The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Read online

  So the key to fellowship was physical action. The most important difference between Hillary and Lawrence was that Lawrence’s nostalgie de la boue involved no more danger than the chance of lice or sore heels, but Hillary’s reimmersion of himself in the active world of male comradeship was likely to cost him his life.

  To Kennington Hillary wrote: ‘The Mint helped to clear up something that had been worrying me for months. To fly again or not. I had got to the stage when I could rationalise no longer, but relied on instinct to tell me when the time came … I have despised these men I have lived with in messes – pilots too – despised them above all drunk, and have felt a longing to get away from them and think. But Lawrence is right. Companionship such as this must depend largely on trivialities (the wrong word), ordinary things is perhaps better.’

  It is one of the tender paradoxes of Richard Hillary’s life that a man rightly described by his senior commander as ‘excessively individualistic’ should yet have chosen to sacrifice his life to some vague idea of comradeship.

  Mary Booker wrote to him: ‘I am glad, darling, that you are nearly out of the tunnel concerning your decision [to return to flying], yet I find myself with Linklater. We on the outside could not help finding ourselves on the same side. True justice should not have put the decision on you at all.’

  She dined with him on 22 October, the day of his speech at the Foyle’s literary lunch. Any bitterness there may have been seems to have been forgiven; there may even have been a final re-consummation of their feelings. A week later on 30 October, Mary wrote in her diary: ‘Dine Richard. Miracle.’ It was the last word she wrote about him.

  Hillary’s life had until this point played in a resoundingly major key. There had been comedy and pain, despair and excitement, but there had not been much ambivalence or mystery. From the day the Medical Board passed him fit for flying in November 1942, the whole tenor of his life shifted. It became cloudy, frightening, and harder to understand.

  The Board essentially left the decision to him; and when he had declared himself fit he returned to compel Sir Sholto Douglas to keep his promise, which, against his better judgement, he did. Douglas sent him to an Operational Training Unit in Berwick-shire with a view to becoming a night-fighter pilot. He later commented: ‘I should never have made him that promise.’

  Rosie Kerr, Hillary’s friend and a former patient at East Grinstead, was outraged at the RAF’s ‘Boys’ Own’ attitude, not only to Hillary’s life, but, if he was to be in night-fighters, to the life of his navigator/radio operator: ‘Incomprehensible. He was not fit. They only had to say, once and for all, that they could not afford to lose more planes, let alone two lives, and reject him. After a few weeks he would have accepted it, and found something else.’

  But the RAF, for all its talk of ‘wizard prangs’, was a peculiarly – perhaps irresponsibly – sophisticated service. They allowed their men to fight alone, with as little pressure from the institution as possible. They may have even taken the view that it was healthier for the service as a whole for men to risk their lives than to infect others with their frustrations.

  Richard Hillary then had the dreadful task of breaking the news to his mother. He wrote to her: ‘I just want to thank you for always having faith, for not questioning my decision, for never betraying that you feel unhappy and, above all, for your unfailing sense of humour … Finally one must listen to one’s own instinct, and the time will come when I shall know that my instinct was right and my reason wrong. You must try not to worry about me and to have the same faith I have that I shall be all right, for I know it… There are few things to which one can cling in this comic war. To see straight and know where one is heading is perhaps the most important of all. God bless you always. Richard.’

  He wrote the letter on the evening of 19 November at the Oxford and Cambridge University Club. When he had finished it he wrote out his will.

  It was an odd little document, but very eloquent of its author. It included these clauses:

  To Tony Tollemache I leave my gold watch.

  To Merle Oberon (Lady Korda), I leave my gold aeroplane clip.

  To my mother I leave my everlasting love and gratitude …

  I want no one to go into mourning for me.

  As to whether I am buried or cremated – it is immaterial to me, but as the flames have had one try I suggest they might get their man in the end.

  I want no one to feel sorry for me. In an age where no one can make a decision that is not dictated from above, it was left to me to make the most important decision of all. I am eternally grateful to the stupidity of those who left me that decision. In my life I had a few friends. I learned a little wisdom and a little patience. What more could a man ask for?

  The words ‘the stupidity of those who left me that decision’ are particularly characteristic. They refer not to Eric Linklater, Lovat Dickson and others who had tried to dissuade him, yet had finally let him go; they are a half-affectionate reference to the men of the Medical Board. Hillary implies that he knew he was not really fit; but the RAF had allowed him to fight the War in the way he had first desired when at Oxford: exciting, individual and disinterested.

  It was almost midnight by the time he had finished writing both the will and the letter to his mother. He left the club and walked through the cold, blacked-out streets to his parents’ flat in Knightsbridge. He went and sat on his mother’s bed, as he had done when he was a child, and told her of everything he had done during the day.

  He did not tell her of the content of the letter that was in the post, nor did he tell her of the third letter he had written: to his new commanding officer, asking him that in the event of his death they should first inform Mary Booker, then allow four hours before officially contacting his mother.

  ‘You will be all right,’ he told Mary. ‘You can take it.’ They dined together on 23 November, and the following day Hillary’s father Michael took him to the train at King’s Cross. The station was filled with servicemen, the majority of them RAF men bound for Grantham in Lincolnshire from where the bomber squadrons flew at night to pound the German cities. The Berwick train was filled almost as soon as it had drawn into the station; the corridors were packed with men sitting on their kit bags. Here were the reluctant, unbelieving men that Hillary had backed against ‘Hitler’s dogma-fed youth’.

  Hillary, his hands hidden in his greatcoat pocket and with a porter carrying the bag he could not manage himself, was unable to find a seat. His father saw him into a carriage and attempted to say goodbye from the platform as Richard leaned out through the window with his habitually sardonic smile. It was another boarding school goodbye, but it threw the others into bitter relief. Michael Hillary, as usual, could find no gesture of physical affection, nor even gentle words. He made an awkward goodbye and walked away. As he was leaving the station he was overcome with remorse and foreboding. He stopped. He bought a packet of cigarettes, went back to the train, and thrust them stiffly through the window.

  Hillary arrived at Berwick at six in the evening and changed on to a chain for Reston. There were two young men fresh from training school in his compartment, but when he examined them Hillary did not feel the bond of comradeship that had made him so anxious to return. They seemed to him callow and less worth dying for than Colin Pinckney and Peter Pease. At Reston he moved into a compartment of his own and felt the weight of a great loneliness. There was a final change of trains and then half an hour in a van to RAF Charter Hall.

  It was the end of the world. Freezing winds swept across the tarmac from the North Sea; the sleeping huts had damp walls and no fires; someone had stolen all the plugs from the baths. Hillary wept into his pillow. The next day he was given an armament lecture which turned out to be an exact repeat of the one he had described at Kinloss in The Last Enemy. He raised his head from the desk and half expected to see Noel Agazarian and the ghosts of the long-haired boys, but there was only a pinched-looking lad who picked his nose.

  E
very day at Charter Hall was a new abandonment; the atmosphere was like a boarding school Sunday, only colder and more sinister. Hillary’s depression was intensified by a book he found in the small library. It was T.E. Lawrence’s letters; and what struck him was a passage in which the editor, David Garnett, wrote of Lawrence’s return to the ranks at Uxbridge: ‘One wonders whether his will had not become greater than his intelligence … The courage of the boy too proud to make a fuss is something we admire; in an educated man it is ridiculous and a sign of abnormality.’ Hillary was starting to believe that his own decision had been ‘ridiculous’. What was he trying to prove?

  Many of the other pilots on the station looked up to Hillary as a Battle of Britain ‘hero’. They could not extend to him the fraternity he craved because they were in awe of him. Some showed their feelings by apparent disdain. They queried his lack of experience at flying by night; they pointed out coldly that it was not just his own life he was risking, but that of his navigator/radio operator.

  Hillary questioned his own feelings and motives in much the same way. He felt fear in a way that he had never acknowledged before. He wondered whether it was flying at night that scared him, or whether it was some more fatal awareness that his life was coming to a close. ‘This is a queer place,’ he wrote, ‘for journey’s end.’

  In December he managed to get leave to go to a wedding in London. Here he saw his friends Rosie Kerr and Archie McIndoe. It was clear to them that something had gone badly wrong. McIndoe was alarmed at Hillary’s mental condition. He had had to deal with Hillary’s aggression and resentment in hospital, but at least they had been emotions that derived from a hunger for life and anxiety about its healthy continuation. The sight of a meekly compliant Richard Hillary was frightening, and McIndoe eventually wrote a letter to the Medical Officer at Charter Hall, strongly warning him that he thought Hillary unfit for duty.

  On his return to Charter Hall after the wedding, Hillary made a last, great effort to lift his spirits. ‘Much better today,’ he wrote to Mary Booker, ‘for I have finally flown; with no particular distinction and only dual, nevertheless I have flown. My greatest difficulty is taxiing these heavy brutes. I find that I have not the strength in my right thumb to work the brakes, so I am to have an extension fitted to the brake lever.’

  Once Hillary was up in the air again, the truth became quite clear: he was not fit to fly. Not only was his mental attitude wrong, but his hands were too weak to work the cumbersome levers of the heavy night-fighters. His eyes were insufficiently protected by their new lids, and he suffered persistent and acute headaches.

  Through the pain rang the word ‘coward’, uttered by Kathleen Dewar. He did not believe he was going to survive; his old fighter-pilot’s instinct lent him some absurd hope while he was up in the air, but his reason told him otherwise. Yet while he glared across the frozen airfield waiting for his death, he found at last some of the old comradeship and mutual loyalty he thought had been lost to ‘the one who is left’.

  The other pilots began to lose their awe of him and to treat him as one of their own. He responded with desperate relief: ‘I feel a new-old warmth begin to course through me; the potion is already at work. I pick up the newspaper-Beveridge Report. Oh, the fellow is thinking about after the War: we’ll probably all be dead anyway. Let’s find out what Jane’s doing in the Daily Mirror. We turn the page; we comment on her legs, and I look more closely at the faces around me, and what I see pleases me. I am happy.’

  His battle now was with the machines. Gales howled across the runway; clouds sank down to only 600 feet; the brake lever ripped the soft skin from his hands, and still he couldn’t hold the heavy plane on landing but bogged it into the soft mud beside the outer track. Hour after hour he ploughed through the grey Scottish cold with no landmark to guide him, flying on his instruments alone; and like all Spitfire pilots he was used to seeing rivers, fields and churches beneath the twitching rudder bars: to trust a needle in a glass dial was against all his fighter instincts.

  He felt the eyes of Pease and Pinckney on him; he felt the expectation of all young men who had died, as he fought to justify ‘my right to fellowship with my dead’. If in some celestial dispersal hut they might have watched him they would have laughed and told him to get the hell out of it and back to London; but the need to prove himself worthy of them closed his mind to reason. Although he did not seek death, he did, in some incoherent way, long for its release.

  His performance in the air made it likely that his wish would shortly be fulfilled. His instructor, Wing Commander James Benson, DSO, DFC wrote: ‘I sent him solo and it was terrible. I gave him further instruction and then he challenged me to stand behind him whilst he flew and tell him what he did wrong. I did. He nearly killed us both. But somehow we eventually got it sorted out and he got the hang of it. He thought a lot of me for that.’

  Hillary was moved from Bisleys to Blenheims, which were even more awkward to fly. Another Blenheim pilot wrote: ‘I have a strong hunch that the designer of the cockpit had a perverted sense of humour as … the airscrew pitch and petrol controls were behind the pilot’s back where he groped in the dark, tearing fingers and thumbs on every sharp piece of metal that could be cunningly concealed to catch the unwary.’ Where the Bisley had a switch to shut the gills, the Blenheim had a wheel behind the pilot’s head that needed to be turned about fifty times; where the Bisley had a simple lever to raise the undercarriage, the Blenheim had a catch that needed to be released with the thumb. Even able-bodied pilots frequently found their fingers immovably trapped by this catch when they most needed a free hand elsewhere in the cockpit. Hillary’s thumb was clawed too deep into his palm to be able to work the lever at all, and on his first Blenheim flight he received a radio message telling him his undercarriage was still down. Unable to do anything about it, he was forced to land again straight away. Even then the RAF did not deny him the chance to fly; they merely sent someone with him to operate the undercarriage.

  Night flying began at five o’clock each evening, though frequently the weather was so bad that pilots would be hauled out of their planes and sent back to the dispersal hut to wait either until the gale had dropped or the snow had lifted. Hillary strained his watering eyes to see through the muddy, unwashed perspex of the canopy, but could see neither the fitter, nor his torch, nor anything at all but the deep darkness of the night.

  From his hut he wrote letters in which he described Charter Hall as ‘the forgotten man’s last stop’. He formed a close friendship with a navigator/radio operator, Wilfrid Fison, a man whose job was onerous enough in such conditions without the added burden of an incapacitated pilot. Fison had, however, been specially chosen to accompany Hillary, because, according to the Station Medical Officer, he was, ‘an old Cambridge Blue, of a temperament just calculated to suit Hillary, and the prospects were that they would make a good pair.’ However, Fison was thirty-seven, had no combat experience, and had joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve only a year before. He was known as a kind and selfless man, and there is no evidence that he was frightened of flying with Hillary. However, since Hillary made it clear that he was aware of Fison’s shortcomings as a navigator it is inconceivable that Fison could not have seen how far short Hillary fell of the standard required to fly a Blenheim safely. Perhaps the Medical Officer hoped the crippled pilot and ageing navigator could console one another with talk of sporting events at the ancient universities.

  On 17 December McIndoe wrote to the Medical Officer at Charter Hall. He pointed out that Hillary’s left eye was not standing up to the strain of night flying. He believed that if he continued to fly it ‘can only end one way’. Since there was more work to be done on the eyelid, McIndoe asked if Hillary could be sent to East Grinstead ‘at an early date’. ‘In the meantime,’ he wrote, ‘I do feel that if you could restrain him from further flying, it might save him from a very serious accident. After I have dealt with his eye, I can reopen the matter with the Central Medical Establishment,
and a more satisfactory disposal could be made for him.

  ‘Would you be so good as to treat this letter as private and confidential to yourself. The feelings of these young men are very apt to be hurt in relation to this vexed question of operative work following an injury. I feel however there is a strong case for intervention.’

  The Medical Officer, however, was away on leave and McIndoe’s letter remained unopened on his desk.

  Charter Hall was known to the men who were sent there as Slaughter All. The Blenheims were old, shaky, and skimpily serviced by a sullen groundstaff. The Flight Commander told Hillary: ‘I wouldn’t fly one of these Blenheims at night for any price – tried once – shook me to the tits. Can’t even see the instruments and fuck all outside … Tomorrow you’ll have all that and your engine’ll cut out too just for full measure, and if you prang they’ll say it was your fault.’

  The airfield was laid out in accordance with the lessons learned from air raids about the need for dispersal. It was a German bomber raid on Hornchurch that had caused the damage to Hillary’s Spitfire canopy which prevented his escape above the Thames estuary. At Charter Hall there were therefore icy miles to cross between mess and billets with further long walks to the flights. The permanent staff were indolent and malicious; while the trainees had all known the rigours and comedy of service discipline, they found the attitude of these superiors curiously dispiriting. ‘They are machines, not men,’ wrote Hillary. The instructors themselves were of a higher calibre, but they were only on six-month postings as rest from operational duties and many of them resented being there. The pupils, too, were transient and were unable to make any impact on the morale or safety of the airfield.