大象传媒

My mother and father were very hospitable people and used to go for a drink to the Durham Ox pub in Oxford Street, Lincoln. They very often brought servicemen home for Sunday lunch, two of them, in particular, a young Jamacian Upper Gunner a Lancasters Stationed at Skellingthorpe Aerodrome and a navigator, Bill Owen. Bell was 18, I was nearly 13, on sight I fell madly in love with him and he used to pull my leg and say he'd come back and marry me. Unfortunately, this was not to be as Bill's crew, apart from Hughie the Jamacian, who was on sick leave at the time, failed to return from a mission over Koningsberg on the 29th of August 1944. Hughie was the one who brought the news to us at 10pm the following night. I cried myself to sleep for weeks.
Since that time I have researched that particular plane's mission, I am still in touch with Hughie, who is 82, and met up with the bomb aimer, a Canadian, who was the only one to bail out and became a prisoner of war.
I have still got the last letter that Bill wrote on the day he was killed.

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