The Hero Maker

by Stephen Dando-Collins

When Brickhill told Margot that he was going to join the Baders on their holiday, she asked why she couldn’t go too. Brickhill responded that this wouldn’t be a holiday, it would be work. Flaming rows ensued, with Brickhill accusing his wife of being ‘capricious, aggressive, irrational, uncooperative and extravagant’.214 This culminated in an argument on 16 June which grew from a disagreement over the placement of a tea tray. According to Brickhill, Margot lost her temper and laid into him with her fists. Grabbing her wrists, he held them firmly until she desisted. An hour later, a heated dispute erupted over a nail file. This time, he forced her right arm behind her back until her anger subsided.215

  A week later, they were again arguing about Brickhill’s upcoming Cornwall trip. Tapping her cheek with his index finger, Brickhill declared, ‘I’m not going to be henpecked by you, Maggie!’

  He would claim that she reacted by attempting to slap and then scratch him. Grasping her wrists, he forced her back, sitting her down in a chair.216

  The arguments lasted up until the moment Brickhill left for Cornwall, when, as he was going out the door, Margot suddenly changed her tune. She informed him she didn’t want to accompany him anyway, as she was going to stay for three months at Taplow, a Buckinghamshire village on the Thames opposite Maidenhead, to the near west of London.

  At Porthleven on the south coast of Cornwall, twenty kilometres from Penzance, the Baders and Brickhill checked into a small seaside hotel overlooking the bay. Typical of hotels of the day, the establishment had no en-suite bathrooms. Instead, the bedrooms on each floor shared a single bathroom. This didn’t bother the Baders, although Douglas soon tired of having to strap on his legs each morning to cross the corridor to the bathroom, where he would only have to unstrap the prosthetics again to get into the bath.

  ‘Stand “cave” for me, old boy, there’s a good chap,’ said Bader to Brickhill.

  So, most mornings, Brickhill would stand at Bader’s bedroom door and let him know when the coast was clear. Bader would then bounce out legless, on hands and rump, and cross the corridor to the vacant bathroom. To shave, he sat in the bath, having hoisted himself in, using what Brickhill described as ‘arms developed enough to choke a gorilla’.217 The first morning that Brickhill acted as crossing guard, he stayed outside the bathroom, chatting with Bader through the closed door.

  Bader, as he heaved himself from the bath, bellowed, ‘Some clot of a woman I’d never met before asked me what was the hardest thing to do without legs. I told her it was drying my stern while sitting on a stool after a bath. She was speechless – first time in years, they told me.’218

  They played two rounds of golf a day throughout most of their stay. One day, after their morning round, Bader suggested they forget golf that afternoon and work on the book instead.

  ‘You’re getting soft, chum,’ said Brickhill flippantly.219

  Bader only responded with a scowl. The next day, Brickhill discovered that his companion had dented the socket of his right prosthetic, and when he’d removed the tin leg it had stripped the skin off his thigh, leaving it red raw. Bader picked up the phone and sent for a spare right leg, and the following morning it arrived by train, in Bader’s cricket bag. They didn’t golf that morning, but by the afternoon, Bader, with his thigh bandaged and the new prosthetic in place, was back out on the course. When he’d first been fitted with his tin legs, he’d routinely fallen over twenty or thirty times a day. The only time that Brickhill saw Bader fall over was one day on the Cornish golf course, when he tripped over Brickhill’s golf bag. Cursing liberally, and waving Brickhill away, Bader pulled himself back to his feet.

  Brickhill was determined to get the book’s dialogue right, and at one point Bader spoke about an incident with a colleague when he was in command of 242 Squadron, whose other pilots were all Canadian. Years later, Bader would recall that, when he couldn’t remember the exact words the other fellow had used, Brickhill responded, ‘Tell me the sort of thing he would have said.’220

  Once the book was produced, Jill Lucas, a friend of the Baders who’d known both them and the men of 242 Squadron during the war, remarked to Thelma, ‘The extraordinary thing is that Brickhill never met any of those Canadians, yet he has got them so right.’221

  In the second week of the Cornwall stay, a letter turned up at the hotel for Brickhill. It was from a firm of Chelsea solicitors. The lawyers informed him that they were acting on behalf of his wife, and she had instructed them that he had deserted her, had gone to live in Cornwall and had left her destitute. What was Mr Brickhill’s response? Stunned, and angry, he wrapped up the sessions with Bader and hurried back to Chelsea. Only years later would Brickhill learn, from Margot herself, that, before she engaged the solicitors, she’d gone to Chelsea Police and told them that her now-famous husband had bashed and then deserted her. The police had recommended she get a lawyer.

  Back in London, Brickhill found that Margot had kept her threat and rented a flat in Taplow. In the hope of impressing his style-conscious wife and winning her back, he now emulated Peter Finch, Ian Bevan and Russell Braddon by moving into a Dolphin Square flat, renting number 527 Rodney House. He even had a letterhead printed, featuring his name and the prestigious address. In the same complex, up on their block’s flat roof, Finch’s wife, Tamara, sword in hand, helped her husband practise his fencing for his stage roles. Brickhill’s wife, meanwhile, was still living apart from her husband. Brickhill tried to talk Margot into coming back to London, but she refused, and demanded he send her money to pay her rent, which he did.

  When he turned up at Elstree Studios on 12 August for what would prove to be intense Dam Busters script-assessment meetings, Brickhill pretended all was sweetness and light in his personal life. Joining Brickhill at the meeting table to read through Bob Sherriff’s script were Clark, Mycroft, Whittaker, the film’s art director, Robert Jones, and scenario editor Frederick Gotfurt – somewhat ironically a German by birth, whose imperfect English sometimes made his interpretation of dialogue problematic.

  Sherriff’s screenplay closely followed the build-up to and execution of the dams raid as Brickhill had written the story. Brickhill liked Sherriff’s script, as did everyone else at the table. But, despite this universal approval, many points of detail proved sticking points for one or more of those at the meeting. Over the next three days, they worked through each one of them in exacting detail.

  Some deviations from fact in the final script would have irked Brickhill. Yet when proposed story changes were run by Barnes Wallis, the pragmatic scientist was unconcerned by the filmmakers’ concessions to budget or the need for an exciting, fast-paced cinematic narrative. ‘No one scene is the truth,’ Wallis would say when the film was released, ‘but the whole thing adds up to the truth.’222

  Among the liberties taken in the final screenplay were the truncating of the time it took Wallis to develop his weapon, and incorrectly crediting Gibson with a spotlight system which the squadron used to gauge height at low level. The script also gave Wallis a memorable invented line. In the film, to acquire a Wellington bomber for trial flights Wallis asks if it would help if the authorities were informed he’d designed the Wellington? In reality, he didn’t say that, and he’d only been responsible for the structure of the ‘Welli’s airframe and wings.

  With the film now scheduled for production the following year and Bader research almost completed, over the next few weeks Brickhill devoted his time to convincing Margot to come back to him, sending her express-delivery letters almost daily and ringing her frequently. Suspecting that she was homesick for Australia, he proposed that, as soon as he completed the Bader book, they would go back to Australia for a year, see their families, live in a big house by the sea, and save on the tax that would accrue on the big earnings he was expecting from the Bader project – he’d learned that the top marginal tax rate in Australia was seventy per cent, as opposed to 97.5 per cent in the UK.

  In a 29 August telephone conversation, Margot refused to say whether she
would accompany him back to Australia, and, when he pressed her to see him, she declared, ‘There’s no point in our meeting, Paul.’223

  The next time he telephoned, in early September, Brickhill decided to go on the offensive, revealing for the first time that he knew Margot had committed adultery with Douglas Gordon at St-Paul-de-Vence. Margot was stunned. Overnight, her attitude changed. She became, Brickhill was to say, ‘solicitous and affectionate’, and was amenable to getting back together. Brickhill had meanwhile not been sleeping, and his doctor recommended that he and Margot only cohabit again once he’d completed the Bader book.224

  Like a dating couple, they began seeing each other again at weekends, and a month later they were once more making love, in the Dolphin Square flat, although they continued to live apart. This October get-together was prompted by a celebration. Margot had returned to the modelling agency that had previously employed her, and it secured her five days’ mannequin work with fashion designer Norman Hartnell, famed as the Queen’s couturier. Hartnell liked Margot’s elegant walk. This, he said, could not be taught. At the end of the engagement, he offered Margot a full-time job as one of six mannequins who would model his Coronation range up to the Coronation the following June. Margot gleefully accepted.

  In November, Brickhill announced to the press that he and his wife would be sailing from England to Australia aboard the liner Orontes the following July, for an extended stay. Australian Women’s Weekly would herald their return in a 3 December issue featuring a fashion spread of Margot and other Hartnell mannequins modelling their employer’s gowns.

  19.

  Reaching for the Sky

  IN JANUARY 1953, David Higham finalised the contract with William Collins and Sons that would cover the publication of the Bader book in Britain and the Commonwealth, right down to a scale of royalty percentages – the more books that sold, the higher the percentage return to the author. Billy Collins also guaranteed to publish all of Brickhill’s future books. This was like a security blanket to the Australian. He told the chairman that he now felt comfortable with, and confident in, his new publishers. ‘I am extremely glad that I took the plunge and went with you.’225

  He was keen to get into fiction, and his sessions with Battle of Britain ace Bader had prompted an idea, which he floated by Higham, who took it up with Collins. Brickhill was thinking about writing a novel about a Battle of Britain fighter pilot. Billy Collins immediately ran with the idea. This, he declared, would be Brickhill’s next book after the Bader biography. The author subsequently backed off, saying he had first to write the Bader book before he could think seriously about a novel.

  Unbeknowns to Collins, Brickhill was considering another escape book, this time set in Burma and probably inspired by stories told to him by Russell Braddon. He also had vague ideas for another couple of novels.226 Still, it was encouraging to know that his publisher was ready, willing and waiting. Meanwhile, in New York, the Ann Watkins Agency had secured a contract with Norton & Co for publication of the Bader book in the United States.

  Brickhill’s relationship with Margot was better than it had been in ages, and she was showing genuine interest in his work. Over the Christmas break, the Baders had read Brickhill’s first 15,000 words of the Bader book, and were delighted. Brickhill wrote to Billy Collins in late January: ‘My own wife, who is a fairly sound judge, agrees.’ Margot had also seen the next 10,000 words, and Brickhill said she was ‘more enthusiastic than I have ever seen her. Frankly, I myself cannot tell.’ Nonetheless, he was beginning to feel more confident that the book would end up as he’d hoped.227

  Margot was meanwhile hard at work in the world of high fashion. Though only being paid eight guineas a week, she was receiving double the wage of casual mannequins. The low pay didn’t concern Margot; she was in her element. Her days in the Hartnell studio began at 10.00 am. Mornings were taken up with fittings in the workshop, afternoons with showings to wealthy clients who sat in gilt chairs in a grey-carpeted showroom as the mannequins glided by. At one point, Hartnell took his models to Scotland for fashion shows.

  Another time, Hartnell’s models featured in a Society of London Fashion Designers show at Claridge’s hotel, with Her Majesty the Queen and her sister, Princess Margaret, guests of honour. Relaxing after the show, Margot and other models were sitting in their gowns in the dressing room, chatting and smoking, when the Queen and Princess walked in, trailed by a royal entourage. Swiftly stubbing out their cigarettes, Margot and her friends jumped to their feet and curtseyed, before being introduced to the royal pair.

  In early March, Margot moved in with Brickhill at the Dolphin Square apartment. He’d sealed their reunion by offering her £5000, in two instalments, on condition she invest it. This was a substantial sum. At the time, the average annual salary in Britain was £500, and the average house price £2700. A brand new Rolls-Royce could be had for £4700.

  Just after he parted with the first instalment, Brickhill heard from David Higham that film producer Robert Clark was having grave doubts about The Dam Busters going into production.

  ‘In view of falling box office receipts,’ said Clark, ‘it’s becoming a financially dangerous proposition.’228

  This rocked Brickhill back on his heels, and caused him to immediately tighten his financial belt. Meanwhile, he still didn’t have a title for the Bader book, and nothing suggested by Collins or Higham appealed. In desperation, Brickhill had Margot run a competition for a title among the models at Hartnell’s studio. That didn’t bring the necessary result either, and in the end he would give Margot credit for the title Reach for the Sky. She felt it a joint effort, saying she’d thought of it only a second or two before he did.229 Still, Brickhill wasn’t entirely sold on the title; for now, it would remain provisional.

  He was also struggling to make headway with the manuscript. Having set the July departure for Australia as the deadline for delivering the finished book to Collins, Brickhill decided that the only way he was going to complete it in time was by secluding himself away, in the sun, with a peaceful water view, writing nonstop. He booked a passage to Jersey in the Channel Islands, ‘To live in a cave to finish my new book,’ he told Australian Women’s Weekly London correspondent Michael Plant. ‘London is the worst place in the world to try to write a book.’230

  His plan was to remain on Jersey until July, when he would travel overland to join Margot aboard the Orontes at Gibraltar, after she’d sailed with the ship from Southampton. When Plant asked Brickhill what he planned to do in Australia, the author replied, ‘Buy a little house at Palm Beach and just lie in the sun.’231

  Before Brickhill set off for his Channel Islands hide-away, he and Margot hosted an SAW hot-chocolate soiree at Australia House. By this time, SAW membership had grown to include women writers such as Florence James and Dymphna Cusack, co-authors of Come in Spinner, and young Irish-Australian author Catherine Gaskin, who would complete her novel Sara Dane on her twenty-fifth birthday the following year.

  According to Brickhill, Margot was ‘habitually and incorrigibly late for appointments’.232 Nonetheless, for the press and public at the SAW event they put on ‘the faces’, as Brickhill called their smiling public personas.233 Margot was impeccably dressed in suit and hat, but it was Brickhill’s plum-coloured, pearl-buttoned vest that attracted most attention.

  With William Collins keen to generate pre-release publicity for the Bader book, a reporter from Australia’s People magazine sat husband and wife down together for an interview which ranged over both their backgrounds. As the pair spoke at length with the reporter, Brickhill was cheerful and friendly, and neither he nor Margot let on that, until just weeks before, they’d been living apart for eight months, or that twelve months prior to this Margot had been undergoing psychiatric treatment. To cover up that treatment, Brickhill told the reporter they’d moved to St-Paul-de-Vence four months earlier than had been the case.

  The resultant People article, which would run over more than three pages
in May, would drip with envy over the couple’s apparent glamorous and lavish lifestyle, while disparaging Brickhill’s books as merely ‘a series of reports’, granting that The Great Escape was ‘a brilliant report’. The People reporter would go on, ‘After the Bader story, the man who has made a fortune out of reporting in three busy years will write another escape book – about prisoners-of-war in Burma this time – then he will tackle one, two, or three novels, after that a film or two.’234

  Brickhill was eager to get away from London, where unanswered fan mail piled up along with letters and cables about serialisations, foreign translations and article requests. There were lunch invitations from people who wanted something from him. Five men mentioned in Escape Or Die were asking for contact details about other former chums. An acquaintance had sent his own escape manuscript for comment. Someone wanted Brickhill’s help hitching a lift on a NATO aircraft. Then there was a dentist’s appointment and arrangements for garaging the Alfa while he was overseas.

  ‘I sometimes wonder whether it’s worth trying to write books at all,’ Brickhill told the People reporter with exasperation born out of his anxiety over the unfinished Bader manuscript.235 Yet while he was prepared to hire staff to keep Margot happy, he would always be too frugal to emulate other successful authors and employ a personal assistant to free him of day-to-day annoyances.

  In the last days of March, loaded down with his typewriter and several suitcases, and clutching an attaché case containing his partly written Bader manuscript, Brickhill landed on Jersey. One suitcase was entirely filled with notes and transcriptions of interviews with Bader and others.

  He took a single room in a house called ‘Koi Hai’ in the parish of Grouville. On the southeast tip of the island, it wasn’t far from the capital, St Helier, and possessed sweeping views across a broad sandy beach and the waters of Royal Bay. By repute, the shallows here could be pleasantly warm in summer; Brickhill, a strong swimmer, would be able to take a daily dip once the weather improved. And his landlady was a Mrs Joy.236 All boded well for a pleasant stay.