The Last Man at the Airfield

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 was nearly always the murmur of somebody explaining how young the aircrew had been, how many operations they had flown, or what it must have felt like to climb aboard an aircraft on a dark wartime evening without knowing whether you would ever see Lincolnshire again.

After closing time, however, East Kirkby seemed to remember what it had once been.

The October afternoon had been grey from the beginning, but by half past five the light had almost entirely drained from the sky. Heavy clouds hung low over the fields beyond the airfield, turning the flat Lincolnshire landscape into a series of dark shapes that disappeared into the distance, while rain moved steadily across the old concrete in fine, slanting lines. Water gathered in cracks along the dispersals and trembled beneath every gust of wind, reflecting the weak glow from the remaining lights around the museum.

I had stayed behind to sort through a box of photographs that someone had donated to us.

It was the sort of job that seemed simple when somebody first mentioned it. There were only a few envelopes, most of them containing copies of wartime photographs which needed checking and returning to the correct folders, and I had confidently said that I would finish them before I left. Twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour at most.

More than an hour later, I was still sitting at the desk. The building around me had become very quiet.

Not peacefully quiet, either. There is a particular silence that settles over an old place when you know that you are alone inside it, and once you become aware of it, every tiny noise seems to separate itself from the background. The ticking of a clock becomes louder than it has any right to be. The wind finds gaps around window frames and whispers through them. Pipes knock somewhere inside a wall, wood shifts as the temperature falls, and occasionally something outside gives a sudden metallic rattle which your mind insists upon turning into footsteps before common sense has time to intervene.

I tried not to think about any of that.

Instead, I concentrated on the photographs. They were mostly familiar scenes from Bomber Command stations: young men standing beneath enormous wings, ground crew leaning against tractors, bicycles propped against brick walls, WAAFs gathered beside operations buildings and groups of aircrew posing with the easy confidence of people who had not yet discovered how temporary the moment in front of the camera might become.

That was what always caught me. How ordinary they looked.

There were no solemn faces staring knowingly towards death, no sense that history was waiting for them beyond the edge of the photograph. They pushed one another, grinned at the camera, tucked hands into pockets and stood with shoulders pressed together as if somebody had interrupted an afternoon with friends.

You could look at one of those photographs for several minutes and almost forget what happened after the shutter closed.

A noise outside made me raise my head. Something had struck the side of the building.

I waited, listening. The wind moved over the roof with a low rush and rain whispered against the windows, but nothing else followed.

I returned to the photograph in my hand. Then came three knocks.

They were quiet enough that, at first, I wondered whether I had imagined them.

Three deliberate taps against the glass. I looked towards the window. Darkness stared back at me.

Beyond my own reflection there was almost nothing to see except the rain and the vague outline of the building opposite.

I remained completely still, listening so intently that the clock on the wall suddenly seemed unbearably loud. Nothing happened.

I told myself it was rainwater, perhaps a loose branch blown against the wall, although there were no trees close enough to reach the window.

Then the sound came again. Three knocks. Exactly the same rhythm.

I pushed my chair backwards.

“Hello?” My voice carried strangely through the empty room and seemed to make the silence that followed even more noticeable.

There was no reply.

I stood and crossed towards the window, although every instinct told me not to. When I looked outside, the yard appeared empty, the wet ground shining weakly beneath the lights, and beyond it the darkness stretched away towards the airfield.

Nobody stood beneath the window. I laughed quietly at myself, although there was very little humour in it, and returned to the desk.

That was when the lights went out.

The entire room disappeared so suddenly that for several seconds I could not understand what had happened. The ticking clock vanished with the light, leaving only the rain and the sound of my own breathing, while the darkness pressed around me with an immediacy that made the familiar room feel completely different.

I reached automatically for my phone and turned on the torch.

At almost the same moment, the emergency lighting flickered reluctantly into life along the corridor, casting a thin yellow glow through the doorway. It was barely enough to illuminate the floor and lower walls, and instead of making the building feel safer it produced long, distorted shadows in every corner.

“Perfect,” I muttered.

I checked my phone. No signal. For some reason, that bothered me more than the power cut.

I had stayed late enough. The photographs could wait. I pulled on my coat, gathered my things and stepped outside.

The rain had almost stopped, but the air had changed. Fog was beginning to form over the old airfield.

At first it lay close to the ground in thin strips, collecting in shallow hollows and drifting lazily across the concrete, but as I watched it seemed to thicken and spread, softening the outlines of the buildings and hiding sections of the runway beyond.

The temperature had dropped too. Damp cold slipped beneath my coat and settled against my skin, carrying with it the smells of wet grass, old concrete and autumn earth.

I began walking towards the exit.

“Bit late to be wandering around.”

The voice came from my left. I turned so quickly that my bag slipped from my shoulder.

A man was standing beside the hangar. I had not heard him approach.

For several seconds I simply stared at him, trying to understand how somebody could have been so close without my noticing.

He was young, certainly no older than his early twenties, with dark hair that looked damp at the edges and a pale, narrow face which seemed almost colourless beneath the weak exterior light. He wore a heavy dark jacket over a woollen jumper, loose trousers and boots that looked old-fashioned enough to catch my attention without immediately seeming strange.

He smiled when he saw my expression. “Sorry. Didn't mean to frighten you.”

“You nearly killed me.”

His smile widened slightly. “That would be unfortunate.”

There was something about the answer that made me look at him more closely. He did not appear threatening. If anything, he looked awkwardly apologetic, like someone who had realised too late that he had made a joke at the wrong moment.

I recovered my bag from the ground. “I thought everyone had gone.”

“Most have.”

The reply was odd enough to make me pause. “Do you work here? I've not seen you before”

He glanced towards the Lancaster before answering. “Not exactly.”

“A volunteer, then?”

“Something like that.”

I almost laughed. “That's very mysterious.”

“I didn't mean it to be.”

He pushed his hands further into his jacket pockets and looked across the airfield as though he was waiting for somebody.

Up close, there was an unmistakable difference about his clothes. They were not costume-shop clothes or the sort of reproduction uniform somebody might wear for a historical event. They looked worn in a way that modern clothes rarely did, the wool slightly rough at the collar and the jacket softened by use.

Still, East Kirkby was hardly the strangest place to encounter someone dressed in wartime clothing.

I assumed there was a perfectly reasonable explanation.

“I was just leaving,” I said.

He nodded. “Probably sensible.”

“Are you staying?”

His gaze remained fixed towards the runway. “For a little while.”

The fog had reached the edge of the yard now, sliding across the ground around us. I started walking again. After a few seconds, I realised he had fallen into step beside me. For some reason I was glad of it.

The airfield no longer felt merely empty. It felt watchful. We had crossed only a short distance when a sound rolled across the darkness.

At first, I assumed it was thunder. The noise was low enough to be felt before it was properly heard, a deep vibration that seemed to move through the wet ground and rise into my chest. It came again, steadier this time, followed by another note underneath it.

I stopped walking. The man beside me had stopped too.

“That isn't thunder.”

He said nothing. The sound grew louder. There was a rhythm to it now, unmistakable once I allowed myself to recognise it.

An aircraft engine. Then another joined it.

My stomach tightened.

A third followed. Then a fourth.

Four engines working together somewhere beyond the fog.

Anyone who has heard a Lancaster knows that sound. It has a depth to it which is difficult to describe, because you do not simply hear four Merlins approaching; you feel them in the air around you, a heavy, rolling growl that seems to occupy every space at once.

I looked instinctively towards the hangar that Just Jane rest in overnight, before another day of taxi runs, another day of keeping history alive.

The sound was coming from the runway.

“Is there something flying tonight?” I asked, even though I knew that would be impossible.

The young man did not answer immediately. His whole posture had changed. A minute earlier he had seemed relaxed, even amused, but now his shoulders had stiffened and his face had lost what little colour it possessed.

“No.”

“You sound very certain.”

“I am.”

The engines grew louder still. I searched the sky, expecting to see navigation lights emerging through the cloud or perhaps an aircraft crossing low overhead from Coningsby.

Nothing appeared. The noise continued for perhaps ten seconds more.

Then it stopped. Not gradually. There was no slow fading into the distance, no sense of an aircraft passing beyond hearing.

One moment the engines filled the airfield. The next there was nothing. The silence that followed felt enormous.

I realised I had been holding my breath. “That was a Lancaster.”

“Yes.”

The answer came so quietly that I almost missed it.

I turned towards him. “How do you know?”

He looked at me then, and for a moment something passed across his face which I could not read.

“You don't forget them.”

Before I could ask what he meant, a whistle sounded somewhere in the fog.

A short, sharp blast. Then another.

The young man turned his head immediately.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“That was not nothing.”

He kept watching the darkness.

The fog had become considerably thicker while we were standing there. Buildings which had been perfectly visible minutes before were now pale shapes, and the far side of the airfield had disappeared entirely.

A voice called out. It was too distant to make out the words. I stared into the fog.

Another voice answered. Then another. Men. More than one.

For a few seconds I stood listening, trying to convince myself that staff must still be somewhere on site, but the sounds did not come from the museum buildings. They came from the airfield itself.

There was laughter. A bicycle bell rang somewhere beyond sight. Metal clattered against metal. Then came the unmistakable scrape of heavy boots crossing concrete.

I looked at the young man. “Who's out there?”

His jaw tightened. “No one.”

“I can hear them.”

“So can I.”

That answer frightened me more than anything else had.

The voices grew louder. There was a shout about fuel. Another voice answered with something about an engine.

Somewhere nearby a vehicle started, its motor coughing roughly before settling into a rattling idle.

I stared towards the fog. Slowly, shapes began appearing inside it.

At first, they were so faint that I thought my eyes were inventing them, but then one passed directly across a pool of light.

A man. He wore overalls and carried something over one shoulder.

Another figure followed him, wheeling a bicycle. Neither looked towards us. Neither appeared to notice that they were walking through an airfield which, seconds earlier, had been completely empty.

I stepped backwards. “What is happening?”

The young man beside me did not answer. His face had become very still.

Then the engines returned. This time there were more than four. Far more.

The sound built from the distance until the entire night seemed to tremble with it, layer upon layer of Merlin engines blending together as though aircraft were taxiing all around us.

Through the fog, a shape emerged. A wing appeared first. Black and enormous. Then a fuselage. Twin fins.

A Lancaster sat on the dispersal. Not Just Jane. Another aircraft entirely.

Men moved around it with practised urgency. A ground crewman disappeared beneath one wing while another climbed onto a ladder near the cockpit. Somebody stood beside the nose smoking a cigarette, the tiny orange glow appearing and disappearing as he lifted it to his mouth. A WAAF hurried past carrying a bundle of papers against her chest, dark hair escaping beneath her cap, and for the briefest moment I heard someone calling over to her “Sergeant Williams, your tea is getting cold!”

I could smell exhaust. The sharp, unmistakable tang of machinery warming in damp air. I could even feel heat drifting from one of the engines.

None of it was possible.

The young man moved in front of me. “Don't look.”

It was the first time he had sounded afraid. I stared at him.

“What do you mean, don't look?”

“Just go back inside.”

“You told me to leave.”

“I know.”

“Who are those people?”

He said nothing.

A voice called from beside the Lancaster.

“Ron!”

The young man flinched. I looked from the aircraft to him.

The voice came again.

“Ron! Come on, we're going!”

His face changed. Not surprise. Recognition.

I felt something cold settle in my stomach. “Is that you?”

He did not answer.

“Your name is Ron?”

The engines began turning faster. One of the men beside the aircraft climbed aboard. Another followed. Ron took a step backwards.

“No.” His voice was barely audible.

The figure beside the Lancaster cupped his hands around his mouth.

“Ron!”

Ron shook his head. “I’m not going.”

I moved towards him without thinking.

“What do you mean?”

He did not look at me. His eyes were fixed upon the aircraft with an expression that had nothing to do with fear of flying and everything to do with memory.

I reached for his arm. My hand passed through it. There was no resistance. No fabric. No warmth. Nothing.

I stumbled backwards with a cry, nearly losing my footing on the wet concrete.

Ron looked down at the place where my hand had passed through him. For several seconds neither of us spoke.

The Lancaster behind him continued to idle. Men moved beneath the wings. Voices drifted through the fog. And suddenly I understood why I had never heard his footsteps.

Why his clothes looked wrong. Why the cold did not seem to touch him. Why he had known exactly what four Merlin engines sounded like before the aircraft ever appeared.

Ron raised his eyes to mine. There was something almost apologetic in his expression.

“I hoped you wouldn't notice.”

My mouth had gone dry. “What are you?”

A faint, unhappy smile touched his face. “I think you've worked that out.”

The airfield around us flickered. That is the only way I can describe it.

One moment the wartime dispersal was there, busy with men and machinery and the great dark aircraft waiting to leave, and the next I saw the empty modern airfield beneath it, before the past returned once more.

The two worlds seemed to exist on top of one another.

“How long?” I asked.

Ron looked towards the Lancaster.

“A long time.”

“What happened?”

He was silent for so long that I thought he would not answer.

Finally, he said, “I was supposed to go with them.”

The words were almost lost beneath the engines.

“With the crew?”

He nodded. “But I got ill that afternoon. Fever, sickness, couldn't stand properly. Medical officer took me off flying and they found someone else.”

The Lancaster waited behind him.

“They went without you?”

“Yes.”

“And they didn't come back.”

His face tightened. “No.”

There was no need to ask what had happened to them. The answer was written everywhere in his expression. I looked towards the six men preparing the aircraft.

“How did you know?”

“We waited.”

His voice became distant. “That was the worst part. People think the worst moment must have been when somebody told you an aircraft had gone down, but most of the time nobody knew that. Not straight away. You waited for the sound of engines. You counted aircraft. You watched the clock. Every time something came over the horizon, you thought it might be yours.”

The fog moved between us.

“We waited until there was nothing left to wait for.”

He looked at me. “I should have been on it. I should have been with them”

“You were ill.”

“I know.”

“You couldn't control that.”

“I know.”

“Then it wasn't your fault.”

He smiled sadly. “You can know something for a very long time without believing it.”

The engines behind him rose suddenly. Ron turned.

The crew were ready. One of the men stood beside the aircraft looking towards him. He was smiling. Not accusingly. Not angrily. Simply waiting.

Ron stared at him.

“They've been coming back for years.”

I followed his gaze.

“Every October?”

He nodded.

“I never go.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought they were coming for me.”

The figure beside the Lancaster lifted one hand. Ron watched him.

For the first time, I wondered whether we had both misunderstood what was happening.

“What if they aren't?”

Ron looked at me. “What?”

“What if they aren't coming to take you anywhere?”

The engines continued idling in the darkness.

“What if they're just coming back because you're still waiting?”

His expression changed. Only slightly. But enough.

Behind him, the airman lowered his hand and turned towards the aircraft. Ron watched him begin to walk away.

Then he stepped forward. The movement seemed to cost him everything. Another step followed. Then another. He stopped and looked back at me.

For the first time since I had seen him beside the hangar, he no longer appeared frightened.

“Thank you.”

I wanted to ask what would happen now. Whether he would come back. Whether they had been doing this for eighty years. Whether the dead could really spend decades waiting beside an airfield because part of them had never quite accepted that the war had ended.

But the fog moved across the concrete between us.

When it cleared, Ron was gone. So was the Lancaster. The men had disappeared. The engines had fallen silent.

East Kirkby was empty again.

I do not remember walking back to the building. I remember only finding myself standing beneath the emergency lighting with my keys trembling between my fingers while I tried repeatedly to unlock a door I had already unlocked.

The electricity returned several minutes later. The sensible thing would have been to leave immediately.

Instead, I went back to the photographs. Near the bottom of the final box, I found a photograph of seven young men standing beside a Lancaster.

I knew him immediately. Even before I properly looked at the faces, even before I turned the photograph over in search of names or dates, I knew him.

Ron stood at the end of the group with his hands pushed into the pockets of the same heavy jacket I had seen him wearing less than an hour before. His dark hair had been caught untidily by the wind and there was that same faint, uncertain smile on his face, as though he had only reluctantly agreed to stand in front of the camera.

For several seconds I simply stared at him.

The other six men wore flying clothes, some with Mae Wests already fastened over their uniforms, and they had crowded together beneath the Lancaster's wing with the easy closeness of men who knew one another well. One had an arm thrown around another's shoulder. The man in the middle was laughing at something outside the frame. Another had turned his head at the last moment so that the photograph had caught him looking towards one of his crewmates rather than at the camera.

Ron stood slightly apart from them. Not excluded. Just separate.

As though, even then, there had been some invisible distance between him and the six men beside him.

My hands had begun to shake by the time I turned the photograph over.

The names had been written carefully in pencil, followed by their positions aboard the aircraft. Pilot. Flight engineer. Navigator. Bomb aimer. Rear gunner. Mid-upper gunner.

And then Ron. Beside his name, somebody had added a short note.

Removed from crew owing to illness. Replacement flown.

I read it twice. Underneath, written in a different hand, were four more words.

Aircraft failed to return in October 1943.

For a long time, I could hear nothing except the rain against the windows. I thought about the Lancaster I had seen through the fog and the six young men waiting beside it. I thought about the way Ron had stepped backwards when they called his name and the quiet certainty in his voice when he had told me that he should have been with them.

Then I noticed one final note beneath his name. The handwriting was newer than the rest.

Ronald returned to East Kirkby regularly throughout his life. He passed away in October 1991.

I stopped breathing. I looked towards the dark window.

Ron had been dead for thirty-five years.

And less than an hour earlier, I had stood beside him on the airfield and listened while he told me why he had never been able to leave it behind.

I turned the photograph over once more. This time I did not look only at Ron.

I looked at all seven of them. At the six young men preparing to fly together and the seventh who, through nothing more than an illness on the wrong afternoon, would be left behind to grow older without them.

Perhaps that was why he had returned to East Kirkby throughout his life. Perhaps every October, when the nights drew in and the mist gathered over the old airfield, he had come back to the last place where his crew had still been alive.

People have been telling stories about ghosts at old RAF stations for generations. Aircrew seen crossing empty dispersals, footsteps heard in buildings long after closing, doors opening by themselves, voices where no living person is standing and the sound of aircraft engines drifting across fields which have not launched a bomber since the war.

Perhaps some of those stories are only stories. Old places create shadows, and imagination is especially powerful after dark. But I no longer think every ghost remains because they cannot find their way home.

Some, I think, know exactly where home is. They are simply waiting for the rest of their crew.