An unplanned weekend through Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire became a journey through three different kinds of memory: the lives commemorated at the International Bomber Command Centre, a return to RAF Brampton more than twenty years after my parents left and an unexpected encounter with my own aviation history at Duxford.
The weekend began, as these things often do, with rather more optimism than planning.
Into the bag went running kit and a yoga mat: two things that seem to accompany me whether I am travelling for work, away with the kids or heading to the other side of the world. Swimming trunks and a large travel towel went in too, rather hopefully, just in case an opportunity for a dip in the Great Ouse presented itself. Then came the actual essentials: clothes, toothbrush and everything else needed for a night away.
My girlfriend and I did not have a particularly fixed plan. In fact, much of it was still forming as we left. The International Bomber Command Centre near Lincoln had been on my list since a trip to Lincoln with my daughter a few years earlier, when circumstances meant we had not managed to get there. This time it seemed a good place to start.
Our first indication that this might not be a normal Saturday came when we reached the car park: CARPARK FULL.
There was a brief moment of horror. We had driven all the way to Lincolnshire and appeared to have chosen precisely the wrong day. Fortunately, the staff found space for us. Once parked, horror rapidly turned into excitement. Completely by chance, we had arrived during the centre’s Salute to the 40s weekend.
Instead of the quiet visit we had imagined, the site was full of life. There were period uniforms and dresses, original RAF equipment, tents, displays and music. Everywhere we looked, people had made an extraordinary effort to recreate something of the atmosphere of the 1940s.
What I particularly liked was that it never felt as though the entertainment overwhelmed the reason the place exists. There was celebration, certainly, but there was remembrance too.
At the centre of the site stands the memorial spire. Around it, the names of those who lost their lives stretch along the memorial walls. Walking beside them and gradually spiralling inwards towards the tall monument, decorated with ceramic poppies and passing through its base, the sheer number becomes difficult to comprehend. Statistics about wartime losses can become abstract remarkably easily. Names do not.
One name follows another, then another, and another. Whatever else was happening around us: the sunshine, music, uniforms and families enjoying the event; the scale of the loss remained impossible to ignore.
Perhaps that was what made the day work so well. Remembrance did not have to mean silence and solemnity alone. The people wearing RAF uniforms and 1940s dresses were, in their own way, keeping a connection with that generation alive. We had gone expecting to spend some time at a memorial, perhaps visit the café and learn a little more about Bomber Command. Instead we had stumbled into an event that showed how history can be remembered with both reverence and life.
Leaving Lincolnshire, our route south took us along the A1 and A14 towards Cambridgeshire. Just off the route lies RAF Brampton, on the outskirts of Huntingdon. For many years my parents lived there and I wanted to show my girlfriend where.
Calling it my childhood home is not quite right. Growing up with boarding school meant that the places my parents lived never felt like “home” in quite the same way they probably did for children who grew up with neighbourhood friends and a continuous local community. By my second year at Warwick University I thought of the house I shared in Leamington Spa as home. I still returned to Brampton during university holidays, particularly in the summers, although by my third year placements and then more and more studying in my fourth year, university life increasingly kept me elsewhere.
My parents eventually left when I was around 25, by which time I was living near Southampton and working for IBM. Yet Brampton still contains a surprisingly large collection of memories. What was strange was how difficult it initially was to orient myself. The entrance that once defined the boundary of the base has effectively disappeared. I remember gates, fencing, guards and the routine of showing an identity card to enter. The perimeter was once an absolute boundary between inside and outside. Now you simply drive in. It feels oddly wrong.
We drove slowly around the estate while I tried to reconstruct the place aloud:
That was where the tennis courts were. The playing fields were over there. That was the Officers’ Mess. And that’s our old house.
The house itself is still there, as is much of the street, along with the former Station Commander’s house. For a moment it provides an anchor to memory.
I can remember cycling repeatedly around that block. I remember getting my first car and one snowy day, conducting what I considered a suitably scientific experiment into braking on snow. At very low speed I applied the brakes, discovered just how little grip was available and slowly slid forwards into the corner until the car came gently to rest against the kerb. Lesson learned.
There were runs and bike rides too. I remember going out with my father: runs along the Great Ouse and time at Hinchingbrooke Country Park. I cannot remember many of the details now but for some reason I can still picture the dragonflies. Memory is strange like that. Whole conversations disappear, yet decades later a dragonfly beside a path remains.
There were mountain-bike rides along the flat local trails, often past seemingly endless fields of oilseed rape and cycling past Huntingdon Life Sciences with its armed police presence. There were trips to the pub with my brother when we were both young adults back from university, followed by long walks back onto the base. I remember on one occasion we ended up helping the landlord finish beer from a barrel that needed changing.
I learned to ride a motorbike locally and although Brampton itself was separate from an operational airfield, RAF life still occasionally intruded in memorable ways. I remember going out in the car when we were stationed at RAF Wyton nearby with my father over Christmas while he checked that aircraft elsewhere were properly tied down.
These are not great historical events. They are simply the ordinary details around which a life accumulates and that was what made returning difficult. Our house remained but much of the place that gave it context had disappeared.
The biggest loss at RAF Brampton is not necessarily any individual building. It is space. The estate I remember had houses surrounded by generous areas of green. There were playing fields and tennis courts. Buildings stood apart from one another. It felt open.
That openness created room not simply for grass but for a community. Now much of it has been filled with modern housing. The tennis courts have gone. Playing fields have disappeared beneath development. Former office areas have been replaced. The wide spaces that once allowed the base to breathe have become considerably more densely built. The Officers’ Mess still survives but apparently awaits redevelopment.
For me, it remains filled with memories: New Year’s Eve parties, military social events, cheap bars, people dressing up and a sense of community that came from families sharing the peculiarities of service life. Seeing it quiet and awaiting its next use felt particularly sad. Of course places change. RAF Brampton could not remain frozen indefinitely simply because I remembered it fondly.
But that does not mean every change is an improvement. What seems to have been lost are many of the things that made the place special in the first place. Redevelopment can preserve houses while still erasing a way of living.
Driving slowly around with my girlfriend, pointing out places that mostly no longer existed, made that surprisingly tangible. It is one thing to remember somewhere. It is another to return and discover that you have become the map.
From Brampton we continued south to Bar Hill, our stop for the night, and after checking into the hotel we walked across to the supermarket for supplies. Heading in the same direction was a Scottish couple carrying OMM rucksacks.
Anyone who spends enough time outdoors develops a habit of noticing other people’s kit and the bags immediately caught my attention because we had the same ones at home. That observation became a conversation. We talked about how their day had gone and where they were heading. They were using the hotel as an overnight stop before continuing to France. It was only a brief exchange between four people walking to a supermarket. Yet it was another of those small moments that for me make loosely planned trips worthwhile.
The following morning we headed to Duxford. At the Imperial War Museum Duxford we accepted the offer of the shuttle minibus and rode down the length of the airfield towards the American Air Museum. The driver pointed things out as we travelled, including a British Antarctic Survey aircraft, back at Duxford to have additional equipment fitted before returning south.
My girlfriend then asked a simple question: “Have you ever been in any of these planes?”
Actually, yes. A de Havilland Chipmunk.
More than thirty years earlier, when I was around sixteen and an RAF cadet, I had been given an air-experience flight. I remember the briefing and putting on the parachute, which effectively doubled as the seat. Wearing it meant waddling rather inelegantly out towards the aircraft. We were also given instructions about what would happen if we ever needed to abandon the aircraft; including the memorable advice about jumping behind the wing.
Once airborne, I was actually allowed to take the controls. For a teenager, it was an extraordinary opportunity. The pilot then demonstrated some aerobatics. At some point during a loop I looked upwards and saw the ground above me. That was enough. I decided that while travelling in aeroplanes was perfectly acceptable, I did not have any great need to fly them myself.
Interestingly, another form of flight gave me almost the opposite experience. Years earlier, my brother, grandfather and I went up in a hot air balloon over Norfolk, a present for my grandfather from my parents. I loved it. When the burners were off there was an extraordinary silence because the balloon moves with the wind, there is almost no sensation of wind rushing past. You simply drift above a familiar landscape.
It remains one of the most wonderful forms of travel I have experienced. (I was reminded of it by the Virgin Baloon Basket at Duxford) We also benefited from being the three lightest passengers. When it came to landing we escaped being placed on the leading side of the basket, meaning somebody else had the privilege of having their noses rather closer to the Norfolk soil as the basket dragged along before finally stopping.
The American Air Museum contains aircraft so extraordinary that even standing beside them does not entirely make their capabilities believable.
The SR-71 Blackbird immediately draws the eye. Its combination of speed, altitude and extraordinary engineering still seems almost unreasonable. Nearby sits the U-2, another aircraft designed to operate at altitudes that push towards the edge of space. Imagine sitting in one of those aircraft with the curvature and darkness of the upper atmosphere around you.
Then there is the enormous B-52, representing an entirely different answer to the requirements of Cold War aviation.
The A-10 brought another personal connection. I remembered them from the Americans at RAF Alconbury and the extraordinarily loud period when A-10s temporarily operated from RAF Wyton while runway work was being carried out elsewhere. They were very, very loud. At Duxford, something that had once simply formed part of the background to life in the area was now sitting behind museum barriers.
We continued through Duxford: restoration work, historic operations rooms, the Parachute Regiment exhibition, Harriers, Canberras and aircraft representing generation after generation of aviation development. Then, in Hangar 2, we found it: a de Havilland Chipmunk, not the actual aircraft I had flown but the same type. It was lovely to see.
Standing beside it did not make me wish I had become a pilot. Looking at the aircraft simply reminded me what an extraordinary opportunity that teenage flight had been. That, perhaps, is one of the pleasures of getting older. Experiences do not necessarily have to have been entirely enjoyable at the time for you to become grateful that you had them. I have been fortunate enough to accumulate quite a few of those.
Duxford also offers another aircraft that remains almost unbelievable even when you are standing inside it: Concorde. We timed our route through the museum so that we could watch the demonstration of its famous moving nose. For take off and landing the nose could be lowered to improve the pilots’ view of the runway, before being raised again for high-speed flight. Seeing the mechanism actually move makes the engineering challenge more tangible. Later we walked through the aircraft itself. I have been inside museum Concordes before, but every time the same thing surprises me: it is small.
The fuselage feels impossibly narrow for an aircraft that once crossed the Atlantic faster than the rotation of the Earth beneath parts of its route. The glamour of Concorde tends to dominate photographs and films. Standing inside reveals something else: just how many compromises and constraints had to be engineered around the simple ambition of carrying passengers at twice the speed of sound.
Towards the end of the day we were walking alongside the airfield towards the last few exhibits. Earlier we had seen the crew around Sally B, Duxford’s B-17 Flying Fortress, sitting out on the concrete. So perhaps we should not have been entirely surprised by what happened next. Four radial engines announced themselves overhead. We stopped, so did plenty of other people and there above us was a B-17 Flying Fortress in flight.
Sally B carries Memphis Belle markings on one side, a legacy of her appearance in the 1990 film, but seeing any B-17 flying close overhead is something quite different from looking at one in a hangar. For a few moments, history was not static at all. It was moving through the sky above us.
Only afterwards did I realise how neatly the three parts of the weekend fitted together.
It made the weekend feel like more than a collection of historic places. It was a chapter of my life sitting inside a much larger history.