The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives

by Sebastian Faulks

  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. Pritc
hett, 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:

  Richard Hillary was typical of the intellectual who becomes a fighter pilot. That in itself sounds formidable enough, because the qualities of both must produce in a man obsessively strong traits of individuality. By the time he arrived at Bentley the whole force and expression of his character had become excessively individualistic. It was known that he was exceptionally talented and highly-strung. That was clear enough from a reading of his remarkable book … There was some devil goading him on which none of us could understand. He never spoke about it, but the result of that goading was to be seen in his manner. From the moment he arrived at my Headquarters he started nagging at everybody about being allowed to return to operational flying. He had been through a hard and trying time, and many people went out of their way to help him; but Hillary simply could not reconcile himself to having to stay on the ground. He spoke to me several times about getting back to flying, and each time I told him that I simply could not recommend it. But he kept pestering me, and in the end I gave in with a rather foolish suggestion.

  ‘If you can get the doctors to pass you,’ I told him, ‘you can go back on ops.’

  I said that because I felt certain that the doctors would never pass him fit for any sort of operational flying. But I had not counted on Hillary’s pertinacity and persuasiveness.

  So, in order to rid himself of Hillary’s attentions, Douglas passed the decision on to someone else. It was similar to the way in which McIndoe had finally yielded. Other people who talked to Hillary at the time also tried to dissuade him from flying again, but in the end they tended to give way both to the force of Hillary’s personality and to a feeling that a man should, after all the arguments have been put to him, be allowed to decide the shape of his own destiny.

  Eric Linklater, a writer whom Hillary had met through Lovat Dickson, described the process: ‘I was one who tried to make him change his mind. I was alternately rough and plausible. I wanted to keep him out of the sky and make him earthbound. And then, one evening, I was frightened that I might succeed; and said no more … I remember very clearly the night when I discovered that I could try no more to dislodge him from his resolution for fear that happened. In his character – in his mind, his spirit, his personality – there was a quality like something with a sharpened edge and a fine surface, and I was suddenly frightened that my argument would dull the edge or tarnish the surface. And that is the sober truth of it.’

  This sophisticated, almost existential, argument seems, curiously enough, to have been accepted by most of Hillary’s friends. Their regard for him extended to allowing him into danger.

  On 21 July 1942 Richard Hillary was back in the air. He flew a light aircraft – all that he was permitted – on a mission to collect material for the Order book, and in the course of it came across his old friend Raspberry – now Squadron Leader Berry. Within a week or so he was flying Spitfires again, though he was aware that he would not be able to handle the plane in battle. He flew sixty hours in single-engined fighters, some with the tacit connivance of his superiors and some without. In the late summer he was in touch with Max Aitken, whom he had met in 1939, and who had become one of the toughest and most successful fighter pilots in the RAF. Aitken told Hillary that if he could pass his medical and complete the necessary training, he was prepared to accept him into his night-fighter squadron.

  As Hillary built up his strength and his defences for his next encounter with the Medical Board, there were a number of literary activities to occupy him. He wrote a script for a propaganda film about the work of the Margate lifeboat and did a radio broadcast for the BBC, which was chiefly a reworking of passages from The Last Enemy. He was a good publicist for his own book, and spoke stirringly at a Foyle’s lunch about the nature of fascism. Lovat Dickson commented that ‘Everything which he touched seemed suddenly to reflect the light of publicity on him, when what he wanted was the quietness and security of the shadows.’ Lovat Dickson was working closely with him at this time, but his view does not coincide with Eric Linklater’s opinion that Hillary was ‘fertile of stratagem and device to make [the book] more widely known and numerously read’. And while part of Hillary was certainly looking for quietness and security, his confused search seldom took him close to the ‘shadows’.

  Where it did take him was to the painter Eric Kennington, to whom he was introduced by Eric Linklater. Hillary was ecstatic about his new friend. He wrote to Mary Booker: ‘I have quite lost my heart to Kennington. He has the most extraordinary personal magnetism of anyone I have met – a great man I think. Certainly his sculpture of Lawrence is a masterpiece. His farm is so restful, that I feel the life in me stirring and the writing is beginning to come.

  ‘I return tomorrow until Thursday to sit for him. He is no longer with the RAF, so it must be a private arrangement… Now I really shall have something to leave you. As soon as it is done, I will make my will and set my family’s mind at rest.’

  Hillary’s letter crossed with one from Mary terminating their affair. She felt he had become too remote and too self-interested; the strain of being continually separated from someone who in any case seemed more concerned for himself than for her had become too much to bear. She marked the date in her engagement diary: ‘Dismissal R.H.’ and asked if they could still be friends.

  Hillary accepted that she was right. ‘I must give all of myself or nothing,’ he wrote. The circumstances of their separation and his own increasingly desperate quest to understand what he should do next meant that he could not give all of himself; it had therefore to be nothing. Some of Hillary’s friends had remarked that Mary Booker was not only old enough to be his mother, she was almost exactly the same age as Edwyna Hillary. Whatever the peculiar needs of each party, both behaved with dignity at the end of the affair.

  The emotional void in Hillary’s life was largely filled by his friendship wit
h Eric Kennington and by his reading of T.E. Lawrence. Kennington had been one of Lawrence’s closest friends and had done an admired portrait of him. He had illustrated Seven Pillars of Wisdom and shared much of Lawrence’s outlook on life, particularly his ideas about heroism. Kennington allowed Hillary to read a privately circulated copy of Lawrence’s book The Mint, which was, on Lawrence’s instructions, not to be published before 1950, when the people who might be offended by his uncompromising portraits would presumably be dead. The book tells of Lawrence’s flight from fame, in 1922 and his enlistment in the ranks of the RAF at Uxbridge. He felt that the wealth and glory that had come to him from his Arabian adventures had in some way corrupted him and set him apart from ‘humanity’; in a confused but passionate gesture of fraternity he tried an ‘inclination towards ground level’ in an attempt to ‘make myself more human’. Among the Ordinary Aircraftmen Second Class, or ‘erks’ as they called themselves, of RAF Uxbridge Lawrence purged his soul. Richard Hillary, who had less far to descend, but who felt a similar confusion about the ‘responsibilities of the man who is left’ and had seen it compounded by a vague feeling of guilt at the success of The Last Enemy, responded wholeheartedly to Lawrence’s extraordinary book.

  The Mint was written in note form in the barracks at night and Lawrence never gave it a gloss of fluency. The result, with its largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, occasional alliteration and frequent absence of articles, sometimes sounds like a Middle English poem crossed with the Henry Green of Living. The effective plainness of style is complicated by murmurs of homosexual masochism. Lawrence’s attitude to his colleagues is inconsistent, as was Hillary’s. In one striking sequence Lawrence weeps in the back of a lorry that is taking him and a squad of twelve on a fatigue to a neighbouring aerodrome. ‘I was trying to think, if I was happy, why I was happy, and what was this overwhelming sense upon me of having got home, at last, after an interminable journey … word-dandling and looking inward, instead of swaying upright in the lorry with my pals, and yelling Rah Rah at all we met, in excess of life. With my fellows, yes; and among my fellows: but a fellow myself? Only when in concert we obeyed some physical movement, whose pattern could momently absorb my mind.’