Down memory lane in Cambridge

GO FEEDBACK: The flatness of East Anglia accentuates the feeling that you're somewhere a bit different in England, writes KATY MCGUINNESS

STUDENT LIFE doesn't look more seductive than it does in Cambridge when the sun is shining. At The Varsity hotel, the city's newest lodgings, breakfast is served in a dining room overlooking the Cam River with a view across to Magdalene (pronounced "maudlin") College. St John's, Trinity, Jesus, King's, Christ's, Queens', Gonville Caius (pronounced "keys"), Clare and Corpus Christi – some of the most beautiful among Cambridge's colleges – are all within walking distance. Aficionados of University Challengekeep their eyes peeled for star performers whizzing past on bicycles.

In the coffee shops, the talk is of tenure and publication. At the Cambridge outpost of London favourite Patisserie Valerie, academics scheme over applications for research funding while in Fitzbillies, hung-over students cram themselves with the bakery’s famous Chelsea buns.

Over bloody steaks at Côte on Bridge Street, a father coaches his son in interview technique. “You must,” he says, “make them understand that theirs will be a better college if they let you in. This is no time for false modesty.”

The boy’s mother rubs his hand and looks as if she might cry. She is probably thinking back to when she first deposited him at playschool and wondering what happened to all those intervening years. In a few months he will be gone, and her nest will be empty.

Cambridge lies on the fringes of the Fens, the setting for Graham Swift's novel Waterland.The world conjured by Swift is damp and uneasy, its reality as slippery as the eels that are its slithery motif. I spent time in these parts two decades ago, when I produced the film adaptation of Waterland, starring Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke. (Trivia fans might be interested to know that both Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal put in brief cameos – their father, Stephen, was the film's director.)

In those weeks of criss-crossing East Anglia, you could almost feel the landscape getting in on you. It is its very flatness, the sense that the skies here are bigger than in any other part of England, which made the area suitable as a base for Britain’s controversial area bombardment campaign against the cities of Germany. This is the place that Daniel Swift, in recent homage to the lost airmen of the second World War, names Bomber County.

My father was one of the bombers, part of the Pathfinder Force of Bomber Command from late in 1943 up until March of 1945. He was a navigator with 35 Squadron when he was barely older than the boy in the restaurant in Cambridge. At first the planes were Halifaxes, but by the spring of 1944 his logbooks show a progression to Lancasters. In total he flew 57 active missions, mainly at night. These are the sorties written in red ink – Berlin, Stuttgart, Rouen, Cologne.

It’s a short drive or bus trip south from Cambridge to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, an RAF station built during the first World War and now the most important aviation museum in Europe. For aviation anoraks, Duxford is heaven on earth, with a fine collection of aircraft from the US as well as planes from Britain and the Commonwealth. From Spitfires to Gulf War jets and everything in between. There’s even Concorde.

The plane I wanted to see was the Lancaster. My father died when I was 18, long before I had much interest in what he had done during the war. And as he was not inclined to boasting, and had perhaps learned to live with the post-war opprobrium cast in the direction of Bomber Command, with the distancing of themselves from the dirty business of bombing by those in high places, he tended to fob off my questions. So when, as a child, I used to ask about the medals and decorations on his dress uniform as he headed off to a mess dinner, the answers were always the same. “This one’s for being the best dancer, this one’s for scoring a goal at football. This one’s for making a great cup of tea.” It was much later that I was able to identify the gilded wing of the Pathfinder Force, the white and purple ribbon from which hung the Distinguished Flying Cross.

The Lancaster at Duxford is huge, much larger than I had imagined. Those who flew Lancasters recall the intense cold, especially at night. The layers of clothes, the lucky scarves, the superstitions.

More than 56,000 British and Commonwealth aircrew died in the course of the RAF’s attempt to win the war by bombing. My father was one of the lucky ones. There is still no permanent memorial to the men of Bomber Command lost in Bomber Harris’ controversial campaign. But on The Mall in London, there is one to the pets who died in the war.

- thevarsityhotel.co.uk

- duxford.iwm.org.uk