The Hero Maker

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  Writing enthusiastically to Billy Collins at the end of the month, Brickhill said:

  Above is my new address, which is exactly what I wanted, a large and pleasant room in a modern house with sun pouring in the wide windows and peace on all sides. There’s nothing to do except get on with the job, which I am doing. In these circumstances I don’t expect much trouble in having my m/s finished by mid-July.237

  He’d commenced the letter with ‘Dear Collins’, a little jab at English pomposity and class consciousness. When he’d first written to the chairman, he’d begun with ‘Dear Mr Collins’. In his responses, Collins persisted in addressing him with ‘Dear Brickhill’, so now Brickhill returned the compliment. In a postscript to this latest letter, he asked Collins not to give out his address to anyone travelling to Jersey. ‘I’m a working hermit now.’238 He would not tolerate drop-in visitors such as those who had helped ruin the stay at St-Paul-de-Vence.

  As Brickhill settled down to work, Margot spent the Easter weekend in France. The Hartnell models were giving a show at the Le Touquet casino. The preceding week they’d chosen their favourite delicacies in advance, having worked out they would be served ‘at least five first-class meals’ in France.239 On Jersey, Brickhill resumed his former frantic working pace. Several times, Margot flew out to weekend with him on the island, but otherwise he wrote without interruption.

  June 2, Coronation Day in Britain, saw Margot on temporary seating in East Carriage Drive with thousands of others, cheering the Queen’s golden carriage as it passed on its way to and from Westminster Abbey. Indifferent to the royal occasion across the Channel, on Jersey Brickhill worked like a man possessed. With his emotional life back on an even keel, he’d rediscovered the old magic. In under three months he expanded his initial 25,000 words to create a manuscript of 150,000, completing it three weeks ahead of schedule. He knew it was overlong and that he could probably chop 10,000 to 15,000 words, but he would leave a decision on length to his publishers.

  On 22 June, he sent his typescript to David Higham in London, who would pass copies on to William Collins in London and Norton & Co in New York, along with Brickhill’s observations on where cuts might be made. Asking that Collins provide him with a detailed forensic report by the time he set off for Australia in mid-July, he intended to work on cuts and revisions on the voyage to Australia, putting the reworked manuscript in the mail to Higham in London when the Orontes docked at Fremantle, Western Australia, in August.

  Brickhill had previously arranged that Bader and his wife come to Jersey to holiday with him in June and discuss the final draft. Periodically, he’d fed stages of the manuscript to Bader, who’d responded with his comments. Not long before the couple was due to set off for Jersey, Bader sent Brickhill a letter which Brickhill felt was intolerably rude. In his lengthy response, Brickhill argued his case while holding nothing back. After the Baders flew in to Jersey on 23 June, Brickhill wasted no time referring to his last letter.

  ‘What letter, old boy?’ Bader came blandly back, looking innocent. ‘I received no letter.’

  Brickhill had kept a carbon copy, which he handed to Bader, who read it quickly, nodding. ‘After some fairly impassioned dialogue he apologised with great charm,’ Brickhill would later say, ‘and we were out playing golf the next morning with the old amiability.’240 He knew in advance that Bader was happy with his work. ‘Bader thinks the book is splendid,’ he’d written to Billy Collins, ‘which is a bit remarkable as he is somewhat a “difficult” person.’241

  There was only one early chapter that troubled Bader, and he wanted it out. ‘I feel too ruddy naked!’ he protested.242 The chapter covered the amputation of Bader’s legs and his postoperative physical and mental difficulties, accounts of several car crashes while learning to drive with tin legs, pay rises he’d received, and Bader’s secret registry office marriage to Thelma in 1933 – family and friends had thought their 1937 church wedding their first. Brickhill felt strongly that the episodes covered by the chapter should stay. ‘I would not want to eliminate them in any circumstances as they are important to the story, showing early struggles after losing his legs.’243

  For three days he discussed the book with Douglas and Thelma, holding his ground. In the end, the trio agreed that the contentious chapter should remain, but with two paragraphs removed. ‘Apart from that everything is fine and he approves the lot,’ Brickhill reported to Billy Collins.244 Years later, Bader would say that he had no quarrel with the way the book ended up, although he thought Brickhill ‘had pressed the point too far’ when writing of an inner demon which he believed had driven Bader to succeed through the 1930s and 1940s.245 In fact, with the skill of a trained psychologist, Brickhill had laid bare Bader’s soul.

  On 6 July, Brickhill left Jersey feeling pleased with himself, but worn out. After stops at Saint-Malo and Bordeaux, he would spend a week or so in Gibraltar winding down until the Orontes arrived.

  At the Dolphin Square apartment in London on the morning of 7 July, Margot was packing. She was due to board the Orontes at Southampton in ten days’ time. Her luggage included numerous clothes trunks, and hatboxes filled with hats by St Cyr, Hartnell’s French millinery associate. Margot had made herself several cotton outfits for the warmer Australian climes, but the rest of her new wardrobe had been purchased from Hartnell before she left the designer’s employ in June. Brickhill, who’d been given a discount by Hartnell, had forked out between £500 and £600 on his wife’s outfits.246

  Before she departed London, Margot would go into detail with a Sydney newspaper correspondent about the Hartnell wardrobe she was taking to Australia. When asked why they were going, she replied, ‘My husband needs a rest, and we hope to find a home near the sea.’247

  But Margot was unhappy. Not only was her husband leaving her to organise the packing and transport of their things to the ship at Southampton, she was peeved that he hadn’t given her the rest of the money he’d promised in March. As she packed, the phone at Dolphin Square rang. She found Billy Collins on the line. Collins told her he’d tried to call her husband on Jersey, but just missed him. He was delighted with Brickhill’s Bader manuscript, he said, and, while his marketing chief Ronald Politzer was still reading it, he felt the book would even outsell The Wooden Horse.248

  Brickhill’s editor at Collins, Mark Bonham Carter, was just finalising a detailed report on the manuscript, and Collins knew Brickhill was anxious to get his hands on it, to guide his revisions. At this point, the chairman didn’t know whether that report would be ready for Margot to take with her when she left for Southampton. In the event, Bonham Carter completed the report, which ran to thirteen pages, on 16 July.

  The only forwarding address that Collins had for Brickhill at that point was the Orontes’ shipping agents in Gibraltar. Rather than risk it going astray, and knowing that Margot was not leaving London until 17 July, Bonham Carter had the report hand-delivered to her at Dolphin Square. Margot’s discontent with her husband was multiplied by being used as a courier. On receiving Bonham Carter’s report, she slipped it in among a collection of her own papers she was leaving in England until their return. When she and her baggage went out the door to go to Waterloo Station on the morning of 17 July, she left the editor’s report behind.

  Brickhill drew his wife into his arms when he joined her on the Orontes in Gibraltar on 20 July. Only once they’d celebrated their reunion did he broach the subject of business. While spending eight days waiting in the Rock Hotel in Gibraltar he’d received letters from David Higham and William Collins making comment on Reach for the Sky. Higham’s letter included suggestions for improvements from his associate Paul Scott, who felt that Brickhill had allowed Bader’s bad qualities to overtake the good as the narrative progressed, losing the reader’s sympathy for the man. The Collins letter was less helpful. It combined the comments of three people including marketing chief Politzer, and ran to just over two pages. Essentially, it was merely praise for a job well done.

 
; Where, Brickhill asked, was the detailed Bonham Carter report that Collins had promised would be sent to Margot before she sailed? Margot could only shrug.

  In completing the manuscript at breakneck speed, Brickhill had exhausted himself. And now he was bitterly disappointed, feeling that his publisher had let him down, had cast him to the literary wolves. ‘I won’t pretend I wasn’t a bit upset by it,’ he would later say. In fact, he was ‘quite aggrieved’. He had always struggled to get Evans Brothers and Faber & Faber to give him full and frank reports. Such independent and detached views of his work were invaluable to him, he would later tell Mark Bonham Carter. For, like many an author, after living and sleeping with his work in progress for months and years, he tended to lose objectivity.249

  As the Orontes sailed on, putting him increasingly out of easy contact with London, Brickhill could only stare at his manuscript and wonder what he should do to improve it. He gave it to Margot to read, hoping she would be able to satisfy unanswered questions troubling him. She had, after all, previously made valuable comments about the early chapters. But Margot had made new friends in the ship’s first-class lounge and was engrossed in onboard activities. By the time the ship docked in Sydney, Margot would not have read past page 6. Spiralling into depression aboard ship, Brickhill began taking meals in his cabin. At each port on the voyage, Margot arranged shore excursions with fellow passengers, expecting her husband to join in. But Brickhill didn’t like his wife’s new friends. At Port Said, he accused her of making him wait in the Simon Arzt department store for two hours while she shopped.

  ‘The trip was pretty foul,’ Brickhill would later tell Billy Collins.250 He wasn’t referring to the weather. When the Orontes docked at Fremantle, Brickhill kept out of sight, as the press, alerted by the presence of Margot Brickhill, Hartnell model and wife of famous author Paul Brickhill, poured aboard to interview her, photographing her posing in Hartnell clothes. A similar press reception awaited the couple at the Orontes’ stops in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. In Adelaide, Margot told reporters they would buy a house in Sydney.251

  Brickhill finally spoke to reporters once they reached Melbourne. ‘I will give away the writing of war thrillers,’ he announced, adding that Reach for the Sky would be his last of that genre. He had by this time gone cold on the idea for the Battle of Britain novel, and would soon be discouraging Billy Collins from mentioning in the blurb for Reach for the Sky that this would be his next Collins release. ‘I plan at present to write three books on Australia,’ Brickhill told the press, ‘one on city life, and possibly two on country life.’ The return to his homeland had stimulated a desire to write the great Australian novel, although he had no detailed plots in mind. ‘I have also discussed the possibilities of an Australian film before I left London.’

  In answer to a question about previously announced plans to make a film version of The Dam Busters, he said, ‘They had begun, but they were curtailed when the 3-D film industry started.’ In fact, although Brickhill didn’t then know it, producer Robert Clark had regained his confidence in the project and was moving towards commencing filming The Dam Busters at London’s Elstree Studios within four months.

  When asked whether a film version of The Great Escape was likely, Brickhill replied, ‘The film option on The Great Escape has also been sold.’ He didn’t elaborate, or identify Fred Coe as the producer holding the option.252

  Landing at Sydney in the third week of August, the couple were met by William Collins’ industrious manager for Australia, Freddy Howe. Brickhill was worried that he would be stung for massive import duties for Margot’s trunk-loads of expensive clothes and hats, but Howe sweet-talked Customs and smoothed the path for a cost-free entry into Australia. Howe was ‘magnificent’, Brickhill would gleefully report to Collins. ‘The Collins organisation seems to be able to turn on anything, anywhere, at any time.’253

  After catching up with Brickhill’s family in Sydney, the couple went to stay with Margot’s mother at Richmond. By the end of the month, Brickhill had moved in with his proud parents at Greenwich Point. His father retired from the newspaper game this same year, but would stay active as president of the Lane Cove Progress Association. Margot, meanwhile, remained at Richmond. The couple’s pressure-cooker relationship, progressively strained by the voyage out, was at exploding point.

  Brickhill’s income continued to multiply. Higham was negotiating with British filmmakers about Reach for the Sky screen rights. The News of the World had made a hefty serial rights bid. Considering the paper too downmarket, Brickhill plumped for John Bull magazine, and when it offered £12,000, twice as much as it had previously paid to serialise any book, both Brickhill and Bader were delighted, and Higham sealed the deal. John Bull’s serialised version would start appearing a week before Collins released the book the following April. Deals were also done for serialised versions in Australian newspapers in 1954. With a mixture of amusement and annoyance, Brickhill would read that the British press had anointed him the highest-earning author in the UK in 1953, estimating his income for the year at £115,000. He had certainly earned more than enough to pay off his parents’ house, a priority from the beginning.

  In the meantime, Margot’s mother, a member of the Country Women’s Association, had arranged for Margot to co-judge the Miss Manning Contest at the CWA Ball at Taree in Northern New South Wales, with Sydney opera singer Eric Starling. In mid-September, mother and daughter headed north to Taree. The town’s newspaper declared that Margot ‘possessed all the attributes of a good and conscientious judge’, expressing confidence that ‘her charming personality would immediately bring out the best in the girls’.254

  While Margot told the press that she and her husband were both staying at Richmond, Brickhill remained at his parents’ house, from where he wrote to Billy Collins, ‘Australia seems very sunny and prosperous, but I’m missing London very, very much and couldn’t bear to think of myself as a long-term exile.’255 For now, he had a job to do. On the afternoon of 31 August, secure in his parents’ bosom, he started polishing Reach for the Sky. During September, as he worked, he learned that his old 92 Squadron flying partner Neville Duke had just become famous in Britain. A test pilot now, Duke had broken the world air speed record.

  Within several weeks, Brickhill had completed his Bader book. Without the guidance of Bonham Carter’s report, he’d decided not to make major cuts. In the US, Norton & Co were planning to reduce the book from 150,000 words to 100,000, but that didn’t bother Brickhill. He felt the British version much more important. And he was having second thoughts about the title. He wrote that month to Higham and Collins that he thought it should become Foothold in the Sky. ‘I don’t press the point, but I feel Reach for the Sky is just a shade too light, slightly hackneyed and faintly reminiscent of a cowboy story.’256 Higham didn’t agree, and Collins felt that such a title would be seen as a bad pun on Bader’s legs, or lack of them. For a while, Collins considered One of the Few as an alternative title, but in the end preferred to stay with Reach for the Sky. From Sydney, Brickhill concurred.

  By the time the author mailed the revised manuscript to London on 12 September, he’d dedicated the book to Thelma Bader. ‘She was the luckiest break Douglas ever had,’ he would say in a press article he wrote to promote the book on its release.257 Thelma was, in fact, the sort of wife he would have liked for himself.

  Once the book was in the mail, Brickhill could relax, play golf and do a little sailing on Sydney Harbour. He also tied down opportunities to exploit his books locally. A visiting Australian radio producer and budding author by the name of Morris West had come to one of Brickhill’s Chelsea flat parties in 1951, and the pair had kept in touch. West had also met Jon Cleary at that party; they subsequently became best friends. Brickhill now did a deal with West for his Australasian Radio Productions to record three Brickhill books as commercial radio dramas, with actors playing the roles. Brickhill himself recorded an introduction for each series. Reach for the Sky, longest
and last of the three series, would run to fifty-two half-hour episodes. With television only reaching Australia in 1956, these radio serials had millions of listeners when they went to air in 1953–54.

  Sydney actor Rodney Taylor would appear in all three Brickhill radio serialisations, playing increasingly important roles: one of the prisoners in The Great Escape, Dave Shannon in The Dam Busters and Douglas Bader in Reach for the Sky. In 1954, once recording of Reach for the Sky was completed, Taylor would set off for England. Travelling via Los Angeles, he would be waylaid there by offers of acting work, and stay. As Rod Taylor, he would become a Hollywood star. Taylor’s last, brief role, before his death in 2015, would be as Winston Churchill in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 movie Inglourious Basterds.

  Margot, meanwhile, was enjoying the limelight. Before leaving London, she had contracted Australian modelling jobs for renowned textile designer Miki Sekers of the West Cumberland Silk Mills in England’s northwest. In October, she helped show a range of Sekers’ new nylon garments at the Myer Emporium in Melbourne and Prince’s Restaurant in Sydney. Her husband now put a proposition to her from Freddy Howe, who’d asked Brickhill to do a Woman’s Day feature with his wife as advance publicity for Reach for the Sky. With the magazine proposing to make Margot the cover girl for the issue, she agreed. In early November, the couple did the interview and a studio photo shoot, with neither revealing they’d been apart for months. Margot fronted the magazine’s 16 November issue, with a story about the couple and the upcoming book on page 2 along with a photo of them together.

  Margot got on well with her in-laws, driving Dot around in a borrowed car. But her relationship with Brickhill was on the brink. In November, as the couple walked on the grassy reserve that sloped down to the Lane Cove River near 41 George Street, Brickhill was thinking that divorce was probably the best course for them. It was then that Margot dropped a bombshell. She announced that she was pregnant.