In 1931 he went to Shrewsbury, a public school in Shropshire, where he took part enthusiastically in the traditional activities. At the age of fifteen he was taught English by a Mr McEachran, an inspiring teacher who, Hillary told listeners to an American broadcast in 1942, was the most important influence in his life. Richard told him that he wanted to be a writer when he grew up and that his model would be Steinbeck: McEachran encouraged him, and Richard read widely. He became a handsome and sexually precocious youth; he lost his virginity at the age of sixteen, a feat that was the subject of incredulous schoolboy envy.
In the school holidays he would go off to Europe on his own rather than visit his parents in Khartoum. His mother agreed only reluctantly to this arrangement, but it enabled Richard to learn French and German as well as to enlarge his sexual experience. He took what public school had to offer, but remained cantankerous and provocative. He had few friends at Shrewsbury where most of his contemporaries regarded him as aloof and unreliable; a kind of choric response developed at the mention of his name: ‘Oh, that shit Hillary.’
He became tediously argumentative and crudely personal in his comments; he refused to accept such concepts as ‘house loyalty’, and this made him unpopular. Although he was intellectually more mature than the other boys he was never chosen for any honours or teams. Forced by his parents’ absence to develop some self-sufficiency at an early age, he had allowed it to develop into an assumed superiority. His housemaster wrote: ‘He seemed to dislike the conventional views of things, often merely because they were conventional… He liked shocking people in a mild way.’ These were also the characteristics of the adult man: he was inclined to argue and strike attitudes, but he never had the intellectual curiosity or perhaps the capacity to develop coherent alternatives to the conventions he opposed. The Last Enemy was at times an angry and rebellious book, but in his deepest beliefs its author did not seriously differ from others of his age and occupation.
Hillary was none the less an inquisitive and intelligent boy, good enough at work to win a place at Trinity College, Oxford, where he went in October 1937. Trinity was a small and friendly college whose spacious garden included a lime walk that dated from the eighteenth century. It was noted less for its scholars than for its sportsmen. Hillary said that the ethos of the college at the time was one of ‘alert philistinism’, though contemporaries in other colleges questioned the adjective. Trinity was often thought to be rather grander than it really was, perhaps out of confusion with Trinity, Cambridge. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby made this assumption when claiming that as an Oggsford man’ it was at Trinity that he had spent his undergraduate days – ‘I always carry a souvenir of my Oxford days. It was taken in Trinity quad – the man on my left is the Earl of Doncaster.’
Hillary’s main contribution to the college was as an oarsman. He had grown two inches since school, but his disruptive personality made him a tricky crew member: on one occasion he engaged in a fist fight with the bow man Derek Graham. He stroked the Trinity boat in his first year when it went to the Head of the River (came first in the college summer races). This achievement meant that he was considered for the university eight to row against Cambridge. He would not figure prominently among the twenty-five-year-old colonial postgraduates who make up the team today, but in 1938 a slightly-built natural athlete with a hangover could still do well.
Nearly all the young men at Trinity had been to public schools (Hillary claimed that they came from the ‘better’ public schools), where they had been well enough taught to be able to drift through three years at Oxford and still gain a respectable second-class degree. Hillary read history under the tutorship of Melville Paterson and Reggie Weaver, of whose teaching it was said that ‘Patters can’t and Reggie won’t’. The public school atmosphere of the college was carried into Oxford life: it was considered unacceptable to be different or unconventional in any way. Displays of learning were as suspect as suede shoes or beards. This sense of cohesiveness or uniformity was enforced by the enormous number of clubs and societies which offered an even tighter bonding and even stricter elimination of the ‘peculiar’.
Societies, however, usually have a defensive purpose, and what Hillary and his friends wished to protect themselves against was the bungling and bureaucracy of politics. They knew that a war was coming, but they wanted to fight it on their own terms. It had been made inevitable by the low calibre of the 1930s politicians throughout Europe, who had fudged, postponed and appeased; but when it came to the action, Hillary’s generation wanted it to be swift, clear and, as far as possible, undisciplined. There was little sense of idealism in their attitude and none at all of ideology.
A University Air Squadron offered training at the Government’s expense: Hillary learned to fly on Tiger Moths at an airfield outside Oxford. Members of the squadron regarded students who did artillery or infantry exercises with the Officers Training Corps as absurdly solemn. Although he stressed how uninterested he was in politics, Hillary was scornful of left-wing undergraduates who had fallen under the influence of the Auden group. Such people, he thought, despised the middle classes from whom they received their education, but could not gain entrance to the world of labour they admired. They were thus useless. Hillary’s criticism of them was less a political than a practical one: their beliefs, he reasoned, had rendered them incapable of participating. It seems curious that Hillary was able to overlook so completely the Spanish Civil War, in which many such men had found redeeming action and even death. He must have been aware of the participation of George Orwell and Stephen Spender in Spain, and of the death of others, such as John Cornford. The French writer Andre Malraux, despite his lack of flying experience, raised a squadron for the Republicans. The Prime Minister Léon Blum was unable to supply planes officially because he needed Britain’s continuing support against the Germans, and Britain was fastidiously neutral in Spain on the grounds that the ‘Bolshevists’ were as bad as the Fascists. However, Blum managed to allow some planes to find their way, unarmed, over the Pyrenees, for the use of Malraux, who lobbed out bombs by hand on to Franco’s forces, who were using planes supplied by Hitler.
In The Last Enemy Hillary condensed the left-wing position in a pacifist figure called David Rutter. Although the name of Rutter appears on no university lists, he appears to have been a real person whom Hillary wished to protect, by changing his name, from public disapproval. In a dialogue with Rutter Hillary clearly stated his own reasons for fighting in the RAF: ‘In the first place I shall get paid and have good food. Secondly, I have none of your sentiments about killing, much as I admire them. In a fighter plane, I believe, we have found a way to return to war as it ought to be, war which is individual combat between two people, in which one either kills or is killed. It’s exciting, it’s individual and it’s disinterested. I shan’t be sitting behind a long-range gun working out how to kill people sixty miles away. I shan’t get maimed: either I shall get killed or I shall get a few pleasant putty medals and enjoy being stared at in a night club.’
His idea of what war ought not to be was based on the Western Front, with its long-range artillery bombardments and mass, anonymous slaughters. War in the air would be ‘exciting, individual and disinterested’, by the last of which he meant free from ideological or institutionalised motive.
He was right about killing or being killed, wrong about not being maimed.
Hillary had matured considerably since leaving Shrewsbury. Straightforward young Trinity men like Sammy Stockton and Frank Waldron no longer considered him a ‘shit’ but were in awe of his charm, sophistication and physical daring. On one occasion he climbed out of the window of a second-floor room in Garden Quad and inched his way along a narrow ledge to the amazed protest of friends on the ground. He liked to test his courage because he was aware of his limitations.
On various excursions to London he impressed his friends with his precocious savoir-vivre. He favoured a club in Beak Street called the Bag o’ Nails, where a bored
-looking band played shuffling music while girls smooched up to half-cut customers at dimly lit tables. While Hillary’s friends, in varying degrees of embarrassment and virginity, managed only to buy warm, overpriced champagne, Hillary always contrived to leave with the best-looking girl. They suspected that with Hillary she even ‘did it’ for free. The others left with empty pockets and nothing to take home but the cheery call of Millie, the owner, to ‘remember the dear old Bag’.
In Oxford Hillary joined the staff of the university magazine Isis. His father was anxious that he should follow him into the colonial service, and as a compromise Hillary modified his declared ambition from ‘writer’ to ‘journalist’. To this end he spent more time on Isis and neglected his rowing. He was consequently dropped from the Trinity first eight, though this did not prevent him setting off for Germany in July 1938 to take part in a regatta.
By describing themselves as an Oxford University crew, Hillary and Frank Waldron had persuaded the German and Hungarian governments to pay for ten of them to travel to Bad Ems in Germany and thence to Budapest. They suffered the usual fate of sporting students on an overseas trip; their exuberant drinking was encouraged by hosts anxious to see their own teams do well. The competitive atmosphere was intensified and soured by Nazi pride. A local coach found them an almost watertight boat, though they did no practice. A number of well-muscled Aryan youths sneered at them before the race, and a misunderstanding over starting orders meant that they set off some way behind five German crews. Halfway up the course someone spat on the Oxford boat from a bridge, and this apparently provided the necessary spur to their performance. They stormed up the last part of the course to win the General Goering cup by two-fifths of a second. It was not a popular win.
In Budapest two days later, the team was sabotaged by dastardly Hungarians, who filled them with wine and goulash and made them row three times in the heat of the day. The triumph of B ad Ems could not be repeated: Sammy Stockton, the man who had stroked them to victory in Germany, failed to stay the course. Defeat went down well with their hosts, however, who had a further explanation of why the ‘Oxford University Team’ had lost: a cartoon in a local paper showed eight men in a boat looking over their shoulder at a naked girl in a skiff.
The delights of Europe drew Hillary back twice before the War, once on a farewell gastronomic tour of Brittany, and once to a regatta in Cannes. In England he had begun an affair with a girl called Anne Mackenzie, whom he had first met in the summer of 1938 after his triumph on the Thames. His letters to her show a capacity for despair that would have surprised Frank Waldron and the other militantly unsentimental members of the Trinity boat. It was camouflaged in some self-conscious banter: ‘The spring has had a bad effect on me,’ he wrote in May 1939, ‘and I have burst into verse – also composed a song about mountains and the moon and you! You must hear it sometime. It will thaw the icy walls of your heart.’
The letters show that Hillary had developed a mental framework and a vocabulary for dealing with such affairs. His approach was conventionally romantic but with a ragged edge of truculence. In July he wrote: ‘Sometimes now I wish there would be war – as I feel then that so many things would clarify themselves and you and I could be together again anyhow for a short time and there would be no false values and muddled thinking. Life would have a purpose while it lasted. I’m afraid that I’m becoming very heavy and rather boring. But a young man in love was ever a pitiable object. I wish I could be with you – have you in my arms, but the day when I shall be able to do that again seems very remote.’
There was something false about the feeling Hillary was claiming; and, like most of his relationships with women, his affair with Anne Mackenzie was short-lived. His expressed despair seemed to stem less from the anguish of love thwarted than from a reluctant acceptance that he must fight. On the morning of 3 September 1939 he listened to Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast at the house in Beaconsfield that his parents used on their visits to England. When it had finished he said goodbye to them and borrowed his father’s car to drive over to the headquarters of the University Air Squadron in Oxford. It was the end of his second year at Oxford, but he had no qualms about leaving his degree until ‘later’.
Hillary was initially made a sergeant and put in charge of a platoon of fellow-undergraduates. He found himself too unmilitary to shout at them and therefore gave drill orders only after democratic consultation. Soon afterwards he was commissioned into a different wing and found himself among several old Oxford friends, including Frank Waldron and an Armenian called Noel Agazarian, who combined intelligence, sporting ability and a disrespect for authority in about the same proportions as Hillary and had consequently become a close friend. Agazarian had intended reading for the Bar after having been sent down from Oxford for what Hillary called ‘breaking up his college’. Hillary and Agazarian were posted to a flying school at Kinloss, on the north-east coast of Scotland. They drove up with a third Oxford undergraduate called Peter Howes, a scientist who proved helpful on the technical aspects of subsequent flying exams.
At Kinloss they met regular RAF men who treated them with disdain, referring to them as ‘weekend pilots’ and ‘long-haired boys’. Hillary was quite able to withstand the mockery and even became mildly cooperative when the flying began on American trainers called Harvards. He was taught by a Sergeant White, who turned him into a competent, if not a brilliant, pilot. He made mistakes through arrogance and inattention, but in a crisis that was not of his making he showed speed of reaction. The sensation of flying was intoxicating and still untainted by any sense of duty. The war by land had not yet started, so, alone in the air, Hillary and the other long-haired boys could make carefree swoops through soft white canyons, watching the shadow of the plane move down the long pale embankments of cloud.
It was in Scotland that Hillary first heard an aircraft crashing. The pilot was doing a height test and had presumably fainted; little of him was found, so they filled the coffin with sand. It was on the same station that he first flew by night. After two practice circuits with Sgt White, he was allowed to take the plane up on his own. He took off without difficulty and flew for some minutes; all went well as long as he kept his gaze on the instrument panel. Then, unable to resist the temptation, he stared out of the cockpit and found the horizon had vanished. This is a sensation the pilot dreads. With cloud covering up the light of the stars, he has no way of knowing where he is, or how far from the earth. He is aware simultaneously of the vastness of the space around him and of feeling trapped in a constricting and dangerous little box. Hillary looked down for the flare-path of the runway: he saw nothing, but noticed that he was gaining speed. He jerked back the stick to slow down, but could still see nothing. He half stood up in his seat, craning his neck. Suddenly he saw the lights of the flare-path: there was space between him and the earth – he was safe. After a moment of shame, he felt powerful and exhilarated. He experienced the feeling of arrogance, of mastery of himself and his destiny, that was common to airmen when they had regained control of their machines.
Back on the ground he was tersely congratulated by Sgt White. As they smoked a cigarette in the hangar another pilot tried to land. He overshot the runway and disappeared out to sea. They found his body, with his machine half in and half out of the water. In his pocket were ten pounds he had drawn to go on leave the next day. He was the same age as Richard Hillary: twenty.
Hillary and his colleagues were somehow able to dismiss such incidents from their personal assessments of the War, which they continued to discuss only in terms of what selfish pleasure or satisfaction it might offer. The arrival of a Spitfire squadron in Scotland caused particular excitement. These fast, manoeuvrable fighters were what all the training pilots wanted to fly, but casualties in Fighter Command were as yet so light that no further pilots were required. When they completed the course in Scotland most of the young pilots, including Hillary, Noel Agazarian and Peter Howes, were therefore posted to ‘Army Cooperation’.
This meant training in cumbersome Lysanders at Old Sarum in Wiltshire.
Hillary, slightly to his surprise, enjoyed the further training, which included aerial photography and long-distance reconnaissance. He even warmed to the Lysander after a while. It was more like flying an old single-decker bus than a Spitfire, but it was commendably easy to control and appeared impossible to stall. Hillary tried his best by putting his plane through various loops and rolls; it was only when he realised his observer was not strapped in but had been hurled around in the rear cockpit that he put an end to the aerobatics: he had taken the man’s shrieks for boyish enthusiasm. Agazarian meanwhile managed to flip over his Hector while trying to take off. The plane did not catch fire, but Agazarian was not out of danger: many young flyers when overturned in the cockpit undid their straps, fell out and broke their necks. Fortunately the upside-down Agazarian retained some mental equilibrium and escaped with a severe reprimand.
The days of innocence ended with Dunkirk in June 1940. Hillary motored down to Brighton with Agazarian and Peter Howes to see some of the returning soldiers for himself. He found them resentful at the lack of air cover they had received from the RAF, but, in a moment of uncharacteristic self-control, Hillary forbore to point out that if the RAF had not gained supremacy above Flanders there would have been no evacuation at all. They spent the day at Brighton in the traditional way of off-duty servicemen, and on the way back to Old Sarum Peter Howes drove the car off the road. It was almost the last of the undergraduate pranks.
Leave was cancelled and side arms were issued. The Government appealed for calm and volunteers for a Local Defence force, the forerunner of the Home Guard. Up and down the country people began to understand for the first time that there might soon be German tanks in their streets, swastikas on their town hall and a summer sky dark with descending paratroops.