The Fatal Englishman (27 page)

‘Starting at Oxford before the war the author takes us through the Battle of Britain and his months in hospital to the final dramatic climax of a blitz on London.

‘By rums humorous and tragic, it is an essentially human document and the book which everyone knew must come out of the Royal Air Force.’

It is not a very good example of the form, but that is not surprising. Hillary fairly selects ‘ease’ and ‘clarity’ as the outstanding facets of his style. What is most striking about the blurb is his description of himself at Oxford as ‘left-wing’. His intolerance of state or corporate interference in individual affairs was such that he could barely grant the RAF the right to put its ‘duellists’ into numbered squadrons. His position at Oxford might playfully have been described as anarchistic with a very small ‘a’, but his remarks in the book itself about the ‘Auden group’, as well as his consistent distrust of the state place him a long way from any recognisable Left position.

Wartime printing restrictions meant that it would take Macmillan even longer than it usually took a publisher to produce a book.
Falling Through Space
was due out in February 1942 in the United States, but meanwhile Hillary had nothing to do. He applied to be a reporter with the RAF in the Middle East, but was refused on medical grounds. When the United States entered the war on 8 December 1941, he volunteered to train American pilots, but this application was also unsuccessful.

Merle Oberon had given him a letter of introduction to a friend of hers called Mary Booker, and one damp evening in December Hillary called at her flat on the Bayswater Road. The housekeeper let him in and told him Mrs Booker would be back soon.
While he was waiting for his hostess, Hillary fell asleep in an armchair.

Mary Booker was a 44-year-old divorcee, elegant, mondaine and famously beautiful. Her dark hair had gone white in her twenties and rose from her forehead in two shimmering curves. She had deep brown eyes, a small nose, and a magnolia-coloured skin that had remained almost unlined. An early marriage to an insurance broker had produced two daughters who by this time were almost grown-up. Although she had been photographed and feted as a ‘society beauty’ in her youth, she had shown an elegant indifference to such attention. Her beauty and charm were intensified by her nonchalance and the simplicity of her style. Her father was a merchant called Charles Walter, whose business was principally in South America, and her mother was Ada Yeats, first cousin of the poet. After her divorce in the early Thirties, Mary tried to support her children by working in films. Despite the patronage of Alexander Korda, she was not successful. She became an adviser on interior decoration and made some money in partnership with two friends. What she was doing at the time she met Richard Hillary is not known; even her second husband Michael Burn was not able to discover, though some people believed that one of her numerous friends in the Foreign Office had secured her job working in ‘something secret’, probably in Naval Intelligence.

She had lovers, but did not become the kind of divorced Thirties beauty who lived only for men. She had many female friends, to whom her kindness rendered her beyond jealousy. They remarked on her sympathy, her capacity for listening, and her serenity. She was an unusual mixture: smart and conventional, yet not fussy about money or fashion; gentle and understanding of other people, yet troubled in her own life and, for all her worldly experience, unsuccessful at organising her own affairs.

Not everyone was charmed by Mary Booker. There were some who found her fey, some who believed that her apparent indifference to material things masked a manipulative nature, and some who found her unembarrassed references to ‘love’ and
‘the spirit’ to be – in the brutal adjective of the period – ‘common’.

As she crossed Hyde Park on that damp December evening Mary Booker noticed that the blackout was not fully drawn in the sitting-room window of her third-floor flat. When she went upstairs she was able to take a long, slow look at the figure sprawled in her armchair before he finally awoke. In the first hour that they spent together Mary Booker saw at once that while Hillary was brash, he was also sensitive. Although he spoke with what she described as ‘a pose of nonchalance, and a slightly aggressive attitude to life’, she had no doubt that he had also ‘a sensitivity which must have caused him a degree of mental suffering far beyond the physical torment of those months after his rescue from the sea.’

Mary Booker had arrived, by a different route, at an attitude towards the War that was curiously like Hillary’s own. She had become aware of what she called a ‘blind selfishness’ in her previous attitude to life, and saw the War, and the necessary victory, as a way of morally redefining herself.

Their affair did not begin at once. Hillary remained officially on leave until 1 January 1942 when he left London to go on a course at the RAF Staff College at Gerrards Cross. He found it physically exhausting, but that did not prevent him from beginning to plan his return to active duty. He wrote to Edward Warburg in New York: ‘After this Staff course I may come out on the Staff in Washington if Bill Thornton [the Air Attaché] will have me. If not, I’m going back to hospital to get medically fit again. I shall fly again. This I think will be possible. I have no intention of taking an office job at the Air Ministry.’

This decision to fly again was thus already taken when his affair with Mary Booker began at the end of January; the implications of it hung over their relationship throughout its brief but intense duration. There were one or two scruples over Merle Oberon to be cleared away before Richard and Mary could be quite relaxed about their new intimacy. Merle Oberon, after all, had provided the introduction on the grounds that Mary would look after Richard, not that they should fall in love. Richard was impatient with all this: he would have met Mary anyway, through other
friends in common; and, as he wrote to Mary Booker, ‘I love you, and do not, nor ever have loved Merle … My dominant emotion on arriving back [from America] was one of relief.’

He stayed at Gerrards Cross until his course finished at the end of March. He was due for another operation at East Grinstead on 10 April, but he was still feeling weak and was prone to fainting. Macmillan, meanwhile, had managed to schedule publication of
The Last Enemy
for the end of April, which was a considerable achievement in the circumstances and reflected Lovat Dickson’s belief in the book’s urgent topicality. They might have got it out even sooner had they not had to print a further 10,000 copies for the Book of the Month Club.

On 29 February Hillary heard that Colin Pinckney had been killed in Singapore. He was now not only the last of the longhaired boys, he was the last of the triangle of friendship with Pease and Pinckney that he had described in
The Last Enemy.
The continuing presence of death seems to have intensified his feelings for Mary as well as raising in his mind, ‘yet again the question which I have put in the book, and have attempted to answer, of what is the responsibility of the man who is left.’ In early April he spent a holiday with Mary in the cottage she had renovated in Llanfrothen in North Wales. Each spoke rapturously of the time, yet the intensity of their happiness seemed to underline how troubled each one was at heart.

The course at Gerrards Cross showed that Hillary was not well enough organised to be a staff officer. The Commandant recommended he join Combined Operations. The idea was that he would accompany commando operations in France and on his return write about them for the newspapers. Before anything could happen, however, he had to return to East Grinstead for more surgery on his hands. It was while he was there in April that, in conversation with another ‘guinea-pig’, Geoffrey Page, Hillary developed the idea of flying night-fighters. He accepted that the injuries to his hands would limit his speed of response by day, but he believed that at night, ‘you can creep up behind your target and shoot the bastard down.’ McIndoe told Hillary and Page that they had ‘not a chance in hell of getting back. Not only do I disapprove, but the Air Ministry would not allow it.’ In fact
McIndoe simply believed that they had done enough: Page had had fifteen operations in the course of his two years in hospital. But they kept nagging at McIndoe until finally he told them, ‘If you’re determined to kill yourselves, go ahead. Only don’t blame me.’ He wrote out the necessary medical certificates. Three months later Page was made operational and flew till the end of the war, collecting the DSO and DFC with bar. The Medical Board was at this stage prepared to pass Hillary fit for light aircraft only, and in daylight.

In the Queen Victoria Hospital he had operations on his eyelid and on his hand. The latter procedure produced pain that Geoffrey Page, not a complaining man, compared to having nails driven through the hand and withdrawn with clumsy pincers. Hillary described his fingers as ‘a bit of a bore’. His eyebrow became infected with one of the many streptococci that had bred since his last visit to East Grinstead; the graft on his upper eyelid was successful, but he believed McIndoe had done the wrong one, as it was his lower lid that was troubling him. He vented his frustration in fierce arguments with the hospital staff. He behaved like the pre-‘enlightenment’ boy who had first arrived there, but no one who understood the pain he endured was blaming him for that. No one, that is, except the embittered Kathleen Dewar, who took the opportunity to call him a coward. Hillary was not in a robust enough state to treat the jibe with the contempt it needed, and was wounded by it.

In May he was moved to the RAF Officers’ Hospital at Torquay to recover his strength. He found no relaxation or peace of mind there. All aspects of his life were troubling him. He wanted to fly again and was not sure what, if anything, an attachment to Combined Operations would entail. He was agitated by the strength of his feeling for Mary Booker and the strong sexual appetites that were frustrated by their separation. While he had a large envelope of favourable reviews from the United States, he was still in the anxious weeks before British publication, which had been slightly delayed, and
The Last Enemy
was a vulnerably personal first book. Even if it went well, he was aware of his limitations as a writer and had no new idea on
which to work. Pain, infection and continuing disfigurement did nothing to comfort him.

Meanwhile, Richard and Mary wrote each other letters. Mary’s second husband Michael Burn found a well-preserved packet of them and published a selection in 1988. Their intense and self-regarding quality made them uncomfortable to read. Mary writes at this time of the ‘extraordinary contrasting and many-sided quality of our love’ and ‘the seriousness of our love’; ‘We are,’ she tells Hillary, ‘the most extraordinary couple that ever loved.’ It is more than seriousness that is conveyed by their letters, it is a self-conscious solemnity. Perhaps the circumstances made it inevitable. Richard was thinking of a return to flying and was aware of the dangers it would entail. It was far from clear at this stage that Britain would win the victory that they believed would have such profound personal implications for them both. It was a strange and risky thing for each to do, to embark on an affair so all-involving at such a precarious time.

The Last Enemy
was published on Friday 19 June and fulfilled all its publisher’s ambitions. Although Churchill had ensured that the whole population was aware of the importance of what the fighter pilots had done in the Battle of Britain, few people were aware of quite how it was achieved, or at what cost. The hospital at East Grinstead began to receive hundreds of donations from readers of the book. Desmond MacCarthy, Storm Jameson and Elizabeth Bowen were among its reviewers. They were impressed by Hillary’s story, though V.S. Pritchett, among others, was unconvinced by his climactic conversion: ‘Mr Hillary conveys the impression that he likes the spectacle of himself believing, and not that he believes … he remains egocentric, busily self-conscious in defiance and remorse.’

The tersest verdict came from Geoffrey Page, who read it in hospital. ‘I think it’s beautifully written, Richard. In fact I’m surprised a supercilious bastard like you could produce something like this … However, there’s one thing I don’t quite understand … You write of being an irresponsible undergraduate before the war, then, as a result, you change, and, presto, here
you are, a different person … In my opinion, you’re still as bloody conceited as ever.’

On 1 July Hillary returned to East Grinstead for a final operation on his eyes. Despite a seizure as he was coming round from the anaesthetic, the operation was deemed a success, and a week later he was posted to Fighter Command HQ at Bentley Priory near Stanmore with orders to rewrite the Pilot’s Order Book. This was a wise way for the RAF to capitalise on the talent of a man who had just published an acclaimed literary memoir, though as a job it lacked excitement. ‘The Pilot’s Order Book,’ Hillary explained, ‘is the thing every pilot has to sign as understanding the rules and regulations that apply locally … This entails reading through some 4,000 orders, deciding what is obsolete and what is relevant – retype the whole bloody lot’ – or at least instruct a typist on which bits to delete.

At the same time his application to join Combined Operations was turned down on the bureaucratic grounds that if he had passed through RAF Staff College he ought to remain at the RAF’s disposal. Hillary regretted not only the missed posting, but also the London flat that should have gone with it. Meetings between him and Mary were difficult to arrange without such a base, and Mary’s sense of discretion would not allow him to stay in the flat she shared. The Blitz had made property extremely scarce, and the lack of somewhere private to meet was a major irritant in their affair.

Hillary’s commander in chief at Bentley Priory was Sir Sholto Douglas, who later became Marshal of the Royal Air Force. In his memoirs some years later he gave a detailed picture of him: