‘What a strange world it is that we have grown up in.
For as soon as we have begun to live, we have to think about dying’.
(his friend Mary MavIvor, 31st August 1939.)

So begins the Prologue to Leighton Bowens book.

This is the tale of HIS war, from 1939 to 1945.

Here, on these pages, you’ll not find the tales of monumental struggle and epic battles. Instead you’ll find the story of an ordinary man caught up in the historic events that changed the lives of so many people.

His book uses letters, written to friends and family during these years, also his diaries that he managed to write and secrete about his person and of course, his memories. From working in a Bank in Frome to wearing khaki he tells the story of his early enlistment, on 2nd September 1939, to the day he arrives back at his job at the end of 1945.
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…….Four teenagers find the mutilated corpse of a young girl stuffed into a dumpster in an Edinburgh alleyway. Who is she ? Where did she come from ? Who killed her and why ? Above all, where is the baby to which she had obviously recently given birth ?

So reads the ‘blurb’ on this dark Detective Mystery that introduces a new character to Tony Blacks stories, Detective Inspector Rob Brennan.

‘Truth Lies Bleeding’ is a dark tale of the underbelly of Edinburgh society, the people who inhabit this place are not the ones you would like to come across on a cold rainy night.
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On her kidney, her kidney, was a bird’s eye view of Sydney! .. BPF song, ‘The Much Tattooed Lady’

Hobbs was thirty years a Fleet Air Arm aviator and for many years ran the Fleet Air Arm museum. It would be difficult to find anyone better qualified to write up the high noon of Britain’s naval air power, the Fleet Air Arm’s Annus Mirabilis 1944-5 when the Royal Navy fielded, far-flung off the coast of the Japanese Empire, the largest fighting fleet it has ever put to sea.

By the end of 1944 the Royal Navy had expanded to a total strength of 800,000 including Royal Marines (about 10%) and WRNS. If discharges and casualties are included, that means that close on a million people had worn those uniforms in World War II. The hugely successful management of such an expansion says something remarkable about the pre-war Officers and senior ratings including the many recalled to service from civilian life, and particularly about the Dartmouth process - Admiral Twiss, released from Japanese confinement as a Lieutenant, when asked how it was, is supposed to have remarked to the effect that after Dartmouth it wasn’t so bad. By 1945 the thousands of wartime reinforcements had produced Commanding Officers of ships, submarines and particularly Fleet Air Arm squadrons; the Branch had suffered appalling attrition through the early carrier losses and in combat and accidents. By the end of the war 14 out of the 31 FAA squadrons in the BPF were commanded by RNVRs. 15 COs were RN ‘Air’ Branch and only two were career naval officers.
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