The Fatal Englishman (24 page)

Next to the bath, in a curtained-off section of her own, was a girl of fifteen who had been terribly burned by boiling sugar in a factory. She was in with the men because she could not be moved too far from the saline bath, but however gently the nurses handled her, she always screamed. A degree of tension affected the others every evening as her bath-time approached.

Most of the men in Ward Three were the age of students. They had helped to win the Battle of Britain, but were now so mentally and physically damaged that they found it difficult to believe they had any life worth living. Among them moved the strange figure of McIndoe in his threadbare sports jacket and baggy flannels, and they came to idolise him. His insistence on civilian clothes and laxity of manner was a relief after the rigours of the service; his brusqueness was as close to sympathy as they could bear. They were facing the prospect of ten, twenty, or in some cases as many as forty, further operations, each one excruciating in its way. McIndoe was forty-one at this time, old enough to be the father of most of what he called his ‘guinea-pigs’. They called him Archie, and he didn’t seem to mind; he himself spoke in exactly the same way to visiting dignitaries as to the junior
porters. He shuttled between the beds on his short legs with Jill Mullins at his elbow taking notes. A little way behind would be John Hunter, who usually had a number of complicated bets to settle with patients. The idea was that he would buy them a drink if they had felt sick after his anaesthetic, but these wagers were more a matter of honour since he always bought the drinks anyway.

However fast he moved, McIndoe took time to explain the full course of intended treatment to each patient. He made no promises and did not underplay the degree of permanent disfigurement they could expect, but merely to hear someone offering them an organised and practical route back to normal life seemed miraculous to many of the men who believed they would pass the rest of their lives as freaks. The sweaty camaraderie of Ward Three was partly an accident. Officers and men were at first segregated, but McIndoe discovered that the officers in isolation made a slower recovery than the men who mucked in together. The officers dwelled too much on their traumas and tended to lose their appetites; in the hothouse of Ward Three they had to compete with the clamorous stoicism of the men. In any case, segregation became impossible when the numbers increased: there were not enough staff, and there was only one saline bath. The writ of the new democracy ran outside the wooden walls of the hut. Residents of East Grinstead grew used to seeing officers pushing ordinary airmen in wheelchairs to a pub in town. Sometimes McIndoe, Hunter and Mullins would go with them. McIndoe would whack out a few chords on the piano while Hunter waved a ten-shilling note at the barman.

McIndoe became a powerful figure in town and was invited to dinner by most of the socially conscious families. He did not resent this; on the contrary, with Jill Mullins at his side, he enjoyed the gush of their admiration and, when he had drunk of it long and deep, he asked them for donations.

In the course of the war 4,500 allied airmen suffered serious burns, or as McIndoe put it, ‘had their bark knocked off. For the public’s benefit he developed a straightforward explanation of the process: ‘A pilot is hurled like a blazing torch from his plane and sustains burns of the exposed parts of his body, or his plane
crashes and he is enveloped in flame, lying unconscious against red-hot material. He sustains deep burns of the exposed part of the body, together with a greater or lesser extent of burning of the covered parts, depending on the efficiency of the protective material.’ The injuries were made worse by the habit of many pilots, including Hillary, of flying without goggles or gloves. More than 200 of the cases that passed through East Grinstead were men whose faces had been burned away.

McIndoe found Hillary a difficult patient. His supercilious manner and provocative conversation at first made him unpopular on the ward. Gradually, however, people came to respect his integrity and to see that in a loud-mouthed way he was a brave man, with his own peculiar battles to fight. Geoffrey Page, a Hurricane pilot with injuries similar to Hillary’s, found him a ‘basically pleasant young man hiding behind a barrier of cynicism, a defence mechanism perhaps evolved from an over-doting maternal influence.’ When Page first arrived another guinea-pig, Roy Lane, told him Hillary was a ‘conceited young man with an inferiority complex’. Lane too believed Edwyna Hillary was responsible: ‘For years he’s been told by his mother what a wonderful boy he is, but in the service he’s had his backside kicked. Not surprising he’s a bit mixed up.’ Page took several weeks to overcome his awe at Hillary. In the mean time he joined the other patients in attacking him verbally, telling him to shut up, or even hurling their rationed eggs at him.

Hillary mentioned none of the antagonism in
The Last Enemy
, though his dismissive attitude and obvious impatience with hospitals and fellow-sufferers make it easy enough to imagine. His new upper lip was to be made from skin on his left arm, next to the site of his new eyelids. Hillary’s reasoning was that if he went for the inner arm rather than the leg, which was the other possibility, he wouldn’t have to shave. When the dressings were taken off, Hillary saw that his right eyebrow had been lifted higher to bring it into line with the left. There were stitches beneath both eyes where McIndoe had trimmed back the ledges left by the earlier graft of the lower eyelids. When he visited Hillary that evening McIndoe looked with some anxiety at the scar under the right eye, which appeared swollen and blue. He
said nothing, but moved on; and for once his anti-bedside manner was not effective. Hillary was left feeling forlorn.

The next day he and seven others were moved into isolation in a ward in the main part of the hospital. An infection was flourishing in the jungly atmosphere of Ward Three. The others in with him began to succumb. A man called Neft started to suppurate about the face; a Squadron Leader Gleave became infected in the nose; the bandage on Hillary’s upper lip smelled so powerfully that he had to pour eau-de-Cologne on to it. Their heads were shorn and rubbed with powder; all had swabs sent for analysis. The results said that six of the eight were infected, but the nurses would not tell them which two were safe. Hillary was not one of them. He developed mastoiditis, an acute infection of the bone behind the ear, the treatment for which (a drug called Prontosil) made him feel sick.

Eight days after his operation the dressings were taken off. Hillary’s relief at ridding himself of the suppurating gauze was tempered by the dismay at the new upper lip that McIndoe had given him. It had no central ridge, it was completely white and it was narrower than his previous one. He went to ease the bandages from the donor site on his arm. When he had completed this delicate process, the sister removed the stitches. The wound, however, immediately peeled back like a burst sausage. His body’s reserves, depleted by the infection, had not been sufficient to fuse the two sides of the cut.

Hillary now faced another unwanted trial of his resolution. The pain in his ear, and the nausea caused by the Prontosil, made sleep impossible. He walked about the ward in his distress, but in the gloomy light could make out only people in equally dire circumstances: charred, fearful, feverish. The next day he had an operation to treat the mastoiditis, but the infection had also taken root in his lip. The pain was worse than anything he had endured since the crash. The thundering pressure in his head was matched in horror by the sound of footsteps in the corridor when they came to pierce the hole behind his ear with a steel probe to drain the pus.

For much of this time he was either delirious or unconscious from morphia. He was moved to the glassed-in extension where
he had first been sent as a punishment. It was from here that he had heard a large bomb whistling down through the night. The impact of its landing was such that it took Hillary some time to work out that the bomb had not actually exploded. He was so disappointed, so powerless and frustrated, that he began to sob. He had wanted to die.

The next day he argued with a doctor who planned to move him back to Ward Three, where he would be safer if the bomb exploded. His humiliation, his pain and his disappointment that the bomb had not gone off slopped over into petulant abuse. No power on earth, he said, would take him back to that place of human refuse; if anyone touched him, he would get up and walk back to London. Sister Hall, who had nursed him throughout the infection, offered to convert a consulting room into a bedroom for Hillary, and the young doctor, relieved to be rid of his difficult patient, swiftly agreed.

That night McIndoe came to see him. He tried to explain to Hillary the difficulties of running the hospital, and how, although Hillary had had an unlucky time, he must try to keep going. Hillary noticed that McIndoe was still in his operating robes and felt slightly chastened when he noticed McIndoe’s tense, exhausted expression.

The next day he was visited by Denise and his mother, who had motored down together from London. The delirious sweating had caused him to lose almost three stone in the course of a week and the Prontosil had made his face grey. His mother, who had borne up stubbornly thus far, looked crushed. She believed her son was going to die. She sat with Denise at the end of the bed, within the narrow field of his vision, and tried to find words to comfort him.

He did not die. Slowly the infection retreated; the grafts took; he began to put on weight. When he was eventually moved back to the main ward, he found he had a new neighbour. This was a 26-year-old South African called Edmonds, who was the worst burned pilot in the RAF to survive. He had crashed at night while still training. His plane caught a wing as he was taking off, flipped over and burst into flames: Edmonds was trapped inside. When he arrived he was barely recognisable as a human being. McIndoe
performed two emergency operations but then had to leave him to lie in his own suppuration. After nine months, McIndoe sent him away to build up his strength for the ordeal of surgery. On his return to the bed next to Hillary’s, Edmonds was facing several years under the knife. He never once complained; and his manner affected Hillary. Edmonds’s first operation went wrong: the infection got under his right eyelid and it had to be taken off and thrown away. It was McIndoe’s first failure with an eyelid. Through the insensitive crash talk of his neighbours, the well-meaning questions of visitors, Edmonds remained even-tempered and polite. When a visitor twittered about how well he looked, Hillary turned his face to the wall, expecting some explosion. But Edmonds merely replied, ‘Yes, and I’m feeling much better, too.’

Hillary could not understand where Edmonds found the courage to confront his future. He wondered whether he derived strength from having been very close to death, but McIndoe, who had seen almost 200 men die, told Hillary they were never aware of how close they were to the end. Hillary could find no answer to the problem other than to think the will to live must be ‘instinctive’. Even at the time he was aware that this solution was improbable.

The following day the ear surgeon said Hillary was fit enough to move, and, since McIndoe was planning no operations for the time being, he went back to the Dewars’ convalescent home. It was here that his mother brought him the news that Noel Agazarian had been killed. That meant Richard Hillary was the last surviving member of the group of friends from the University Air Squadron who had originally gone north to Kinloss; he was in his own words ‘the last of the long-haired boys’.

He was a changed man. The alteration was clearest in his face. Almost all the skin on it was new, and although McIndoe had done as well as any surgeon at the time could have done, the results looked hasty and peculiar. The eyes had no lashes, and their habitual half-smile had been replaced by an involuntary glare. His lips were thin and straight; the fetching bow and curve of the upper one had been replaced by a featureless strip from his
inner arm. The stitching that joined the different flaps of skin was plainly visible, and, in areas where it was stretched over the bone, the skin was thin and shiny. The face, however, was a triumph of normality compared to the hands. The severity of the burning and the early tannic acid treatment had drawn the fingers down into the palms, like a bird’s claws. Although McIndoe hoped to work further on them, for the time being the fingers on each hand were strapped to a device like a miniature tennis racket, which was supposed to straighten them. Hillary was no more patient about wearing these than he had been about wearing gloves in the cockpit, and took them off when they irritated him.

At Dutton Homestall Hillary became friendly with the Dewars’ daughter Barbara. Their intimacy displeased Kathleen Dewar, who was jealous of her daughter and was herself attracted to Hillary. Her jealousy took the form of bitter verbal exchanges in which she questioned Hillary’s character and motives. Despite his outward bravado he had always been morbidly sensitive and was particularly so at this low point in his life. He tried to be philosophical about Kathleen Dewar’s remarks, but they wounded him at the time and later came back to trouble him profoundly.

McIndoe encouraged his patients to go into town for a few hours each day to remind themselves of what normal life was like. The next stop was to go up to London, a day at a time to begin with, then for longer periods. The residents of East Grinstead were used to seeing badly burned men, but the reaction of Londoners was a trial. Some of the pilots were contemptuous of people who recoiled from them: clearly they didn’t understand that a war could not be fought without cost. This contempt was a protection for them. Others found it harder to reconcile themselves to having become repulsive.

Hillary relied on Denise’s beauty to draw the eyes of strangers from his face; and when once a good-looking woman smiled at him he felt a return of self-esteem that went beyond simple vanity. Denise had knitted him some gloves and wore an identical pair herself so that he should not feel they had been made specially for him. In the winter of 1941-2 Hillary frequently spent the night at Denise’s flat in Eaton Place. She shared it with
her sister Penny, who worked at the Admiralty. Denise was in the ATS, and the house was full of young men and women in various uniforms. When they had all gone home, Richard and Denise continued their long conversations against the sound of bombs falling on the docks and on the residential streets nearby.