ON Saturday, June 7, 1943, Ken Bowes married his sweetheart Joyce Barton at Darlington register office. The following Friday, he was dead.

He baled out of his burning bomber into the Zuider Zee off the coast of Holland, and his body was never found.

This evening, at 8pm, in the new Dutch town of Dronten where there is a street named in his honour, a service of remembrance will be attended by his cousin.

It will be held in front of the battered propellor which was salvaged from the wreckage of his Lancaster.

Ken was born in 1920, in Billingham, Teesside, to quite elderly parents. "His father, John, was a wonderful man who was stone deaf," recalls Ken's cousin, Marjorie Little.

"He developed Ken's interest in swimming and Ken became a very good swimmer - but he stopped Ken from diving because he blamed diving on him going deaf."

Being an only child, he spent a lot of time with his cousins, Marjorie and her sister, Betty, in Westlands Road, Darlington. "My mother lost five boys in childhood and so he was the son she never had," says Marjorie, now 80 and living in Hurworth.

"I remember the day he got this yellow Calthorpe motorcycle. He came round so proudly on it, and he took me for a ride over The Stang. There was a thunderstorm, and there I was on the back of it - no helmet in those days - and my father wiped the floor with him, dreadful language, 'what the hell d'you think you were doing?'"

They played tennis together on a court in the Denes area of Darlington, and there he met Joyce, who probably went to school with Marjorie at Alderman Leach, in Cockerton.

When war broke out, Ken ditched his plans to join the civil service and signed up for the RAF.

He spent two years in Canada training - "He sent me back six pairs of nylons which lasted me the whole of the war", says Marjorie - and then returned to this country for active service.

In 1942, Britain and America threw a "thousand bomber raids" at German industrial cities. In 1943, from March to July, vast numbers of planes bludgeoned the heart of the German war effort in the factories along the banks of the Ruhr.

In the middle of all this, Flight Sergeant Kenneth Bowes snatched some leave. He dashed to Darlington, married Joyce, and dashed back to RAF Wickenby, in Lincolnshire.

Six days after becoming a married man, he was in the air again, the navigator aboard Lancaster ED357 - one of the 783 planes bound that night for Dsseldorf.

"When we arrived at the aircraft, for some reason one of the groundcrew told us to adjust and tighten our parachute harnesses," recalled his mid-upper gunner, Sergeant Bill Pingle. "Mine was loose, so I adjusted the slack. We had our last smoke while waiting for our time of take off."

Bill, a Canadian who died a couple of years ago, would be one of the two members of the seven man crew to survive the night of June 11, 1943.

The journey over to Dsseldorf was quiet. ED357, along with 654 other aircraft, reached the target. In all, they dropped 2,000 tons of bombs, demolishing 1,500 acres of buildings. Some 64 factories were hit, including those producing armaments, and about 30,000 homes were destroyed, with another 20,000 heavily damaged. Fires were started that were still smouldering seven days later.

As ED357's pilot, an Australian called Danny Thompson, turned for home, an engine caught fire. He and the engineer, Jim Osborne, fought to extinguish it, but, once it was out, the Lancaster was unable to regain height. Thompson had no other option but to crawl home at a low level.

"I don't know how low we got before all hell let loose, recalled Bill Pingle.

A nightfighter hit and raked the aircraft.

"The last I heard was Danny saying 'bale out'. I got out of my turret and went to the back of the aircraft and opened the door. By this time, it was on fire from front to back.

"I could see Clarence 'Sparky' Sparling, the rear gunner, was having trouble getting out of his turret. I pulled and he pushed until he came free. We went back and put on our 'chutes and shook hands. The flames were coming down the side of the aircraft towards the door.

"Before we had chance to bale out, a figure - I think it was Ken - came running from the front of the aircraft without stopping and jumped. We had talks later and neither of us could remember seeing a 'chute on whoever it was that left before us."

Perhaps the fire had already destroyed Ken's parachute; perhaps the plane was so low that he thought with his swimming expertise he had a chance of surviving without it. Perhaps - we shall never know.

Bill jumped through the flames. His parachute opened and he landed in the water of the Ijsselmeer - a large inland lake into which about 1,200 British planes crashed during the course of the war.

After a couple of hours in the water, he was pulled out by the crew of a tug towing a barge, and revived with a shot of Schnapps.

"They unhooked the barges and took the tug back to make a sweep of the area," said Bill in a letter to Marjorie. "By about 8.30am (ED357's official time of ditching was 2301), after about two hours of searching, they were about to give up.

"We had seen parts of the aircraft floating and, as I stood at the front of the tug, I saw seagulls diving at an object in the water.

"As we came closer I could see it was Sparling. We got him on board and found he was in good shape, just exhausted. He was almost ready to give up."

The two were handed over to the Germans and spent the remainder of the war as prisoners.

The rest of the crew members of ED357 were not so fortunate. During the next couple of days, four bodies of airmen were washed up along the Dutch coast, but no sign of Ken was ever found. He was only 23.

"His father died about a year later, probably of a broken heart because they worshipped their boy," says Marjorie.

"Then his mother suffered a stroke and she was in Stockton and Thornaby Hospital for ten years.

"She was convinced that he was wandering somewhere having lost his memory because she said he would never drown, he was such a wonderful swimmer.

"I promised her I would do everything I could to find him."

Joyce - Ken's widow - drifted out of Marjorie's life. "Someone said she married again, but I don't know," she says.

It took a long time for Marjorie to fulfil her promise to her aunt. A very long time.

It wasn't until the early 1990s that she heard, through The Northern Echo's sister paper, The Darlington and Stockton Times, that a war researcher was looking for the relatives of a Billingham lad called Kenneth Bowes.

She got in touch, and he told her that in 1964, as the Ijsselmeer was drained and land was reclaimed from the water, the wreckage of ED357 had been recovered.

There was still no sign of Ken, but a propellor had been taken from the plane and embedded in concrete as a memorial. It stood in the centre of the new town of Dronten, which was being built on the reclaimed land.

In fact, eight streets in the new town had been named after the seven crew and another after the aeroplane itself. And so Lancasterdree runs into Boweshof - a corner of a foreign field that is forever Billingham and Darlington.

In 1993, Marjorie and her sister Betty, who died three years ago, went over to attend the annual ceremony in memory of all the hundreds of crews who ditched into the Ijsselmeer on their way home from the skies of Germany.

"The Dutch went out of their way to be kind to us," says Marjorie. "They think the world of the RAF and said that if it hadn't been for them they wouldn't have survived."

Marjorie, accompanied by her husband Bob, is making her second visit this week for tonight's service, which also marks the 60th anniversary of the end of the war.

"It was heart-rending in 1993, it really was," says Marjorie. "But I feel that I buried Ken for my aunt's sake. He was the light of her life."

After all that time, the promise was fulfilled.