The Fatal Englishman (18 page)

If the RAF represented Britain in those two years, and if the fighter pilots were its epitome, there was a short time when the most emblematic of them all was Richard Hillary. His book about his experiences,
The Last Enemy
, was published in 1942 and struck some mysterious answering note in the British wartime mood. Christopher Wood’s stricken man on a parachute had found his powerful, symbolic hour.

It was fitting that the hero of the moment should be a twenty-one-year-old Australian with an ambivalent feeling about ‘English’ virtues. Hillary was born on 20 April 1919, in Sydney. His father Michael was a civil servant of Anglo-Irish descent; his mother Edwyna had Scottish and Spanish blood. Michael Hillary had served in India and Mesopotamia during the Great War, had won the DSO and was twice mentioned in dispatches. From 1921 to 1923 he was private secretary to the Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes. Then, when Richard was three, Michael Hillary was posted to Australia House in London. Richard lived the rest of his life in England and did not appear to think his Australian beginnings important. He was sent to boarding schools at an early age and adopted the manners they taught. He was too emotionally open to be regarded as typical, but he certainly viewed himself as English.

As a child he was pugnacious and self-assertive. He would hop about in a fury if he was denied, but soon afterwards he could laugh at himself. His nerves and emotions were close to the surface, and he was tiresomely quick-tempered. The loss of a game of tennis or beach cricket would mean a heavy fire of hurled
bats and rackets; the thwarting of any whim would mean tears and abuse. It was some compensation to his parents that he was doggedly truthful. When he had behaved badly he never sought to escape the blame; his father could recall no instance in his life in which he had shown less than complete dedication to the truth. Richard respected his father, but did not feel close to him. Michael Hillary was a friendly, hospitable man up to a point; but he had strict views on how things should be done. For warmth of emotional contact, Richard Hillary turned, like Christopher Wood, to his mother. Personal connections were her strong point: as a spiritualist she even believed in communication with the dead. She was a good-looking woman, mild-mannered and devoted, to the point of indulgence, to her hot-headed son. Photographs of Richard as a child show a plump, cheeky-looking boy with the confident look in the eye of one who will jump off the highest wall, take on the biggest bully and persecute those less brave than himself.

Michael Hillary’s visit to London preceded a permanent posting as Auditor-General in the Sudan, so the question of boarding, schools arose at once. The real separation came in September 1926 when Richard was seven and a half. Shortly before their departure for the Sudan his parents left him in the headmaster’s study at his preparatory school. The full implications of his abandonment somehow escaped the child until the moment when his mother leant down to kiss him goodbye. His skin turned crimson, his eyes shone, his jaw clamped tight. He watched his mother leave, but he did not cry. She had taught him to be a ‘man’.

He wrote to her in Khartoum, begging her to take him away. Mother and son had developed the rugged intimacy that was necessary in a relationship which had to survive separation for two-thirds of the year. When they were reunited Richard was too happy to worry about school: the last thing he wanted to do in the holidays was to trail round alternative places, to be shown down further brown corridors that smelled of loneliness and chalk and boiled dinners. He finished his time at the school; in the phrase employed in such cases, he ‘stuck it out’.

In 1931 he went to Shrewsbury, a public school in Shropshire,
where he took part enthusiastically in the traditional activities. At the age of fifteen he was taught English by a Mr McEachran, an inspiring teacher who, Hillary told listeners to an American broadcast in 1942, was the most important influence in his life. Richard told him that he wanted to be a writer when he grew up and that his model would be Steinbeck: McEachran encouraged him, and Richard read widely. He became a handsome and sexually precocious youth; he lost his virginity at the age of sixteen, a feat that was the subject of incredulous schoolboy envy.

In the school holidays he would go off to Europe on his own rather than visit his parents in Khartoum. His mother agreed only reluctantly to this arrangement, but it enabled Richard to learn French and German as well as to enlarge his sexual experience. He took what public school had to offer, but remained cantankerous and provocative. He had few friends at Shrewsbury where most of his contemporaries regarded him as aloof and unreliable; a kind of choric response developed at the mention of his name: ‘Oh, that shit Hillary.’

He became tediously argumentative and crudely personal in his comments; he refused to accept such concepts as ‘house loyalty’, and this made him unpopular. Although he was intellectually more mature than the other boys he was never chosen for any honours or teams. Forced by his parents’ absence to develop some self-sufficiency at an early age, he had allowed it to develop into an assumed superiority. His housemaster wrote: ‘He seemed to dislike the conventional views of things, often merely because they were conventional… He liked shocking people in a mild way.’ These were also the characteristics of the adult man: he was inclined to argue and strike attitudes, but he never had the intellectual curiosity or perhaps the capacity to develop coherent alternatives to the conventions he opposed.
The Last Enemy
was at times an angry and rebellious book, but in his deepest beliefs its author did not seriously differ from others of his age and occupation.

Hillary was none the less an inquisitive and intelligent boy, good enough at work to win a place at Trinity College, Oxford, where he went in October 1937. Trinity was a small and friendly
college whose spacious garden included a lime walk that dated from the eighteenth century. It was noted less for its scholars than for its sportsmen. Hillary said that the ethos of the college at the time was one of ‘alert philistinism’, though contemporaries in other colleges questioned the adjective. Trinity was often thought to be rather grander than it really was, perhaps out of confusion with Trinity, Cambridge. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby made this assumption when claiming that as an Oggsford man’ it was at Trinity that he had spent his undergraduate days – ‘I always carry a souvenir of my Oxford days. It was taken in Trinity quad – the man on my left is the Earl of Doncaster.’

Hillary’s main contribution to the college was as an oarsman. He had grown two inches since school, but his disruptive personality made him a tricky crew member: on one occasion he engaged in a fist fight with the bow man Derek Graham. He stroked the Trinity boat in his first year when it went to the Head of the River (came first in the college summer races). This achievement meant that he was considered for the university eight to row against Cambridge. He would not figure prominently among the twenty-five-year-old colonial postgraduates who make up the team today, but in 1938 a slightly-built natural athlete with a hangover could still do well.

Nearly all the young men at Trinity had been to public schools (Hillary claimed that they came from the ‘better’ public schools), where they had been well enough taught to be able to drift through three years at Oxford and still gain a respectable second-class degree. Hillary read history under the tutorship of Melville Paterson and Reggie Weaver, of whose teaching it was said that ‘Patters can’t and Reggie won’t’. The public school atmosphere of the college was carried into Oxford life: it was considered unacceptable to be different or unconventional in any way. Displays of learning were as suspect as suede shoes or beards. This sense of cohesiveness or uniformity was enforced by the enormous number of clubs and societies which offered an even tighter bonding and even stricter elimination of the ‘peculiar’.

Societies, however, usually have a defensive purpose, and what Hillary and his friends wished to protect themselves against
was the bungling and bureaucracy of politics. They knew that a war was coming, but they wanted to fight it on their own terms. It had been made inevitable by the low calibre of the 1930s politicians throughout Europe, who had fudged, postponed and appeased; but when it came to the action, Hillary’s generation wanted it to be swift, clear and, as far as possible, undisciplined. There was little sense of idealism in their attitude and none at all of ideology.

A University Air Squadron offered training at the Government’s expense: Hillary learned to fly on Tiger Moths at an airfield outside Oxford. Members of the squadron regarded students who did artillery or infantry exercises with the Officers Training Corps as absurdly solemn. Although he stressed how uninterested he was in politics, Hillary was scornful of left-wing undergraduates who had fallen under the influence of the Auden group. Such people, he thought, despised the middle classes from whom they received their education, but could not gain entrance to the world of labour they admired. They were thus useless. Hillary’s criticism of them was less a political than a practical one: their beliefs, he reasoned, had rendered them incapable of participating. It seems curious that Hillary was able to overlook so completely the Spanish Civil War, in which many such men had found redeeming action and even death. He must have been aware of the participation of George Orwell and Stephen Spender in Spain, and of the death of others, such as John Cornford. The French writer Andre Malraux, despite his lack of flying experience, raised a squadron for the Republicans. The Prime Minister Léon Blum was unable to supply planes officially because he needed Britain’s continuing support against the Germans, and Britain was fastidiously neutral in Spain on the grounds that the ‘Bolshevists’ were as bad as the Fascists. However, Blum managed to allow some planes to find their way, unarmed, over the Pyrenees, for the use of Malraux, who lobbed out bombs by hand on to Franco’s forces, who were using planes supplied by Hitler.

In
The Last Enemy
Hillary condensed the left-wing position in a pacifist figure called David Rutter. Although the name of Rutter appears on no university lists, he appears to have been a real
person whom Hillary wished to protect, by changing his name, from public disapproval. In a dialogue with Rutter Hillary clearly stated his own reasons for fighting in the RAF: ‘In the first place I shall get paid and have good food. Secondly, I have none of your sentiments about killing, much as I admire them. In a fighter plane, I believe, we have found a way to return to war as it ought to be, war which is individual combat between two people, in which one either kills or is killed. It’s exciting, it’s individual and it’s disinterested. I shan’t be sitting behind a long-range gun working out how to kill people sixty miles away. I shan’t get maimed: either I shall get killed or I shall get a few pleasant putty medals and enjoy being stared at in a night club.’

His idea of what war ought
not
to be was based on the Western Front, with its long-range artillery bombardments and mass, anonymous slaughters. War in the air would be ‘exciting, individual and disinterested’, by the last of which he meant free from ideological or institutionalised motive.

He was right about killing or being killed, wrong about not being maimed.

Hillary had matured considerably since leaving Shrewsbury. Straightforward young Trinity men like Sammy Stockton and Frank Waldron no longer considered him a ‘shit’ but were in awe of his charm, sophistication and physical daring. On one occasion he climbed out of the window of a second-floor room in Garden Quad and inched his way along a narrow ledge to the amazed protest of friends on the ground. He liked to test his courage because he was aware of his limitations.

On various excursions to London he impressed his friends with his precocious
savoir-vivre.
He favoured a club in Beak Street called the Bag o’ Nails, where a bored-looking band played shuffling music while girls smooched up to half-cut customers at dimly lit tables. While Hillary’s friends, in varying degrees of embarrassment and virginity, managed only to buy warm, overpriced champagne, Hillary always contrived to leave with the best-looking girl. They suspected that with Hillary she even ‘did it’ for free. The others left with empty pockets and nothing to
take home but the cheery call of Millie, the owner, to ‘remember the dear old Bag’.

In Oxford Hillary joined the staff of the university magazine
Isis.
His father was anxious that he should follow him into the colonial service, and as a compromise Hillary modified his declared ambition from ‘writer’ to ‘journalist’. To this end he spent more time on
Isis
and neglected his rowing. He was consequently dropped from the Trinity first eight, though this did not prevent him setting off for Germany in July 1938 to take part in a regatta.

By describing themselves as an Oxford University crew, Hillary and Frank Waldron had persuaded the German and Hungarian governments to pay for ten of them to travel to Bad Ems in Germany and thence to Budapest. They suffered the usual fate of sporting students on an overseas trip; their exuberant drinking was encouraged by hosts anxious to see their own teams do well. The competitive atmosphere was intensified and soured by Nazi pride. A local coach found them an almost watertight boat, though they did no practice. A number of well-muscled Aryan youths sneered at them before the race, and a misunderstanding over starting orders meant that they set off some way behind five German crews. Halfway up the course someone spat on the Oxford boat from a bridge, and this apparently provided the necessary spur to their performance. They stormed up the last part of the course to win the General Goering cup by two-fifths of a second. It was not a popular win.

In Budapest two days later, the team was sabotaged by dastardly Hungarians, who filled them with wine and goulash and made them row three times in the heat of the day. The triumph of B ad Ems could not be repeated: Sammy Stockton, the man who had stroked them to victory in Germany, failed to stay the course. Defeat went down well with their hosts, however, who had a further explanation of why the ‘Oxford University Team’ had lost: a cartoon in a local paper showed eight men in a boat looking over their shoulder at a naked girl in a skiff.