Retired Bedfordshire teacher publishes a historical fiction
Bernard O'Connor, a retired teacher in Bedford, for many years researched the history of RAF Tempsford, a disused airfield about halfway between Cambridge and Bedford.
Said to have been designed by a magician to look disused, it was used from early 1942 as a top-secret base for two Special Duties Squadrons.
On the nights either side of the full moon, they flew out on missions to drop supplies to resistance groups in occupied Western Europe. They also parachuted secret agents on special missions and, on occasions, landed them in isolated fields and picked up others to bring them back to Britain. Agents in fear of capture who were unable to be brought back by plane (or boat) had to make their way over the Pyrenees into Spain and get to Gibraltar from where they were returned to Blighty.
Having researched the female agents flown out from RAF Tempsford (who are commemorated on a marble block in the village of Tempsford), he has written a historical fiction, an account of his liaison with a French teacher whose grandmother's cousin was one of the secret agents flown out of Tempsford - twice.
As the story unfolds, she lets him have sections of the journal and he then answers her queries about the airfield, the Special Duties Squadrons and the Special Operations Executive, the top secret intelligence organisation set up in 1940 to 'set Europe ablaze by sabotage'.