal bank and the sting of sleet against my face.

  ***

  The first thing I noticed when I awoke the following morning was how different everything smelled. No more floor polish, cigarette smoke, drains, stale sweat and boiled cabbage, just the fresh smell of clean bed linen against my face.

  I made to swing myself out of bed, but forgot that I was no longer twenty-four, but fifty-six with knees that had been twice round the clock. The effort of standing up made me wince and my back joined in the protest at my sudden movements.

  I pulled on my dressing gown – that too smelled almost overpoweringly perfumed to my coarsened senses – and padded through to the kitchen. While the kettle was boiling I leafed through the pile of mail that had accumulated in my absence and turned on my PC. I had just taken my first sip of tea when it happened – a movement on the kitchen worktop caught my eye. The ginger cat was back. It treated me to a look of contempt, tiptoed round the sink with the grace of a ballerina and then disappeared through the wall next to the microwave. After my earlier mistake of trying to leap out of bed like a twenty-something, the cat was yet another unwelcome reminder of the reality to which I’d returned. I swallowed a couple of pills and stared at my PC screen, willing my hallucinations to stay away.

  I turned once more to the 362 Squadron Operation Record Book for February and March 1944 to see what awaited me. A list of familiar names; Berlin (several times), Magdeburg, Frankfurt, Augsburg, Schweinfurt, Leipzig – 362 lost five aircraft out of eighteen sent on that raid and now, all thirty-five names had faces. The list continued through March with the same dismal butcher’s bill of young lives until I got to the date that interested me most – the 29th of March. Depleted by so many losses, 362 Squadron could only muster twelve aircraft for the raid on Brunswick. Bomber Command’s loss rate was catastrophic – thirteen percent of the aircraft sent out that night failed to return – the forecast cloud en route never materialised and, under a bright moon, the Luftwaffe’s night fighters wrought terrible destruction. By a ghastly twist of fate, of the twelve Lancasters that took off from Leckonby that night, not one returned. My aircraft, I knew, had crashed shortly after takeoff, three others crash-landed in southern England after being badly damaged and the remaining eight, including Press-on Preston’s crew, were shot down. Of the fifty-six men in these aircraft, only ten parachuted to safety to become prisoners of war. The entire squadron had been destroyed in a single night. However, the RAF’s training machine had evidently churned relentlessly on, because by the end of the following week, 362 Squadron was already getting back to strength with a new CO, Flight Commanders, three crews recalled from leave and ten new crews, two of which were starting their second tour of ops.