The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives

  He did not die. Slowly the infection retreated; the grafts took; he began to put on weight. When he was eventually moved back to the main ward, he found he had a new neighbour. This was a 26-year-old South African called Edmonds, who was the worst burned pilot in the RAF to survive. He had crashed at night while still training. His plane caught a wing as he was taking off, flipped over and burst into flames: Edmonds was trapped inside. When he arrived he was barely recognisable as a human being. McIndoe performed two emergency operations but then had to leave him to lie in his own suppuration. After nine months, McIndoe sent him away to build up his strength for the ordeal of surgery. On his return to the bed next to Hillary’s, Edmonds was facing several years under the knife. He never once complained; and his manner affected Hillary. Edmonds’s first operation went wrong: the infection got under his right eyelid and it had to be taken off and thrown away. It was McIndoe’s first failure with an eyelid. Through the insensitive crash talk of his neighbours, the well-meaning questions of visitors, Edmonds remained even-tempered and polite. When a visitor twittered about how well he looked, Hillary turned his face to the wall, expecting some explosion. But Edmonds merely replied, ‘Yes, and I’m feeling much better, too.’

  Hillary could not understand where Edmonds found the courage to confront his future. He wondered whether he derived strength from having been very close to death, but McIndoe, who had seen almost 200 men die, told Hillary they were never aware of how close they were to the end. Hillary could find no answer to the problem other than to think the will to live must be ‘instinctive’. Even at the time he was aware that this solution was improbable.

  The following day the ear surgeon said Hillary was fit enough to move, and, since McIndoe was planning no operations for the time being, he went back to the Dewars’ convalescent home. It was here that his mother brought him the news that Noel Agazarian had been killed. That meant Richard Hillary was the last surviving member of the group of friends from the University Air Squadron who had originally gone north to Kinloss; he was in his own words ‘the last of the long-haired boys’.

  He was a changed man. The alteration was clearest in his face. Almost all the skin on it was new, and although McIndoe had done as well as any surgeon at the time could have done, the results looked hasty and peculiar. The eyes had no lashes, and their habitual half-smile had been replaced by an involuntary glare. His lips were thin and straight; the fetching bow and curve of the upper one had been replaced by a featureless strip from his inner arm. The stitching that joined the different flaps of skin was plainly visible, and, in areas where it was stretched over the bone, the skin was thin and shiny. The face, however, was a triumph of normality compared to the hands. The severity of the burning and the early tannic acid treatment had drawn the fingers down into the palms, like a bird’s claws. Although McIndoe hoped to work further on them, for the time being the fingers on each hand were strapped to a device like a miniature tennis racket, which was supposed to straighten them. Hillary was no more patient about wearing these than he had been about wearing gloves in the cockpit, and took them off when they irritated him.

  At Dutton Homestall Hillary became friendly with the Dewars’ daughter Barbara. Their intimacy displeased Kathleen Dewar, who was jealous of her daughter and was herself attracted to Hillary. Her jealousy took the form of bitter verbal exchanges in which she questioned Hillary’s character and motives. Despite his outward bravado he had always been morbidly sensitive and was particularly so at this low point in his life. He tried to be philosophical about Kathleen Dewar’s remarks, but they wounded him at the time and later came back to trouble him profoundly.

  McIndoe encouraged his patients to go into town for a few hours each day to remind themselves of what normal life was like. The next stop was to go up to London, a day at a time to begin with, then for longer periods. The residents of East Grinstead were used to seeing badly burned men, but the reaction of Londoners was a trial. Some of the pilots were contemptuous of people who recoiled from them: clearly they didn’t understand that a war could not be fought without cost. This contempt was a protection for them. Others found it harder to reconcile themselves to having become repulsive.

  Hillary relied on Denise’s beauty to draw the eyes of strangers from his face; and when once a good-looking woman smiled at him he felt a return of self-esteem that went beyond simple vanity. Denise had knitted him some gloves and wore an identical pair herself so that he should not feel they had been made specially for him. In the winter of 1941-2 Hillary frequently spent the night at Denise’s flat in Eaton Place. She shared it with her sister Penny, who worked at the Admiralty. Denise was in the ATS, and the house was full of young men and women in various uniforms. When they had all gone home, Richard and Denise continued their long conversations against the sound of bombs falling on the docks and on the residential streets nearby.

  Richard was beginning to reach the end of what he could take from Denise. Her attitude to Peter’s death and to her own situation was too resolutely mystical for him. Although he had himself had a vision of Peter’s death, he was not prepared to infer from it the existence of any spiritual world. He seemed to see his premonition as no more than an extreme example of male comradeship: when your mind and body were so fully stretched in the taking and saving of life at hundreds of miles per hour 25,000 feet above the earth, when you depended for your existence on the bark and crackle of the R/T system, it was only natural that you should see, beneath the green fog of anaesthetic, an Me-109 closing on your best friend’s tail.

  In April Hillary returned to a guest night at Hornchurch, but found it difficult to racapture the careless indifference with which he and his fellow-pilots had viewed their flying lives. So many of them were dead. He invited twenty old friends to a party at his mother’s flat in London, but after an hour he could bear it no longer and walked off into the night.

  In The Last Enemy Hillary wrote that when he heard of Noel Agazarian’s death he ‘felt no emotion at all’. If this is true, and it seems improbable, it can only be that the emotion that the news provoked was too complicated to be registered at once. He felt lucky and he felt guilty. There seemed to be no purpose in his survival. Yet he shied away from the rhetoric of sacrifice; he refused to be part of the way that politicians talked of the War. At this stage in his life he tried to recultivate the arrogance and selfishness that others had critically described in him. He wanted to feel the same contempt for the politicians, the enemy, and the unthinking people of his own country that had enabled him to take to the sky as though it were some superior joust between the best knights of either side. He could not recapture his old state of mind, however; the death of so many friends had bound him both to them and to some sort of common cause that he could as yet neither understand nor describe. He very much disliked this new sensation of fraternity; he recoiled from it for reasons of intellect, taste and snobbery.

  In The Last Enemy he dramatised this change of heart in an invented piece of narrative. A chapter called ‘I See They Got You Too’ tells first of all how he went to Norfolk to see his old Oxford pacifist friend David Rutter – a man who at one stage held all the anti-war ‘progressive’ views. Rutter has undergone a terrible transformation; he has seen that his socialist objections are false, that the war has become a crusade, and that personal conscience is an indulgence at a time when the battle is for civilisation itself.

  Back in Liverpool Street Hillary takes a taxi west, but has not gone far before the intensity of the bombing forces the cab to stop. Hillary goes into a pub called The George and Dragon, on which a bomb falls. The house next door takes most of the blast and Hillary helps an ARP warden to dig out a woman who is trapped. They first remove her dead child. When he looks down into the woman’s ‘tired, blood-streaked, work-worn face’ Hillary has ‘a sense of complete unreality’. He gives her some brandy; as she takes the flask from his clawed hand and looks up at his face, she says, ‘I see they got you too.’ Hillary leaves the scene in
a fit of incoherent fear and anger. The prose becomes hysterical as he tries to explain what effect the woman’s words have on him. He dramatises it as a sudden and complete self-knowledge: ‘With awful clarity I saw myself suddenly as I was. Great God, that I could have been so arrogant!’

  The enlightened man then vows to put his new self-knowledge to good use. He will write a book, and his subject will be the men he has known. The story will be addressed to ‘Humanity’, the amorphous and previously despised mass of people of whom he now feels himself to be a part.

  Hillary admitted later that the incident was invented. He did change, but the process was slow. The theme of personal growth in the book is at best unclear and at worst factitious and embarrassing. Without a belief that some kind of transformation had taken place, however, Hillary would not have attempted the descriptions of flying, of life on the station and of plastic surgery – all that is most valuable in The Last Enemy. Back in the convalescent home at Dutton Homestall he began the painful task of writing. To begin a book is almost always an act of perverse and unattractive self-assertion; to do it when you have not written one before and when you have to grip the pen in a clawed hand requires a particular stubbornness. Hillary at once emitted signals of distress: the words wouldn’t come, he was useless, what was the point? His natural author’s feelings of presumption and unworthiness were intensified by the personal doubts and re-evaluations that his experiences had precipitated.

  But what he wrote was good. He had begun with a description of his blazing descent into the North Sea. At Dutton Homestall there was a volunteer nurse called Patricia Hollander with whom Hillary had become friendly. She knew Rache Lovat Dickson, an editor at the publishing house of Macmillan, and late one afternoon she took Hillary to see him in London. Despite the warning he had been given, Lovat Dickson was shocked by Hillary’s appearance. The March wind had flayed his skin and made his lidless eyes water. Pat Hollander explained that Hillary would like to read out the first chapter of his book.

  Lovat Dickson was horrified by the idea. A publisher did not work in this way. There should have been lunch at the Garrick first, then lunch with Hillary’s agent. The manuscript should have been completed, typed up, then delivered over another lunch, perhaps at an Italian restaurant in Soho. There then should have followed a few telephone calls from Hillary’s agent wondering whether Rache had yet had time to have a look at…

  Hillary just fixed him with his sore-eyed glare and read. Lovat Dickson was too fascinated by the skeletal hands that gripped the pages to be able to take in the words. When he did manage to concentrate he noticed that Hillary did not read well. A strange shyness made him flush, and this caused the weals of his bums to stand out. Somehow, beneath his horror both at Hillary’s appearance and at his series of publishing faux pas, Lovat Dickson managed to recognise that what he was listening to was ‘first-class reporting’. He told Hillary that many people could write, but that few had the perseverance to finish their books. If Hillary could write another half dozen chapters as good as the first, then they might do business. With such words had Lovat Dickson seen the last of many would-be writers in the past. Would Hillary be different?

  The condition of his hands made it difficult for him to write for long periods, so he tried dictating instead. The results seemed far from what he had set out to say. Faced with this impasse, he decided to do something else. He wanted to go to the United States and talk to the workers in aircraft factories that were supplying the RAF with planes. He thought it would be a good idea if he could ‘try to make something living out of the job of putting nuts and bolts into an airframe’. With the same directness with which he had approached Lovat Dickson, he this time presented himself to Duff Cooper and Sir Walter Monckton at the Ministry of Information. They decided to send him to America, subject to Air Ministry approval. He was officially attached to the Air Mission, so that his visit would not look like propaganda, and duly arrived on his mission to encourage the workers.

  The British Embassy in Washington, however, took one look at him and shuddered. Sir Gerald Campbell, the minister In charge of such matters, thought a speaking tour of women’s clubs of the Mid-West by such a badly mutilated man would prevent the United States from ever joining the Allied cause. He suggested that Hillary give some talks on the radio and perhaps publish them as a pamphlet. Hillary was upset by the thought that the face that had once lured young women to his bed would now determine the mothers of America against committing their sons to battle. He had come, in any case, not to address ladies’ luncheons but to speak to the factory workers; and surely, he argued with Sir Gerald, he could still manage that without frightening anyone. The chiefs of various aircraft companies in New York said they could smuggle him in and out of the factories with no publicity and no photographs. Hillary lobbied hard among British and American diplomats; with their support, he presented his case to the British Ambassador, Lord Halifax. Unfortunately Halifax had already been briefed by Sir Gerald Campbell and had himself commissioned a briefing of President Roosevelt, who replied that the whole enterprise was clearly a ‘psychological error’. Halifax told Hillary that he himself, of course, still had an open mind.

  Various official doors swung soundlessly shut. Hillary was flown to Boston with a view to having plastic surgery from a man called Quesanazian who unwisely told Hillary he had orders to keep him there. Hillary at once flew back to New York to try to prolong the debate. Eventually he was barred – apparently by both governments and their diplomatic representatives – from writing or broadcasting anything at all under his own name. He was allowed to write anonymous agency copy for the British Press Service for distribution to American newspapers, who were largely uninterested. Although the question of America’s involvement in the War was a matter of global importance and the subject of extremely delicate negotiation, the insensitivity with which Hillary was treated was by any standards remarkable.

  In these circumstances, with the pen clutched in his charred hand, he settled down again to write The Last Enemy. He was lent a room in which to work by the banker Edward Warburg and patiently scratched out his recollections of Oxford and his summer travels. He was writing a memoir, but he felt able to embellish, omit and invent. He later referred to the book as a ‘novel’, which it certainly was not. It was autobiography, shaped by a fair literary sense of what to include, what to dwell on and what to pass over. Its falsities were minor, its fidelity to the wider truth of his experience in the War was almost total.

  In July and August Hillary was allowed by the British and American governments to make four anonymous broadcasts. These were essentially readings from drafts of what was to become The Last Enemy. Hillary spoke with the accent of public school and Oxford, though not exaggeratedly so by the standards of the time; he still said ‘parachute’, for instance, rather than ‘perachute’. His voice was mournful and deep. What was shocking about it was that it could under no circumstances be identified as the voice of a man of twenty-two. The timbre, the inflection and the sheer weariness of it, preserved on tape, would make most listeners put its owner at nearer fifty. He performed well. His melancholy tone and his slightly soft V somehow helped to make the flying adventures sound more credible.

  In New York Hillary also met Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French author-pilot who was at this stage wondering how best to help the Free French. Saint-Exupéry was a shambling, clumsy man whose flying life had been marked by frequent crashes. He had gained popularity by his accounts of long-distance flight in the service of the French mail. His books combined lucid narrative with philosophical musing; and although the cause of the French colonial mail was scarcely as pressing as the defence of European freedom there was something genuinely heroic in this burly cavalier with his long nose and mournful, doglike eyes. Saint-Exupéry had just delivered a book called Pilote de Guerre, an account of his time in the French airforce during the fall of France, a subject that called for the philosophical resources of a Pascal. It was to be published i
n America under the rather plodding title Flight to Arras.

  Hilary was introduced to Saint-Exupéry by his translator, Lewis Galantière, who invited them to lunch together. Hillary appeared to think that the older man would patronise him, but Saint-Exupéry disarmed him with champagne and an offer to write a preface to his book. Galantière explained that in America there was no tradition of established writers introducing young talent in this way, and that the gesture might be misinterpreted, particularly since he was hoping that Hillary would be published by the same house as Saint-Exupéry.

  Michael Hillary believed Richard’s meeting with Saint-Exupéry was decisive in making his son decide to return to flying. There were certainly some highly suggestive passages in Flight to Arras: ‘What do I accomplish by risking my life in this mountain avalanche [ie the eponymous flight]? I have no notion. Time and again people would say to me, “I can arrange to have you transferred here or there. That is where you belong. You will be more useful there than in a squadron. Pilots! We can train pilots by the thousand! Whereas you-” No question but that they were right. My mind agreed with them, but my instinct always prevailed over my mind.’

  Or even more plainly: ‘I accept death. It is not danger that I accept. It is not combat that I accept. It is death. I have learnt a great truth. War is not the acceptance of danger. It is not the acceptance of combat. For the combatant it is at certain moments the pure and simple acceptance of death.’

  There were also many passages that exalted the nobility and danger of flying in comparison to the ‘barbarous dilapidation’ of life on earth. ‘Up here at any rate death is clean. A death of flame and ice! Of sun and sky and flame and ice. But below! That digestion stewing in slime…’

  In The Last Enemy Hillary was meanwhile writing: ‘The fighter pilot’s emotions are those of the duellist – cool, precise, impersonal. He is privileged to kill well. For if one must either kill or be killed, as now we must, it should, I feel, be done with dignity. Death should be given the setting it deserves; it should never be a pettiness; and for the fighter pilot it never can be.’ A death of flame and ice …