“It’s only a racetrack. There’s nothing really to see.” This is what the woman said to me over the phone. I think her underselling the racetrack maybe had to do with my accent, so very not British, and hers so obviously so. It was evident to her that we had come from far away, and this clearly meant wanting to see something more than a racetrack in rural Yorkshire, so she didn’t want to promise more than she could possibly fulfill. But, really, I didn’t want to see something; rather, I wanted to feel something, and I wanted my dad, who had travelled with me, my husband, and my mom, to feel something too. Almost eight decades earlier, this racetrack was the last place my grandfather Malcolm “Mackie” MacLeod had ever stepped foot. This was before he got on a plane the night of January 14, 1945, and then never stepped foot anywhere again. He was a bomber pilot, a flying officer. He flew Lancasters—lumbering behemoths that carried huge payloads of bombs. The planes also had the downside of being nice, big targets in the sky.
I’ve spent a great deal of time chasing after ways that might allow me to get a sense of who this person was. Though my father was only a baby at the time of Mackie’s death, my grandmother and great-aunt talked about him all the time—conjuring him up for me and my brother, figuring that the more stories they told, the more we would get to know him. But it seemed to make him less, not more, accessible. As a child, I was convinced that he was this incredible, mystical being—incomparable and incomprehensible at the same time. I learned that he could fly planes, he could play the fiddle, he could dance, he could cook, he was hilarious, he was universally loved, but most of all, he was a war hero, and he was killed in that war. But because I had no access to him, he was a fenced-off place.
