A wartime memoir of family heroism and endurance

To write a debut book at the age of 63 is either brave or stupid, but there is an instinct in all of us to leave something behind which becomes more pressing with advancing years.

My mother’s story of her wartime experiences and those of her family was so remarkable that I could easily quash any egotistical desire to work up an ordinary career into something anyone would read. My mother did not think the story extraordinary. Neither did my grandmother talk much about the war. As a child I assumed that everyone had parents and grandparents in uniform in those years and thus the fact my mother, her older sister, brothers Nick and Tony, and her parents all served did not strike me as noteworthy.

The photographs of all six of them looking handsome and heroic were prominent in my childhood home, but I asked few questions. Buried in my mother’s quiet pride was pain and I instinctively knew not to dig. The past lay sleeping. And after she died, step by reluctant step, the story forced itself on me and I stumbled from one coincidence to another that left me wanting more.

The first trigger was when I took my children to stay with my brother in England and he suggested a day out. The boys in my extended family had their way and we agreed to go to the RAF Museum in Hendon. The simulator kept them occupied for several hours and I drifted away to wait for them.

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I wandered into an adjoining hangar and there before me stood an enormous aircraft filling the entire space of the building. A beam of sunlight shone through the skylight and caught the Perspex of the dome over the cockpit. I imagined that the beast was blinking at me and that I had disturbed a huge lizard in her sleep. I walked under the nose and stared at her belly, the flaps falling open as if she was waiting still for her clutch of eggs, the thousands of tons of bombs she used to carry. I touched her wheel, as big as a tractor’s and tried to imagine the destruction this aircraft must have caused. An elderly man was standing at the tail.

“What is this airplane?” I asked.

“This is a Lancaster, it won the war. Best heavy bomber ever built. And this is S for Sugar, the most famous of them all; she flew over 100 missions,” he replied, in a voice that trembled with emotion.

I emerged from under the aircraft to take a better look at this old lady who could inspire such feeling. On each on the nacelles on the four-engine aircraft is painted the name of one of her wartime pilots. It was a shock to see “Pilot Officer A.B.L. Tottenham”, my uncle Tony.

Prisoners’ suffering

Later, during a delayed stopover in Singapore, I found myself in an open-air restaurant by the small chapel and prison of the war museum at Changi, outside the city. The garden was lush and the frangipani trees emitted a fragrance akin to hot sugar.

Noisy mynah birds hopped from branches eyeing the tables for crumbs. A waiter, his waist bound in crisp white linen, placed a plate of spicy prawns and noodles before me. I thought of my family who were here all those years ago, who could only have imagined such a feast, and I lost my appetite.

I was distressed by what I had seen in the museum that marks the place where Allied prisoners suffered so much at the hands of the Japanese. The photographs were of starving, semi-naked wretches, jap nappies hanging loosely from their sharp hips. Ingenious radios hidden in the heel of a shoe and homemade prosthetic limbs for the amputees attest to a hardship that was hard to believe.

The remnants of their possessions – a battered tin cup, a toothbrush made from kapok – seemed pathetic to me, a spoilt baby boomer. But I had recognised my Uncle Nick among them. Although emaciated, and missing some teeth, his smile was the same as my mother’s.

I still did not think to investigate the story until I received a letter from BreastCheck telling me I had to return because the mammogram revealed something irregular. It was a scare but after minor surgery I am fine. However, in the throes of fright I asked myself what to do if time was to be short. Apart from the settling of affairs it was necessary to understand my mother’s wartime story and the anguish it caused her. Only the bones of it were known to me. Even those should be recorded before they are forgotten I told myself.

I went to RAF Waddington to search the records. I found them for Sugar and for Tony’s other missions. The curator knew Tony’s name and I was ashamed that I had not known any of this before. I visited the Horse and Jockey pub so that I could picture him drinking there. The publican told me that he had a few old photographs on the wall in the snug. One of them was the same one my mother had of Tony lifting a bottle of beer to celebrate Sugar’s 100th mission.

“That’s my uncle,” I said, astonished at finding a photograph of one of my uncles on a wall.

Awful years

I went to another Lincolnshire airfield at east Kirkby run by some enthusiasts dedicated to preserving the Bomber Command legacy, the Panton family. Here tourists can climb inside a surviving, although sadly not airworthy, Lancaster and taxi out on to the airfield. They were mostly people like me who had a relation who once flew in these great hopes of the war. Although her wheels never leave the ground this Lancaster serves an honourable purpose, helping us to get a glimpse of what it was like for thousands of young men every night during those awful years.

I wriggled to get into the fuselage and bent double to push myself beyond the main spar into the cockpit where the space was also tight. I sat in the flight engineer’s seat for our short journey on to the airfield. The engines started up, the sound deafening and magnificent. The aircraft throbbed and rattled, the chocks were removed and slowly it lumbered forward. We were wearing helmets so that the pilot could communicate with us but we were all overcome with the shuddering power of the Lancaster and no one wanted to chat.

I stared out over the wing at the circular whirr of the two Merlin engines and watched the ground move slowly 30ft below me. The aircraft needed a wide arc to turn on the ground and was unresponsive, dull witted and massive. It was impossible to think of her once performing acrobatics, corkscrewing in the air like a swallow avoiding a sparrow hawk. The engines were switched off, but the roar still echoed and we shook our heads as if our ears were deceiving us.

“Can you imagine the black terror that these young men faced when they had to go out night after night over Germany over a barrage of searchlights, anti-aircraft guns and heading into swarms of Messerschmitt?” asked the pilot. He had said this hundreds of times before but his voice retained a frisson of awe. “Over 50,000 died in Bomber Command,” he added quietly.

By September 2014 when my cousin and I made a pilgrimage to my uncle's grave my research was almost done. What happened that day was another extraordinary twist in the story, one that by then I knew I could write. But a memoir did not seem enough and would be a sack of dry bones. What did they feel? How did they react to what happened to them? So I have written a novel to make the story breathe. It needed to live just as they did. If I have done them an injustice in imagining how it was for them I hope they forgive me.
This Tumult by Caroline Preston is published by Lilliput Press, at €15