The Taxi Ride That Started It All

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 age of 33, I finished cancer treatment after a year and a half of a really tough treatment plan.

Going through cancer changes your relationship with time. For months, so much of life had revolved around appointments, treatment and simply getting through what was immediately in front of me. When treatment finally came to an end, I found myself thinking about all those things I'd always said I'd like to do one day.

“One day” suddenly didn't feel like a particularly good reason to keep putting things off.

So I made a bucket list.

It wasn't about doing anything especially dramatic. It was about giving myself things to look forward to and finally saying yes to experiences I'd thought about for years.

And there was one thing I knew had to be on it. A Lancaster taxi ride.

I'd always loved aviation, and the Lancaster in particular had fascinated me for years. So I booked a taxi ride aboard NX611 Just Jane at the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre.

At that point, there was no thought of writing a book. I wasn't an author. I wasn't researching a novel. Jane Williams and Bill Jenkins didn't exist, and there certainly wasn't anything called Bomber County Books.

After everything the previous year had held, I was simply doing something I'd always wanted to do. I was going for a taxi ride.

Looking back now, it's quite extraordinary how much can begin with a single decision to stop saying one day.

Meeting Just Jane

There is a huge difference between seeing a Lancaster in a photograph or museum and actually climbing inside one.

From the outside, the Lancaster is enormous. Once you're inside, it somehow feels remarkably small.

The spaces are cramped. The metal surrounds you. You begin to appreciate just how little separated the seven young men aboard from everything happening outside their aircraft.

And then the engines start.

It's difficult to adequately describe the sound of four Merlin engines coming to life when you're sitting inside the aircraft. You don't just hear them. You feel them.

For me, that was the moment something changed.

Suddenly, it wasn't simply an aeroplane I had admired for years.

I started thinking about the people who had once done this for real.

Young men climbing aboard Lancasters night after night, preparing to fly for hours into darkness and danger, knowing that there was always a possibility they wouldn't come back.

And then my thoughts went beyond the aircraft. I began thinking about the people who watched them leave.

Those who flew — and those who waited

We understandably talk a great deal about the courage of Bomber Command's aircrew, and rightly so. But standing at East Kirkby also made me think about the enormous community that existed around every aircraft.

The ground crews preparing them. The WAAFs working across the station. The people in the operations room following the night's activity. The friends noticing an empty chair the following morning.

And, of course, the wives, girlfriends and families who loved men who regularly disappeared into the night. What did that do to you?

How did you allow yourself to fall in love with somebody when every goodbye carried an uncertainty neither of you could acknowledge? How did you make plans for after the war when getting through the next operation wasn't guaranteed?

Those questions stayed with me long after I left East Kirkby.

And slowly, two people began to emerge from them. Jane and Bill.

From a taxi ride to Just Jane

The idea that eventually became Just Jane wasn't born as a grand plan to write a novel.

It grew from those questions.

Jane Williams became a young WAAF working in the operations room at RAF East Kirkby, surrounded by the machinery of Bomber Command while experiencing the war from the ground.

Bill Jenkins became a Lancaster pilot — one of the men who left the relative safety of the airfield and disappeared into the darkness.

Their relationship allowed me to explore both sides of something I'd thought about since that taxi ride: what it meant to fly, and what it meant to wait.

The Lancaster would always be at the heart of the story, but I didn't want to write a book simply about the Lancaster. I wanted to write about the people around it.

The friendships. The dances. The cups of tea (mostly cold). The fear nobody quite admitted to. The routines that made extraordinary circumstances feel ordinary. The moments of happiness grabbed between operations.

And the knowledge, always somewhere in the background, that everything could change in a single night.

Eventually, those thoughts became a manuscript. And that manuscript became a book.

Coming back to East Kirkby

Perhaps the strangest part of the whole journey has been returning to the place where it began with a copy of Just Jane in my hands.

The book is now available at the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre — beside the Lancaster that inspired it. I'm not sure I'll ever become completely accustomed to that.

Something I experienced there as a visitor has travelled out into the world. People I've never met now know Jane and Bill. Readers have written to tell me about relatives who served with Bomber Command, their connections to Lincolnshire and, occasionally, that I've made them cry. (Sorry about that.)

The book has travelled far beyond East Kirkby too — even crossing the Atlantic and finding its way to Canada and another surviving Lancaster.

None of that was something I imagined when I climbed aboard NX611.

The story gives something back

There was one thing I became certain about as Just Jane moved towards publication.

The place that gave me the story should benefit from it. That's why 100% of my royalties from Just Jane are donated to the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre.

I don't personally take the royalties from the novel. Instead, they go back to the organisation caring for NX611 and preserving the remarkable aviation history that inspired me to write in the first place.

And that idea has now grown beyond one book. It's become the principle behind Bomber County Books.

I want to continue writing historical fiction inspired by Bomber Command and the people who lived beneath the skies of Bomber County. And, as those stories grow, I want them to continue giving something back to the aviation heritage organisations working to protect this history.

Hence the words beneath the Bomber County Books name: Stories that give back.

Two years later

Two years ago, I went to East Kirkby because cancer had taught me something I wish I hadn't needed to learn quite so young: Don't leave everything for “one day.”

I wanted to experience a Lancaster.

I came away thinking about seven young men climbing into one. About the people watching from the ground. About love and fear and waiting. About all the lives that once filled airfields that today stand quiet.

I didn't know it then, but somewhere amongst the sound of those four Merlin engines, the first tiny seed of Just Jane had been planted.

Since then there has been a published novel, airshows, book signings, wonderful messages from readers, new friendships, money raised for aviation heritage and, now, the beginning of Bomber County Books.

And there are more stories to come.

When I wrote that bucket list, I thought I was making a list of experiences I wanted to have.

I couldn't possibly have known that ticking off one of them would give me an entirely new chapter of my life.