Bomber Boys - a Ghost Story by Simon Leighton-Porter

Author:Simon Leighton-Porter [Leighton-Porter, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mauve Square Publishing
Published: 2015-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

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 December 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.

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