The Fatal Englishman (32 page)

Denise Maxwell-Woosnam was among those who agreed with him, and encouraged him to return to action. Admittedly she and his other friends did not realise how heavy the planes would be, how badly serviced, and how lethally dangerous; but in the general matter of the question of whether to fly or not to fly, they were not, like Arthur Koestler, perplexed. Mary Booker did not try to prevent him. Eric Linklater shied away at the moment he thought he might dissuade him.

At the end of
The Mint
Lawrence gave a lyrical evocation of the joys of service life. It takes away the anguish of individual responsibility; it removes the doubts and questions that can plague a man:

Service life in this way teaches a man to live largely on little. We belong to a big thing, which will exist for ever and ever in unnumbered generations of standard airmen, like ourselves. Our outward sameness of dress and type remind us of that… As we gain attachment, so we strip ourselves of personality.

Lawrence talks of a lazy afternoon in the sun, in the mouth of an open hangar and concludes:

Such moments of absorption resolve the mail and plate of our personality back into the carbo-hydrate elements of being. They come to service men very often, because of our light surrender to the good or evil of the moment.

Airmen have few possessions, few ties, little daily care. For me, duty now orders only the brightness of the five buttons down my front… In the summer we are easily the sun’s. In winter we struggle undefended along the roadway, and the rain and wind chivy us, till soon we are wind and rain. We race over in the first dawn to the College’s translucent swimming pool, and dive into the elastic water which fits our bodies closely as a skin – and we belong to that too. Everywhere a relationship: no loneliness any more.

No loneliness any more. In some ways going back was easier for Richard Hillary than staying out.

Michael and Edwyna Hillary formed a trust, based at Trinity College Oxford, to keep the memory of their only child alive. They became close to Mary Booker, who sent flowers each year on the anniversary of Richard’s death, as Winifred Reitlinger remembered Kit Wood to his mother. Michael Hillary refused to appear in a radio programme about Richard because Arthur Koestler had also been invited and he believed Koestler was responsible for having started the suicide/murder theory. Mary Booker eventually married Michael Burn, a writer and journalist. She died in 1974, and in 1988 Burn published a selection of her letters to Hillary and his to her, which he found in a leather-bound album with a brass lock in the boxroom of their house. Mary had written out some lines from Swinburne as a preface:

They gave him light in his eyes
And love, and a space for delight,
And beauty, and length of days,
And night, and sleep in the night.

Richard Hillary is remembered by those of his friends who are still living. They feel uneasy with the literary process that tried to make a symbolic figure of him in the years after his death. As time has passed the mythic encrustations have largely fallen away, and people are left with a memory of someone very individual, very forceful and very young.
The Last Enemy is
out of print, but it has survived in the culture because it has, in Koestler’s brilliant phrase, ‘specific weight’.

Denise Maxwell-Woosnam overcame her grief at the death of Peter Pease and married happily. She is well, untroubled in her faith, and still lives in England. She remembers Richard Hillary and his kindness to her.

Brian Carbury became one of the greatest fighter-pilots of the Battle of Britain, recording fifteen and a half kills between July and October 1940, including five Me-109’s in a single day.

Archie McIndoe was knighted for his services to plastic surgery. In 1950 he declared that he would divorce his wife and
marry Jill Mullins, but changed his mind at the last moment. The second Lady McIndoe turned out to be a widow he met while waiting for the divorce to come through. Jill Mullins’s long wait was disappointed.

Shortly after VE Day two German doctors went to visit the hospital at East Grinstead. They had heard of McIndoe from German prisoners who had been treated by Red Cross doctors using his techniques.

The German doctors were allowed into the surgery one morning when McIndoe was about to operate on a particularly mutilated Czech pilot called Frankie Truhlar. McIndoe spent slightly longer than usual washing up, then went into the theatre where Truhlar, already anaesthetised, lay covered in green towels.

Instead of picking up the scalpel, McIndoe ripped back the towels that covered Truhlar’s ravaged face and legs. ‘This,’ he said, rounding on the German doctors, ‘is what your war has done.’ The two men left in silence.

Compared to Truhlar or Edmonds, Richard Hillary was not so very badly burned; but he was only twenty-three when he died, and he spoke like an old man.

Jeremy Wolfenden

I
n 1965 A.J.P. Taylor completed Volume XV of
The Oxford History of England
, which was later published separately as
English History 1914-1945.
It was a caustic, sometimes mocking account of the little men who had mismanaged a small island and a large empire. Yet it ended on a note that was all the more curious for the fact that is so clearly took Taylor himself by surprise:

In the Second World War the British people came of age. This was a people’s war. Not only were their needs considered. They themselves wanted to win. Future historians may see the war as a last struggle for the European balance of power or for the maintenance of Empire. [They did.] This was not how it appeared to those who lived through it. The British people had set out at all costs to destroy Hider and National Socialism – ‘Victory at all costs’. They succeeded. No English soldier who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade. The British were the only people who went through both world wars from beginning to end. Yet they remained a peaceful and civilized people, tolerant, patient, and generous. Traditional values lost much of their force. Other values took their place. Imperial greatness was on the way out; the welfare state was on the way in. The British empire declined; the condition of the people improved. Few now sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Few even sang ‘England Arise’. England had arisen all the same.

The surprise was caused by the fact that nothing in Taylor’s narrative to 1939 had supposed England capable of acting in such a way and nothing he had seen since had led him to believe it capable of continuing.

Taylor was a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and it was
behind its fancy white crenellations that the peculiar story of Jeremy Wolfenden was fomented and begun. It started in provincial pride and glory and ended with suspicious death, far from home, and an ill-tempered visit to the college by the gentlemen of the Secret Intelligence Service.

In the 1930s Magdalen had set its course to the Left and determined to lose its reputation as a finishing school for aristocrats and to compete with the most intellectually accomplished colleges. Its star fellows were Taylor and Bruce McFarlane in history, Peter Medawar in science, the philosopher J.L. Austin and, in English, C.S. Lewis. A significant recruit to the cause was a young man called Jack Wolfenden.

Born in 1906, he was the son of an education official at the County Hall in Wakefield, Yorkshire. He was a brilliant product of Chapel and grammar school, a walking vindication of the uses of literacy. He had Yorkshire roots, a trace of Southern swank after a childhood stay in Swindon, and a hard, competitive character. Greek and Latin were the only subjects that counted for scholarship boys, and in due course Jack Wolfenden was entered for the awards offered by Queen’s College, Oxford. On a wet and windy night Alfred John Spilsbury, the headmaster of Wakefield Grammar School, tramped to the Wolfendens’ modest house to tell them their Jack had won a scholarship.

‘My parents,’ he recalled, ‘did not say much, that night or ever. We were, after all, taciturn Yorkshire folk, not given to facile expression of our feelings. In fact, the deeper the feelings, the less they were spoken. There might be a momentary trembling of a lip, or a sudden start of tears to the eye, or a quick pressure of the hand; but there were very few words, either in joy or in sorrow.’

Jack Wolfenden read classics, or ‘Greats’, as they were called at Oxford. In his third year he started to have tutorials in philosophy from T.D. Weldon in Magdalen. Weldon, known as ‘Harry’ after a music-hall comedian, was a defensive, hard-shelled, lonely man, afraid of betraying anything that might be construed as ‘weakness’, or even feeling. He was also terrified of women. Under Weldon’s tutelage at Oxford, Jack Wolfenden listened to Wagner, read widely and worked hard. He believed that, since he had taken a catastrophic second in Mods, the first
part of his degree, he was destined for a life of schoolmastering. Then Weldon made him a surprising offer. In 1928 Oxford was starting a new course called Modern Greats, or PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics). Such was the demand for it that Weldon believed Magdalen would need another philosophy don in addition to himself. He offered the job to Jack Wolfenden on condition that he got a First in Greats. The First, after immense toil, was achieved, and, following a year in Princeton, Jack Wolfenden became a don at Magdalen in 1929. In 1932 he married Eileen, second daughter of A.J. Spilsbury of Wakefield GS, who had made the rainy trip with news of his Oxford scholarship. When their boy Jeremy was born in 1934, Harry Weldon became his godfather.

Jeremy Wolfenden was born seven weeks early, on his father’s birthday, 26 June. Haruspicators after the event could delight in both these facts: the precociousness and the father’s shadow. Jack had left Magdalen to become headmaster of Uppingham at the amazing age of twenty-eight. Jeremy was the first baby born in School House for fifty years. Masters and boys who had thought it indelicate even to notice Eileen Wolfenden’s pregnancy could now happily pay court to the little boy. He was everything the earnestly over-achieving Jack Wolfenden might have wanted: a boy, a charming boy, an instantly and prodigiously clever boy.

At two years old he could pick out the letters of the alphabet; at three he could do the same in Greek; at four he could read fluently. In the summer of 1939, aged five, he would get up early to make a start on the Child’s Encyclopaedia. Strange words appeared in his conversation, which turned out to be the phonetically-pronounced trophies of his reading. He didn’t like it when his parents laughed affectionately; he considered that to be
annoying.
His cousin Sally Hinchliff was evacuated from Dover, where her father was a doctor, and came to stay at Uppingham. Her mother Clytie was Eileen Wolfenden’s sister, and Sally was a child almost as prodigious as her cousin Jeremy. Each developed a fantasy world with a secret language; but then, unusually, they fused them into one. During the War they would lie in bed giving
imaginary wireless reports, from Jupiter, in Jeremy’s case, from the Middle of Nothing Land in Sally’s. They could talk to one another in such a way that no one else could understand. They might have been twins.

Jeremy was a difficult child to bring up and was more advanced in some ways than others. The constant presence of a nanny protected him from some of the practical demands of life; he would never, for instance, answer the telephone. Every day after tea he came down from the nursery to play with his parents. They were old-fashioned provincial Yorkshire people. Jack Wolfenden remained an ascetic, unsophisticated man: he had a good mechanical brain, but little imaginative flair; the outstanding periods of his distinguished public life were as a quasi-civil servant when he became head of the University Grants Committee and of the British Museum. As a teacher he tended to the Gradgrindian: ‘Look it up,’ was his favourite advice to children and pupils. He was morbidly frightened of emotion, a failing that his friends put down to shyness. He was too busy to be personally involved with his children’s upbringing; his wife believed he was more like an uncle than a father, making friendly but irregular excursions from the smoky atmosphere of his study. Photographs show him looking lean and active: on a hiking holiday he is wearing British Empire shorts and long socks, peering eagerly at the map, mouth clenched round a bough of briar. Even as he sits reading in a deckchair, his spectacles give off an air of twinkling urgency.

Eileen Wolfenden was equally old-fashioned, though in the manner thought more appropriate to a mother. She was content for the nanny to look after her children by day, but was keen to direct Jeremy’s reading. She introduced him to books of the Greek legends and amused him by drawing the heroes from the stories. She was a warm and imaginative mother when she had charge of her children; she was good at finding ways to keep Jeremy occupied.