A few months earlier I would have scoffed at such a notion, but now I understood how the horror of this loss had seeped into the very fabric of RAF Leckonby and why it was still manifesting itself today. That thirteen percent of the Lancasters and Halifaxes despatched to Brunswick had failed to return was just another grim statistic in the audit of Bomber Command’s war and in the same way, 362 Squadron’s losses that night were nothing more than an unlucky roll of the dice.
A further search on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s website showed me that of the 362 Squadron crews who had been shot down over Germany, the majority had their final resting place in one of three cemeteries. To me, these names were now more than statistics, they had faces, personalities, some of them I counted as friends. I had no intention of sharing their fate, but I reasoned that the least I could do was to make my own small act of homage by visiting their graves, starting my visit at the CWGC cemeteries at Reichswald and Rheinburg, both near the Dutch border. It took me only a few mouse clicks to make the bookings and I found a flight from Humberside to Weeze airport, an airfield I had visited many times when it was called RAF Laarbruch. It seemed only right that I should fly to Germany on the evening of the 29th of March.
At around ten I phoned the Lincoln Post’s office and told them I’d be coming in. Bennett, the editor, welcomed me back and accepted my story that I’d been too ill to work without demur. I then drew an envelope out of my jacket pocket and handed it across the desk to him. He opened it and read my resignation letter to the end. He then looked at me over the top of his glasses and said, ‘Well, I can’t say I’m surprised, old son, just hope you find enough to keep you occupied.’ He then trotted out the ritual platitudes about ‘dropping in to see them if ever I was passing’, ignoring the fact that anyone walking down Lincoln High Street couldn’t help but pass the newspaper’s front door.
So it was with a sense of relief that I headed out once more into the gloom of a damp February morning and set off to buy some food. I had only gone a few paces when I became aware of a figure walking in step by my side. Harrison. ‘Why can’t you leave me alone?’ I hissed out of the corner of my mouth. ‘I’ve said I’ll come back and I will.’
‘Just making sure you’re all right,’ he replied. ‘Don’t be surprised if you have visitors.’
‘Stop talking in bloody riddles, man,’ I said, stopping in my tracks, all earlier feelings of contentment now destroyed. I turned towards him, hands on hips, but all I saw was a middle-aged woman shopper who looked at me very oddly and hurried on, crossing the road to put as much space between herself and the local madman as possible. I took one of my pills and dismissed Harrison’s appearance as a hallucination.
What happened that evening showed me I was wrong. I had just finished clearing away the supper things and was about to settle down in front of the TV when I heard a tapping at the window. At first I ignored it as the product of tiredness and an over-active imagination, but then it came again – tap, tap, tap. I pulled the curtains aside. What I saw made me reel back in shock. The courtyard outside my kitchen was full of people, not just any people but aircrew from 362 Squadron. Some were maimed beyond recognition, others horribly burned while a few looked almost normal save for a greenish, unhealthy pallor to their skin.
The sound of a cough inside the kitchen made me let go of the curtains and spin round in alarm. It was Harrison, dressed in his usual tweed coat and sitting, perfectly relaxed, at my kitchen table. ‘Evening, Bill,’ he said. ‘Told you there might be visitors, didn’t I?’
For a second I considered killing him but then realised that would be impossible. ‘How the hell did you get in here?’ I shouted.
‘Come now, Bill,’ he replied with a sneer. ‘You should know better than to ask silly questions like that.’
‘And what are they doing here?’ I jerked my thumb towards the kitchen window.
‘Who?’
‘You know bloody well who. Them. Your precious sodding visitors. You can bugger off and take them with you.’ I marched across to the window and pulled the curtains aside. The courtyard was empty. Then the breeze blew and a bare branch of Wisteria knocked gently against the window. Tap, tap, tap. ‘If this is your idea of a joke…’ I made to grab at Harrison but there was nobody there. Just the sound of a man’s laughter fading into the distance.
When eventually I got to sleep that night, my dreams were haunted by visions of dead aircrews and the sound of Amy’s voice calling to me for help. As a result I felt tired and irritable when at last a yellowish-grey dawn broke over Lincoln. Worse still, I realised that I had absolutely nothing to do – no work, no deadlines, no reason for so much as putting one foot in front of the other.
Why I did it, I’ll never know, but I finally decided I had to visit Leckonby again, to see for myself whether the modern age had finally blotted out the horrors of the past.
During the weeks since my last visit the old airfield had changed beyond recognition. The new estate had an unmistakeable Sunday morning feel to it as I drove along what was still just recognisable as the line of the south-westerly runway. Front lawns were newly turfed and proud owners were washing their cars on the driveways of identikit houses. The first daffodils were out. On the eastern side of the site, work was still going on and I parked the car to see if I could locate any of the buildings that were now so familiar to me. All had been erased and as I picked my way along a muddy track, the setting would have been tranquil were it not for the whump, whump, whump from the wind turbines which now lowered from the crest of the Wolds. Everything was perfectly normal, wonderfully, boringly normal, but the sense of relief I was so hoping for eluded me. Seeing Leckonby transformed like this left me mourning for my other life – a life where I was young and, for six more weeks anyway, immortal. I turned and started to walk back to the car. As I felt in my pocket for the keys, a movement in the next field the other side of the lane caught my eye – a tall, elderly gentleman was striding along the hedgerow and at his side gambolled a black Labrador. The man stopped and looked directly at me. Colonel Cavendish – this was the final straw, I had to go back.
When I got home I went from room to room calling Harrison’s name, but as I had come to learn, people who turn up unbidden are never around when you need them. After ten minutes of calling him I lost patience, grabbed my coat and set off on foot down the hill to the High Street. I hung around for a few minutes outside the Lincoln Post’s offices – no Harrison. Next I tried the coffee shop round the corner – still no sign of him. After an hour of fruitless trudging the streets of Lincoln in the raw chill of the east wind, I gave up and went into the bookshop, scene of my earlier embarrassment. I was browsing half-heartedly at the history shelves when a familiar voice came from behind me.
‘I understand you’re looking for me.’
‘Yes. Where the hell have you been?’
‘Berlin, since you asked,’ replied Harrison. ‘Anyway, last time we met you told me to bugger off. So I did.’
The sweat was forming on my brow and I checked over my shoulder to make sure nobody could see me talking to thin air. ‘Look, I don’t care about that. I’ll come back, just call the dogs off, will you? I’ve got a few days’ leave and then I come back to die. Is it too much to ask to leave me in peace?’
‘No. It’s perfectly reasonable,’ he replied with that annoying bloody nonchalance of his. ‘Just wanted to make sure you’d got the message.’
I snorted at this. ‘Oh I’ve got the bloody message all right. And I could’ve done without you conjuring up Colonel Cavendish and his loveable sidekick this morning.’
Harrison frowned. ‘Believe me, Bill. I have nothing to do with Cavendish. He comes and goes as he pleases and if it’s any consolation he scares me shitless too.’
I shuddered at the thought that even Harrison went in fear of Cavendish. ‘So how do I get back?’ I asked.
‘Come to the Ferryboat at seven on Sunday evening. I’ll be waiting for you.’
&nbs
p; ***
Driving February rains filled the dykes of Lincolnshire to the brim that year. Trapped indoors by the weather with no company and nothing to do, time hung heavily on me once more. The normality I had craved now felt dull after my brief dalliance with early 1944, I missed Betty terribly and I longed to return. However, what would happen to me after I dodged my fate on the 29th of March still nagged at me like a bad tooth.
The rain continued to fall in stair-rods as I made my way along the side of the Hobbs Bank Drain in the dark. Even the cows and their calves must have been under shelter because I saw not a single living thing until I reached the Ferryboat Inn. I knocked at the back door. Footsteps approached and then I heard the sound of the bolts being drawn back. The landlord’s face appeared briefly around the door and without a word he beckoned me inside. I followed him along the dimly-lit corridor and he nodded towards the door leading into the bar.
As promised, Harrison was waiting for me and a few minutes later we were both huddled in the bow of the rowing boat, trying to keep dry under the pouring rain. Once more he had borrowed the CO’s car and he drove us back to the mess.
When I reported to the B Flight offices the following morning, there were almost as many new faces as familiar ones. The squadron had been back to Berlin the night before and three more of its aircraft had been lost – another twenty-one men gone and another twenty-one to take their place on the abattoir conveyor belt. My own crew seemed better for their leave. They were now over half way through their tour having seventeen trips to their credit with me lagging two trips behind. Hudson, my mute navigator, actually instigated a conversation and Peters now spoke with the confidence of an old hand. The unspoken belief seemed to be that they might just be the first 362 Squadron crew in nearly a year to survive their tour of thirty ops. I longed to tell them what fate had in store but my courage failed me.
***
The rain turned to heavy snow and it wasn’t until the night of the 15th of March that we restarted on operations with a raid on Stuttgart, a city 362 Squadron had bombed twice in the previous few weeks. Of the twenty-seven bombers lost that night, none were from Leckonby and there was even talk that our run of bad luck might have ended. I knew differently. Three nights later, we were part of a mass raid on Frankfurt which left the city a boiling cauldron of flame. One of our aircraft failed to return.
On the night of the 24th word came back from the squadron’s engineers of full fuel tanks and a lighter than usual bomb load. We all knew what that meant – Berlin. Our run of good luck had come to an end. The forecast winds were hopelessly inaccurate, but thanks to Hudson’s skill as a navigator, we were one of the few aircraft to find and bomb the city centre. Peters did well too, confidently assuring me that the target markers were way to the south-west of the briefed aiming point. Out of the eighteen Leckonby-based Lancasters taking part, two of our crews failed to come home. Virtually none of the men I had met in December were still alive.
It was to be my last operation. By now I desperately wanted to stay – the crew of O-Orange were at last working as a team, I was in love with Betty and distraught at the thought of leaving her. But leave her I must, so, without a word to anyone, on the night of the 28th of March I took my crew for a drink in the Ferryboat Inn. I bought the first round, carrying a tray bearing seven pints of foaming bitter back to our table by the fire. I took a couple of sips and then excused myself. Without pausing, I made my way into the now familiar corridor and in a few paces, my hand hesitated over the handle of the door that stood between a life I had come to love but must forsake, and the grey reality of what was little better than an existence. I took a deep breath, opened the door and ran out into the darkness, crunching over the frozen slush. After about fifty yards I turned round. The Ferryboat Inn had gone. Against the glow from the streetlights of the new housing estate I could just about make out the mound that marked where the pub had once stood.
The following evening I loaded my suitcase into the back of the car and set off for Humberside Airport to catch the flight to Weeze in Germany.
We were taken by bus from the terminal to an Anglia Airways twin turboprop airliner where I took my seat two rows back from the front of the cabin on the left hand side and settled down to read my book. The other passengers trooped on but I paid them no heed. I thought we were about to start up but the captain’s voice came over the PA system, apologising for the delay, saying there were six more passengers still to board but they would be arriving shortly on a second bus.
I was vaguely aware of headlights outside on the ramp and then the sound of men’s voices, chattering and bantering as they climbed the short steps to the aircraft. I don’t know what made me look up, but what I saw was not possible. The first man was in his late twenties, short, of stocky build and with a broken nose. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, staring at him to make sure. He was the double of ‘Charlie’ Chester, my rear gunner from 362 Squadron. An unsettling experience, but as I told myself, just a coincidence. Moments later, my confidence was shattered when I saw the next of the latecomers – thin, boyish, with pinched, whippet-like features. Grey, my mid-upper gunner. I gawped at him in disbelief as he walked past but he seemed entirely unaware of my presence. Close behind him strode a tall individual whose pale features were heavily freckled and topped with a mop of badly cut orange hair – Wells, the wireless operator. By now I was frozen with terror, dreading what I knew must come. It did. Hudson, my navigator took the seat just behind mine, shortly followed by Boyle, the flight engineer, who took the seat to the right of mine across the aisle. Last of all came Peters, my bomb aimer. He too completely ignored me and took the seat in front of mine. For a moment I considered jumping up and running off the aircraft but it was too late. The cabin crew had already shut the door and the left propeller was turning. I tried to steady myself. Logic told me that these were nothing but six ordinary passengers and my misfiring subconscious had transformed them into something they were not. I grabbed the pill bottle from my pocket and swallowed two tablets.
A few minutes later, the pilot swung the aircraft onto the runway and the dull thrum of the engines rose to a roar as we began the takeoff roll. The wheels thumped home and a few seconds later the lights of Lincolnshire disappeared as we entered cloud.
At first, it was no more than a gentle lurch in yaw and I put it down to the autopilot engaging, but then it came again, more strongly, and then moments later…mayhem. An appalling detonation and the aircraft slewed violently to the left as shards of metal blasted through the aluminium skin and into the cabin. It had to be a bomb. Terrified screams. Darkness. Falling luggage as the aircraft lurched into a 60-degree bank to the left. Then light, but this time orange and menacing, coming from the left wing. A plume of bright flame streamed back from the engine housing which was now at an angle to the wing, tilted outwards and upwards. Through gaping holes in its outer casing I could see stationary turbine blades that should have been spinning at thousands of RPM. But where was the propeller? As the crew managed to roll the aircraft wings-level and the emergency cabin lights came on, it dawned on me. No bomb. A propeller blade must have come adrift and sliced into the aircraft. The massive centrifugal forces generated by the destabilised propeller disc had almost torn the engine from its mountings, twisting it at a crazy angle to the airflow. Worse was to come. The cockpit door opened and on hands and knees, bleeding from gaping wounds to his left arm and face, the captain struggled into the passenger cabin. One of the cabin crew tried to help him to his feet. He attempted to speak. ‘Help us. For God’s sake, help us. I can’t see. I can’t see…’
With difficulty I got to my feet. Icy needles of cold air were gushing into the cabin through holes in the side of the aircraft. Whatever malign chance was operating against me that night I wasn’t going to let it win. I shut the flight deck door behind me and climbed into the captain’s vacant seat, flinching as the still warm blood from his headset ran down my cheek. To my right, the co-pilot had the control yoke hard over
to the right. The intercom was still working. ‘You need more right rudder,’ I said, gesturing at the slip ball which was parked at full deflection to the right.
‘Can’t,’ was all he said.
I looked more closely and saw that his right leg had been almost completely severed and bright red arterial blood was pumping out in regular but weakening spurts.
‘I have control,’ I replied, taking the yoke. I had instructed on turboprops during my time in the RAF. This one was bigger than the King Airs I had flown, but I saw enough that was familiar to give me a fighting chance of getting us back on the ground in one piece. To my relief, I was able to trim out most of the yaw and with only gentle pressure on the right rudder pedal, managed to get the aircraft flying in what passed for a straight line. ‘Right, I’ll fly the aircraft. Shut the left HP cock, turn off the engine master and fire the extinguisher. Make a mayday call, transponder to emergency and get us a heading to the nearest airfield.’ No reply. I looked to my right and saw the co-pilot’s head had slumped forward onto his chest.
Bomber Boys - a Ghost Story Page 21