....its 1942 and a Fairey Battle aircraft takes off from an air strip in northern Iceland. On board are six members of a Royal Air Force squadron based in Reykjavik . The pilot, a New Zealander called Arthur Round and the other men would never be seen alive again. A young man, the projectionist at the local cinema, watches as the aircraft disappears into the low cloud.....


....nearly 60 later the projectionist’s assistant, Hurdur, is walking across a glacier high in the mountains of northern Iceland. It’s not an uncommon sight, for 15 years Hurder has spent most weekends in the summer searching glaciers for a crashed RAF plane; It’s a promise he made to the an old man who taught him to use a projector. He finds, lying on the ice, a scrap of material it’s a collar, the old fashioned type which used to fix to a shirt with a stud. There’s a laundry tag attached with the name A. Round on it.....

....I was, for many years, a volunteer with the Royal Air Force’s Mountain Rescue Service (MRS). The task of recovering the remains of the Aircrew at the crash site fell to MRS and I was selected, with 5 other volunteers, to go. 60 years of glacial movement and global warming had removed the surface ice from the crash site. Lots of wreckage was visible. There were personal, poignant items clearly visible in the twisted metal, boots, a cigarette case, small change even a few teeth. I remember Danny tipped the propeller up so that a single blade pointed to the sky. The scene, somehow, became three dimensional at that point. We collected what remains we could, when we unearthed fragments of bone they were dazzlingly white but within an hour of exposure to the air they turned brown, oxidised, like a discarded apple. We found the pilot’s gold wrist watch the leather strap still intact, the face was missing, on the reverse it was engraved ‘To Arthur, Love Dad’. We couldn’t look at each other. Nick spontaneously, began reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Danny, who was holding the watch, began to cry, he said he felt like a thief. We built a cairn with a plaque at the site of the air strip. The remains were buried at the Britain and Commonwealth War Grave in Reykjavik, full honours, a piper played the lament ‘Flowers of the Forest’, I cried like a child. R.I.P.