A Piece of History That Wouldn’t Let Me Go: July 1944

I wrote recently about my fascination with the past and the way our actions have consequences through time (“The Past is not Past,” 27 September 2026). Here’s an example of a piece of local history that wouldn’t let go, leading in time to a competition-winning short story and my novel, Fifty-One.

Half a mile from my home, there is a plaque on the wall of the former Marks and Spencer store on Lewisham High Street, marking one of London’s worst catastrophes in World War Two.

By July 1944 the Germans were clearly losing the War. But at this late stage, London suffered a short but terrifying reprise of the aerial bombardment it had endured in 1940-41, when Hitler unleashed his long-rumoured new weapons, starting with the V1 – a jet-propelled, pilotless plane. For a few months, these flying bombs rained on London. They didn’t change the course of the war, but they were terrifying. They came at any time, droning across the city’s sky until their engines cut out, and the V1 spiralled blindly down to explode wherever it landed. There was no protection – they contained more high explosive than any previous individual bomb, and they fell indiscriminately, meaning blackout precautions were no protection.

After I first read the inscription on that plaque, I stood up and looked around, seeing the street with new eyes. I counted the people I could see around me, losing count in the forties. I tried to imagine what it must have been like – 9:41 on a Friday morning, explosive death falling from a clear sky, killing in an instant everyone I could see and more, and wounding hundreds more.

I knew I had to write a story about it, which I duly did: a ghost story called ‘Fifty-One’ – in which a boy accidentally causes his girlfriend to run to the precise place the bomb falls, bringing about her death. He’s haunted by the thought of what was in her mind as she died – the belief that he betrayed her and she died before he could explain. The twist in the story is that the narrator is also killed by the bomb, and is forever frozen in place, able to see his similarly ghostly lover, but unable to reach her.

The story won a Dark Tales contest, and appeared in an anthology a few years ago. (It appears not to be available online anywhere, so it’s on my to-do list to put that right.)

The V1 stuck with me, nagging away at the back of my mind. I knew there was more to write about that incident. A couple of years after the short story, I started writing the novel that would eventually also be called Fifty-One. Despite the identical title, the story here is very different. The novel digs deeper into the real historical events, by means of travellers back in time to wartime London.

It often happens that a short story provides the seed for a longer work. Fifty-One was a little unusual – at least for me – in that it grew out of two short stories. The Dark Tales piece (Fifty-One) provided the V1 disaster. But I took other important elements from another, very different short story, which appeared in the November 2016 inaugural issue of Phantaxis, a science fiction magazine.

This story was called ‘How Stanley Spencer Painted the Cookham Resurrection’, it was a light-hearted time travel romp, in which a team of timecops go back to 1920s England to prevent religious fanatics stopping England’s top 20^th Century painter completing his masterpiece. Instead (spoiler alert!), they inadvertently provide the inspiration!

Mixing time travel with the stark power of that bomb falling on a London market street, gave me the germ of the novel that became ‘Fifty One’. In this story, the main character is Jacob Wesson, a timecop sent back 100 years to 1940s London to foil a plot to assassinate Winston Churchill.  The assignment plays out with apparent ease, but the jump home goes wrong, leaving Jake stranded in the war-ravaged past. His team, including his partner and his live-together-work-together girlfriend, are frantic to trace him.

Stuck in the past, Jake must pull from his training and blend in. He clings to the one familiar face he can find, Amy Jenkins, a war widow whose wedding he crashed during the Churchill assignment. Drawn to each other by their loneliness, thrown together amid the terror of war, Jake and Amy fall in love. He embraces a future with Amy, resigned to living out a life in the years before he was born.

Until, that is, Jake is suddenly jumped back to 2040, where his girlfriend and team await him. But Amy is jumped, too. When they learn that Amy should’ve been killed by that July 1944 V1, Jake faces a terrible choice: take Amy back to her own time and assure her death, or save her and risk changing the past and unravelling the modern world.

It’s a twisty tale, as time travel stories should be, with romance, excitement and tragedy. It was fun to write, not least for the opportunity to dig into the history of my local neighbourhood, mixing it with a noirish science fiction thriller.

It was published in 2018 by US Indie publisher Filles Vertes Press. Reviews were good: one reviewer said, “After reading a comparison between this and ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’, I admit I was sceptical. I was wrong.”

Sadly, Filles Vertes went out of business, but the book rights reverted to me and I’ve made sure it remains available (see below).

If you want to read 5*-reviewed science fiction novel, Fifty-One, you can get it here