The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Read online

  Richard emerged on to the airfield at about eight that morning. It was foggy and overcast; he was worried because he had a new hood on his cockpit and it was reluctant to slide back and forth along the groove. He worked with a corporal fitter to file and lubricate the hood until, by ten o’clock, they had managed to get it to slide halfway. That was all there was time for; the order came to take off and patrol base. As Hillary started the engine, the corporal stepped away from the plane, giving a sinister fingers-crossed sign.

  Hillary was flying with Brian Carbury and Hugh Stapleton. They went through the clouds at about 12,000 feet and into a dazzling sun. Almost at once they flew straight into a large formation of Messerchmitts; they had no time to group themselves before the sky was filled with individual fights. As Hillary fought to gain height he saw a single Messerchmitt climbing away from the sun and he closed in behind it. He fired from about 200 yards and saw smoke coming from the plane’s engine and splinters of metal tearing off its wing. It did not go down, however, and Hillary, instead of breaking away, decided to go for the kill. Perhaps it was the RAF’s insistence that ‘aircraft must be seen to descend with flames issuing. It is not sufficient if only smoke is seen’ that was responsible for his exposing himself to danger. At any rate, as soon as he had hit the Messerchmitt a second time, and seen it spiralling downwards, he felt an explosion knock the stick out of his hand and found his own cockpit filled with flames. He reached up to open the hood, but it would not move.

  He tore off his straps and tried again. This time he managed to move it halfway. He dropped back into the seat and reached for the stick so that he could turn the plane over and allow himself to drop out. His oxygen cylinder was on fire and there were flames inside his mask. The heat was so strong that he fainted. The pilotless plane went into a spin and, by some chance of gravity, chucked him out of the half-open hood.

  When he regained consciousness he found himself falling through space. He was able to pull the rip-cord of his parachute, which jerked open and checked the rate of his fall. As he looked down he saw the grey mass of the North Sea beneath him. He could not release himself from his parachute before flopping into the water with the silk billowing about him.

  Once in the sea, he tried again to undo the harness, but his hands were too badly burned. As usual he had not been wearing gloves, and the skin was shredded and white back to the wrists. There was a nauseating smell of burned flesh. Nor had he worn his goggles; and the pain of the September sun in his face made him suspect that he had paid a price for that too.

  His life jacket supported him efficiently in the sea, and the water itself was not too cold, but he could see that he was a long way from land. After half an hour his teeth began to chatter. The sun went in but his face still burned. He tried to look again at his hands, but could not see them. He believed he was blind and about to die. He unscrewed the valve of his life jacket to hasten the end. The air rushed out and his head sank beneath the waves. After swallowing some water, he came back to the surface: he was so entangled in his parachute that it was keeping him afloat. He tried once more to release the harness, tearing at it with his raw hands. There was nothing he could do, so he lay back exhausted and thought of those who would miss him. He thought of his mother; and she, crouched in the dark flat, was thinking of him.

  Then there were voices and there were hands lifting him. There was the metal spout of a brandy flask between his flayed lips. The Margate lifeboat had been searching for three hours and was 15 miles east of its station when the crew finally sighted him. In the boat he began to feel the pain of his injuries properly for the first time. The crew rigged up a shade to keep off the rays of the reappearing sun. After an agonising journey, they docked at Margate, where Hillary was transferred by ambulance to the local hospital. There at last he felt the welcome invasion of a needle in his veins.

  Towards evening in Edwyna Hillary’s flat the bakelite telephone thundered on the table. Squadron Leader Fraser asked to speak to Michael Hillary; denied this possibility, he went into such a long preamble about Richard’s popularity and achievements that Edwyna assumed her son was dead. She had to interrupt Fraser to force him to the point. No, he said, Richard was not dead; but he had gone down in flames and was missing. Fraser told her the chances of his being picked up were good, but his words of official optimism were not reassuring.

  A long three hours followed before the telephone rang again. From the Squadron Leader’s friendly bluster, Edwyna Hillary extracted directions to the hospital in Margate. The next morning she and her husband set off.

  Throughout the years of separation, Richard Hillary’s mother had remained single-mindedly devoted to him and she felt the full force of a mother’s anguished tenderness when the nurse opened the door into Richard’s darkened room. She and Michael Hillary could make out no more than a shape on a bed, until the blinds were thrown up and the lights turned on with a theatrical flourish. His body hung on straps, just clear of the mattress. The legs and arms were wrapped in bandages, and the clawed hands were propped in front of his face. His eyes had been painted with gentian violet, while the rest of his face and his hands were coated with black tannic acid. To conceal the horror of the bums they had covered his face with white gauze, in which was cut a narrow slit for the lips. The handsome boy with his big eyes, his thick hair and his mocking, slightly cruel smile now looked like a corpse awaiting burial.

  ‘Cocky’, ‘argumentative’ and ‘arrogant’ were the adjectives his contemporaries had most often used to describe Richard Hillary at school and university. He had other qualities, too: a genuine sensitivity towards himself, and to others when he chose to indulge it; and a largeness of spirit that was manifest in his curiosity and openness to experience. His challenging manner, allied to his striking facial beauty, made timorous people fear and distrust him. None of these qualities, the bad or the good, made it any easier for him to adapt himself to his new circumstances. Even those who did not like him found something poignant in the sight of a man so physically proud rendered so dependent and vulnerable, without even a skin to protect him.

  Edwyna and Michael Hillary talked to their son, while his awareness of them flowed and ebbed. The lifetime of partings and enforced self-control had to some extent prepared them all. When it was time for his dressings to be changed, they quietly stole away, just as they had on his first day at school.

  On the fifth day he was put in an ambulance to be moved up to the Royal Masonic Hospital in London. He was driven by two anxious ATS women and accompanied by his nurse. The journey went without incident until they came to London, where they lost their way. By the time they arrived in Ravenscourt Park Hillary was exhausted and in pain. There were tears from both of them when his Margate nurse came to say goodbye. The house surgeon gave him an anaesthetic and removed the tannic acid from his left hand. In theory tannic acid formed a hard protective layer beneath which the skin could heal at its own pace, leaving the acid to be chipped away gradually. In fact most pilots treated in this way developed septicaemia beneath the crust, and Hillary was among the first to have the treatment reversed. His fingers had already clawed and curled down into his palms, partly as a result of the stiff tannic coating. They operated on only one hand because the risk of shock was too great for them to do both.

  While under the anaesthetic Hillary, who prided himself on being almost without any access to mystical or synthetic thought, had a vision. He saw Peter Pease flying in his Spitfire, calm and level. Then he saw a Messerchmitt closing on his tail. He tried to shout and warn Pease, who was oblivious to the danger. His Spitfire was hit, turned slowly on its back, and plummeted to the earth. Hillary woke up to find himself being restrained by nurses: he had been screaming in his sleep. Two days later he received a letter from Colin Pinckney asking after him, giving him news of the squadron and telling him that Pease was dead.

  Hillary made slow progress in the Royal Masonic Hospital. It was run more informally than official RAF hospitals, and he was look
ed after by dedicated and slightly flirtatious nurses. His dressings needed to be changed every two hours and the performance itself took an hour, so they were with him most of the time. Once they had stopped passing out at the sight of his wounds, they developed a happy relationship and connived at keeping him in Ravenscourt Park when officialdom muttered about a transfer. After a few weeks he was allowed to walk about and to take a bath, though as his hands were useless everything had to be done for him.

  Edwyna Hillary came and sat with him every day. She would read to him with the rapt pleasure of a mother who has somehow recaptured her son. In The Last Enemy Hillary claimed that his mother said to him at this time: ‘You should be glad this has to happen to you. Too many people told you how attractive you were and you believed them. You were well on your way to becoming something of a cad. Now you’ll find out who your real friends are.’ It is not just the unnatural speech rhythms that make this passage look invented; it too conveniently opens the way for what is to be the main literary theme of the book: Richard’s conversion from selfish arrogance to an altruistic concern for ‘humanity’.

  It was not Edwyna Hillary, in any case, who tapped the gentler reserves of Hillary’s character, but an unexpected visitor who came several days later. Richard was at an emotional nadir. He had learned that Pip Cardell was dead and that Berry and Brian Carbury had been awarded the DFC, with Carbury already down for a bar to his. His friends were either dying or fighting, and either would have been preferable to his pain and immobility.

  The Matron knocked at the door and announced ‘Someone to see you.’ It was Denise Maxwell-Woosnam, Peter Pease’s fiancée. Richard Hillary wrote about her in the terms he reserved for passages of flying or for Peter himself. She was ‘the most beautiful person I have ever seen’. It was an awkward meeting, according to Denise. Richard was in severe pain, and she was not sure if she should have visited him. Once she began to talk about Peter, however, she felt an intense sympathy radiate from him. He said, ‘Don’t tell me how he died. Let me tell you.’ He recounted his premonitory dream at some length. He would not let her speak until he had finished. He was correct in every detail.

  Denise was deeply moved. She found herself forgetting that Richard was suffering, because his identification with her own wound seemed so complete. He asked her to visit again, and she did.

  She indulged herself with talk about Peter and felt encouraged by the completeness of Richard’s sympathy. When she had talked as much as she could, she felt Richard turn the conversation to the future, and to the plays and books they would write together. In due course Richard used her rather as he had used Peter: as a template against which to measure his beliefs and convictions. He believed that she and Peter were very similar people; certainly they had faith in the same institutions and believed fiercely in the War as a moral crusade to rid the world of the Nazi evil.

  Quite what emotions Denise roused in Hillary is hard to say. It may be that there was no more than either of them admitted; that it was a case of altruistic friendship and mutual support. Hillary’s stress on her physical appearance, however, and his powerful feelings for her fiancé complicate this premise. To fall in love with the woman you are comforting, the woman who is mourning the death of a man you also loved, and who is depending on you for disinterested support … the possibility had at the very least a kind of literary appeal.

  That autumn Hillary certainly had time for romantic introspection. He was allowed out of the hospital during the day, and would roam around London. The city was crouched beneath incessant bombing and Hillary admired the way the people had responded. He liked the nonchalance, the frantic gaiety, and the busy, uncomplaining way in which rich women who did not normally emerge before cocktails at noon would be at the desk of some voluntary organisation by nine. Some people recoiled at the sight of his injuries, but others, from nervousness or understanding, looked kindly on him. He found the smiles of women soothing. He was only twenty-one and he was proud of the sexual rewards his exceptional good looks had brought him. His attractiveness to women was an integral and important part of his idea of himself; if it had been burned away, then he would not merely miss the physical consolations of sex, he would have to revise his whole sense of who he was. It posed a test for him as complete as that posed by polio for Christopher Wood when, at the onset of puberty, it changed him from an athlete to a bedridden artist.

  Hillary spent many evenings at Denise’s house in Eaton Place, where they talked about Peter. A Christian faith made Denise believe that she and Peter would be reunited or even that they had not, in some way, been truly parted. Richard tried to tease her out of this belief because he thought she was using it as a pretext for prolonging her mourning and delaying her inevitable treaty with the hard world that remained. It was during one such evening that he claimed, not quite credibly, that he ‘became aware with a shock of never before having thought of her as a woman, a creature of flesh and blood’. Much though Denise liked Richard, there was no question of any sort of affair. She was, and remained for some time yet, emotionally frozen by her grief.

  At the Royal Masonic Hospital Hillary met the plastic surgeon A.H. McIndoe, and it was one of the crucial encounters of his life. McIndoe came with a mixed reputation. He was a thick-set New Zealander with stubby fingers, colonial vowels and horn-rimmed bifocal glasses. He was ambitious, bullying and crafty. He had charm, but he used it only when his natural aggression had not won him his way. He had compassion, vision and generosity of heart, but they were not qualities he found it necessary to keep on display. He had one further ability: he could give his patients hope. They came to believe that, whatever his shortcomings, he was a great man.

  McIndoe was of Scottish Presbyterian stock and was brought up in Dunedin, a dead-end town that had been enriched by a goldstrike in 1862. McIndoe’s father was a printer and his mother an amateur painter. The young Archibald trained as a doctor at the University of Minnesota. In 1929 he went to England to work with his cousin Sir Harold Gillies. He switched from abdominal surgery, which he had practised in the United States, to plastic surgery at his cousin’s suggestion.

  Plastic surgery at this time was considered by many surgeons to be the domain of quacks and make-up artists. Its practitioners were accused of having turned the operating theatre into a ‘beauty shop’. Even before McIndoe’s work made the craft respectable, this judgement was unfair. Plastic surgery became vital, whatever its detractors said, in the treatment of bullet wounds during the Great War. Gillies had trained at Aldershot at a unit set up to treat facial casualties from the Somme in 1916. Machine-gun bullets left tearing damage on both entry and exit; they had a habit of spinning on the bone, which increased their destructive torque and compounded it by firing the splinters of the bone itself at high velocity. There are photographs of living soldiers whose faces have been almost completely slashed away by bullets.

  Gillies learned from the Somme casualties and made discoveries of his own. The most important was that of the ‘tubed pedicle’. The ordinary pedicle attached skin from adjacent parts of the body; by his tube, Gillies was able to graft skin from quite widely separated parts of the body, sometimes by stages. The principle behind it was that if the new flesh were wrapped on to itself in tubes it would be more ‘portable’ and less prone to infection.

  McIndoe began as his apprentice and bag-carrier but soon became a partner. Gillies was thought by other surgeons to be more of an originator, but McIndoe was technically his superior. He held the scalpel between thumb and forefinger with his little finger cocked. His thick fingers, encased in size eight gloves, were capable of astonishing dexterity, and he was scornful of surgeons with delicate hands: ‘The man with ladies’ fingers is no surgeon,’ he was heard to say.

  McIndoe always worked with the same team. His anaesthetist was a burly bald-headed man called John Hunter, who took pride in making the most po-faced ward sisters smile at his saloon-bar jokes. He was indefatigably good with children and waggish with patien
ts as they went under. ‘Hello, I’m John Hunter, better known as the Gasworks,’ he would tell his prone patient.’ Do you know the one about the girl called Virginia? Just a little prick, if you’ll pardon the expression’ and so on. Despite his blustering geniality, he was a sensitive doctor, admirably precise with needle and gas. McIndoe’s other indispensable colleague was a theatre sister called Jill Mullins. Although she was repelled by surgery, she was attracted by McIndoe. He liked her dexterity, her reliability and her elegant presence: she was said by her admirers to resemble Gertrude Lawrence.

  In the years just before the war, Gillies was invited to Germany to lecture and took the opportunity, like Richard Hillary’s crew in the General Goering cup, to mock his Nazi hosts. He told them of a nose job he had perfected which left the patient with a choice of different bridges. ‘It is perfectly possible,’ he told his solemn audience, ‘for a patient to pocket several different-sized bridges and change his racial and facial characteristics by sleight of hand.’

  By 1939 McIndoe had become Consultant in Plastic Surgery to the RAF and was assigned to the Queen Victoria Hospital at East Grinstead. He descended on Sussex like a stumpy whirlwind. Flanked by John Hunter and Jill Mullins, he strode through the grounds and buildings of the hospital. There were only twenty-four adult and six children’s beds. ‘Bit of a shack,’ said McIndoe. ‘Still, we can probably tart it up.’ It was well placed for London and there was space in the grounds for further development. Members of the hospital staff panted along behind him as he made a rapid inspection through his thick bifocals. He liked what he saw.