Re-enactors, Merlin engines, Just Jane after dark and fireworks over the former RAF East Kirkby. There are certain places where history never feels particularly far away. The Lincolnshire Avaition Heritage Centre is one of them. During the day, you can walk between the surviving buildings, stand beneath the control tower and look across the old airfield while trying to imagine what it must once have been like when Lancasters were scattered around the dispersals and thousands

The woman who ran towards a burning aircraft. When we remember the women of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, it is easy to picture the familiar images: WAAFs working over plotting tables, driving staff cars across windswept airfields, operating telephones, repairing aircraft or waiting beside bicycles outside station buildings. Yet behind those photographs were thousands of individual women, each with her own story. Some were extraordinary. For the first in a new series looki

The first mistake was staying after everyone else had gone. East Kirkby had always felt different to me once the visitors began drifting towards the car park and the ordinary noises of the day slowly disappeared. While the museum was open, the old airfield belonged comfortably to the present. Children ran between buildings while their parents called after them, cups and plates clattered in the café, volunteers stopped to talk beneath the wings of the Lancaster, and somewhere

There are war memorials in village squares, beside churches and on the edges of old airfields. They are places we expect to find remembrance. And then there are places like this. In the middle of a working field at Sibsey Northlands, near Boston in Lincolnshire, surrounded when I visited by rows of broccoli, stands a small granite memorial. It would be easy to pass the field without ever knowing what lies beneath it. The inscription reads: HERE LIES THE CREW OF A LANCASTER BO

There are some days that feel special before they have even properly begun, and the BBMF Members’ Day was one of them. Arriving at an RAF station in the early morning felt slightly surreal in itself. There is something about passing through the gates of a working RAF base that makes you very aware of where you are, but for someone with such a fascination with Bomber Command and Lincolnshire’s aviation history, being on an airfield in the heart of Bomber County made it feel ev

Lancasters, loss and the Lincolnshire airfield where history still feels very close. There are some historic places where you have to work quite hard to imagine what once happened there. RAF East Kirkby is not one of them. Stand on the old airfield today and so much of its wartime story is still around you. The original control tower remains. Parts of the airfield survive. And, most unmistakably of all, there is the sound of four Merlin engines when Lancaster NX611 Just Jane

Books, bombers, brilliant people and one unforgettable sight over the skies of Woodchurch. Taking Just Jane to an airshow felt like bringing the book directly to the people who would understand so much of what inspired it. For an entire weekend I was surrounded by historic aircraft, people with their own connections to wartime aviation, family stories being passed down through generations and, every so often, the unmistakable sound of an aircraft overhead that made practicall

There are moments in Just Jane that are entirely fictional. And then there are moments that really happened. When I began writing Jane and Bill's story, I wanted the world around them to be as real as possible. RAF East Kirkby wasn't simply somewhere for me to place two fictional characters. It had been home to real airmen and women, real Lancasters had departed from its runways, and real tragedies had unfolded there. One of those tragedies happened on 30th December 1944, whe

My first author event. My first public reading. My first book signing. And somehow, it all happened in the heart of Bomber County. There are certain moments in this whole Just Jane journey that have made me stop and think, how on earth did I end up here? The Woodhall Spa Festival of Storytelling was definitely one of them. Only a few days after Just Jane was officially published, I found myself heading to Lincolnshire for something completely new: my first event as a publishe

Two years ago, I climbed aboard a Lancaster. I had no idea it would lead to a novel — let alone everything that has happened since. Two years ago, I arrived at the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre in East Kirkby to tick something off my bucket list. A taxi ride aboard Avro Lancaster NX611, Just Jane. That was all it was supposed to be. But the reason I had that bucket list in the first place is an important part of the story. Why there was a bucket list In 2024, at the a