The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Page 18

  To begin with there was not enough to do. The staff stood idly about the wards, cleaning and recleaning the floors, checking that the equipment was in place and the beds correctly aligned. Then, as the sunshine of the summer of 1940 lingered on into autumn, the staff of the hospital were able to stand outside on the parched brown lawns and watch the twisting, intricate manoeuvres of twinkling fighter planes above them. They could hear the whine and complaint of the single engines some time after the slick of their vapour trails had crossed or parted. To all of them there was a sense of something distant, barely real. It was more chivalrous, more individual then they had imagined war to be; but it was also more cruel.

  McIndoe had been driving round the hospitals of southern England in his Vauxhall, finding out what kind of cases he could expect. In the Royal Masonic Hospital at Ravenscourt Park he was told of a young man who had been shot down and badly burned on his hands and face. McIndoe was conducted into the ward and brought not quite face to face – because the other man’s features were concealed by gauze – with Richard Hillary.

  McIndoe and Hillary were bound to irritate each other. Hillary’s innate self-regard and hectoring manner had been intensified by the pain and humiliation of his injuries. He was not in the mood to be loved or healed; and McIndoe himself provided sufficient reasons for any young man to be wary. What he had to offer Hillary at first was quite simple. He could see that the gentian violet on his eyes was doing him no good, and ordered it to be stripped off. He also saw that Hillary was in danger of losing the sight in his lidless eyes and ordered them to be covered at once. Lukewarm brine was prescribed for the bums while McIndoe found Hillary a place at a Red Cross convalescent home two miles from East Grinstead. This was Dutton Homestall, the home of John and Kathleen Dewar. McIndoe housed his patients there while they were waiting for operations at East Grinstead; with the Dewars’ cooperation, they were allowed to live as normally as their injuries permitted.

  When McIndoe took the dressings off Hillary’s hands, he tapped something white on the knuckle of his right forefinger. ‘Bone,’ he said. This was the kind of brevity that Hillary could respect. What came next was less welcome. Hillary asked when he might fly again. ‘Next war for you,’ said McIndoe.

  When Hillary was eventually moved from the Royal Masonic Hospital to Dutton Homestall he met two men of a kind that appealed to him. Tony Tollemache was a casualty from a Blenheim bomber. The plane had somersaulted on landing and thrown Tollemache clear. He, however, believing his gunner was still inside, went back into the flaming aircraft to look for him. He took his time searching. The gunner was lying dead beside the plane; but by the time he saw this, Tollemache was burned all over.

  Hillary’s other new friend was Colin Hodgkinson, who had been injured when the Albatross he was flying had been in collision with a Hurricane. He had fallen 500 feet and ended up trapped beneath the instrument panel. It was not until after dinner on the first day at the Dewars’, when Hodgkinson walked away from the table, that Hillary noticed he had tin legs.

  He retired to bed feeling pleased with his new home. He enjoyed the soft linen and the prospect of breakfast in bed. The next day, however, he was told that he would be going straight into the Queen Victoria for an operation. Although his eyes were still infected, it had been decided that if they waited any longer he would lose his sight. McIndoe was to give him some eyelids. Until this time Hillary had been pampered. He had not been in a condition to appreciate it, but the conditions in which he had lived in London were, by hospital standards, luxurious.

  The Queen Victoria Hospital was different. Hillary and Tollemache went into the main building in a daze of whisky. John Dewar was of the distilling family and made supplies available to the men McIndoe had told him to treat like house guests. After some banter with the Irish nurses, they were persuaded into bed, where McIndoe visited them that night. He prescribed a stomach pump for both of them and peered into Hillary’s eyes. ‘They’re still pretty mucky,’ he said, ‘but I think you’ll find it a relief to have some eyelids on them.’

  In the morning Hillary’ was prepared for the operation. The skin for his new eyelids was to come from the soft inside of his left arm. The whole of the arm and the armpit was closely shaved, then sterilised. His first injection did not make him feel sleepy, so he asked for a cigarette and lay behind the screen puffing with provocative insouciance. Tony Tollemache was wheeled back into the ward after his operation, breathing ether, and Hillary was taken out in his place. In the theatre he was welcomed by the ever-genial John Hunter with his tubes and cylinders. McIndoe lowered over him in skull-cap and multi-coloured gown; Hunter slid the needle softly into the vein, contenting himself with nothing more rib-tickling than a friendly, ‘Well, goodbye.’

  Hillary felt no particular pain when he came round, but was completely incapacitated. Effectively blind for five days, he had to be bathed and fed where he lay. He could not read, but what he could do was talk. He and Tollemache competed in the careless devilry of their conversation. Needing a focus for their energies, they criticised the hospital and its staff. Hillary could not see whether any of the sisters were in the room and relied on Tollemache to give him the all-clear for his ribaldry. To a determined joker like Tollemache the possibilities were irresistible; he provoked Hillary into his most vulgar abuse when the ward sister was present. As a result the two men were separated, with Hillary being moved into a glassed-in extension off the main ward.

  Here McIndoe came to take off the dressings and let his patient see. The new eyelids were grotesquely too large. The only way Hillary could look ahead of him was by turning his face towards the ceiling. McIndoe was unconcerned; and within a few days the skin shrank into position, so that Hillary could move the new lids up or down. McIndoe next provided him with a pair of lower lids. This time when the dressings were taken off Hillary thought he looked like an orang-utan: the flesh beneath his eyes had been built outwards to make ledges from which the new lids would contract. For the first time since the accident, however, he could close his eyes: until then he had had to roll up his eyes when he wanted to sleep, leaving the whites exposed in a picture of frozen horror.

  Hillary was not required to have further operations until January 1941. He spent the intervening time either at the Dewars’ convalescent home or up in London with Tony Tollemache. After dinner they would go to a night club and watch the young people on the dance floor. They were like old men, still capable of going out for a pleasant evening with a good cigar to finish, but no longer able to participate in the vital exchanges that they watched. Neither admitted to any feeling of frustration; they pretended to be relieved that they were now excused from the hot imperatives of youth.

  When Hillary returned to East Grinstead for a new upper lip the only available bed was in Ward Three – a long, low hut about fifty yards from the main hospital that took the most serious cases. Hillary’s burns, though agonising, were not as extensive or as deep as those suffered by many of the inmates of Ward Three.

  It was a place in which even Hillary’s perverse bravado was tested. The men lay in strange postures, some with their faces attached by grafts to their shoulders, some with their hands on their stomachs and some with their inner forearms flush against their foreheads with the wrist bent over their skulls like creatures from a medieval depiction of torment. Patients with burned hands lay in soft cocoons of cotton; some with smashed faces had their heads held up on pulleys by delicately balanced weights. Warm air was thought to give grafts a better chance to take: the paraffin heaters were kept burning even in summer and the windows were never opened.

  The atmosphere, while fetid, was also curiously informal. Those who were dressed wore civilian clothes; beneath the beds were crates of Worthington and Double Diamond. The men behaved as though there were nothing wrong or even particularly unusual in their circumstances. When one of them could not contain his pain, another would simply turn up the volume on the wireless that played all day long, so that the gr
oans rang no more than a descant on the songs of Vera Lynn. Some of them saved their own painkillers to give to a man in torment from his spine.

  Near the door was the saline bath in which McIndoe prepared his patients for their operations. At first it had been an ordinary bath with salt added by hand; later the taps were removed to prevent the patients injuring themselves and brine was pumped from a tank through pipes on the ceiling of the ward. The water was kept circulating at just above blood temperature. McIndoe claimed to have discovered the uses of brine, though a version of his bath had been used to treat mustard gas casualties in the Great War.

  Next to the bath, in a curtained-off section of her own, was a girl of fifteen who had been terribly burned by boiling sugar in a factory. She was in with the men because she could not be moved too far from the saline bath, but however gently the nurses handled her, she always screamed. A degree of tension affected the others every evening as her bath-time approached.

  Most of the men in Ward Three were the age of students. They had helped to win the Battle of Britain, but were now so mentally and physically damaged that they found it difficult to believe they had any life worth living. Among them moved the strange figure of McIndoe in his threadbare sports jacket and baggy flannels, and they came to idolise him. His insistence on civilian clothes and laxity of manner was a relief after the rigours of the service; his brusqueness was as close to sympathy as they could bear. They were facing the prospect of ten, twenty, or in some cases as many as forty, further operations, each one excruciating in its way. McIndoe was forty-one at this time, old enough to be the father of most of what he called his ‘guinea-pigs’. They called him Archie, and he didn’t seem to mind; he himself spoke in exactly the same way to visiting dignitaries as to the junior porters. He shuttled between the beds on his short legs with Jill Mullins at his elbow taking notes. A little way behind would be John Hunter, who usually had a number of complicated bets to settle with patients. The idea was that he would buy them a drink if they had felt sick after his anaesthetic, but these wagers were more a matter of honour since he always bought the drinks anyway.

  However fast he moved, McIndoe took time to explain the full course of intended treatment to each patient. He made no promises and did not underplay the degree of permanent disfigurement they could expect, but merely to hear someone offering them an organised and practical route back to normal life seemed miraculous to many of the men who believed they would pass the rest of their lives as freaks. The sweaty camaraderie of Ward Three was partly an accident. Officers and men were at first segregated, but McIndoe discovered that the officers in isolation made a slower recovery than the men who mucked in together. The officers dwelled too much on their traumas and tended to lose their appetites; in the hothouse of Ward Three they had to compete with the clamorous stoicism of the men. In any case, segregation became impossible when the numbers increased: there were not enough staff, and there was only one saline bath. The writ of the new democracy ran outside the wooden walls of the hut. Residents of East Grinstead grew used to seeing officers pushing ordinary airmen in wheelchairs to a pub in town. Sometimes McIndoe, Hunter and Mullins would go with them. McIndoe would whack out a few chords on the piano while Hunter waved a ten-shilling note at the barman.

  McIndoe became a powerful figure in town and was invited to dinner by most of the socially conscious families. He did not resent this; on the contrary, with Jill Mullins at his side, he enjoyed the gush of their admiration and, when he had drunk of it long and deep, he asked them for donations.

  In the course of the war 4,500 allied airmen suffered serious burns, or as McIndoe put it, ‘had their bark knocked off. For the public’s benefit he developed a straightforward explanation of the process: ‘A pilot is hurled like a blazing torch from his plane and sustains burns of the exposed parts of his body, or his plane crashes and he is enveloped in flame, lying unconscious against red-hot material. He sustains deep burns of the exposed part of the body, together with a greater or lesser extent of burning of the covered parts, depending on the efficiency of the protective material.’ The injuries were made worse by the habit of many pilots, including Hillary, of flying without goggles or gloves. More than 200 of the cases that passed through East Grinstead were men whose faces had been burned away.

  McIndoe found Hillary a difficult patient. His supercilious manner and provocative conversation at first made him unpopular on the ward. Gradually, however, people came to respect his integrity and to see that in a loud-mouthed way he was a brave man, with his own peculiar battles to fight. Geoffrey Page, a Hurricane pilot with injuries similar to Hillary’s, found him a ‘basically pleasant young man hiding behind a barrier of cynicism, a defence mechanism perhaps evolved from an over-doting maternal influence.’ When Page first arrived another guinea-pig, Roy Lane, told him Hillary was a ‘conceited young man with an inferiority complex’. Lane too believed Edwyna Hillary was responsible: ‘For years he’s been told by his mother what a wonderful boy he is, but in the service he’s had his backside kicked. Not surprising he’s a bit mixed up.’ Page took several weeks to overcome his awe at Hillary. In the mean time he joined the other patients in attacking him verbally, telling him to shut up, or even hurling their rationed eggs at him.

  Hillary mentioned none of the antagonism in The Last Enemy, though his dismissive attitude and obvious impatience with hospitals and fellow-sufferers make it easy enough to imagine. His new upper lip was to be made from skin on his left arm, next to the site of his new eyelids. Hillary’s reasoning was that if he went for the inner arm rather than the leg, which was the other possibility, he wouldn’t have to shave. When the dressings were taken off, Hillary saw that his right eyebrow had been lifted higher to bring it into line with the left. There were stitches beneath both eyes where McIndoe had trimmed back the ledges left by the earlier graft of the lower eyelids. When he visited Hillary that evening McIndoe looked with some anxiety at the scar under the right eye, which appeared swollen and blue. He said nothing, but moved on; and for once his anti-bedside manner was not effective. Hillary was left feeling forlorn.

  The next day he and seven others were moved into isolation in a ward in the main part of the hospital. An infection was flourishing in the jungly atmosphere of Ward Three. The others in with him began to succumb. A man called Neft started to suppurate about the face; a Squadron Leader Gleave became infected in the nose; the bandage on Hillary’s upper lip smelled so powerfully that he had to pour eau-de-Cologne on to it. Their heads were shorn and rubbed with powder; all had swabs sent for analysis. The results said that six of the eight were infected, but the nurses would not tell them which two were safe. Hillary was not one of them. He developed mastoiditis, an acute infection of the bone behind the ear, the treatment for which (a drug called Prontosil) made him feel sick.

  Eight days after his operation the dressings were taken off. Hillary’s relief at ridding himself of the suppurating gauze was tempered by the dismay at the new upper lip that McIndoe had given him. It had no central ridge, it was completely white and it was narrower than his previous one. He went to ease the bandages from the donor site on his arm. When he had completed this delicate process, the sister removed the stitches. The wound, however, immediately peeled back like a burst sausage. His body’s reserves, depleted by the infection, had not been sufficient to fuse the two sides of the cut.

  Hillary now faced another unwanted trial of his resolution. The pain in his ear, and the nausea caused by the Prontosil, made sleep impossible. He walked about the ward in his distress, but in the gloomy light could make out only people in equally dire circumstances: charred, fearful, feverish. The next day he had an operation to treat the mastoiditis, but the infection had also taken root in his lip. The pain was worse than anything he had endured since the crash. The thundering pressure in his head was matched in horror by the sound of footsteps in the corridor when they came to pierce the hole behind his ear with a steel probe to drain the pus.

  For muc
h of this time he was either delirious or unconscious from morphia. He was moved to the glassed-in extension where he had first been sent as a punishment. It was from here that he had heard a large bomb whistling down through the night. The impact of its landing was such that it took Hillary some time to work out that the bomb had not actually exploded. He was so disappointed, so powerless and frustrated, that he began to sob. He had wanted to die.

  The next day he argued with a doctor who planned to move him back to Ward Three, where he would be safer if the bomb exploded. His humiliation, his pain and his disappointment that the bomb had not gone off slopped over into petulant abuse. No power on earth, he said, would take him back to that place of human refuse; if anyone touched him, he would get up and walk back to London. Sister Hall, who had nursed him throughout the infection, offered to convert a consulting room into a bedroom for Hillary, and the young doctor, relieved to be rid of his difficult patient, swiftly agreed.

  That night McIndoe came to see him. He tried to explain to Hillary the difficulties of running the hospital, and how, although Hillary had had an unlucky time, he must try to keep going. Hillary noticed that McIndoe was still in his operating robes and felt slightly chastened when he noticed McIndoe’s tense, exhausted expression.

  The next day he was visited by Denise and his mother, who had motored down together from London. The delirious sweating had caused him to lose almost three stone in the course of a week and the Prontosil had made his face grey. His mother, who had borne up stubbornly thus far, looked crushed. She believed her son was going to die. She sat with Denise at the end of the bed, within the narrow field of his vision, and tried to find words to comfort him.