The Fatal Englishman (26 page)

He was clawing something back from the flames.

Meanwhile, Hillary’s attractiveness to women began to return. He lacked his old beauty, but not the old manner. If there was an element of pity or concern in their attentions, that made no difference to the way in which it was expressed. At a party given by his publisher he was introduced to Merle Oberon, then at the considerable height of her fame as an actress following her role as Cathy in Alexander Korda’s film of
Wuthering Heights.
She was an emotionally volatile woman whose two-year-old marriage to Korda had done nothing to stabilise her. She had herself been disfigured in a car crash, though had regained her looks almost completely; when she first saw Richard Hillary she felt a passionate bond with him. Her publicity agent Tessa Michaels reportedly said that Hillary excited a protective feeling in Merle
Oberon: she believed she could reignite his passive sexual self-confidence. Just how dormant that side of him had been is open to question: he had mentioned in passing that he sometimes feared women only wanted to sleep with him for the perverse pleasure of feeling his clawed hands. This argues that, for whatever reason, he had already had lovers since his crash. In any event, the affair with Merle Oberon was relatively light-hearted; it took his mind off his humiliation by the British Embassy and gave him relief from the rigours of writing.

Merle Oberon was of Eurasian origin, though she became engaged, with Alexander Korda and various studio publicity hacks, in elaborate attempts to conceal her beginnings. They pretended she was originally Tasmanian, and this led to farcical and unhappy scenes when she was required to open a Merle Oberon memorial theatre in her ‘native’ island. She had shuttled from one lover to another in the belief that the latest would provide her with the love and rootedness she lacked. She was hopelessly fickle and studiously indecisive, but she was a very beautiful and charming woman and there is no reason to think that her affair with Richard Hillary brought him anything other than pleasure. It was certainly better than being stuck in the soupy air of Ward Three.

It came to a natural end when Hillary returned to London in October 1941. In his briefcase were the proofs of what the American publishers called
Falling Through Space.
He went to see Rache Lovat Dickson at Macmillan’s one evening, just as the office was closing. Lovat Dickson was again shocked by Hillary’s failure to understand how things were ‘done’. He made excuses about shutting up the office and getting off home while Hillary sat hunched up in his greatcoat, watching him with an ironic smile.

‘You told me to come back when I’d finished the book,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ve done it. Here it is.’

Lovat Dickson was astounded. To have written the book so quickly and to have found an American publisher… this was not at all what was supposed to happen. English writers should be published in London first, and their English publishers might
help them to find an American publisher in due course, but that should take time, and usually never happened at all.

‘Saint-Exupéry read it in America and liked it’, said Hillary. ‘I hope you like it too. Telephone me when you’ve read it.’

He waved Lovat Dickson goodbye and sauntered off into the dark evening.

Lovat Dickson liked it all right. Although he told the story against himself of how Hillary had twice confounded him, he was a perfectly competent publisher. When he read the bundle of dog-eared galley proofs he believed that he was holding a book that not only contained outstanding accounts of action but also in some way captured the feelings of a generation.

He was proved right.
The Last Enemy
rapidly acquired the peculiar aura of a book that says something vital, whose importance goes beyond what it literally describes. In the years since Hillary’s death its reputation has remained high. Though minor compared to the great prose memoirs of the First World War, it has succeeded in holding its own as a book whose passionate reporting no internal shortcomings and no change of fashion can devalue. It became, and has remained, a ‘classic’ in the sense that, whatever its failings, it has something to say about flying, about the War and about people’s attitudes to the War, that will always need to be read as long as interest in the subjects themselves continues.

So what did Richard Hillary put into
The Last Enemy?
He began with an account of the events of 3 September 1940, the day of his crash. Quaintly titled ‘Proem’, this flashback was the part he read to Lovat Dickson at their first meeting. It is arguably the best sequence in the book. It reveals at once Hillary’s strengths as a writer: the ability to describe action in a clear, laconic, but not affectedly laconic, style; an ease and charm in first person narrative that is unusual in a writer of any age; and a modest reticence about his own sufferings which neither obscures them nor descends to a merely dismissive stoicism.

He leaves himself unconscious in Margate hospital and begins the narrative proper with his arrival at Oxford. He describes the ‘alert philistinism’ of Trinity and gives a very rapid sketch of the left-wing and anti-war positions. It is not presented as an
argument but as a first person memoir; his purpose is merely to describe what he and his friends felt – which turns out to be not much: ‘We were disillusioned and spoiled.’ Hillary welcomed the fact that the War would solve his problems over choosing a career; as a fighter pilot he would find ‘a concentration of amusement, fear, and exaltation which it would be impossible to experience in any other form of existence.’ The War itself would give to him and his friends a chance to prove that their ‘effete veneer was not as deep as our dislike of interference … that, undisciplined though we might be, we were a match for Hitler’s dogma-fed youth.’ Although he wrote about himself, Hillary stressed that he believed he ‘differed little in essentials from the majority of young men with a similar education.’

The second chapter describes training in Scotland and the third the move to Old Sarum. Hillary devotes a good deal of space to his various friends and their out-of-hours exploits. Though trivial in themselves, they have a poignancy lent by the knowledge that the War is about to begin in earnest. From the moment he climbs into a Spitfire, Hillary’s writing recaptures the verve and tautness of the opening ‘Proem’. He is much better when describing flying than when recreating late-night conversations.

Chapter Four is called ‘The World of Peter Pease’ and indulges the less interesting aspect of Hillary’s writing. His feelings for Pease are hard for the reader to share when the descriptions that Hillary offers to justify them make Pease out to have been no more than a kind and thoughtful man. Hillary’s passion for him is puzzling, unless you believe either that he was in love with him or that he is at this stage withholding – consciously or otherwise – many of his own doubts and worries from the narrative. His long recreated conversations with Pease are laboured and unconvincing: the intellectual content is not sufficient to justify their inclusion at such length. Where Hillary does much better is in his descriptions of life on the station at Montrose, and in his brief accounts of his fellow-pilots, such as Brian Carbury, Hugh Stapleton and Pilot Officer Berry (he gives Berry no Christian name). Hillary is pleased that he is able to mix with what he calls ‘the Carburys and Berrys’ – men, in other words, of an inferior social class; and his appreciation of them, which becomes more
marked as the book progresses, is touched with an unconsciously comic snobbery. This is one of those tricks that hindsight plays; all writers suffer from the changed orthodoxies of later generations: the bomber pilot Guy Gibson, for instance, meant no harm by calling his black Labrador ‘Nigger’. Hillary’s terse affection for his fellow-pilots would not have seemed patronising in 1941 and remains, in context, one of the most touching qualities of his book.

Chapter Five sees Hillary at Hornchurch during the Battle of Britain and contains the best passages of writing about flying. In Chapter Six he rejoins himself where he had finished in the ‘Proem’. The second part of the book tells of his time in hospital and gradual recovery up to the episode with the attempted rescue of the woman from the bombed house.

In his hospital chapters Hillary exhibits the same attitude towards his own injuries that he had successfully used in the opening. It is not much more than a tone of voice, but it successfully enables him to give detailed descriptions of the surgical processes as well as following his own reactions to it. He is frequently in pain, sometimes in despair, and does not mind admitting it. His occasional weakness effectively highlights his habitual resilience. His sympathy for other victims is done without sentimentality; the truculent, questioning side of his own character is helpful to him in viewing these other wounded men: his continual puzzling over why and how they manage is more affecting than straightforward pity. The arrival of Denise Maxwell-Woosnan at his bedside has great dramatic force, though less for what Hillary says than for what the reader (rightly or wrongly) infers – that under the guise of comforting her he is falling in love with his best friend’s fiancée. The conversations with Denise that Hillary actually recreates or invents, have the same rhetorical, dead quality as those with Peter Pease.

The next two chapters, ‘The Beauty Shop’ and ‘The Last of the Long-Haired Boys’, became deservedly famous. They deal with McIndoe’s work in the hospital and with Hillary’s own progress through operations, mastoid infection and the continuing news of other squadron deaths. He remains complaining, awkward, sometimes bitter, and this attitude continually saves the book
from becoming an example of the Our Island Fortress’ propaganda he deplored. Yet the agony suffered by Hillary and
the
other patients, particularly during the mastoid episode, is movingly evoked. Hillary’s prose is essentially one of action; it is not much suited to the mimetic falsities of ‘realistic’ dialogue and becomes incoherent when faced with abstractions. However, in the East Grinstead chapters his writing proves more flexible than one might have expected, and he successfully integrates his own psychological development into the action.

The last chapter is ‘I See They Got You Too’. Here Hillary’s technique fails him, and the book ends with a series of rhetorical declarations which lack the authenticity of the descriptive chapters. The problem comes with the moment of enlightenment, when he believes that the scales of self-delusion have fallen from his eyes. ‘With awful clarity I saw myself suddenly as I was. Great God, that I could have been so arrogant!’

It is almost always embarrassing when a writer invites you to join in such epiphanies. While you may accept his criticism of his earlier self, the concomitant invitation – to believe that he is now remade, enlightened and beyond criticism – is less easy to take. In Hillary’s case, it is hard to believe in his version of either side of the volte-face. Although he has certainly been arrogant and selfish, he has also shown admirable qualities of stoicism and, like all the pilots, a dazzling indifference to his own fate. If he has grumbled a little in hospital, that has endearingly reduced him to a human scale with which we can more easily identify. It seems quite wrong for him to reject so floridly all he has been. Worse than this, we suspect that he is himself not sincere in his repudiation.

The change that took place in Richard Hillary does not seem to have been a sudden revelation, experienced in the psychological and, at times, almost spiritual terms he describes. On the contrary, the change was gradual. And, although his grief at his own disfigurement and the deaths of his friends may have provided the emotional triggers, the change was ultimately an intellectual one. It was a change of conviction: he came to believe that the War was not only worth fighting but was an historic emergency with universal moral implications.

Hillary himself put it clearly in a letter: ‘I got so sick of the stuff about our Island Fortress and the Knights of the Air that I determined to write it anyway in the hope that the last generation might realise that while stupid, we were not that stupid, that we could remember only too well that all this had been seen in the last war but that in spite of that and not because of it, we still thought this one worth fighting.’

In the last paragraph of
The Last Enemy
, he put the point more floridly and added a note of personal emotion. Beneath this, however, it is recognisably the same point: ‘If I could do this thing, just tell a little of the lives of these men, I would have justified, at least in some measure, my right to fellowship with my dead, and to the friendship of those with courage and steadfastness who were still living and who would go on fighting until the ideals for which their comrades had died were stamped for ever on the future of civilisation.’

The odd word in that sentence is ‘my’, in the phrase ‘my dead’. Much speculation has swirled about the last year of Richard Hillary’s life, and it hangs heavy over his insistence on returning, against medical advice, to flying operations. But if one bears in mind the words that Hillary had written and published, and in particular the phrase ‘my dead’, then his motivation is not so very puzzling after all.

Hillary’s own view of his book is preserved in a letter he wrote to Rache Lovat Dickson on 24 December 1941, accepting the invitation to write the jacket notes or ‘blurb’. Publishers commonly ask authors to do this: it saves them time and the possible embarrassment of making clear, if they write the blurb themselves, how completely they have misunderstood the author’s intentions.

Dear Lovat Dickson,

Taking you at your word and casting shame to the winds, I enclose the following blurb which you can cut and minimise to your heart’s content.

‘RH
is
a young man at Oxford at the outbreak of war. He had hoped eventually to become a foreign correspondent, an ambition which everybody reading this book will have no doubt that he will achieve. This is his first book and with it he has set himself a high standard, but one which he will doubtless maintain. Here is a writer who happened to be a pilot, not a pilot who happened to write a book. It is no mere record of fighting experience; it tells not only how but why the youth of this country went to war, tracing with an ease and clarity of style that is admirable the transition from a left-wing Oxford egocentricity to a spirit which from August to October last year drove the enemy from these shores.