Tony
Were you always
planning to write? And was it always going to be this book?
Christopher
This is actually my second manuscript – the first is
called The Art of Waiting (appropriately
named, as it’s still waiting). After I’d read a lot about Bomber Command, and
the last airworthy Lancaster in England had flown over my house on several
occasions and I’d got to know the sound of its engines, and I’d heard more
anecdotes about Jackie from my grandmother – and had read A.C. Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities, in which he
compares the Bomber Command airmen to the 9/11 bombers – I knew I wanted to
write a book about Bomber Command. I’m not a historian, so it had to be a novel
– though the first draft of the book was trying unsuccessfully (and
unintentionally) to be both a novel and a history book. And I had this naïve
notion that a novel might be read by people with no interest in Bomber Command,
and that if they read it, they might understand why the public perception of
the Bomber Command airmen has been lazy and unfair, and that I might somehow
help to set the record straight. I spent the Christmas holidays in 2009 in
front of the fire, drinking Hook Norton beer and listening to Magic FM, and
from that I got the basic shape and sentiment of what I wanted to try to put
into words. Then it was a case of trying to get that sentiment out, and I did
it in a rush, long nights and weekends (and more beer and love songs) until it
was done. In part it’s a tribute to Jackie and the other 55,572 who died while
flying with Bomber Command, and in part it’s an attempt to try to understand
for myself what he went through, to understand it by trying to re-imagine it.
