The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Read online

  The Air Ministry rushed to strengthen the country’s air defences, and this meant drafting in more fighter pilots. Of the twenty young men at Old Sarum, fifteen would be required; the names of the five who would remain in Army Cooperation would be drawn from a hat. Hillary, with a grim little flourish, described the draw as his worst moment of the war. He was lucky in the draw: he was to be a fighter pilot at last.

  Their training was completed by instructors of No. 1 Squadron in Gloucestershire. Among Number 1 were the first pilots of the War to be decorated. They were famous throughout the country for their recent exploits in France, and even Hillary treated them with their due respect. The men from Number 1 were impressed by the German machines, the Messerchmitt 109 in particular, and by their pilots’ skill; but they showed contempt for the Germans’ tactical inflexibility and preference for fighting only when numbers favoured them. Many airmen at the time spoke like this, depicting the Germans in a way that seems almost like national caricature; but for the purpose of building their own morale it was sensible to focus on German weakness, and the subsequent performance of the RAF against the Luftwaffe bore out some of their claims.

  At last the moment came when Hillary climbed into a Spitfire. It was not a big plane: a tall man could stand beside it and place his hand on the top of the cockpit. Pilots wore a lightweight flying suit to keep the oil off their uniform, fleece-lined boots (maps stuffed down one, revolver down another, though the gun always flew out when the parachute jerked open), and a Mae West life-jacket, with a thick collar to keep sagging heads above water, and a number of pockets and whistles at the front. The pilots were sceptical about the value of whistling in the vastness of the Channel. The flying helmet had an oxygen mask and a microphone built into the mouthpiece with earphones stitched in at the side. The mask had a characteristic smell of old rubber. Some pilots used goggles with tinted lenses when flying into the sun, many kept them on top of their heads; it was agreed that their chief purpose was to protect the eyes from fire. The gloves (silk beneath wash-leather) did the same for the hands.

  The parachute was strapped like a bulging nappy beneath the pilot’s backside. The tighter the fitting, the less chance of injury when it opened. There was no dignity in the resulting waddle to the plane, and the pilot needed a hand up from the ground crew on to the wing. The seat was no more than a piece of moulded metal, as on a child’s pedal car, designed to accommodate the parachute; later in the war it had also to take a one-man dinghy pack.

  Once inside, the pilot strapped himself tightly into his seat. Flying upside down with orange tracer grazing your cockpit was made worse if you were also banging around inside the plane. Not that there was that much space: the bigger pilots would touch the canopy with their heads and either side of the cockpit with their shoulders. The hands and feet had only a few inches of movement, but that was all that was needed. The Spitfire was a delicately responsive plane.

  Richard Hillary was enthralled by its beauty and simplicity. His first flight ran smoothly; then came an aerobatic flight in which he was told to ‘make her talk’; then came oxygen climbs and fighting exercises. It all went well; and if Hillary did not describe flying the Spitfire as a ‘piece of cake’ he may well have been the first pilot in Britain who did not.

  The Spitfire had been designed by a young man called R. J. Mitchell; the Merlin engine with which it was fitted was the work of Sir Henry Royce. Both men died before the plane had been properly tested. Its chief backer in the RAF was Sir Hugh Dowding, who was Air Member for Supply and Research in the years before the War and Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command to the end of 1940. The Spitfire was a superlative piece of engineering, and in the hands of the young RAF pilots in the Summer of 1940 it was-just-able to prevent the Luftwaffe from realising its declared aim. Enthusiasts therefore argued that the performance of the Spitfire saved Britain and the then free world from conquest. The flying facts were more complicated. The Messerchmitt 109 was the plane responsible for most of the damage inflicted on the RAF, and it was an equally sophisticated machine. It was as fast as the Spitfire, much faster than the Hurricane, and could out-dive or out-climb either. It was also better armed. A cannon fired explosive shells through the propeller hub, in a variation of the syncopated technique that Roland Garros had allegedly developed from watching the electric fan in the apartment of Jean Cocteau’s mother. The Me-109 also had four, sometimes six, machine guns, two of which were mounted above the engine cowling. These were much more powerful than the Spitfire’s eight Browning machine guns, though the Brownings had a higher rate of fire.

  Where the British fighters were superior was in their turning circle. Both Spitfires and Hurricanes could out-turn the Me-109, and in one-to-one fights this manoeuvrability was crucial. The best tactic for a Messerchmitt was a high-speed attack, followed by a sudden dive or climb. Because, however, they were detailed to escort flights of bombers, they were not supposed to stray too far from their formation. Thus they found themselves drawn into fights over a small area, where the more agile Spitfires turned inside them and delivered their lighter fire in quick bursts. The German tactical inflexibility that the No. 1 Squadron instructors had described to Hillary and his colleagues became important when Goering, anxious about the losses inflicted on his bombers, instructed the Messerchmitts to stick even more closely to them, thus limiting further his fighters’ potential superiority.

  They remained a frightening weapon. Many were painted yellow about the nose and all of them fired tracer bullets; the sight of orange lead issuing from a yellow plane had an unsettling effect on young RAF pilots. Both the Messerchmitt and the Spitfire were improved as the war went on, so that either might edge ahead at any one moment; but in the critical summer of 1940 they were evenly matched. The older Hurricane enjoyed a swan song in the Battle of Britain, and although it was not used in large numbers again after 1940 it remained much loved by the men who flew it.

  The drawbacks to the Spitfire were few. Most of the pilots, including Richard Hillary, bought rear-view mirrors from car accessory shops and screwed them to the top of the cockpit windscreen. Flying upside down in a slow roll was unpleasant because pieces of dust and grit fell down into the pilot’s eyes as he hung from his straps; but this could happen in any plane. It was only in night flight that the Spitfire showed serious defects. The bulky engine cowling reduced vision on either side of it to an angle of no more than 45 degrees. Blackout precautions meant that the flare-path on which the pilots were supposed to land was in 1940 limited to a single line of ‘glim-lamps’ which were masked in such a way that they could only be seen on a shallow angle of approach. Night landings in Spitfires were excruciating, even for experienced pilots. Richard Hillary, significantly, seems to have avoided night flying almost completely.

  The normal flying formation for Spitfires was an inverted V, with the leader at the apex. When they wanted to attack, they would go into ‘line astern’ – ie a straight line behind the leader – until the leader called ‘Echelon starboard’ when the two machines behind him would draw to his right, still remaining close. They would then dive down on to the enemy formation and open fire from behind. When they were only 100 yards away from them, they would kick hard on the rudder and slam the stick forward so that they would tear downwards and away. They would then reform to repeat the attack from the left.

  They broke downwards to avoid the fire of the enemy tail gunners; if the enemy planes were Me-109s, which had no rear-gunners, the Spitfires would break upwards. Engagement with fighters often came down to one-to-one combat or ‘dog-fights’. Here there were no real rules, except always to try to turn inside your opponent, think fast, shoot when you had the opportunity, and, above all, to break away fast. Aerobatic manoeuvres were of little use, as most of them presented longer and slower targets to the enemy. The exception was a controlled spin – a corkscrew movement vertically downwards – which might make the enemy think you had lost control and were no longer worth following.

  The
pilots were not able to convey in words the sensations they experienced in the air. The speed, danger and exhilaration were hard enough to describe; but there was a metaphysical element too: an impression of having escaped terrestrial restraints, of being not only in control of your destiny but in some sense beyond it. It was no wonder that when these men returned to the airfields and gathered in the mess they cultivated an ironic understatement, reducing what they had experienced to a few set formulae – ‘Money for old rope’, ‘Piece of duff and so on. Since they could not communicate to the outside world what it was like, they might as well use an agreed code amongst themselves. When they spoke of someone who had crashed and died as having ‘gone for a Burton’ (ie gone to the pub for a glass of (Burton’s) beer) it neither diminished their sympathy for the dead man nor quelled their own fear of dying.

  By this time Hillary had begun to irritate his two Oxford friends, Peter Howes and Noel Agazarian, and they him. They decided to separate. Agazarian, known as ‘Aga’, appeared like a festive wraith in various other war memoirs. His arrival at an airfield, usually in a borrowed ‘Maggie’ (a Magister trainer) was always the prelude to a punishing evening. When the training was over Hillary applied for a vacancy in 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron with two new friends: Peter Pease and Colin Pinckney. Peter Pease was to have a profound if curious influence on Hillary’s life.

  Hillary’s French publisher assumed that Richard Hillary fell in love with Peter Pease. His description of him in The Last Enemy was certainly ardent. He called him ‘the best-looking man I have ever seen’. Photographs of Pease, which showed a pleasant-seeming young man with crinkly hair and full lips, were not always just. Hillary was handsome and arrogant enough himself not to be wasteful with his compliments.

  If it was love, it was certainly pure, or at any rate not physical. The French enjoy suspecting all English men of homosexuality (not without reason in Christopher Wood’s case), but Hillary was proudly heterosexual, and, perhaps surprisingly, good at making friends with women. Pease was shortly to be married and was too conservative a character to have tolerated any homo-erotic feelings in himself. What apparently fascinated Hillary about Peter Pease was his mind, and what he stood for; and in view of Hillary’s self-consciously ‘rebellious’ temperament this is the more perplexing part of it.

  Pease was an old Etonian, a member of the Tory squirearchy, whose family came from Richmond in Yorkshire. Peter had been at the beginning of his third year at Cambridge when the War broke out. He was modest, shy and utterly conventional. He believed in his country, his society and his place within it. He was motivated by a sense of noblesse oblige and an unshakably rooted belief in the natural virtue of the country for which he was prepared to risk his life. His beliefs were firm and secure; his surface shyness concealed a serene sense of his privileged debt to an ordered world. He had been a gifted schoolboy at Eton, known at first for his beautiful treble voice (he made a record of ‘O for the wings of a dove’) and later for the way he dragged his tall figure up the High Street on his way to edit the school magazine or consult the history library. His school career had been crowned with both academic and social glories; it was accepted that he had both the mental equipment, the inclination and the self-discipline to command the career of his choice in the Diplomatic Service.

  So they motored north, a pushier Charles Ryder and a sober Sebastian Flyte. The gravel of the Pease ancestral home crunched beneath the well-mannered tyres of his two-seater. The dinner was a quiet affair with Pease’s parents and brothers; as the port circulated Hillary felt disturbed and confused by the sudden thought of how much Pease’s death might mean to him. After dinner Lady Pease told how she had declined to send Peter’s younger brother away from Eton to America because it would set a bad example.

  Hillary enjoyed trying to provoke Peter Pease out of his Anglican quietism. He accused him of being vulgar in his patriotism, archaic in his religion and sentimental in his notion of public duty. In fact, Hillary was, through Pease, testing out the extent of his own belief in these things. It probably did seem absurd to him that such an intelligent man could be so complacently certain of such conventional values, without any of the anguish and self-examination that people of twenty normally go through: there was possibly real irritation in his questioning. It seems, however, that what Hillary was trying to tease out of Peter Pease was a reason for dying.

  Hillary was by no means an intellectual, but he was clever enough to be confused. Peter Pease had something he envied, and that was his certainty: where Richard was bewildered, Peter was calm. Richard did not believe in the old values that Peter represented, but he had no better ones to put in their place; he had only a childish truculence. There was no doubt in his mind as to which of them would be happier at the moment of his death.

  Peter Pease, in his quiet way, appears to have understood Richard Hillary quite well. He both liked him and pitied him. He knew that Hillary was floundering, but he also knew that when it came to a crisis he would not waver. As far as the protection of Britain and the defeat of the Nazis were concerned it did not terribly matter to Peter Pease whether each pilot hurtling towards death in his Spitfire did so with a completely settled system of beliefs. It was enough that he should be prepared to fight, and die. Because he is remembered principally through the distorting prism of Richard Hillary’s hero-worship, it is hard to take the full measure of what a remarkable young man Pease was. Although Hillary was not snobbish, he was fascinated by some quality of ‘Englishness’ in Pease that he felt his own Australian beginnings had not provided. Yet other people, as English as Pease himself, were also profoundly impressed by his grace and mental strength. Hillary felt himself being gradually drawn by the certainty of Pease’s character to the point of view he represented. Pease tolerated Hillary’s excesses and to some extent encouraged them, because he could see that Hillary’s brashness and bravado concealed a drastic lack of confidence and a fear of the future.

  From Edinburgh Hillary and Pease went to 603 Squadron’s base aerodrome at Turnhouse and thence north to Montrose, where they were assigned to ‘B’ flight. Here Hillary made further friends. Among the men of ‘B’ flight was a New Zealander called Brian Carbury who had previously worked as a shoe salesman. He had come to Britain on a short service commission and was to become the best flyer in the squadron. Pilot Officer Berry, known as ‘Raspberry’, was another man from a modest background. He had a strong Hull accent and a short, expressive vocabulary. Other new colleagues were Hugh ‘Stapme’ Stapleton, a twenty-year-old South African; ‘Bubble’ Waterston; the nineteen-year-old ‘Broody’ Benson; the innocent Pip Cardell; and Don MacDonald, who had been in the Cambridge Air Squadron, where he had known Peter Pease and Colin Pinckney. It was a typical fighter squadron: typical in its national and social makeup, in its age, its nicknames, its keenness and its very short life expectancy.

  Fighting at this stage consisted of no more than shooting down the odd single plane sent over by the Germans from Norway. Hillary was not yet fully operational, but was flying up the coast one day when he heard a section being ordered to start tracking an enemy bomber. He should have returned to base, but instead decided to have a go on his own. He assumed the bomber would be flying in cloud cover, so made a number of dives and climbs in and out of the cloud. He found nothing, so returned to base where he was told that the enemy bomber had passed just over the aerodrome. Brian Carbury’s section landed shortly afterwards and told Hillary that, seeing an aircraft diving in and out of the clouds, they had fallen into line astern behind him and had been on the point of opening fire when Carbury recognised the Spitfire tail.

  The next day the Flight Commander made Hillary operational, explaining quietly, ‘I think it will be safer for the others.’ On leave from the station at Montrose, Hillary went up to Invermark where a local landowner, Lord Dalhousie, had turned over his shooting lodge to the young pilots. He fished on the loch and shot a stag, though the look in the animal’s eyes as it lay dying made him
vow that from then on he would kill only Germans. He found two other non-hunters in ‘Bubble’ Waterson and ‘Stapme’ Stapleton who, much to Hillary’s surprise, spent their leave not wenching or drinking but playing hide-and-seek with local children. Hillary joined their games enthusiastically; there was a perverse pleasure to be had from picnic and rounders in the heather while they waited for their part in the War. Hillary excelled as a storyteller and could hold the small audience rapt. When they tired of stories they could indulge in some rougher games. On one occasion Hillary floated out into Loch Lee in a dinghy they had taken from a crashed Heinkel while Stapleton fired at it with a .22 rifle from the bank.

  The wait for war was not long. The squadron was ordered from Montrose to Turnhouse, near Edinburgh. With the German air offensive gaining momentum over southern England, Hillary and his friends knew they were on their way into action. There was huge excitement among them; ‘Broody’ Benson in particular (his nickname was ironic) was panting to be let loose. The relief squadron was already in sight, shimmering down over the boundary of the airfield, coming in to land on delicate wheels. Hillary was assigned to ‘E’ Flight, clambered into his Spitfire, and roared down the runway. They dipped their wings in farewell as they came over, then headed south. In The Last Enemy Hillary wrote that they then flew down the valley where the children played and that with white boulders in the heather the children had spelled out the message ‘Good Luck’.

  He later admitted that this was an invention: the children could not have known of the Air Ministry’s orders. What Hillary conveyed by this elaboration was his own feeling that an era had ended. There would be no more conversations with Peter Pease about the meaning of life and whether Richard was an ‘anarchist’; there would be no more rounders and picnics; no more self-doubt; no second chances when the plane on his tail forbore to fire because he was a friend: from now on there would be only metal and fire.