The Fatal Englishman (23 page)

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 patients 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.

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 groans 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.