Flying after ghosts

The mystery he was about to solve had started at 4pm on Thursday, September 28, 1944. Flight Lieutenant Duncan McCuaig had just successfully ``shot'' photographs of the Focke-Wolf factory in Bremen from his little, unarmed reconnaissance Spitfire, and was escaping as fast as he could with his vital information. Until the development of the newest Focke-Wolf plane, Germany had nothing as fast as the Spitfire. Not surprisingly therefore they didn't like these photographs being taken, and sent up two of their pilots to deal with the little British plane.

The enemy planes, Focke-Wolf D-9s, came at Duncan straight out of the sun, and he didn't stand a chance. The German ace-pilot Robert Weiss scored a fatal hit, and the Spitfire plummeted to earth. Duncan baled out at 300 feet, pulling the ripcord of his parachute, but it failed to open, and seconds later he hit the ground. He was killed on impact, and his plane crashed into a field nearby, on a farm in the little village of Apelstedt, near Bassum, south of Bremen. Duncan was given a decent burial in the local graveyard, with his name marked on a simple cross. He was 24 years old when he died.

Under normal circumstances, his body would have been re-interred at the end of the war in a British military war grave and the family would have been notified. The story would have been laid to rest along with the pilot.

However, at the time of transfer, possibly because of weathering of the original simple cross, or through human error, the name McCuaig was misread as McCraig, ``R'' and ``U'' confused! The authorities could find no trace of a ``McCraig'' who had gone missing over Germany on that date, and in the confusion of war, the matter had to be left unresolved, with the pilot buried under a cross inscribed with the words ``Unknown Pilot'' in the war grave at Sage, near Oldenburg. Eventually his family assumed that he had gone down in the North Sea.

Another part of the jigsaw puzzle is the fact that Duncan McCuaig was married at this address in the West End of Glasgow, not in Killearn which was home for both of them.

There is a treasured wedding photograph of the heart-wrenchingly handsome young RAF pilot and his lovely bride. Olwen, named after an Irish princess, is as dark as Duncan is fair, and they are serenely and completely in love, and totally oblivious to the hardships of war. He was 21 years old, and she was 19. I imagine that they can scarcely believe that this second attempt at elopement has actually succeeded.

The wedding has been clandestinely arranged with the connivance of her mother's cousin, Morag, a great ally! A cake has been baked with precious wartime rations begged and borrowed by Maria, the Polish refugee who lives in the basement flat; great-aunt Jessie's tiny-waisted wedding dress of gorgeous gros-grain silk has been brought down from the attic.

During wartime, wedding banns needed to be displayed for just 24 hours, so that Duncan and Olwen had been in hiding for only one night, which they spent climbing Ben Lomond and watching the dawn. An excerpt from an old letter to his mother from Dr Donald Girdwood, their best man, explains how, in fear and trembling lest he should meet Olwen's father, he collected the marriage certificate. Her father had realised that he could do nothing to stop the marriage, so Donald also carried a letter of conciliation to Olwen: her parents attended the ceremony in cousin Morag's drawing-room, although her father was less than enthusiastic. They were married by the minister of Killearn Parish Church.

The newlyweds moved around a lot. As a reconnaissance pilot, flying solo in his tiny, unarmed Spitfire, Duncan took photographs that enabled the Army, Navy and Air Force to plan battle strategies. The Spitfire had to be unarmed because firstly the camera took up the space used by guns, and secondly, it had to fly fast to get in and out of enemy airspace.

They started married life in Cumbria in Silloth, then moved to Aberdeen, Bath, Bristol, Wick, Northern Ireland, Oxford, and Cornwall. When Duncan was stationed at St Eval in Cornwall he would be flying on reconnaissance missions over France. From RAF Benson in Oxfordshire, he flew out over Germany.

After a year I was born. They were idyllically happy, deeply and spiritually in love. Only one great sadness had marred their lives. Duncan had only one brother, also an RAF pilot; during the Dieppe landings on August 19, 1942, Eric had been shot down. He was picked up, still alive, in the English Channel but died on board ship and was buried at sea. I still cry when I think about the uncle I never met. Eric was a great charmer, very athletic, and with dark, curly hair, looking quite different from Duncan. He had been a promising actor and playwright when war broke out, and had won a scholarship to RADA, where his portrayal of Falstaff had been highly acclaimed.

In later life, Olwen reminisced about those days. She said that they didn't dwell on the fact that Duncan might not come home: it was a job to be done and they just got on with it.

I spent the first year of my life in a little house called ``Boscarne'', perched high on a Cornish cliff. The sound of the wind and the waves on the shore lulled me to sleep, along with the drone of planes overhead from nearby St Eval airfield. In the evenings my parents sat and listened to the music of Sibelius and Beethoven and Brahms, talking of life after the war. They dreamed of moving to Loch Torridon where we had spent a holiday; there are photos of Duncan holding me as we row a boat together. As I was only 21 months old at the time I would guess my energy input did not add significantly to our progress!

Shortly after that holiday, we were posted back to RAF Benson in Oxfordshire. There is a photograph dated September 17, 1944, my second birthday, with me sitting in my pram looking wistful, and the inscription beneath reads: ``God bless Daddy, Daddy back soon''. Well, sure enough, he did come back that day. Eleven days later, however, he failed to come back and someone else in RAF uniform came to the door to tell my mother the grim news that Duncan was ``missing, presumed dead''.

Days went by, then weeks, then months, and still no news. Olwen and I moved back to a cottage along the lane from ``Boscarne'' where we three had been so very happy together. Perhaps she thought that if Duncan were to escape from a POW camp he might find his way back to this place of happy memories. Perhaps the surging sea and the soft Cornish air with its scent of tamarisk brought some element of healing to her breaking heart, but eventually she and I returned home to Scotland, where she planned to start a new life and become a writer.

Meanwhile, another hero had returned home from the horrors of war in Europe, where he had led the flame-throwing tanks of the REME through France and Holland and into Germany. He was Major Douglas Drysdale, and he fell in love with Olwen, and, since all hope for Duncan was now gone, she married him and this wonderful man became my very dear stepfather. (I was devastated when he died in 1984.)

Olwen and Douglas gave me four brothers and a sister, and I had a very happy upbringing. People would tell me about Duncan, what a sweet person he had been, a dreamer, musical, very romantic, a bit impractical, and a fine mathematician and engineer; he was happiest in his old tweed jacket. It wasn't that my mother didn't talk about Duncan so much as that I think it was assumed that I remembered him too. After all, he had been there with us all the time. But the awful thing is that I can't remember him: he is just out of reach, like the sun behind a thick sea mist.

After my mother's remarriage, first of all we

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lived near Killearn, moving soon to Glasgow. When I was six, we moved to Dunblane, and six years later we moved to Dollar. Eventually I came to Glasgow to study. By this time my widowed grandmother and my aunt had moved into the top flat of the old family house in the West End, with cousin Morag occupying the lower flat. I went to live there, and at that time met my future husband, Ian Macdonald, who also had been an RAF pilot. Another very romantic twist to the tale is that Ian proposed to me in the very room where my parents had been married 21 years previously, cousin Morag's drawing-room.

In due course I was married in Dollar to my own hero, Ian, by coincidence on that date, September 28, and we had four children. For 33 years I have been happily married but nevertheless the spectre of unresolved grief haunted my early adult life, and I was troubled with recurring bouts of depressive illness, finally receiving help from psychotherapy. I discovered the healing power of writing.

Meanwhile, out in Germany, another piece of the jigsaw puzzle was taking shape. In the late 1960s a little boy called Werner was puzzled by the rows and rows of crosses in Sage wargrave near his home. He couldn't understand the concept of war at all.

When he grew up he became an amateur war historian, and helped his friend Axel who was writing a biography of the German ace pilot, Robert Weiss, also known as ``The Red Baron of the Second World War'', or ``Bazi''. Bazi Weiss's log showed that it was a Spitfire he had shot down on September 28, 1944, but other records said that it was an American Thunderbolt. To verify the situation they went out with a metal detector, found the plane, excavated it, and confirmed that it was a Spitfire. The plane's number was still legible, and a local resident remembered what had happened that afternoon so long ago.

Werner contacted the British authorities to find out who the pilot had been. Had Werner not been a singularly caring and sensitive young man, he might have left it at that, but he wanted to let the pilot's family know the whole story, especially when the RAF, the Ministry of Defence, and the British Wargraves Commission seemed to have lost track of the family and did not know where Flight Lieutenant McCuaig had been buried. The only clue was that the former Mrs McCuaig had remarried and moved to Dunblane.

Persistence is a virtue that Werner has in abundance, so he wrote to the minister of Dunblane Cathedral who could not help, but did suggest that the Dunblane Air Squadron might be able to help, since they were doing a project to find lost Spitfires for which Dunblane had originally raised funds during the war.

With tremendous dedication and enthusiasm, Flight Lieutenant Ron McLean and his cadets undertook many hours of painstaking detective work: they cycled to Killearn to look at the War Memorial, and found the names of both Duncan and Eric there; then Ron drove to York to search the records of wills to see of any other family members were mentioned; and they searched the registrar's records, where they discovered that Olwen and Duncan had been married, not in Killearn Parish Church, but at a certain address in the West End of Glasgow. Failing to find any McCuaigs or Buchanans still in Killearn, Ron searched the telephone directory in the off-chance that he might find a Buchanan at the wedding address.

When Olwen's sister answered the door that day, it was the breakthrough they had all been waiting for, and within hours I was told the news.

When my aunt came to the door of our little catering business, I was standing making tuna sandwiches. Somewhat hesitantly my aunt said to me: ``Karen, I've just had some extraordinary news; they have found where your father's plane crashed in Germany.''

It took a minute or two for the meaning of what she had just said to sink in. When it did, I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. I remember gasping for breath. After 47!s years of ``missing, presumed dead'', this was dynamic news.

The next thing was to tell my mother. Olwen was suffering from cancer of the spine, and at that time was ill with flu in Strathcarron Hospice which cared for her from time to time although her home was in Dollar with my sister. I didn't know if she was going to be well enough to take this piece of news. The hospice arranged a room where we could be on our own, and I told her to a reaction of amazement, tears, wonder, laughter, more tears, and lots of questions. She made a rapid recovery from her flu, and once she was back in Dollar she had a visit from Ron McLean.

Later that year, I went to the Dunblane Squadron's annual prizegiving where I received on her behalf a beautiful model of Duncan's Spitfire, PL 904, which stands on a little plinth with an actual part of the plane, and the following year she was well enough to present the cadets with a silver quaich to be given annually to the best photographer in the squadron.

The day Ron McLean walked into my shop and told me all about what Duncan had been doing, and the exploits which had earned him the DFC, I swear I grew an inch taller. I suddenly found an identity of my own. It was as if one-third of myself had been in shadow for all those years.

Meanwhile the RAF were trying to find Duncan's grave, but drew blanks everywhere they turned. Werner in Germany was doing detective work too, but nothing turned up. Gradually I absorbed the whole extraordinary story, and life returned to normal, with intermittent contact with Ron and his cadets to whom my mother and I felt a huge debt of gratitude. Their project on my father now included the information that ``Bazi'' Weiss had himself been shot down, three months after Duncan, by a Norwegian pilot called Karl Hannes, who died in 1970.

On Armistice Sunday, 1994, I was thinking about the whole story. As time had progressed with no news of Duncan's grave, Olwen and I both accepted that we would never know, but we felt content with the information we already had. The following day I arrived home from work to find a letter from the British Wargraves Commission telling me that they now had conclusive evidence of the whereabouts of my late father, and the day after that a letter came from the RAF offering to fly me and my mother out to Germany for a memorial service at his grave.

In a telephone conversation the official from the Wargraves Commission explained to me that the papers relating to the ``Unknown Pilot'' showed that the misreading of ``R'' for ``U'' was quite unquestionably the origin of the 50-year-old mystery.

And how had the grave been found at last? Once again, my dear, persistent friend Werner had written another letter. On the 50th anniversary of Duncan's disappearance, September 28, 1994, he had written to the British Embassy in Bonn requesting help. He had the strongest feeling about a certain grave at Sage, a grave marked ``Unknown Pilot'', and wanted further investigation carried out, hence the discovery of the confusion of ``R'' and ``U''.

Is it too far-fetched, I wonder, or biblically incorrect, to think that Duncan's spirit was restless because his beloved Olwen and Karen did not know his final burial place, especially in view of their spiritual closeness before his death? Could it be that Werner's gentle, emotional nature was sensitive to Duncan's restlessness, and that was the driving force which finally solved the mystery?

By the time the news reached us, Olwen's health was deteriorating badly, although she bravely planned to make the enormous effort it would have taken to go to Germany. We talked of the new gravestone which was to be placed almost immediately, and agreed that the wording should be: ``Now Rest in Peace''.

Olwen never made it to Germany. She didn't need to: she and Duncan and Douglas were united by death on December 23, 1994, and her funeral was the celebration of a wonderful life, lived with exceptional courage and faith, an inspiration to many other people. I felt immensely proud of her.

Olwen and Douglas were both very involved in the cause of independence for Scotland, and at their funerals each had a wreath made in the likeness of the Scottish flag, the Saltire. Duncan and Olwen had both been ``exiled'' to English boarding schools and Olwen maintained that Duncan too would have fought for this cause, being not so much anti-England as very pro-Scotland.

So now, at last, I will take a Saltire wreath to Germany for Duncan, and the RAF will hold a simple memorial service. Being of a very romantic nature like my parents, it is my custom to lay a single red rose on the coffin of someone I have loved very dearly. There will be two red roses for Duncan, one from Olwen, and one from me. Entwined with the roses will be a piece of Cornish ivy, from in front of ``Boscarne'', the little house on the cliffs at Trenance. They will be tied with the other half of the red ribbon which tied the rose I placed on Olwen's coffin.

After 50 years, Duncan will now rest in peace, and I will give thanks for God's gift of the truth which has set me free.

work: they cycled to Killearn to look at the War Memorial, and found the names of both Duncan and Eric there; then Ron drove to York to search the records of wills to see of any other family members were mentioned; and they searched the registrar's records, where they discovered that Olwen and Duncan had been married, not in Killearn Parish Church, but at a certain address in the West End of Glasgow. Failing to find any McCuaigs or Buchanans still in Killearn, Ron searched the telephone directory in the off-chance that he might find a Buchanan at the wedding address.

When Olwen's sister answered the door that day, it was the breakthrough they had all been waiting for, and within hours I was told the news.

When my aunt came to the door of our little catering business, I was standing making tuna sandwiches. Somewhat hesitantly my aunt said to me: ``Karen, I've just had some extraordinary news; they have found where your father's plane crashed in Germany.''

It took a minute or two for the meaning of what she had just said to sink in. When it did, I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. I remember gasping for breath. After 47!s years of ``missing, presumed dead'', this was dynamic news.

The next thing was to tell my mother. Olwen was suffering from cancer of the spine, and at that time was ill with flu in Strathcarron Hospice which cared for her from time to time although her home was in Dollar with my sister. I didn't know if she was going to be well enough to take this piece of news. The hospice arranged a room where we could be on our own, and I told her to a reaction of amazement, tears, wonder, laughter, more tears, and lots of questions. She made a rapid recovery from her flu, and once she was back in Dollar she had a visit from Ron McLean.

Later that year, I went to the Dunblane Squadron's annual prizegiving where I received on her behalf a beautiful model of Duncan's Spitfire, PL 904, which stands on a little plinth with an actual part of the plane, and the following year she was well enough to present the cadets with a silver quaich to be given annually to the best photographer in the squadron.

The day Ron McLean walked into my shop and told me all about what Duncan had been doing, and the exploits which had earned him the DFC, I swear I grew an inch taller. I suddenly found an identity of my own. It was as if one-third of myself had been in shadow for all those years.

Meanwhile the RAF were trying to find Duncan's grave, but drew blanks everywhere they turned. Werner in Germany was doing detective work too, but nothing turned up. Gradually I absorbed the whole extraordinary story, and life returned to normal, with intermittent contact with Ron and his cadets to whom my mother and I felt a huge debt of gratitude. Their project on my father now included the information that ``Bazi'' Weiss had himself been shot down, three months after Duncan, by a Norwegian pilot called Karl Hannes, who died in 1970.

On Armistice Sunday, 1994, I was thinking about the whole story. As time had progressed with no news of Duncan's grave, Olwen and I both accepted that we would never know, but we felt content with the information we already had. The following day I arrived home from work to find a letter from the British Wargraves Commission telling me that they now had conclusive evidence of the whereabouts of my late father, and the day after that a letter came from the RAF offering to fly me and my mother out to Germany for a memorial service at his grave.

In a telephone conversation the official from the Wargraves Commission explained to me that the papers relating to the ``Unknown Pilot'' showed that the misreading of ``R'' for ``U'' was quite unquestionably the origin of the 50-year-old mystery.

And how had the grave been found at last? Once again, my dear, persistent friend Werner had written another letter. On the 50th anniversary of Duncan's disappearance, September 28, 1994, he had written to the British Embassy in Bonn requesting help. He had the strongest feeling about a certain grave at Sage, a grave marked ``Unknown Pilot'', and wanted further investigation carried out, hence the discovery of the confusion of ``R'' and ``U''.

Is it too far-fetched, I wonder, or biblically incorrect, to think that Duncan's spirit was restless because his beloved Olwen and Karen did not know his final burial place, especially in view of their spiritual closeness before his death? Could it be that Werner's gentle, emotional nature was sensitive to Duncan's restlessness, and that was the driving force which finally solved the mystery?

By the time the news reached us, Olwen's health was deteriorating badly, although she bravely planned to make the enormous effort it would have taken to go to Germany. We talked of the new gravestone which was to be placed almost immediately, and agreed that the wording should be: ``Now Rest in Peace''.

Olwen never made it to Germany. She didn't need to: she and Duncan and Douglas were united by death on December 23, 1994, and her funeral was the celebration of a wonderful life, lived with exceptional courage and faith, an inspiration to many other people. I felt immensely proud of her.

Olwen and Douglas were both very involved in the cause of independence for Scotland, and at their funerals each had a wreath made in the likeness of the Scottish flag, the Saltire. Duncan and Olwen had both been ``exiled'' to English boarding schools and Olwen maintained that Duncan too would have fought for this cause, being not so much anti-England as very pro-Scotland.

So now, at last, I will take a Saltire wreath to Germany for Duncan, and the RAF will hold a simple memorial service. Being of a very romantic nature like my parents, it is my custom to lay a single red rose on the coffin of someone I have loved very dearly. There will be two red roses for Duncan, one from Olwen, and one from me. Entwined with the roses will be a piece of Cornish ivy, from in front of ``Boscarne'', the little house on the cliffs at Trenance. They will be tied with the other half of the red ribbon which tied the rose I placed on Olwen's coffin.

After 50 years, Duncan will now rest in peace, and I will give thanks for God's gift of the truth which has set me free.