Night Fire
England, 1943. Sergeant Stan ‘Wakey’ Wake, aged twenty-one, is a bomb aimer in the RAF, based in Lincolnshire. Along with his six fellow crew members on the Lancaster bomber they call the Old Dog, he is hoping to stay alive long enough to complete his tour of thirty flights, and he’s desperate to hide his fear of death to avoid being classified as showing a ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’.
The Old Dog’s navigator, Harry Culpepper, clings to his collection of lucky charms in the hope that they will help keep him safe. Stan is convinced that he can see the spirits of dead airmen all around him, which keeps bringing him back to the memory of his late parents. Meanwhile, forty-year-old Abby Sallow, who works nearby as an aircraft salvager, is plagued by ghastly apparitions of her dead son and turns to drink to block them out.
Are their visions real, or are they brought about by guilt? Abby feels guilty for leaving her son, and for Stan it’s his part in killing hundreds – or thousands – of people he’s never met. Will any of them survive the war and get the chance to live the peaceful life they dream of?
If you want to know what it must have felt like to fly bombing missions in the Second World War, reading this book will surely come close – reproducing, as it does, the gut-clenching, vomit-inducing terror, or at times the resignation to one’s fate. You will need a strong stomach for this one. There are graphic descriptions of corpses, and copious amounts of vomit. It tested me at times, but I’m glad I read it as I feel I have a better understanding of an important part of our history from a deeply human perspective.
