She does not fly. But on a still summer morning at East Kirkby, when the ground crew kick her over and four Rolls-Royce Merlins catch one by one, the Avro Lancaster called Just Jane rolls out of her hangar and taxis down what is left of the old runway. The sound is the point. It is the sound seventy aircrew at this airfield heard on the last night of their lives, and the sound their fathers and sisters waited for in the dark hours before dawn, listening for the bombers to come home.
Lincolnshire was made for airfields. Flat, open, drained by Roman engineers and Dutch fenmen, the county became one vast aircraft carrier in the Second World War, ringed with the runways of Bomber Command. RAF East Kirkby opened on 20 August 1943 as one of those stations, tucked just south of Horncastle, off the A155, a few minutes' flight from RAF Coningsby. No. 57 Squadron arrived a week later with their Avro Lancasters and stayed until November 1945, alongside No. 630 Squadron and later, briefly, No. 139 and a string of postwar wings. From a thousand feet up, the airfield is still legible in the fields: the triangle of runways, the dispersed hardstandings, the ghost geometry of a vanished war machine pressed into the Lincolnshire wolds.
On 17 April 1945, with the war in Europe weeks from ending, ground crews were bombing up a No. 57 Squadron Lancaster on the dispersal. Something slipped. A fully armed 1,000-pound bomb fell from its shackle onto the tarmac. The fuse had already been inserted. The bomb detonated, and the rest of the aircraft's load went with it. The blast killed three airmen, wounded sixteen more, wrote off six other Lancasters, and damaged a nearby hangar. The men had survived the Ruhr, Hamburg, perhaps Nuremberg. They died at home, on their own airfield, almost within sight of victory. There is no clean moral to draw from a story like that. The war simply did not always wait for the front line.
After 1945 East Kirkby went the way of most Bomber Command stations - sold off by the government in 1964, the runways used for broiler sheds and farm hard standing. Then in the 1980s two brothers, Fred and Harold Panton, bought the site and the control tower in memory of their brother Christopher, a flight engineer with No. 433 Squadron killed on the Nuremberg raid of March 1944. At the heart of the museum they built stands an Avro Lancaster Mk.VII, registration NX611, named Just Jane after the wartime newspaper comic strip the aircrew loved. She does not fly. But all four Merlins run, and on advertised days she taxis down the surviving runway with visitors strapped into her bomb-bay positions, the propeller wash flattening the long grass either side.
Most of the runway is still there. Local farmers use it for hard standing. Model aircraft enthusiasts launch from it on Sunday afternoons. It still appears on civil aviation charts as a diversion emergency landing site, and in 2008 the museum opened a small grass-and-concrete strip for visiting light aircraft. Outside the main gate, where the guard house once stood, a memorial lists the dead - more than 800 men from 57 and 630 Squadrons who flew from these dispersals and did not come back. The control tower has been restored to look exactly as it did in 1944, down to the chinagraph squadron board with names and aircraft letters in the duty officer's hand. The BBC filmed here in the 1980s, and the television programme Most Haunted came in 2003 to chase ghosts, which the airfield does not need. The Merlins are enough.
RAF East Kirkby sits at 53.139°N, 0.000°W in the Lincolnshire wolds, south of Horncastle and just off the A155. The old triangle of runways is still clearly visible from a cruising altitude of 5,000 ft and above. Nearest active fields are RAF Coningsby (EGXC) about 8 nm to the west and RAF Waddington (EGXW) 18 nm to the northwest. Humberside (EGNJ) is the closest civil airport at roughly 35 nm to the north. Surrounding terrain is flat agricultural Lincolnshire, generally good visibility, occasionally hazy in summer; the North Sea coast lies 12 nm to the east.