The Fatal Englishman (28 page)

Richard Hillary was typical of the intellectual who becomes a fighter pilot. That in itself sounds formidable enough, because the qualities of both must produce in a man obsessively strong traits of individuality. By the time he arrived at Bentley the whole force and expression of his character had become excessively individualistic. It was known that he was exceptionally talented and highly-strung. That was clear enough from a reading of his remarkable book … There was some devil goading him on which none of us could understand. He never spoke about it, but the result of that goading was to be seen in his manner. From the moment he arrived at my Headquarters he started nagging at everybody about being allowed to return to operational flying. He had been through a hard and trying time, and many people went out of their way to help him; but Hillary simply could not reconcile himself to having to stay on the ground. He spoke to me several times about getting back to flying, and each time I told him that I simply could not recommend it. But he kept pestering me, and in the end I gave in with a rather foolish suggestion.

‘If you can get the doctors to pass you,’ I told him, ‘you can go back on ops.’

I said that because I felt certain that the doctors would never pass him fit for any sort of operational flying. But I had not counted on Hillary’s pertinacity and persuasiveness.

So, in order to rid himself of Hillary’s attentions, Douglas passed the decision on to someone else. It was similar to the way in which McIndoe had finally yielded. Other people who talked to Hillary at the time also tried to dissuade him from flying again, but in the end they tended to give way both to the force of Hillary’s personality and to a feeling that a man should, after all the arguments have been put to him, be allowed to decide the shape of his own destiny.

Eric Linklater, a writer whom Hillary had met through Lovat Dickson, described the process: ‘I was one who tried to make him change his mind. I was alternately rough and plausible. I wanted to keep him out of the sky and make him earthbound. And then, one evening, I was frightened that I might succeed; and said no more … I remember very clearly the night when I discovered that I could try no more to dislodge him from his resolution for fear that happened. In his character – in his mind, his spirit, his personality – there was a quality like something with a sharpened edge and a fine surface, and I was suddenly frightened that my argument would dull the edge or tarnish the surface. And that is the sober truth of it.’

This sophisticated, almost existential, argument seems, curiously enough, to have been accepted by most of Hillary’s friends. Their regard for him extended to allowing him into danger.

On 21 July 1942 Richard Hillary was back in the air. He flew a light aircraft – all that he was permitted – on a mission to collect
material for the Order book, and in the course of it came across his old friend Raspberry – now Squadron Leader Berry. Within a week or so he was flying Spitfires again, though he was aware that he would not be able to handle the plane in battle. He flew sixty hours in single-engined fighters, some with the tacit connivance of his superiors and some without. In the late summer he was in touch with Max Aitken, whom he had met in 1939, and who had become one of the toughest and most successful fighter pilots in the RAF. Aitken told Hillary that if he could pass his medical and complete the necessary training, he was prepared to accept him into his night-fighter squadron.

As Hillary built up his strength and his defences for his next encounter with the Medical Board, there were a number of literary activities to occupy him. He wrote a script for a propaganda film about the work of the Margate lifeboat and did a radio broadcast for the BBC, which was chiefly a reworking of passages from
The Last Enemy.
He was a good publicist for his own book, and spoke stirringly at a Foyle’s lunch about the nature of fascism. Lovat Dickson commented that ‘Everything which he touched seemed suddenly to reflect the light of publicity on him, when what he wanted was the quietness and security of the shadows.’ Lovat Dickson was working closely with him at this time, but his view does not coincide with Eric Linklater’s opinion that Hillary was ‘fertile of stratagem and device to make [the book] more widely known and numerously read’. And while part of Hillary was certainly looking for quietness and security, his confused search seldom took him close to the ‘shadows’.

Where it did take him was to the painter Eric Kennington, to whom he was introduced by Eric Linklater. Hillary was ecstatic about his new friend. He wrote to Mary Booker: ‘I have quite lost my heart to Kennington. He has the most extraordinary personal magnetism of anyone I have met – a great man I think. Certainly his sculpture of Lawrence is a masterpiece. His farm is so restful, that I feel the life in me stirring and the writing is beginning to come.

‘I return tomorrow until Thursday to sit for him. He is no longer with the RAF, so it must be a private arrangement…
Now I really shall have something to leave you. As soon as it is done, I will make my will and set my family’s mind at rest.’

Hillary’s letter crossed with one from Mary terminating their affair. She felt he had become too remote and too self-interested; the strain of being continually separated from someone who in any case seemed more concerned for himself than for her had become too much to bear. She marked the date in her engagement diary: ‘Dismissal R.H.’ and asked if they could still be friends.

Hillary accepted that she was right. ‘I must give all of myself or nothing,’ he wrote. The circumstances of their separation and his own increasingly desperate quest to understand what he should do next meant that he could not give all of himself; it had therefore to be nothing. Some of Hillary’s friends had remarked that Mary Booker was not only old enough to be his mother, she was almost exactly the same age as Edwyna Hillary. Whatever the peculiar needs of each party, both behaved with dignity at the end of the affair.

The emotional void in Hillary’s life was largely filled by his friendship with Eric Kennington and by his reading of T.E. Lawrence. Kennington had been one of Lawrence’s closest friends and had done an admired portrait of him. He had illustrated
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
and shared much of Lawrence’s outlook on life, particularly his ideas about heroism. Kennington allowed Hillary to read a privately circulated copy of Lawrence’s book
The Mint
, which was, on Lawrence’s instructions, not to be published before 1950, when the people who might be offended by his uncompromising portraits would presumably be dead. The book tells of Lawrence’s flight from fame, in 1922 and his enlistment in the ranks of the RAF at Uxbridge. He felt that the wealth and glory that had come to him from his Arabian adventures had in some way corrupted him and set him apart from ‘humanity’; in a confused but passionate gesture of fraternity he tried an ‘inclination towards ground level’ in an attempt to ‘make myself more human’. Among the Ordinary Aircraftmen Second Class, or ‘erks’ as they called themselves, of RAF Uxbridge Lawrence purged his soul. Richard Hillary, who had less far to descend, but who felt a similar
confusion about the ‘responsibilities of the man who is left’ and had seen it compounded by a vague feeling of guilt at the success of
The Last Enemy
, responded wholeheartedly to Lawrence’s extraordinary book.

The Mint
was written in note form in the barracks at night and Lawrence never gave it a gloss of fluency. The result, with its largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, occasional alliteration and frequent absence of articles, sometimes sounds like a Middle English poem crossed with the Henry Green of
Living.
The effective plainness of style is complicated by murmurs of homosexual masochism. Lawrence’s attitude to his colleagues is inconsistent, as was Hillary’s. In one striking sequence Lawrence weeps in the back of a lorry that is taking him and a squad of twelve on a fatigue to a neighbouring aerodrome. ‘I was trying to think, if I was happy, why I was happy, and what was this overwhelming sense upon me of having got home, at last, after an interminable journey … word-dandling and looking inward, instead of swaying upright in the lorry with my pals, and yelling Rah Rah at all we met, in excess of life. With my fellows, yes; and
among
my fellows: but a fellow myself? Only when in concert we obeyed some physical movement, whose pattern could momently absorb my mind.’

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.