A mile and a half from Broad Chalke in Wiltshire is the small tillage of Fifield Bavant. In May 1995, fifty years after VE Day, the village held its celebrations. In the tiny Norman church there was a display that included various wartime mementoes – identity card, medals and so on – that had belonged to the pilot and writer Richard Hillary, a branch of whose family lives in the village. A modest crowd of mainly local people came to pay their tributes.

British celebrations of the event split people along a bitter little divide that has run through much of the domestic political discussion of the last quarter of the century. On the one hand were the latter-day Empire Loyalists who tried to suggest that the global war had been won by Britain alone, and that the decisive participation of the great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had been little more than a convenience. On the other were the disgruntled internationalists who were unwilling to believe that Britain might ever have performed a useful or morally just role, and that to suggest otherwise was a conspiracy of an undefined ‘establishment’.

Somewhere among the bunting and the bitterness there were reasonable accounts of what British forces achieved. What might have struck anyone who had no hard allegiance to either side of the political fault line was not so much the size of the British contribution to the Allied effort as its continuity. From 1939 to 1945, from Holland to Tunisia, from Italy to Burma, from Normandy to the waters of the Atlantic, Britain was continually fighting. Its singular position placed it under certain obligations. The disgruntled internationalists pointed out that Halifax, not Churchill, might easily have been its leader; the nationalist romantics claimed that the ‘British character’ was immune to such infection. But however it came about, the isolation of 1940 and 1941 was met in a distinctive way. The International Brigades who fought against Franco in Spain were motivated by a self-conscious political idealism, but the infantry at Dunkirk and the fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain had no such crusading passion. Memoirs of the War made it seem as though at times it was almost a matter of taste: the Nazis were so lacking in self-awareness, so crude, so strangely unimpressive in their way, that they must – albeit reluctantly – be taken on and defeated. Their army might be the finest ever to take the field, their air force might conceivably, as its commander claimed, be able to clear the RAF from the sky, then bomb Britain into submission; but the people behind these outstandingly well-drilled services – those men with their goose-step, their bragging and their hysterical rallies – were preposterous.

Although this contempt lasted throughout the War, it lived, in 1940, with fear. The British armies were on the retreat; and while the Navy went about its work unseen, it was the RAF – the smallest service, whose members often fought in single combat – that seemed best to embody Britain’s position. The public had been bombed, battered and scared, yet in the scruffy, nonchalant figures of the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots it found men on whom it could fasten its hopes.

Many of the airmen were from Commonwealth countries, many more from Poland or Czechoslovakia. The RAF seemed to have a different social feeling from the other services. Those who cared about such things noted a preponderance of ‘minor public school’ men; they called them the Brylcreem Boys in semi-affectionate recognition of the fact that no ‘gentleman’ would use such cheap hair cream. None of this mattered. What was significant was the character of a man who wanted to fly fighter planes. He needed to be competitive and scornful, eager for a chance to prove himself; he needed also a rarer combination of qualities: he had both to be young and alert, yet attach no great importance to his life. This was the requirement that came before patriotism, political belief or even skill in flying. It was not like being in the infantry where, even during the slaughters of the Western Front in 1914-18, you had a better then even chance of surviving. If you flew more than a certain number of missions in 1940-1 you were not likely to come back. This did not mean that all the pilots were reckless, willing to risk their lives for the sake of the chase and kill above the clouds; nor did it mean that they had to be more patriotically motivated. It meant only they had to have, at heart, some indifference to dying. The public were encouraged by Churchill’s speeches to believe this indifference was heroic; the pilots themselves did not see it as such. Far from subscribing to the myth, they tried to subvert it. They cultivated understatement in a private slang; they came close to callousness: they claimed to feel nothing.

If the RAF represented Britain in those two years, and if the fighter pilots were its epitome, there was a short time when the most emblematic of them all was Richard Hillary. His book about his experiences, The Last Enemy, was published in 1942 and struck some mysterious answering note in the British wartime mood. Christopher Wood’s stricken man on a parachute had found his powerful, symbolic hour.

It was fitting that the hero of the moment should be a twenty-one-year-old Australian with an ambivalent feeling about ‘English’ virtues. Hillary was born on 20 April 1919, in Sydney. His father Michael was a civil servant of Anglo-Irish descent; his mother Edwyna had Scottish and Spanish blood. Michael Hillary had served in India and Mesopotamia during the Great War, had won the DSO and was twice mentioned in dispatches. From 1921 to 1923 he was private secretary to the Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes. Then, when Richard was three, Michael Hillary was posted to Australia House in London. Richard lived the rest of his life in England and did not appear to think his Australian beginnings important. He was sent to boarding schools at an early age and adopted the manners they taught. He was too emotionally open to be regarded as typical, but he certainly viewed himself as English.

As a child he was pugnacious and self-assertive. He would hop about in a fury if he was denied, but soon afterwards he could laugh at himself. His nerves and emotions were close to the surface, and he was tiresomely quick-tempered. The loss of a game of tennis or beach cricket would mean a heavy fire of hurled bats and rackets; the thwarting of any whim would mean tears and abuse. It was some compensation to his parents that he was doggedly truthful. When he had behaved badly he never sought to escape the blame; his father could recall no instance in his life in which he had shown less than complete dedication to the truth. Richard respected his father, but did not feel close to him. Michael Hillary was a friendly, hospitable man up to a point; but he had strict views on how things should be done. For warmth of emotional contact, Richard Hillary turned, like Christopher Wood, to his mother. Personal connections were her strong point: as a spiritualist she even believed in communication with the dead. She was a good-looking woman, mild-mannered and devoted, to the point of indulgence, to her hot-headed son. Photographs of Richard as a child show a plump, cheeky-looking boy with the confident look in the eye of one who will jump off the highest wall, take on the biggest bully and persecute those less brave than himself.

Michael Hillary’s visit to London preceded a permanent posting as Auditor-General in the Sudan, so the question of boarding, schools arose at once. The real separation came in September 1926 when Richard was seven and a half. Shortly before their departure for the Sudan his parents left him in the headmaster’s study at his preparatory school. The full implications of his abandonment somehow escaped the child until the moment when his mother leant down to kiss him goodbye. His skin turned crimson, his eyes shone, his jaw clamped tight. He watched his mother leave, but he did not cry. She had taught him to be a ‘man’.

He wrote to her in Khartoum, begging her to take him away. Mother and son had developed the rugged intimacy that was necessary in a relationship which had to survive separation for two-thirds of the year. When they were reunited Richard was too happy to worry about school: the last thing he wanted to do in the holidays was to trail round alternative places, to be shown down further brown corridors that smelled of loneliness and chalk and boiled dinners. He finished his time at the school; in the phrase employed in such cases, he ‘stuck it out’.

In 1931 he went to Shrewsbury, a public school in Shropshire, where he took part enthusiastically in the traditional activities. At the age of fifteen he was taught English by a Mr McEachran, an inspiring teacher who, Hillary told listeners to an American broadcast in 1942, was the most important influence in his life. Richard told him that he wanted to be a writer when he grew up and that his model would be Steinbeck: McEachran encouraged him, and Richard read widely. He became a handsome and sexually precocious youth; he lost his virginity at the age of sixteen, a feat that was the subject of incredulous schoolboy envy.

In the school holidays he would go off to Europe on his own rather than visit his parents in Khartoum. His mother agreed only reluctantly to this arrangement, but it enabled Richard to learn French and German as well as to enlarge his sexual experience. He took what public school had to offer, but remained cantankerous and provocative. He had few friends at Shrewsbury where most of his contemporaries regarded him as aloof and unreliable; a kind of choric response developed at the mention of his name: ‘Oh, that shit Hillary.’

He became tediously argumentative and crudely personal in his comments; he refused to accept such concepts as ‘house loyalty’, and this made him unpopular. Although he was intellectually more mature than the other boys he was never chosen for any honours or teams. Forced by his parents’ absence to develop some self-sufficiency at an early age, he had allowed it to develop into an assumed superiority. His housemaster wrote: ‘He seemed to dislike the conventional views of things, often merely because they were conventional… He liked shocking people in a mild way.’ These were also the characteristics of the adult man: he was inclined to argue and strike attitudes, but he never had the intellectual curiosity or perhaps the capacity to develop coherent alternatives to the conventions he opposed. The Last Enemy was at times an angry and rebellious book, but in his deepest beliefs its author did not seriously differ from others of his age and occupation.

Hillary was none the less an inquisitive and intelligent boy, good enough at work to win a place at Trinity College, Oxford, where he went in October 1937. Trinity was a small and friendly college whose spacious garden included a lime walk that dated from the eighteenth century. It was noted less for its scholars than for its sportsmen. Hillary said that the ethos of the college at the time was one of ‘alert philistinism’, though contemporaries in other colleges questioned the adjective. Trinity was often thought to be rather grander than it really was, perhaps out of confusion with Trinity, Cambridge. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby made this assumption when claiming that as an Oggsford man’ it was at Trinity that he had spent his undergraduate days – ‘I always carry a souvenir of my Oxford days. It was taken in Trinity quad – the man on my left is the Earl of Doncaster.’

Hillary’s main contribution to the college was as an oarsman. He had grown two inches since school, but his disruptive personality made him a tricky crew member: on one occasion he engaged in a fist fight with the bow man Derek Graham. He stroked the Trinity boat in his first year when it went to the Head of the River (came first in the college summer races). This achievement meant that he was considered for the university eight to row against Cambridge. He would not figure prominently among the twenty-five-year-old colonial postgraduates who make up the team today, but in 1938 a slightly-built natural athlete with a hangover could still do well.

Nearly all the young men at Trinity had been to public schools (Hillary claimed that they came from the ‘better’ public schools), where they had been well enough taught to be able to drift through three years at Oxford and still gain a respectable second-class degree. Hillary read history under the tutorship of Melville Paterson and Reggie Weaver, of whose teaching it was said that ‘Patters can’t and Reggie won’t’. The public school atmosphere of the college was carried into Oxford life: it was considered unacceptable to be different or unconventional in any way. Displays of learning were as suspect as suede shoes or beards. This sense of cohesiveness or uniformity was enforced by the enormous number of clubs and societies which offered an even tighter bonding and even stricter elimination of the ‘peculiar’.

Societies, however, usually have a defensive purpose, and what Hillary and his friends wished to protect themselves against was the bungling and bureaucracy of politics. They knew that a war was coming, but they wanted to fight it on their own terms. It had been made inevitable by the low calibre of the 1930s politicians throughout Europe, who had fudged, postponed and appeased; but when it came to the action, Hillary’s generation wanted it to be swift, clear and, as far as possible, undisciplined. There was little sense of idealism in their attitude and none at all of ideology.

A University Air Squadron offered training at the Government’s expense: Hillary learned to fly on Tiger Moths at an airfield outside Oxford. Members of the squadron regarded students who did artillery or infantry exercises with the Officers Training Corps as absurdly solemn. Although he stressed how uninterested he was in politics, Hillary was scornful of left-wing undergraduates who had fallen under the influence of the Auden group. Such people, he thought, despised the middle classes from whom they received their education, but could not gain entrance to the world of labour they admired. They were thus useless. Hillary’s criticism of them was less a political than a practical one: their beliefs, he reasoned, had rendered them incapable of participating. It seems curious that Hillary was able to overlook so completely the Spanish Civil War, in which many such men had found redeeming action and even death. He must have been aware of the participation of George Orwell and Stephen Spender in Spain, and of the death of others, such as John Cornford. The French writer Andre Malraux, despite his lack of flying experience, raised a squadron for the Republicans. The Prime Minister Léon Blum was unable to supply planes officially because he needed Britain’s continuing support against the Germans, and Britain was fastidiously neutral in Spain on the grounds that the ‘Bolshevists’ were as bad as the Fascists. However, Blum managed to allow some planes to find their way, unarmed, over the Pyrenees, for the use of Malraux, who lobbed out bombs by hand on to Franco’s forces, who were using planes supplied by Hitler.

In The Last Enemy Hillary condensed the left-wing position in a pacifist figure called David Rutter. Although the name of Rutter appears on no university lists, he appears to have been a real person whom Hillary wished to protect, by changing his name, from public disapproval. In a dialogue with Rutter Hillary clearly stated his own reasons for fighting in the RAF: ‘In the first place I shall get paid and have good food. Secondly, I have none of your sentiments about killing, much as I admire them. In a fighter plane, I believe, we have found a way to return to war as it ought to be, war which is individual combat between two people, in which one either kills or is killed. It’s exciting, it’s individual and it’s disinterested. I shan’t be sitting behind a long-range gun working out how to kill people sixty miles away. I shan’t get maimed: either I shall get killed or I shall get a few pleasant putty medals and enjoy being stared at in a night club.’

His idea of what war ought not to be was based on the Western Front, with its long-range artillery bombardments and mass, anonymous slaughters. War in the air would be ‘exciting, individual and disinterested’, by the last of which he meant free from ideological or institutionalised motive.

He was right about killing or being killed, wrong about not being maimed.

Hillary had matured considerably since leaving Shrewsbury. Straightforward young Trinity men like Sammy Stockton and Frank Waldron no longer considered him a ‘shit’ but were in awe of his charm, sophistication and physical daring. On one occasion he climbed out of the window of a second-floor room in Garden Quad and inched his way along a narrow ledge to the amazed protest of friends on the ground. He liked to test his courage because he was aware of his limitations.

On various excursions to London he impressed his friends with his precocious savoir-vivre. He favoured a club in Beak Street called the Bag o’ Nails, where a bored-looking band played shuffling music while girls smooched up to half-cut customers at dimly lit tables. While Hillary’s friends, in varying degrees of embarrassment and virginity, managed only to buy warm, overpriced champagne, Hillary always contrived to leave with the best-looking girl. They suspected that with Hillary she even ‘did it’ for free. The others left with empty pockets and nothing to take home but the cheery call of Millie, the owner, to ‘remember the dear old Bag’.

In Oxford Hillary joined the staff of the university magazine Isis. His father was anxious that he should follow him into the colonial service, and as a compromise Hillary modified his declared ambition from ‘writer’ to ‘journalist’. To this end he spent more time on Isis and neglected his rowing. He was consequently dropped from the Trinity first eight, though this did not prevent him setting off for Germany in July 1938 to take part in a regatta.

By describing themselves as an Oxford University crew, Hillary and Frank Waldron had persuaded the German and Hungarian governments to pay for ten of them to travel to Bad Ems in Germany and thence to Budapest. They suffered the usual fate of sporting students on an overseas trip; their exuberant drinking was encouraged by hosts anxious to see their own teams do well. The competitive atmosphere was intensified and soured by Nazi pride. A local coach found them an almost watertight boat, though they did no practice. A number of well-muscled Aryan youths sneered at them before the race, and a misunderstanding over starting orders meant that they set off some way behind five German crews. Halfway up the course someone spat on the Oxford boat from a bridge, and this apparently provided the necessary spur to their performance. They stormed up the last part of the course to win the General Goering cup by two-fifths of a second. It was not a popular win.

In Budapest two days later, the team was sabotaged by dastardly Hungarians, who filled them with wine and goulash and made them row three times in the heat of the day. The triumph of B ad Ems could not be repeated: Sammy Stockton, the man who had stroked them to victory in Germany, failed to stay the course. Defeat went down well with their hosts, however, who had a further explanation of why the ‘Oxford University Team’ had lost: a cartoon in a local paper showed eight men in a boat looking over their shoulder at a naked girl in a skiff.

The delights of Europe drew Hillary back twice before the War, once on a farewell gastronomic tour of Brittany, and once to a regatta in Cannes. In England he had begun an affair with a girl called Anne Mackenzie, whom he had first met in the summer of 1938 after his triumph on the Thames. His letters to her show a capacity for despair that would have surprised Frank Waldron and the other militantly unsentimental members of the Trinity boat. It was camouflaged in some self-conscious banter: ‘The spring has had a bad effect on me,’ he wrote in May 1939, ‘and I have burst into verse – also composed a song about mountains and the moon and you! You must hear it sometime. It will thaw the icy walls of your heart.’

The letters show that Hillary had developed a mental framework and a vocabulary for dealing with such affairs. His approach was conventionally romantic but with a ragged edge of truculence. In July he wrote: ‘Sometimes now I wish there would be war – as I feel then that so many things would clarify themselves and you and I could be together again anyhow for a short time and there would be no false values and muddled thinking. Life would have a purpose while it lasted. I’m afraid that I’m becoming very heavy and rather boring. But a young man in love was ever a pitiable object. I wish I could be with you – have you in my arms, but the day when I shall be able to do that again seems very remote.’

There was something false about the feeling Hillary was claiming; and, like most of his relationships with women, his affair with Anne Mackenzie was short-lived. His expressed despair seemed to stem less from the anguish of love thwarted than from a reluctant acceptance that he must fight. On the morning of 3 September 1939 he listened to Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast at the house in Beaconsfield that his parents used on their visits to England. When it had finished he said goodbye to them and borrowed his father’s car to drive over to the headquarters of the University Air Squadron in Oxford. It was the end of his second year at Oxford, but he had no qualms about leaving his degree until ‘later’.

Hillary was initially made a sergeant and put in charge of a platoon of fellow-undergraduates. He found himself too unmilitary to shout at them and therefore gave drill orders only after democratic consultation. Soon afterwards he was commissioned into a different wing and found himself among several old Oxford friends, including Frank Waldron and an Armenian called Noel Agazarian, who combined intelligence, sporting ability and a disrespect for authority in about the same proportions as Hillary and had consequently become a close friend. Agazarian had intended reading for the Bar after having been sent down from Oxford for what Hillary called ‘breaking up his college’. Hillary and Agazarian were posted to a flying school at Kinloss, on the north-east coast of Scotland. They drove up with a third Oxford undergraduate called Peter Howes, a scientist who proved helpful on the technical aspects of subsequent flying exams.

At Kinloss they met regular RAF men who treated them with disdain, referring to them as ‘weekend pilots’ and ‘long-haired boys’. Hillary was quite able to withstand the mockery and even became mildly cooperative when the flying began on American trainers called Harvards. He was taught by a Sergeant White, who turned him into a competent, if not a brilliant, pilot. He made mistakes through arrogance and inattention, but in a crisis that was not of his making he showed speed of reaction. The sensation of flying was intoxicating and still untainted by any sense of duty. The war by land had not yet started, so, alone in the air, Hillary and the other long-haired boys could make carefree swoops through soft white canyons, watching the shadow of the plane move down the long pale embankments of cloud.

It was in Scotland that Hillary first heard an aircraft crashing. The pilot was doing a height test and had presumably fainted; little of him was found, so they filled the coffin with sand. It was on the same station that he first flew by night. After two practice circuits with Sgt White, he was allowed to take the plane up on his own. He took off without difficulty and flew for some minutes; all went well as long as he kept his gaze on the instrument panel. Then, unable to resist the temptation, he stared out of the cockpit and found the horizon had vanished. This is a sensation the pilot dreads. With cloud covering up the light of the stars, he has no way of knowing where he is, or how far from the earth. He is aware simultaneously of the vastness of the space around him and of feeling trapped in a constricting and dangerous little box. Hillary looked down for the flare-path of the runway: he saw nothing, but noticed that he was gaining speed. He jerked back the stick to slow down, but could still see nothing. He half stood up in his seat, craning his neck. Suddenly he saw the lights of the flare-path: there was space between him and the earth – he was safe. After a moment of shame, he felt powerful and exhilarated. He experienced the feeling of arrogance, of mastery of himself and his destiny, that was common to airmen when they had regained control of their machines.

Back on the ground he was tersely congratulated by Sgt White. As they smoked a cigarette in the hangar another pilot tried to land. He overshot the runway and disappeared out to sea. They found his body, with his machine half in and half out of the water. In his pocket were ten pounds he had drawn to go on leave the next day. He was the same age as Richard Hillary: twenty.

Hillary and his colleagues were somehow able to dismiss such incidents from their personal assessments of the War, which they continued to discuss only in terms of what selfish pleasure or satisfaction it might offer. The arrival of a Spitfire squadron in Scotland caused particular excitement. These fast, manoeuvrable fighters were what all the training pilots wanted to fly, but casualties in Fighter Command were as yet so light that no further pilots were required. When they completed the course in Scotland most of the young pilots, including Hillary, Noel Agazarian and Peter Howes, were therefore posted to ‘Army Cooperation’. This meant training in cumbersome Lysanders at Old Sarum in Wiltshire.

Hillary, slightly to his surprise, enjoyed the further training, which included aerial photography and long-distance reconnaissance. He even warmed to the Lysander after a while. It was more like flying an old single-decker bus than a Spitfire, but it was commendably easy to control and appeared impossible to stall. Hillary tried his best by putting his plane through various loops and rolls; it was only when he realised his observer was not strapped in but had been hurled around in the rear cockpit that he put an end to the aerobatics: he had taken the man’s shrieks for boyish enthusiasm. Agazarian meanwhile managed to flip over his Hector while trying to take off. The plane did not catch fire, but Agazarian was not out of danger: many young flyers when overturned in the cockpit undid their straps, fell out and broke their necks. Fortunately the upside-down Agazarian retained some mental equilibrium and escaped with a severe reprimand.

The days of innocence ended with Dunkirk in June 1940. Hillary motored down to Brighton with Agazarian and Peter Howes to see some of the returning soldiers for himself. He found them resentful at the lack of air cover they had received from the RAF, but, in a moment of uncharacteristic self-control, Hillary forbore to point out that if the RAF had not gained supremacy above Flanders there would have been no evacuation at all. They spent the day at Brighton in the traditional way of off-duty servicemen, and on the way back to Old Sarum Peter Howes drove the car off the road. It was almost the last of the undergraduate pranks.

Leave was cancelled and side arms were issued. The Government appealed for calm and volunteers for a Local Defence force, the forerunner of the Home Guard. Up and down the country people began to understand for the first time that there might soon be German tanks in their streets, swastikas on their town hall and a summer sky dark with descending paratroops.

The Air Ministry rushed to strengthen the country’s air defences, and this meant drafting in more fighter pilots. Of the twenty young men at Old Sarum, fifteen would be required; the names of the five who would remain in Army Cooperation would be drawn from a hat. Hillary, with a grim little flourish, described the draw as his worst moment of the war. He was lucky in the draw: he was to be a fighter pilot at last.

Their training was completed by instructors of No. 1 Squadron in Gloucestershire. Among Number 1 were the first pilots of the War to be decorated. They were famous throughout the country for their recent exploits in France, and even Hillary treated them with their due respect. The men from Number 1 were impressed by the German machines, the Messerchmitt 109 in particular, and by their pilots’ skill; but they showed contempt for the Germans’ tactical inflexibility and preference for fighting only when numbers favoured them. Many airmen at the time spoke like this, depicting the Germans in a way that seems almost like national caricature; but for the purpose of building their own morale it was sensible to focus on German weakness, and the subsequent performance of the RAF against the Luftwaffe bore out some of their claims.

At last the moment came when Hillary climbed into a Spitfire. It was not a big plane: a tall man could stand beside it and place his hand on the top of the cockpit. Pilots wore a lightweight flying suit to keep the oil off their uniform, fleece-lined boots (maps stuffed down one, revolver down another, though the gun always flew out when the parachute jerked open), and a Mae West life-jacket, with a thick collar to keep sagging heads above water, and a number of pockets and whistles at the front. The pilots were sceptical about the value of whistling in the vastness of the Channel. The flying helmet had an oxygen mask and a microphone built into the mouthpiece with earphones stitched in at the side. The mask had a characteristic smell of old rubber. Some pilots used goggles with tinted lenses when flying into the sun, many kept them on top of their heads; it was agreed that their chief purpose was to protect the eyes from fire. The gloves (silk beneath wash-leather) did the same for the hands.

The parachute was strapped like a bulging nappy beneath the pilot’s backside. The tighter the fitting, the less chance of injury when it opened. There was no dignity in the resulting waddle to the plane, and the pilot needed a hand up from the ground crew on to the wing. The seat was no more than a piece of moulded metal, as on a child’s pedal car, designed to accommodate the parachute; later in the war it had also to take a one-man dinghy pack.

Once inside, the pilot strapped himself tightly into his seat. Flying upside down with orange tracer grazing your cockpit was made worse if you were also banging around inside the plane. Not that there was that much space: the bigger pilots would touch the canopy with their heads and either side of the cockpit with their shoulders. The hands and feet had only a few inches of movement, but that was all that was needed. The Spitfire was a delicately responsive plane.

Richard Hillary was enthralled by its beauty and simplicity. His first flight ran smoothly; then came an aerobatic flight in which he was told to ‘make her talk’; then came oxygen climbs and fighting exercises. It all went well; and if Hillary did not describe flying the Spitfire as a ‘piece of cake’ he may well have been the first pilot in Britain who did not.

The Spitfire had been designed by a young man called R. J. Mitchell; the Merlin engine with which it was fitted was the work of Sir Henry Royce. Both men died before the plane had been properly tested. Its chief backer in the RAF was Sir Hugh Dowding, who was Air Member for Supply and Research in the years before the War and Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command to the end of 1940. The Spitfire was a superlative piece of engineering, and in the hands of the young RAF pilots in the Summer of 1940 it was-just-able to prevent the Luftwaffe from realising its declared aim. Enthusiasts therefore argued that the performance of the Spitfire saved Britain and the then free world from conquest. The flying facts were more complicated. The Messerchmitt 109 was the plane responsible for most of the damage inflicted on the RAF, and it was an equally sophisticated machine. It was as fast as the Spitfire, much faster than the Hurricane, and could out-dive or out-climb either. It was also better armed. A cannon fired explosive shells through the propeller hub, in a variation of the syncopated technique that Roland Garros had allegedly developed from watching the electric fan in the apartment of Jean Cocteau’s mother. The Me-109 also had four, sometimes six, machine guns, two of which were mounted above the engine cowling. These were much more powerful than the Spitfire’s eight Browning machine guns, though the Brownings had a higher rate of fire.

Where the British fighters were superior was in their turning circle. Both Spitfires and Hurricanes could out-turn the Me-109, and in one-to-one fights this manoeuvrability was crucial. The best tactic for a Messerchmitt was a high-speed attack, followed by a sudden dive or climb. Because, however, they were detailed to escort flights of bombers, they were not supposed to stray too far from their formation. Thus they found themselves drawn into fights over a small area, where the more agile Spitfires turned inside them and delivered their lighter fire in quick bursts. The German tactical inflexibility that the No. 1 Squadron instructors had described to Hillary and his colleagues became important when Goering, anxious about the losses inflicted on his bombers, instructed the Messerchmitts to stick even more closely to them, thus limiting further his fighters’ potential superiority.

They remained a frightening weapon. Many were painted yellow about the nose and all of them fired tracer bullets; the sight of orange lead issuing from a yellow plane had an unsettling effect on young RAF pilots. Both the Messerchmitt and the Spitfire were improved as the war went on, so that either might edge ahead at any one moment; but in the critical summer of 1940 they were evenly matched. The older Hurricane enjoyed a swan song in the Battle of Britain, and although it was not used in large numbers again after 1940 it remained much loved by the men who flew it.

The drawbacks to the Spitfire were few. Most of the pilots, including Richard Hillary, bought rear-view mirrors from car accessory shops and screwed them to the top of the cockpit windscreen. Flying upside down in a slow roll was unpleasant because pieces of dust and grit fell down into the pilot’s eyes as he hung from his straps; but this could happen in any plane. It was only in night flight that the Spitfire showed serious defects. The bulky engine cowling reduced vision on either side of it to an angle of no more than 45 degrees. Blackout precautions meant that the flare-path on which the pilots were supposed to land was in 1940 limited to a single line of ‘glim-lamps’ which were masked in such a way that they could only be seen on a shallow angle of approach. Night landings in Spitfires were excruciating, even for experienced pilots. Richard Hillary, significantly, seems to have avoided night flying almost completely.

The normal flying formation for Spitfires was an inverted V, with the leader at the apex. When they wanted to attack, they would go into ‘line astern’ – ie a straight line behind the leader – until the leader called ‘Echelon starboard’ when the two machines behind him would draw to his right, still remaining close. They would then dive down on to the enemy formation and open fire from behind. When they were only 100 yards away from them, they would kick hard on the rudder and slam the stick forward so that they would tear downwards and away. They would then reform to repeat the attack from the left.

They broke downwards to avoid the fire of the enemy tail gunners; if the enemy planes were Me-109s, which had no rear-gunners, the Spitfires would break upwards. Engagement with fighters often came down to one-to-one combat or ‘dog-fights’. Here there were no real rules, except always to try to turn inside your opponent, think fast, shoot when you had the opportunity, and, above all, to break away fast. Aerobatic manoeuvres were of little use, as most of them presented longer and slower targets to the enemy. The exception was a controlled spin – a corkscrew movement vertically downwards – which might make the enemy think you had lost control and were no longer worth following.

The pilots were not able to convey in words the sensations they experienced in the air. The speed, danger and exhilaration were hard enough to describe; but there was a metaphysical element too: an impression of having escaped terrestrial restraints, of being not only in control of your destiny but in some sense beyond it. It was no wonder that when these men returned to the airfields and gathered in the mess they cultivated an ironic understatement, reducing what they had experienced to a few set formulae – ‘Money for old rope’, ‘Piece of duff and so on. Since they could not communicate to the outside world what it was like, they might as well use an agreed code amongst themselves. When they spoke of someone who had crashed and died as having ‘gone for a Burton’ (ie gone to the pub for a glass of (Burton’s) beer) it neither diminished their sympathy for the dead man nor quelled their own fear of dying.

By this time Hillary had begun to irritate his two Oxford friends, Peter Howes and Noel Agazarian, and they him. They decided to separate. Agazarian, known as ‘Aga’, appeared like a festive wraith in various other war memoirs. His arrival at an airfield, usually in a borrowed ‘Maggie’ (a Magister trainer) was always the prelude to a punishing evening. When the training was over Hillary applied for a vacancy in 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron with two new friends: Peter Pease and Colin Pinckney. Peter Pease was to have a profound if curious influence on Hillary’s life.

Hillary’s French publisher assumed that Richard Hillary fell in love with Peter Pease. His description of him in The Last Enemy was certainly ardent. He called him ‘the best-looking man I have ever seen’. Photographs of Pease, which showed a pleasant-seeming young man with crinkly hair and full lips, were not always just. Hillary was handsome and arrogant enough himself not to be wasteful with his compliments.

If it was love, it was certainly pure, or at any rate not physical. The French enjoy suspecting all English men of homosexuality (not without reason in Christopher Wood’s case), but Hillary was proudly heterosexual, and, perhaps surprisingly, good at making friends with women. Pease was shortly to be married and was too conservative a character to have tolerated any homo-erotic feelings in himself. What apparently fascinated Hillary about Peter Pease was his mind, and what he stood for; and in view of Hillary’s self-consciously ‘rebellious’ temperament this is the more perplexing part of it.

Pease was an old Etonian, a member of the Tory squirearchy, whose family came from Richmond in Yorkshire. Peter had been at the beginning of his third year at Cambridge when the War broke out. He was modest, shy and utterly conventional. He believed in his country, his society and his place within it. He was motivated by a sense of noblesse oblige and an unshakably rooted belief in the natural virtue of the country for which he was prepared to risk his life. His beliefs were firm and secure; his surface shyness concealed a serene sense of his privileged debt to an ordered world. He had been a gifted schoolboy at Eton, known at first for his beautiful treble voice (he made a record of ‘O for the wings of a dove’) and later for the way he dragged his tall figure up the High Street on his way to edit the school magazine or consult the history library. His school career had been crowned with both academic and social glories; it was accepted that he had both the mental equipment, the inclination and the self-discipline to command the career of his choice in the Diplomatic Service.

So they motored north, a pushier Charles Ryder and a sober Sebastian Flyte. The gravel of the Pease ancestral home crunched beneath the well-mannered tyres of his two-seater. The dinner was a quiet affair with Pease’s parents and brothers; as the port circulated Hillary felt disturbed and confused by the sudden thought of how much Pease’s death might mean to him. After dinner Lady Pease told how she had declined to send Peter’s younger brother away from Eton to America because it would set a bad example.

Hillary enjoyed trying to provoke Peter Pease out of his Anglican quietism. He accused him of being vulgar in his patriotism, archaic in his religion and sentimental in his notion of public duty. In fact, Hillary was, through Pease, testing out the extent of his own belief in these things. It probably did seem absurd to him that such an intelligent man could be so complacently certain of such conventional values, without any of the anguish and self-examination that people of twenty normally go through: there was possibly real irritation in his questioning. It seems, however, that what Hillary was trying to tease out of Peter Pease was a reason for dying.

Hillary was by no means an intellectual, but he was clever enough to be confused. Peter Pease had something he envied, and that was his certainty: where Richard was bewildered, Peter was calm. Richard did not believe in the old values that Peter represented, but he had no better ones to put in their place; he had only a childish truculence. There was no doubt in his mind as to which of them would be happier at the moment of his death.

Peter Pease, in his quiet way, appears to have understood Richard Hillary quite well. He both liked him and pitied him. He knew that Hillary was floundering, but he also knew that when it came to a crisis he would not waver. As far as the protection of Britain and the defeat of the Nazis were concerned it did not terribly matter to Peter Pease whether each pilot hurtling towards death in his Spitfire did so with a completely settled system of beliefs. It was enough that he should be prepared to fight, and die. Because he is remembered principally through the distorting prism of Richard Hillary’s hero-worship, it is hard to take the full measure of what a remarkable young man Pease was. Although Hillary was not snobbish, he was fascinated by some quality of ‘Englishness’ in Pease that he felt his own Australian beginnings had not provided. Yet other people, as English as Pease himself, were also profoundly impressed by his grace and mental strength. Hillary felt himself being gradually drawn by the certainty of Pease’s character to the point of view he represented. Pease tolerated Hillary’s excesses and to some extent encouraged them, because he could see that Hillary’s brashness and bravado concealed a drastic lack of confidence and a fear of the future.

From Edinburgh Hillary and Pease went to 603 Squadron’s base aerodrome at Turnhouse and thence north to Montrose, where they were assigned to ‘B’ flight. Here Hillary made further friends. Among the men of ‘B’ flight was a New Zealander called Brian Carbury who had previously worked as a shoe salesman. He had come to Britain on a short service commission and was to become the best flyer in the squadron. Pilot Officer Berry, known as ‘Raspberry’, was another man from a modest background. He had a strong Hull accent and a short, expressive vocabulary. Other new colleagues were Hugh ‘Stapme’ Stapleton, a twenty-year-old South African; ‘Bubble’ Waterston; the nineteen-year-old ‘Broody’ Benson; the innocent Pip Cardell; and Don MacDonald, who had been in the Cambridge Air Squadron, where he had known Peter Pease and Colin Pinckney. It was a typical fighter squadron: typical in its national and social makeup, in its age, its nicknames, its keenness and its very short life expectancy.

Fighting at this stage consisted of no more than shooting down the odd single plane sent over by the Germans from Norway. Hillary was not yet fully operational, but was flying up the coast one day when he heard a section being ordered to start tracking an enemy bomber. He should have returned to base, but instead decided to have a go on his own. He assumed the bomber would be flying in cloud cover, so made a number of dives and climbs in and out of the cloud. He found nothing, so returned to base where he was told that the enemy bomber had passed just over the aerodrome. Brian Carbury’s section landed shortly afterwards and told Hillary that, seeing an aircraft diving in and out of the clouds, they had fallen into line astern behind him and had been on the point of opening fire when Carbury recognised the Spitfire tail.

The next day the Flight Commander made Hillary operational, explaining quietly, ‘I think it will be safer for the others.’ On leave from the station at Montrose, Hillary went up to Invermark where a local landowner, Lord Dalhousie, had turned over his shooting lodge to the young pilots. He fished on the loch and shot a stag, though the look in the animal’s eyes as it lay dying made him vow that from then on he would kill only Germans. He found two other non-hunters in ‘Bubble’ Waterson and ‘Stapme’ Stapleton who, much to Hillary’s surprise, spent their leave not wenching or drinking but playing hide-and-seek with local children. Hillary joined their games enthusiastically; there was a perverse pleasure to be had from picnic and rounders in the heather while they waited for their part in the War. Hillary excelled as a storyteller and could hold the small audience rapt. When they tired of stories they could indulge in some rougher games. On one occasion Hillary floated out into Loch Lee in a dinghy they had taken from a crashed Heinkel while Stapleton fired at it with a .22 rifle from the bank.

The wait for war was not long. The squadron was ordered from Montrose to Turnhouse, near Edinburgh. With the German air offensive gaining momentum over southern England, Hillary and his friends knew they were on their way into action. There was huge excitement among them; ‘Broody’ Benson in particular (his nickname was ironic) was panting to be let loose. The relief squadron was already in sight, shimmering down over the boundary of the airfield, coming in to land on delicate wheels. Hillary was assigned to ‘E’ Flight, clambered into his Spitfire, and roared down the runway. They dipped their wings in farewell as they came over, then headed south. In The Last Enemy Hillary wrote that they then flew down the valley where the children played and that with white boulders in the heather the children had spelled out the message ‘Good Luck’.

He later admitted that this was an invention: the children could not have known of the Air Ministry’s orders. What Hillary conveyed by this elaboration was his own feeling that an era had ended. There would be no more conversations with Peter Pease about the meaning of life and whether Richard was an ‘anarchist’; there would be no more rounders and picnics; no more self-doubt; no second chances when the plane on his tail forbore to fire because he was a friend: from now on there would be only metal and fire.

On 10 August 1940, after a short delay at Turnhouse, the squadron was switched to Hornchurch in Essex, twelve miles east of London on the Thames estuary. By the time they landed they found that many of their colleagues had already been in action. They watched the Spitfires landing with the leading edges of their wings stained with smoke from their own guns. Brian Carbury told the new arrivals, ‘You don’t have to look for them. You have to look for a way out.’ Don MacDonald had already been killed.

At this stage the German strategy was to try to eliminate the British fighter force by drawing it into combat with their own Messerchmitt 109’s and 110’s. They would then have a clear run for their bombers, and Britain could be pulverised into submission. German attacks began before breakfast and continued until about eight in the evening; the Spitfire squadrons were in the air all day and the pilots took what rest and food they could between flights. Some of the men were close to exhaustion; among them was Peter Howes, who was at Hornchurch with another squadron and was worried because he had not yet shot down an enemy plane.

Hillary was in the air almost at once. When the moment came there was no time for reflection, though he did acknowledge as he faced the instrument panel that he would soon be taking a human life for the first time. It was that way about; he did not think that he himself would shortly die. He believed most pilots had a similar trust in their own invulnerability. It was not an acquired or cultivated thing; it was a faith that sprang from the sense of mastery that the physical action of flying gave to them.

They found the enemy at 18,000 feet: twenty Messerchmitt 109’s above their eight Spitfires. The Germans came down to get them and Brian Carbury led his eight planes in line astern, head-on towards them. Carbury went down briefly, then up, leading the others in a climbing turn to the left. He caught the first Messerchmitt as he went and Hillary found the plane come flush into his own sights. He switched the gun-button to ‘Fire’ and watched the tracer from all eight guns hammering into its target for four seconds. The Messerchmitt hung still for a moment, then spun downwards in a spurt of red flame.

Hillary felt no pity because he knew that none would have been shown to him. The exercise seemed to have some chivalric dignity which robbed it of selfish emotion. Broody Benson, who had been so keen to get at the Germans, was killed in this first engagement.

The losses that followed daily in August and September were greeted calmly at the airfield. The men were not callous, but they were indifferent. They were so wholly engaged in what they were doing, so mentally and physically committed to the fight, on which, after all, their own lives depended, that they felt they had no time to grieve. They were always outnumbered and were therefore rarely able to keep their formation; they would land individually over a period of minutes, sometimes hours, and the fate of each man in the squadron took time to determine. Prolonged absence was not necessarily the prelude to news of another death; a pilot who had parachuted from a stricken plane might take some time to reach a telephone.

They found that what the men of No. 1 Squadron had taught them was true: if the Germans did not have numerical superiority they would not engage but would turn round and head back for the Channel. The sun caused problems for all the pilots. Hillary did not wear his dark-lensed goggles because they interfered with his vision and made him feel shut in; before going into action he would push them up on to his forehead. He also refused to wear gloves because they were too hot and decreased his sensitivity on the controls.

Richard Hillary continued to flout the rules. The War had become exactly what he had hoped: exciting, individual and disinterested. Up in the air the pilots were as selfishly engaged and motivated, as free from discipline, as it was possible for a fighting force to be. They accepted the concomitant risk not so much without qualm as without thought. There was the possibility of fighting in a way that protected your friends but also gave you room for the most extreme form of self-expression. In one of the outstanding sequences of The Last Enemy Richard Hillary described such a flight in the language of rapture.

It was early evening in the last week in August. Brian Carbury had received a bullet wound in the foot and Hillary was to take his place in the next ‘show’. The day was uncharacteristically quiet; by six o’clock they were still playing cards in the mess. Then came the voice of the controller: ‘Six-o-three Squadron take off and patrol base: further instructions in the air.’

They were detailed to intercept twenty enemy fighters at 25,000 feet. Hillary looked through the glass of his cockpit to the plane next to his. He could see Hugh Stapleton’s mouth moving. This usually meant he was singing; sometimes he would do this with his radio-transmitter (R/T) switched to ‘send’, so that the others would receive their instructions from the ground against a background of ‘Night and Day’. On this occasion Hillary picked up the Germans on his headset and shouted back as many pieces of invective as he could remember from his schoolboy holidays abroad. Below them, above the pattern of the English fields on a hot August evening, they watched the German planes form a tight defensive circle, a formation which could only be broken up by dangerously exposed individual attacks.

The Spitfires peeled off into an echelon starboard formation and down in a series of power dives. After picking out his machine and discharging his guns into the nose, Hillary had to pull out in a climb so steep he felt his eyes being driven down into his neck. Then as he circled above them he could see that the attack had successfully broken up the defensive circle. It then became a matter of individual dog-fights. He saw Peter Pease making a head-on attack on a Messerchmitt; the two planes were on a collision course, both firing. Then, just before they would have crashed, the German pulled up, and the grateful Pease was able to fire full into his belly.

The sky was alive with the sound of fighter planes, diving, roaring, spinning, and with the sound of their guns, fired sometimes in long-distance optimism, sometimes in desperate self-defence. Hillary found the sweat coursing down his face. Then suddenly the noise was gone. He looked round for the reflection of the evening sun on metal and saw nothing. This instantaneous dispersal and isolation could happen at any time; the obvious thing for Hillary to do was to return to base. About a mile away, however, he spotted a formation of about forty Hurricanes and set off to join them. The only reason for doing this was bravado: he had some ammunition left and was enjoying being up in the sky.

Just as he was coming in behind them, he looked down and saw, roughly 5,000 feet below, another formation of about fifty planes flying in the same direction. He knew that there were not that many Hurricanes available to make such a ‘step-up’ formation in this part of England: he had made a serious mistake. He looked again at the last plane in the formation he had been about to join and saw that it was carrying a swastika. The Germans seemed unaware that a lone Spitfire was on their tail, with the sun behind him. Hillary kept his nerve in a way that Peter Pease could have admiringly predicted. He closed to within 150 yards, then fired a three-second burst into the tail of the last enemy aircraft. It went over on its back and spun down out of sight. Hillary looked round him for signs of retaliation, but still none of the other planes seemed to have noticed. He considered trying to take out the next plane in the formation in the same way, but decided in a moment of rare discretion to be satisfied with a single kill. He peeled off in a half-roll and headed back to the station, where he found to his irritation that Berry was claiming to have shot down three.

The Battle of Britain had many crises, but there was no more continuous anguish than that suffered in the last week of August and the first of September.

On 13 August Goering had sent his aircraft into battle for what he imagined would be the knock-out blow. He termed it Adlertag or Eagle Day. German intelligence reports persuaded him to believe that attacks on the previous two days had made radar defences in the south of England inoperative and that 11 Group, whose twenty-two squadrons covered the south east, was down to its last planes. Adlertag consisted of attacks on the north of England as well, but Dowding, despite much advice to the contrary, had long been reluctant to move all his fighters to the south-east, and the German attackers therefore met unexpected resistance over the coast of Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland. The Luftwaffe lost seventy-six planes in a day, compared to thirty-four British.

They had more in reserve. When the first major attack came on London on 7 September, Air Vice Marshal Park, a New Zealander who was in charge of the critical South East 11 Group, had not only to scramble every fighter he had but to call in five squadrons from the adjacent 12 Group which had been assembled under Douglas Bader at Duxford in Cambridgeshire. When at the height of the battle Churchill asked Park how many fighters he had left, Park answered, ‘None, sir’.

By the end of August the slow attrition was working in Germany’s favour. Although the Spitfires and Hurricanes were always finishing the day slightly ahead, the British were starting to run out of pilots. Dowding had to take men out of squadrons that were supposed to be resting or re-forming in order to fill the constantly recurring gaps in the squadrons of 11 Group in the south-east.

Jack Wolfenden, the thirty-four-year-old headmaster of Uppingham, a public school in Rutland, was eventually seconded to the Air Ministry to coordinate the recruitment and training of more young pilots. It was a desperate move, whose results were not available until the following year. In September 1940, Dowding and Park faced a crisis of manpower that appeared to have only one outcome, the defeat of the RAF and the conquest of Britain.

At this moment Hitler, impatient at the extraordinary resilience of the RAF, ordered Goering to change his tactics. Instead of clearing the skies of RAF defences, Hitler now wanted to see London burn, and it was to this end that Goering switched his attacks to the capital on 7 September. The error of this change of tactic was not immediately obvious since, as Park’s desperate remark to Churchill indicated, it seemed only to precipitate a new crisis, with the further symbolic anguish that the destruction of a capital city involves. Had Hitler known how close to collapse the RAF was coming in that week, he would have allowed Goering to continue with his initial plan.

What was it like to be a Spitfire pilot in these critical few days? Almost all of those involved struggled to find words. They did not contemplate the larger strategic implications of what they were doing. If they read the papers, it was for ‘Jane’ in the Daily Mirror. They did not dwell on the deaths of their colleagues. Towards their own fate they cultivated a cocky indifference. They concentrated on the things of the moment: flying, tracer, drink, sleep, flying.

You would have slept in your uniform, a couple of hours in an armchair because you were too drunk to go to bed. If you were clever, like Hugh Dundas who flew at Douglas Bader’s elbow, you’d have remembered to turn your trousers inside out before you started drinking, so the beer stains weren’t visible the next day. Then you’d be in a drafty dispersal hut and the phone would ring. It might be the flight sergeant asking for a cup of tea or it might be operations telling you to scramble. Out on the grass the squadron doctor was ladling out his hangover cure from a tin pail. You ran over to the plane and in the grey light before dawn you could hear the soft, low purr of the Merlin engines warming up. The ground crew helped you on to the wing of the little Spitfire and then you were down in the tight cockpit, radio switched on, strapped up tight. The smell of petrol, oil and glycol coolant came in an unmistakable Spitfire cocktail. Once you had cleared the perimeter hedge and were up in the air, a long draught of oxygen would chase away the last traces of the night before.

At 20,000 feet you saw the sun heave up over the horizon, but the unpressurised cockpit was icy and the mud of the airfield had frozen your boots to the rudder bars. Then from the lightening sky you would see the dark flight of enemy bombers, in stepped formation, with fighter escorts. In theory the Hurricanes would take the bombers and the Spitfires would tackle the escorting Messerschmitts. In practice it seldom worked that way; within moments you were alone with only fourteen seconds’ worth of ammunition and the enemy wheeling all about you.

The Spitfire’s gunsights were synchronised to 200-250 yards, which wasn’t really close enough. The better pilots would chase in to 50 yards before firing. The firing button was on the control column; you moved a switch from ‘safe’ to ‘fire’ and that was it: all eight guns went off together with the sound of tearing calico. The recommended burst lasted only two seconds, then you were powering down and away to the left, the forces of gravity pressing your organs against your bones.

The sight of English churches, roads and villages beneath your feet as you straightened up lent a protective edge to your concentration. The constantly visible German tracer that arced towards the thin perspex of your cockpit kept the nerves tight. As you climbed for another attack, you might see a German bomber in flames: it would hang for a moment, then drop from the formation, billowing black smoke. Beside it might be a stricken Spitfire, spiralling down, and you would watch as long as you dared for the blossoming of a parachute.

When your ammunition was used, you had to head back to the airfield. If you were short of fuel, it was usually possible to land at a nearer one: on a clear day you might be able to see as many as five. But it was still dark when you landed back at base; you had been airborne for less than an hour. As you staggered back to the dispersal hut you could watch the beginnings of your second sunrise. You thought of the men who had gone up with you who would never see another.

Two, three, four times a day in those crucial weeks the experience would be repeated. When it grew dark the German attacks finally stopped, and the Spitfire pilots went to the pub. In the numerous White Harts and Royal Oaks of southern England they ducked beneath the beams and pressed up to the bar. They chatted to the locals as casually as if they had stepped off the commuter train from Waterloo. Five shillings would keep them in beer until the local police saw diem out at closing time. There would be more drink back at one of the comfortable houses where they had been billeted around the airfield, and eventually a few hours’ sleep.

Pilots at the bases close to London might have a quick wash after the final sortie and motor up to town, where they liked to shock their more conventional army counterparts by appearing scruffily dressed at London restaurants and night clubs. They knew that there had been a certain snobbery towards them and did nothing to ease the discomfort of those civilians who, having once called them Brylcreem Boys, were now belatedly trying to acknowledge them as heroes.

Hillary enjoyed the puzzlement in the faces of such people as they transparently searched the airmen’s faces for the qualities of heroism which had previously eluded them. They could not find what they were looking for; these men still seemed to them raffish and off-hand: how could they be the nation’s saviours? Their secret bravery and fragile indifference to death were sealed within the private slang of their mess.

Richard Hillary’s war was a short one. The Battle of Britain picked off its pilots with remorseless probability, and Hillary had only two more tales to tell before his own crash. After a flight with his squadron had broken up into dog-fights Hillary found himself once more alone. This time he successfully identified a squadron of Hurricanes and joined them as ‘Arse-end Charlie’, in which role he was supposed to weave around and protect them from attack in the rear. He was having a pleasant time until he noticed bullets appearing along his port wing. There was a tendency in such circumstances for a pilot to do nothing, but somehow to become mesmerised by what was happening. Hillary was able to react, however, by going down into a spin and trying to call up the Hurricanes to warn them off imminent attack. This was made impossible by the fact that his radio had been shot away. That seemed to be the only damage done, and he began to climb again to rejoin the Hurricanes. Then he noticed black smoke coming out of his engine and a smell of escaping glycol; he decided to go back to the station. When his windscreen became covered with oil he thought he had better put down at the nearer station of Lympne. That too became impossible as the engine began to lose power: the only course of action now was to crash-land in a field.

He selected a com field and put the Spitfire down on its belly without incident. As he switched off the petrol and climbed out of the cockpit he saw an ambulance entering the field. It was not for him, but for Colin Pinckney, who was in his parachute dangling from a tree. They had come to earth next to an army cocktail party. While Pinckney was taken off by a doctor, Hillary joined the party and was swiftly stoked up with whisky by the admiring officers. He consumed so much that at dinner that night with the Brigadier he dared not speak, but stared silently whenever a question was put to him and hoped that his hosts would assume his vacant expression was caused by shock. The next day he took his helmet and parachute up on the train to London and demanded a car and a driver from the Air Ministry. By the afternoon he was flying again.

Hillary’s last pre-crash anecdote concerned a flight that same evening. Hornchurch aerodrome had been the focus of an intense German attack and Hillary found himself above twelve Dornier bombers on their way back to France. He was returning to the airfield when he saw them and should have continued, but found the target too big, too slow and too tempting. He dived down amongst them and switched the button to fire. Nothing happened. He had already used all his ammunition. He wrapped both hands about his head and went straight through the enemy squadron, preparing for the end. The Dorniers’ tail-gunners opened fire, but Hillary managed to get through. He landed at Hornchurch with the Spitfire in working order, though a little draughty. Bubble Waterston was killed on this flight.

On 3 September 1940 Edwyna Hillary was on her way to work at the Red Cross when she felt that something had gone wrong. It was a typical day in the Battle of Britain and the Spitfires had been up since dawn; but Mrs Hillary was instinctively convinced that her son had been killed. She told her taxi-driver to take her back to her flat. The rooms were silent and empty. There was no telegram or scribbled message put through the door; just the empty flat which was unaccustomed to her presence at this time of day. She positioned herself for a long vigil, staring at the silent telephone.

Richard emerged on to the airfield at about eight that morning. It was foggy and overcast; he was worried because he had a new hood on his cockpit and it was reluctant to slide back and forth along the groove. He worked with a corporal fitter to file and lubricate the hood until, by ten o’clock, they had managed to get it to slide halfway. That was all there was time for; the order came to take off and patrol base. As Hillary started the engine, the corporal stepped away from the plane, giving a sinister fingers-crossed sign.

Hillary was flying with Brian Carbury and Hugh Stapleton. They went through the clouds at about 12,000 feet and into a dazzling sun. Almost at once they flew straight into a large formation of Messerchmitts; they had no time to group themselves before the sky was filled with individual fights. As Hillary fought to gain height he saw a single Messerchmitt climbing away from the sun and he closed in behind it. He fired from about 200 yards and saw smoke coming from the plane’s engine and splinters of metal tearing off its wing. It did not go down, however, and Hillary, instead of breaking away, decided to go for the kill. Perhaps it was the RAF’s insistence that ‘aircraft must be seen to descend with flames issuing. It is not sufficient if only smoke is seen’ that was responsible for his exposing himself to danger. At any rate, as soon as he had hit the Messerchmitt a second time, and seen it spiralling downwards, he felt an explosion knock the stick out of his hand and found his own cockpit filled with flames. He reached up to open the hood, but it would not move.

He tore off his straps and tried again. This time he managed to move it halfway. He dropped back into the seat and reached for the stick so that he could turn the plane over and allow himself to drop out. His oxygen cylinder was on fire and there were flames inside his mask. The heat was so strong that he fainted. The pilotless plane went into a spin and, by some chance of gravity, chucked him out of the half-open hood.

When he regained consciousness he found himself falling through space. He was able to pull the rip-cord of his parachute, which jerked open and checked the rate of his fall. As he looked down he saw the grey mass of the North Sea beneath him. He could not release himself from his parachute before flopping into the water with the silk billowing about him.

Once in the sea, he tried again to undo the harness, but his hands were too badly burned. As usual he had not been wearing gloves, and the skin was shredded and white back to the wrists. There was a nauseating smell of burned flesh. Nor had he worn his goggles; and the pain of the September sun in his face made him suspect that he had paid a price for that too.

His life jacket supported him efficiently in the sea, and the water itself was not too cold, but he could see that he was a long way from land. After half an hour his teeth began to chatter. The sun went in but his face still burned. He tried to look again at his hands, but could not see them. He believed he was blind and about to die. He unscrewed the valve of his life jacket to hasten the end. The air rushed out and his head sank beneath the waves. After swallowing some water, he came back to the surface: he was so entangled in his parachute that it was keeping him afloat. He tried once more to release the harness, tearing at it with his raw hands. There was nothing he could do, so he lay back exhausted and thought of those who would miss him. He thought of his mother; and she, crouched in the dark flat, was thinking of him.

Then there were voices and there were hands lifting him. There was the metal spout of a brandy flask between his flayed lips. The Margate lifeboat had been searching for three hours and was 15 miles east of its station when the crew finally sighted him. In the boat he began to feel the pain of his injuries properly for the first time. The crew rigged up a shade to keep off the rays of the reappearing sun. After an agonising journey, they docked at Margate, where Hillary was transferred by ambulance to the local hospital. There at last he felt the welcome invasion of a needle in his veins.

Towards evening in Edwyna Hillary’s flat the bakelite telephone thundered on the table. Squadron Leader Fraser asked to speak to Michael Hillary; denied this possibility, he went into such a long preamble about Richard’s popularity and achievements that Edwyna assumed her son was dead. She had to interrupt Fraser to force him to the point. No, he said, Richard was not dead; but he had gone down in flames and was missing. Fraser told her the chances of his being picked up were good, but his words of official optimism were not reassuring.

A long three hours followed before the telephone rang again. From the Squadron Leader’s friendly bluster, Edwyna Hillary extracted directions to the hospital in Margate. The next morning she and her husband set off.

Throughout the years of separation, Richard Hillary’s mother had remained single-mindedly devoted to him and she felt the full force of a mother’s anguished tenderness when the nurse opened the door into Richard’s darkened room. She and Michael Hillary could make out no more than a shape on a bed, until the blinds were thrown up and the lights turned on with a theatrical flourish. His body hung on straps, just clear of the mattress. The legs and arms were wrapped in bandages, and the clawed hands were propped in front of his face. His eyes had been painted with gentian violet, while the rest of his face and his hands were coated with black tannic acid. To conceal the horror of the bums they had covered his face with white gauze, in which was cut a narrow slit for the lips. The handsome boy with his big eyes, his thick hair and his mocking, slightly cruel smile now looked like a corpse awaiting burial.

‘Cocky’, ‘argumentative’ and ‘arrogant’ were the adjectives his contemporaries had most often used to describe Richard Hillary at school and university. He had other qualities, too: a genuine sensitivity towards himself, and to others when he chose to indulge it; and a largeness of spirit that was manifest in his curiosity and openness to experience. His challenging manner, allied to his striking facial beauty, made timorous people fear and distrust him. None of these qualities, the bad or the good, made it any easier for him to adapt himself to his new circumstances. Even those who did not like him found something poignant in the sight of a man so physically proud rendered so dependent and vulnerable, without even a skin to protect him.

Edwyna and Michael Hillary talked to their son, while his awareness of them flowed and ebbed. The lifetime of partings and enforced self-control had to some extent prepared them all. When it was time for his dressings to be changed, they quietly stole away, just as they had on his first day at school.

On the fifth day he was put in an ambulance to be moved up to the Royal Masonic Hospital in London. He was driven by two anxious ATS women and accompanied by his nurse. The journey went without incident until they came to London, where they lost their way. By the time they arrived in Ravenscourt Park Hillary was exhausted and in pain. There were tears from both of them when his Margate nurse came to say goodbye. The house surgeon gave him an anaesthetic and removed the tannic acid from his left hand. In theory tannic acid formed a hard protective layer beneath which the skin could heal at its own pace, leaving the acid to be chipped away gradually. In fact most pilots treated in this way developed septicaemia beneath the crust, and Hillary was among the first to have the treatment reversed. His fingers had already clawed and curled down into his palms, partly as a result of the stiff tannic coating. They operated on only one hand because the risk of shock was too great for them to do both.

While under the anaesthetic Hillary, who prided himself on being almost without any access to mystical or synthetic thought, had a vision. He saw Peter Pease flying in his Spitfire, calm and level. Then he saw a Messerchmitt closing on his tail. He tried to shout and warn Pease, who was oblivious to the danger. His Spitfire was hit, turned slowly on its back, and plummeted to the earth. Hillary woke up to find himself being restrained by nurses: he had been screaming in his sleep. Two days later he received a letter from Colin Pinckney asking after him, giving him news of the squadron and telling him that Pease was dead.

Hillary made slow progress in the Royal Masonic Hospital. It was run more informally than official RAF hospitals, and he was looked after by dedicated and slightly flirtatious nurses. His dressings needed to be changed every two hours and the performance itself took an hour, so they were with him most of the time. Once they had stopped passing out at the sight of his wounds, they developed a happy relationship and connived at keeping him in Ravenscourt Park when officialdom muttered about a transfer. After a few weeks he was allowed to walk about and to take a bath, though as his hands were useless everything had to be done for him.

Edwyna Hillary came and sat with him every day. She would read to him with the rapt pleasure of a mother who has somehow recaptured her son. In The Last Enemy Hillary claimed that his mother said to him at this time: ‘You should be glad this has to happen to you. Too many people told you how attractive you were and you believed them. You were well on your way to becoming something of a cad. Now you’ll find out who your real friends are.’ It is not just the unnatural speech rhythms that make this passage look invented; it too conveniently opens the way for what is to be the main literary theme of the book: Richard’s conversion from selfish arrogance to an altruistic concern for ‘humanity’.

It was not Edwyna Hillary, in any case, who tapped the gentler reserves of Hillary’s character, but an unexpected visitor who came several days later. Richard was at an emotional nadir. He had learned that Pip Cardell was dead and that Berry and Brian Carbury had been awarded the DFC, with Carbury already down for a bar to his. His friends were either dying or fighting, and either would have been preferable to his pain and immobility.

The Matron knocked at the door and announced ‘Someone to see you.’ It was Denise Maxwell-Woosnam, Peter Pease’s fiancée. Richard Hillary wrote about her in the terms he reserved for passages of flying or for Peter himself. She was ‘the most beautiful person I have ever seen’. It was an awkward meeting, according to Denise. Richard was in severe pain, and she was not sure if she should have visited him. Once she began to talk about Peter, however, she felt an intense sympathy radiate from him. He said, ‘Don’t tell me how he died. Let me tell you.’ He recounted his premonitory dream at some length. He would not let her speak until he had finished. He was correct in every detail.

Denise was deeply moved. She found herself forgetting that Richard was suffering, because his identification with her own wound seemed so complete. He asked her to visit again, and she did.

She indulged herself with talk about Peter and felt encouraged by the completeness of Richard’s sympathy. When she had talked as much as she could, she felt Richard turn the conversation to the future, and to the plays and books they would write together. In due course Richard used her rather as he had used Peter: as a template against which to measure his beliefs and convictions. He believed that she and Peter were very similar people; certainly they had faith in the same institutions and believed fiercely in the War as a moral crusade to rid the world of the Nazi evil.

Quite what emotions Denise roused in Hillary is hard to say. It may be that there was no more than either of them admitted; that it was a case of altruistic friendship and mutual support. Hillary’s stress on her physical appearance, however, and his powerful feelings for her fiancé complicate this premise. To fall in love with the woman you are comforting, the woman who is mourning the death of a man you also loved, and who is depending on you for disinterested support … the possibility had at the very least a kind of literary appeal.

That autumn Hillary certainly had time for romantic introspection. He was allowed out of the hospital during the day, and would roam around London. The city was crouched beneath incessant bombing and Hillary admired the way the people had responded. He liked the nonchalance, the frantic gaiety, and the busy, uncomplaining way in which rich women who did not normally emerge before cocktails at noon would be at the desk of some voluntary organisation by nine. Some people recoiled at the sight of his injuries, but others, from nervousness or understanding, looked kindly on him. He found the smiles of women soothing. He was only twenty-one and he was proud of the sexual rewards his exceptional good looks had brought him. His attractiveness to women was an integral and important part of his idea of himself; if it had been burned away, then he would not merely miss the physical consolations of sex, he would have to revise his whole sense of who he was. It posed a test for him as complete as that posed by polio for Christopher Wood when, at the onset of puberty, it changed him from an athlete to a bedridden artist.

Hillary spent many evenings at Denise’s house in Eaton Place, where they talked about Peter. A Christian faith made Denise believe that she and Peter would be reunited or even that they had not, in some way, been truly parted. Richard tried to tease her out of this belief because he thought she was using it as a pretext for prolonging her mourning and delaying her inevitable treaty with the hard world that remained. It was during one such evening that he claimed, not quite credibly, that he ‘became aware with a shock of never before having thought of her as a woman, a creature of flesh and blood’. Much though Denise liked Richard, there was no question of any sort of affair. She was, and remained for some time yet, emotionally frozen by her grief.

At the Royal Masonic Hospital Hillary met the plastic surgeon A.H. McIndoe, and it was one of the crucial encounters of his life. McIndoe came with a mixed reputation. He was a thick-set New Zealander with stubby fingers, colonial vowels and horn-rimmed bifocal glasses. He was ambitious, bullying and crafty. He had charm, but he used it only when his natural aggression had not won him his way. He had compassion, vision and generosity of heart, but they were not qualities he found it necessary to keep on display. He had one further ability: he could give his patients hope. They came to believe that, whatever his shortcomings, he was a great man.

McIndoe was of Scottish Presbyterian stock and was brought up in Dunedin, a dead-end town that had been enriched by a goldstrike in 1862. McIndoe’s father was a printer and his mother an amateur painter. The young Archibald trained as a doctor at the University of Minnesota. In 1929 he went to England to work with his cousin Sir Harold Gillies. He switched from abdominal surgery, which he had practised in the United States, to plastic surgery at his cousin’s suggestion.

Plastic surgery at this time was considered by many surgeons to be the domain of quacks and make-up artists. Its practitioners were accused of having turned the operating theatre into a ‘beauty shop’. Even before McIndoe’s work made the craft respectable, this judgement was unfair. Plastic surgery became vital, whatever its detractors said, in the treatment of bullet wounds during the Great War. Gillies had trained at Aldershot at a unit set up to treat facial casualties from the Somme in 1916. Machine-gun bullets left tearing damage on both entry and exit; they had a habit of spinning on the bone, which increased their destructive torque and compounded it by firing the splinters of the bone itself at high velocity. There are photographs of living soldiers whose faces have been almost completely slashed away by bullets.

Gillies learned from the Somme casualties and made discoveries of his own. The most important was that of the ‘tubed pedicle’. The ordinary pedicle attached skin from adjacent parts of the body; by his tube, Gillies was able to graft skin from quite widely separated parts of the body, sometimes by stages. The principle behind it was that if the new flesh were wrapped on to itself in tubes it would be more ‘portable’ and less prone to infection.

McIndoe began as his apprentice and bag-carrier but soon became a partner. Gillies was thought by other surgeons to be more of an originator, but McIndoe was technically his superior. He held the scalpel between thumb and forefinger with his little finger cocked. His thick fingers, encased in size eight gloves, were capable of astonishing dexterity, and he was scornful of surgeons with delicate hands: ‘The man with ladies’ fingers is no surgeon,’ he was heard to say.

McIndoe always worked with the same team. His anaesthetist was a burly bald-headed man called John Hunter, who took pride in making the most po-faced ward sisters smile at his saloon-bar jokes. He was indefatigably good with children and waggish with patients as they went under. ‘Hello, I’m John Hunter, better known as the Gasworks,’ he would tell his prone patient.’ Do you know the one about the girl called Virginia? Just a little prick, if you’ll pardon the expression’ and so on. Despite his blustering geniality, he was a sensitive doctor, admirably precise with needle and gas. McIndoe’s other indispensable colleague was a theatre sister called Jill Mullins. Although she was repelled by surgery, she was attracted by McIndoe. He liked her dexterity, her reliability and her elegant presence: she was said by her admirers to resemble Gertrude Lawrence.

In the years just before the war, Gillies was invited to Germany to lecture and took the opportunity, like Richard Hillary’s crew in the General Goering cup, to mock his Nazi hosts. He told them of a nose job he had perfected which left the patient with a choice of different bridges. ‘It is perfectly possible,’ he told his solemn audience, ‘for a patient to pocket several different-sized bridges and change his racial and facial characteristics by sleight of hand.’

By 1939 McIndoe had become Consultant in Plastic Surgery to the RAF and was assigned to the Queen Victoria Hospital at East Grinstead. He descended on Sussex like a stumpy whirlwind. Flanked by John Hunter and Jill Mullins, he strode through the grounds and buildings of the hospital. There were only twenty-four adult and six children’s beds. ‘Bit of a shack,’ said McIndoe. ‘Still, we can probably tart it up.’ It was well placed for London and there was space in the grounds for further development. Members of the hospital staff panted along behind him as he made a rapid inspection through his thick bifocals. He liked what he saw.

To begin with there was not enough to do. The staff stood idly about the wards, cleaning and recleaning the floors, checking that the equipment was in place and the beds correctly aligned. Then, as the sunshine of the summer of 1940 lingered on into autumn, the staff of the hospital were able to stand outside on the parched brown lawns and watch the twisting, intricate manoeuvres of twinkling fighter planes above them. They could hear the whine and complaint of the single engines some time after the slick of their vapour trails had crossed or parted. To all of them there was a sense of something distant, barely real. It was more chivalrous, more individual then they had imagined war to be; but it was also more cruel.

McIndoe had been driving round the hospitals of southern England in his Vauxhall, finding out what kind of cases he could expect. In the Royal Masonic Hospital at Ravenscourt Park he was told of a young man who had been shot down and badly burned on his hands and face. McIndoe was conducted into the ward and brought not quite face to face – because the other man’s features were concealed by gauze – with Richard Hillary.

McIndoe and Hillary were bound to irritate each other. Hillary’s innate self-regard and hectoring manner had been intensified by the pain and humiliation of his injuries. He was not in the mood to be loved or healed; and McIndoe himself provided sufficient reasons for any young man to be wary. What he had to offer Hillary at first was quite simple. He could see that the gentian violet on his eyes was doing him no good, and ordered it to be stripped off. He also saw that Hillary was in danger of losing the sight in his lidless eyes and ordered them to be covered at once. Lukewarm brine was prescribed for the bums while McIndoe found Hillary a place at a Red Cross convalescent home two miles from East Grinstead. This was Dutton Homestall, the home of John and Kathleen Dewar. McIndoe housed his patients there while they were waiting for operations at East Grinstead; with the Dewars’ cooperation, they were allowed to live as normally as their injuries permitted.

When McIndoe took the dressings off Hillary’s hands, he tapped something white on the knuckle of his right forefinger. ‘Bone,’ he said. This was the kind of brevity that Hillary could respect. What came next was less welcome. Hillary asked when he might fly again. ‘Next war for you,’ said McIndoe.

When Hillary was eventually moved from the Royal Masonic Hospital to Dutton Homestall he met two men of a kind that appealed to him. Tony Tollemache was a casualty from a Blenheim bomber. The plane had somersaulted on landing and thrown Tollemache clear. He, however, believing his gunner was still inside, went back into the flaming aircraft to look for him. He took his time searching. The gunner was lying dead beside the plane; but by the time he saw this, Tollemache was burned all over.

Hillary’s other new friend was Colin Hodgkinson, who had been injured when the Albatross he was flying had been in collision with a Hurricane. He had fallen 500 feet and ended up trapped beneath the instrument panel. It was not until after dinner on the first day at the Dewars’, when Hodgkinson walked away from the table, that Hillary noticed he had tin legs.

He retired to bed feeling pleased with his new home. He enjoyed the soft linen and the prospect of breakfast in bed. The next day, however, he was told that he would be going straight into the Queen Victoria for an operation. Although his eyes were still infected, it had been decided that if they waited any longer he would lose his sight. McIndoe was to give him some eyelids. Until this time Hillary had been pampered. He had not been in a condition to appreciate it, but the conditions in which he had lived in London were, by hospital standards, luxurious.

The Queen Victoria Hospital was different. Hillary and Tollemache went into the main building in a daze of whisky. John Dewar was of the distilling family and made supplies available to the men McIndoe had told him to treat like house guests. After some banter with the Irish nurses, they were persuaded into bed, where McIndoe visited them that night. He prescribed a stomach pump for both of them and peered into Hillary’s eyes. ‘They’re still pretty mucky,’ he said, ‘but I think you’ll find it a relief to have some eyelids on them.’

In the morning Hillary’ was prepared for the operation. The skin for his new eyelids was to come from the soft inside of his left arm. The whole of the arm and the armpit was closely shaved, then sterilised. His first injection did not make him feel sleepy, so he asked for a cigarette and lay behind the screen puffing with provocative insouciance. Tony Tollemache was wheeled back into the ward after his operation, breathing ether, and Hillary was taken out in his place. In the theatre he was welcomed by the ever-genial John Hunter with his tubes and cylinders. McIndoe lowered over him in skull-cap and multi-coloured gown; Hunter slid the needle softly into the vein, contenting himself with nothing more rib-tickling than a friendly, ‘Well, goodbye.’

Hillary felt no particular pain when he came round, but was completely incapacitated. Effectively blind for five days, he had to be bathed and fed where he lay. He could not read, but what he could do was talk. He and Tollemache competed in the careless devilry of their conversation. Needing a focus for their energies, they criticised the hospital and its staff. Hillary could not see whether any of the sisters were in the room and relied on Tollemache to give him the all-clear for his ribaldry. To a determined joker like Tollemache the possibilities were irresistible; he provoked Hillary into his most vulgar abuse when the ward sister was present. As a result the two men were separated, with Hillary being moved into a glassed-in extension off the main ward.

Here McIndoe came to take off the dressings and let his patient see. The new eyelids were grotesquely too large. The only way Hillary could look ahead of him was by turning his face towards the ceiling. McIndoe was unconcerned; and within a few days the skin shrank into position, so that Hillary could move the new lids up or down. McIndoe next provided him with a pair of lower lids. This time when the dressings were taken off Hillary thought he looked like an orang-utan: the flesh beneath his eyes had been built outwards to make ledges from which the new lids would contract. For the first time since the accident, however, he could close his eyes: until then he had had to roll up his eyes when he wanted to sleep, leaving the whites exposed in a picture of frozen horror.

Hillary was not required to have further operations until January 1941. He spent the intervening time either at the Dewars’ convalescent home or up in London with Tony Tollemache. After dinner they would go to a night club and watch the young people on the dance floor. They were like old men, still capable of going out for a pleasant evening with a good cigar to finish, but no longer able to participate in the vital exchanges that they watched. Neither admitted to any feeling of frustration; they pretended to be relieved that they were now excused from the hot imperatives of youth.

When Hillary returned to East Grinstead for a new upper lip the only available bed was in Ward Three – a long, low hut about fifty yards from the main hospital that took the most serious cases. Hillary’s burns, though agonising, were not as extensive or as deep as those suffered by many of the inmates of Ward Three.

It was a place in which even Hillary’s perverse bravado was tested. The men lay in strange postures, some with their faces attached by grafts to their shoulders, some with their hands on their stomachs and some with their inner forearms flush against their foreheads with the wrist bent over their skulls like creatures from a medieval depiction of torment. Patients with burned hands lay in soft cocoons of cotton; some with smashed faces had their heads held up on pulleys by delicately balanced weights. Warm air was thought to give grafts a better chance to take: the paraffin heaters were kept burning even in summer and the windows were never opened.

The atmosphere, while fetid, was also curiously informal. Those who were dressed wore civilian clothes; beneath the beds were crates of Worthington and Double Diamond. The men behaved as though there were nothing wrong or even particularly unusual in their circumstances. When one of them could not contain his pain, another would simply turn up the volume on the wireless that played all day long, so that the groans rang no more than a descant on the songs of Vera Lynn. Some of them saved their own painkillers to give to a man in torment from his spine.

Near the door was the saline bath in which McIndoe prepared his patients for their operations. At first it had been an ordinary bath with salt added by hand; later the taps were removed to prevent the patients injuring themselves and brine was pumped from a tank through pipes on the ceiling of the ward. The water was kept circulating at just above blood temperature. McIndoe claimed to have discovered the uses of brine, though a version of his bath had been used to treat mustard gas casualties in the Great War.

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.

Richard was beginning to reach the end of what he could take from Denise. Her attitude to Peter’s death and to her own situation was too resolutely mystical for him. Although he had himself had a vision of Peter’s death, he was not prepared to infer from it the existence of any spiritual world. He seemed to see his premonition as no more than an extreme example of male comradeship: when your mind and body were so fully stretched in the taking and saving of life at hundreds of miles per hour 25,000 feet above the earth, when you depended for your existence on the bark and crackle of the R/T system, it was only natural that you should see, beneath the green fog of anaesthetic, an Me-109 closing on your best friend’s tail.

In April Hillary returned to a guest night at Hornchurch, but found it difficult to racapture the careless indifference with which he and his fellow-pilots had viewed their flying lives. So many of them were dead. He invited twenty old friends to a party at his mother’s flat in London, but after an hour he could bear it no longer and walked off into the night.

In The Last Enemy Hillary wrote that when he heard of Noel Agazarian’s death he ‘felt no emotion at all’. If this is true, and it seems improbable, it can only be that the emotion that the news provoked was too complicated to be registered at once. He felt lucky and he felt guilty. There seemed to be no purpose in his survival. Yet he shied away from the rhetoric of sacrifice; he refused to be part of the way that politicians talked of the War. At this stage in his life he tried to recultivate the arrogance and selfishness that others had critically described in him. He wanted to feel the same contempt for the politicians, the enemy, and the unthinking people of his own country that had enabled him to take to the sky as though it were some superior joust between the best knights of either side. He could not recapture his old state of mind, however; the death of so many friends had bound him both to them and to some sort of common cause that he could as yet neither understand nor describe. He very much disliked this new sensation of fraternity; he recoiled from it for reasons of intellect, taste and snobbery.

In The Last Enemy he dramatised this change of heart in an invented piece of narrative. A chapter called ‘I See They Got You Too’ tells first of all how he went to Norfolk to see his old Oxford pacifist friend David Rutter – a man who at one stage held all the anti-war ‘progressive’ views. Rutter has undergone a terrible transformation; he has seen that his socialist objections are false, that the war has become a crusade, and that personal conscience is an indulgence at a time when the battle is for civilisation itself.

Back in Liverpool Street Hillary takes a taxi west, but has not gone far before the intensity of the bombing forces the cab to stop. Hillary goes into a pub called The George and Dragon, on which a bomb falls. The house next door takes most of the blast and Hillary helps an ARP warden to dig out a woman who is trapped. They first remove her dead child. When he looks down into the woman’s ‘tired, blood-streaked, work-worn face’ Hillary has ‘a sense of complete unreality’. He gives her some brandy; as she takes the flask from his clawed hand and looks up at his face, she says, ‘I see they got you too.’ Hillary leaves the scene in a fit of incoherent fear and anger. The prose becomes hysterical as he tries to explain what effect the woman’s words have on him. He dramatises it as a sudden and complete self-knowledge: ‘With awful clarity I saw myself suddenly as I was. Great God, that I could have been so arrogant!’

The enlightened man then vows to put his new self-knowledge to good use. He will write a book, and his subject will be the men he has known. The story will be addressed to ‘Humanity’, the amorphous and previously despised mass of people of whom he now feels himself to be a part.

Hillary admitted later that the incident was invented. He did change, but the process was slow. The theme of personal growth in the book is at best unclear and at worst factitious and embarrassing. Without a belief that some kind of transformation had taken place, however, Hillary would not have attempted the descriptions of flying, of life on the station and of plastic surgery – all that is most valuable in The Last Enemy. Back in the convalescent home at Dutton Homestall he began the painful task of writing. To begin a book is almost always an act of perverse and unattractive self-assertion; to do it when you have not written one before and when you have to grip the pen in a clawed hand requires a particular stubbornness. Hillary at once emitted signals of distress: the words wouldn’t come, he was useless, what was the point? His natural author’s feelings of presumption and unworthiness were intensified by the personal doubts and re-evaluations that his experiences had precipitated.

But what he wrote was good. He had begun with a description of his blazing descent into the North Sea. At Dutton Homestall there was a volunteer nurse called Patricia Hollander with whom Hillary had become friendly. She knew Rache Lovat Dickson, an editor at the publishing house of Macmillan, and late one afternoon she took Hillary to see him in London. Despite the warning he had been given, Lovat Dickson was shocked by Hillary’s appearance. The March wind had flayed his skin and made his lidless eyes water. Pat Hollander explained that Hillary would like to read out the first chapter of his book.

Lovat Dickson was horrified by the idea. A publisher did not work in this way. There should have been lunch at the Garrick first, then lunch with Hillary’s agent. The manuscript should have been completed, typed up, then delivered over another lunch, perhaps at an Italian restaurant in Soho. There then should have followed a few telephone calls from Hillary’s agent wondering whether Rache had yet had time to have a look at…

Hillary just fixed him with his sore-eyed glare and read. Lovat Dickson was too fascinated by the skeletal hands that gripped the pages to be able to take in the words. When he did manage to concentrate he noticed that Hillary did not read well. A strange shyness made him flush, and this caused the weals of his bums to stand out. Somehow, beneath his horror both at Hillary’s appearance and at his series of publishing faux pas, Lovat Dickson managed to recognise that what he was listening to was ‘first-class reporting’. He told Hillary that many people could write, but that few had the perseverance to finish their books. If Hillary could write another half dozen chapters as good as the first, then they might do business. With such words had Lovat Dickson seen the last of many would-be writers in the past. Would Hillary be different?

The condition of his hands made it difficult for him to write for long periods, so he tried dictating instead. The results seemed far from what he had set out to say. Faced with this impasse, he decided to do something else. He wanted to go to the United States and talk to the workers in aircraft factories that were supplying the RAF with planes. He thought it would be a good idea if he could ‘try to make something living out of the job of putting nuts and bolts into an airframe’. With the same directness with which he had approached Lovat Dickson, he this time presented himself to Duff Cooper and Sir Walter Monckton at the Ministry of Information. They decided to send him to America, subject to Air Ministry approval. He was officially attached to the Air Mission, so that his visit would not look like propaganda, and duly arrived on his mission to encourage the workers.

The British Embassy in Washington, however, took one look at him and shuddered. Sir Gerald Campbell, the minister In charge of such matters, thought a speaking tour of women’s clubs of the Mid-West by such a badly mutilated man would prevent the United States from ever joining the Allied cause. He suggested that Hillary give some talks on the radio and perhaps publish them as a pamphlet. Hillary was upset by the thought that the face that had once lured young women to his bed would now determine the mothers of America against committing their sons to battle. He had come, in any case, not to address ladies’ luncheons but to speak to the factory workers; and surely, he argued with Sir Gerald, he could still manage that without frightening anyone. The chiefs of various aircraft companies in New York said they could smuggle him in and out of the factories with no publicity and no photographs. Hillary lobbied hard among British and American diplomats; with their support, he presented his case to the British Ambassador, Lord Halifax. Unfortunately Halifax had already been briefed by Sir Gerald Campbell and had himself commissioned a briefing of President Roosevelt, who replied that the whole enterprise was clearly a ‘psychological error’. Halifax told Hillary that he himself, of course, still had an open mind.

Various official doors swung soundlessly shut. Hillary was flown to Boston with a view to having plastic surgery from a man called Quesanazian who unwisely told Hillary he had orders to keep him there. Hillary at once flew back to New York to try to prolong the debate. Eventually he was barred – apparently by both governments and their diplomatic representatives – from writing or broadcasting anything at all under his own name. He was allowed to write anonymous agency copy for the British Press Service for distribution to American newspapers, who were largely uninterested. Although the question of America’s involvement in the War was a matter of global importance and the subject of extremely delicate negotiation, the insensitivity with which Hillary was treated was by any standards remarkable.

In these circumstances, with the pen clutched in his charred hand, he settled down again to write The Last Enemy. He was lent a room in which to work by the banker Edward Warburg and patiently scratched out his recollections of Oxford and his summer travels. He was writing a memoir, but he felt able to embellish, omit and invent. He later referred to the book as a ‘novel’, which it certainly was not. It was autobiography, shaped by a fair literary sense of what to include, what to dwell on and what to pass over. Its falsities were minor, its fidelity to the wider truth of his experience in the War was almost total.

In July and August Hillary was allowed by the British and American governments to make four anonymous broadcasts. These were essentially readings from drafts of what was to become The Last Enemy. Hillary spoke with the accent of public school and Oxford, though not exaggeratedly so by the standards of the time; he still said ‘parachute’, for instance, rather than ‘perachute’. His voice was mournful and deep. What was shocking about it was that it could under no circumstances be identified as the voice of a man of twenty-two. The timbre, the inflection and the sheer weariness of it, preserved on tape, would make most listeners put its owner at nearer fifty. He performed well. His melancholy tone and his slightly soft V somehow helped to make the flying adventures sound more credible.

In New York Hillary also met Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French author-pilot who was at this stage wondering how best to help the Free French. Saint-Exupéry was a shambling, clumsy man whose flying life had been marked by frequent crashes. He had gained popularity by his accounts of long-distance flight in the service of the French mail. His books combined lucid narrative with philosophical musing; and although the cause of the French colonial mail was scarcely as pressing as the defence of European freedom there was something genuinely heroic in this burly cavalier with his long nose and mournful, doglike eyes. Saint-Exupéry had just delivered a book called Pilote de Guerre, an account of his time in the French airforce during the fall of France, a subject that called for the philosophical resources of a Pascal. It was to be published in America under the rather plodding title Flight to Arras.

Hilary was introduced to Saint-Exupéry by his translator, Lewis Galantière, who invited them to lunch together. Hillary appeared to think that the older man would patronise him, but Saint-Exupéry disarmed him with champagne and an offer to write a preface to his book. Galantière explained that in America there was no tradition of established writers introducing young talent in this way, and that the gesture might be misinterpreted, particularly since he was hoping that Hillary would be published by the same house as Saint-Exupéry.

Michael Hillary believed Richard’s meeting with Saint-Exupéry was decisive in making his son decide to return to flying. There were certainly some highly suggestive passages in Flight to Arras: ‘What do I accomplish by risking my life in this mountain avalanche [ie the eponymous flight]? I have no notion. Time and again people would say to me, “I can arrange to have you transferred here or there. That is where you belong. You will be more useful there than in a squadron. Pilots! We can train pilots by the thousand! Whereas you-” No question but that they were right. My mind agreed with them, but my instinct always prevailed over my mind.’

Or even more plainly: ‘I accept death. It is not danger that I accept. It is not combat that I accept. It is death. I have learnt a great truth. War is not the acceptance of danger. It is not the acceptance of combat. For the combatant it is at certain moments the pure and simple acceptance of death.’

There were also many passages that exalted the nobility and danger of flying in comparison to the ‘barbarous dilapidation’ of life on earth. ‘Up here at any rate death is clean. A death of flame and ice! Of sun and sky and flame and ice. But below! That digestion stewing in slime…’

In The Last Enemy Hillary was meanwhile writing: ‘The fighter pilot’s emotions are those of the duellist – cool, precise, impersonal. He is privileged to kill well. For if one must either kill or be killed, as now we must, it should, I feel, be done with dignity. Death should be given the setting it deserves; it should never be a pettiness; and for the fighter pilot it never can be.’ A death of flame and ice …

Other of Saint-Exupéry’s reflections took time to work their influence on Hillary. Meanwhile, he received a visit from Eugene Reynal, the senior partner of the publishers Reynal and Hitchcock, who, on the strength of the passage Hillary had read out loud to Lovat Dickson, offered him a contract. This early commitment proved vitally encouraging. Through the summer of 1941, the book grew beneath his hands. Both Reynal and Lewis Galantière, who had considerably helped Saint-Exupéry, gave him encouragement and advice.

He was clawing something back from the flames.

Meanwhile, Hillary’s attractiveness to women began to return. He lacked his old beauty, but not the old manner. If there was an element of pity or concern in their attentions, that made no difference to the way in which it was expressed. At a party given by his publisher he was introduced to Merle Oberon, then at the considerable height of her fame as an actress following her role as Cathy in Alexander Korda’s film of Wuthering Heights. She was an emotionally volatile woman whose two-year-old marriage to Korda had done nothing to stabilise her. She had herself been disfigured in a car crash, though had regained her looks almost completely; when she first saw Richard Hillary she felt a passionate bond with him. Her publicity agent Tessa Michaels reportedly said that Hillary excited a protective feeling in Merle Oberon: she believed she could reignite his passive sexual self-confidence. Just how dormant that side of him had been is open to question: he had mentioned in passing that he sometimes feared women only wanted to sleep with him for the perverse pleasure of feeling his clawed hands. This argues that, for whatever reason, he had already had lovers since his crash. In any event, the affair with Merle Oberon was relatively light-hearted; it took his mind off his humiliation by the British Embassy and gave him relief from the rigours of writing.

Merle Oberon was of Eurasian origin, though she became engaged, with Alexander Korda and various studio publicity hacks, in elaborate attempts to conceal her beginnings. They pretended she was originally Tasmanian, and this led to farcical and unhappy scenes when she was required to open a Merle Oberon memorial theatre in her ‘native’ island. She had shuttled from one lover to another in the belief that the latest would provide her with the love and rootedness she lacked. She was hopelessly fickle and studiously indecisive, but she was a very beautiful and charming woman and there is no reason to think that her affair with Richard Hillary brought him anything other than pleasure. It was certainly better than being stuck in the soupy air of Ward Three.

It came to a natural end when Hillary returned to London in October 1941. In his briefcase were the proofs of what the American publishers called Falling Through Space. He went to see Rache Lovat Dickson at Macmillan’s one evening, just as the office was closing. Lovat Dickson was again shocked by Hillary’s failure to understand how things were ‘done’. He made excuses about shutting up the office and getting off home while Hillary sat hunched up in his greatcoat, watching him with an ironic smile.

‘You told me to come back when I’d finished the book,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ve done it. Here it is.’

Lovat Dickson was astounded. To have written the book so quickly and to have found an American publisher… this was not at all what was supposed to happen. English writers should be published in London first, and their English publishers might help them to find an American publisher in due course, but that should take time, and usually never happened at all.

‘Saint-Exupéry read it in America and liked it’, said Hillary. ‘I hope you like it too. Telephone me when you’ve read it.’

He waved Lovat Dickson goodbye and sauntered off into the dark evening.

Lovat Dickson liked it all right. Although he told the story against himself of how Hillary had twice confounded him, he was a perfectly competent publisher. When he read the bundle of dog-eared galley proofs he believed that he was holding a book that not only contained outstanding accounts of action but also in some way captured the feelings of a generation.

He was proved right. The Last Enemy rapidly acquired the peculiar aura of a book that says something vital, whose importance goes beyond what it literally describes. In the years since Hillary’s death its reputation has remained high. Though minor compared to the great prose memoirs of the First World War, it has succeeded in holding its own as a book whose passionate reporting no internal shortcomings and no change of fashion can devalue. It became, and has remained, a ‘classic’ in the sense that, whatever its failings, it has something to say about flying, about the War and about people’s attitudes to the War, that will always need to be read as long as interest in the subjects themselves continues.

So what did Richard Hillary put into The Last Enemy? He began with an account of the events of 3 September 1940, the day of his crash. Quaintly titled ‘Proem’, this flashback was the part he read to Lovat Dickson at their first meeting. It is arguably the best sequence in the book. It reveals at once Hillary’s strengths as a writer: the ability to describe action in a clear, laconic, but not affectedly laconic, style; an ease and charm in first person narrative that is unusual in a writer of any age; and a modest reticence about his own sufferings which neither obscures them nor descends to a merely dismissive stoicism.

He leaves himself unconscious in Margate hospital and begins the narrative proper with his arrival at Oxford. He describes the ‘alert philistinism’ of Trinity and gives a very rapid sketch of the left-wing and anti-war positions. It is not presented as an argument but as a first person memoir; his purpose is merely to describe what he and his friends felt – which turns out to be not much: ‘We were disillusioned and spoiled.’ Hillary welcomed the fact that the War would solve his problems over choosing a career; as a fighter pilot he would find ‘a concentration of amusement, fear, and exaltation which it would be impossible to experience in any other form of existence.’ The War itself would give to him and his friends a chance to prove that their ‘effete veneer was not as deep as our dislike of interference … that, undisciplined though we might be, we were a match for Hitler’s dogma-fed youth.’ Although he wrote about himself, Hillary stressed that he believed he ‘differed little in essentials from the majority of young men with a similar education.’

The second chapter describes training in Scotland and the third the move to Old Sarum. Hillary devotes a good deal of space to his various friends and their out-of-hours exploits. Though trivial in themselves, they have a poignancy lent by the knowledge that the War is about to begin in earnest. From the moment he climbs into a Spitfire, Hillary’s writing recaptures the verve and tautness of the opening ‘Proem’. He is much better when describing flying than when recreating late-night conversations.

Chapter Four is called ‘The World of Peter Pease’ and indulges the less interesting aspect of Hillary’s writing. His feelings for Pease are hard for the reader to share when the descriptions that Hillary offers to justify them make Pease out to have been no more than a kind and thoughtful man. Hillary’s passion for him is puzzling, unless you believe either that he was in love with him or that he is at this stage withholding – consciously or otherwise – many of his own doubts and worries from the narrative. His long recreated conversations with Pease are laboured and unconvincing: the intellectual content is not sufficient to justify their inclusion at such length. Where Hillary does much better is in his descriptions of life on the station at Montrose, and in his brief accounts of his fellow-pilots, such as Brian Carbury, Hugh Stapleton and Pilot Officer Berry (he gives Berry no Christian name). Hillary is pleased that he is able to mix with what he calls ‘the Carburys and Berrys’ – men, in other words, of an inferior social class; and his appreciation of them, which becomes more marked as the book progresses, is touched with an unconsciously comic snobbery. This is one of those tricks that hindsight plays; all writers suffer from the changed orthodoxies of later generations: the bomber pilot Guy Gibson, for instance, meant no harm by calling his black Labrador ‘Nigger’. Hillary’s terse affection for his fellow-pilots would not have seemed patronising in 1941 and remains, in context, one of the most touching qualities of his book.

Chapter Five sees Hillary at Hornchurch during the Battle of Britain and contains the best passages of writing about flying. In Chapter Six he rejoins himself where he had finished in the ‘Proem’. The second part of the book tells of his time in hospital and gradual recovery up to the episode with the attempted rescue of the woman from the bombed house.

In his hospital chapters Hillary exhibits the same attitude towards his own injuries that he had successfully used in the opening. It is not much more than a tone of voice, but it successfully enables him to give detailed descriptions of the surgical processes as well as following his own reactions to it. He is frequently in pain, sometimes in despair, and does not mind admitting it. His occasional weakness effectively highlights his habitual resilience. His sympathy for other victims is done without sentimentality; the truculent, questioning side of his own character is helpful to him in viewing these other wounded men: his continual puzzling over why and how they manage is more affecting than straightforward pity. The arrival of Denise Maxwell-Woosnan at his bedside has great dramatic force, though less for what Hillary says than for what the reader (rightly or wrongly) infers – that under the guise of comforting her he is falling in love with his best friend’s fiancée. The conversations with Denise that Hillary actually recreates or invents, have the same rhetorical, dead quality as those with Peter Pease.

The next two chapters, ‘The Beauty Shop’ and ‘The Last of the Long-Haired Boys’, became deservedly famous. They deal with McIndoe’s work in the hospital and with Hillary’s own progress through operations, mastoid infection and the continuing news of other squadron deaths. He remains complaining, awkward, sometimes bitter, and this attitude continually saves the book from becoming an example of the Our Island Fortress’ propaganda he deplored. Yet the agony suffered by Hillary and the other patients, particularly during the mastoid episode, is movingly evoked. Hillary’s prose is essentially one of action; it is not much suited to the mimetic falsities of ‘realistic’ dialogue and becomes incoherent when faced with abstractions. However, in the East Grinstead chapters his writing proves more flexible than one might have expected, and he successfully integrates his own psychological development into the action.

The last chapter is ‘I See They Got You Too’. Here Hillary’s technique fails him, and the book ends with a series of rhetorical declarations which lack the authenticity of the descriptive chapters. The problem comes with the moment of enlightenment, when he believes that the scales of self-delusion have fallen from his eyes. ‘With awful clarity I saw myself suddenly as I was. Great God, that I could have been so arrogant!’

It is almost always embarrassing when a writer invites you to join in such epiphanies. While you may accept his criticism of his earlier self, the concomitant invitation – to believe that he is now remade, enlightened and beyond criticism – is less easy to take. In Hillary’s case, it is hard to believe in his version of either side of the volte-face. Although he has certainly been arrogant and selfish, he has also shown admirable qualities of stoicism and, like all the pilots, a dazzling indifference to his own fate. If he has grumbled a little in hospital, that has endearingly reduced him to a human scale with which we can more easily identify. It seems quite wrong for him to reject so floridly all he has been. Worse than this, we suspect that he is himself not sincere in his repudiation.

The change that took place in Richard Hillary does not seem to have been a sudden revelation, experienced in the psychological and, at times, almost spiritual terms he describes. On the contrary, the change was gradual. And, although his grief at his own disfigurement and the deaths of his friends may have provided the emotional triggers, the change was ultimately an intellectual one. It was a change of conviction: he came to believe that the War was not only worth fighting but was an historic emergency with universal moral implications.

Hillary himself put it clearly in a letter: ‘I got so sick of the stuff about our Island Fortress and the Knights of the Air that I determined to write it anyway in the hope that the last generation might realise that while stupid, we were not that stupid, that we could remember only too well that all this had been seen in the last war but that in spite of that and not because of it, we still thought this one worth fighting.’

In the last paragraph of The Last Enemy, he put the point more floridly and added a note of personal emotion. Beneath this, however, it is recognisably the same point: ‘If I could do this thing, just tell a little of the lives of these men, I would have justified, at least in some measure, my right to fellowship with my dead, and to the friendship of those with courage and steadfastness who were still living and who would go on fighting until the ideals for which their comrades had died were stamped for ever on the future of civilisation.’

The odd word in that sentence is ‘my’, in the phrase ‘my dead’. Much speculation has swirled about the last year of Richard Hillary’s life, and it hangs heavy over his insistence on returning, against medical advice, to flying operations. But if one bears in mind the words that Hillary had written and published, and in particular the phrase ‘my dead’, then his motivation is not so very puzzling after all.

Hillary’s own view of his book is preserved in a letter he wrote to Rache Lovat Dickson on 24 December 1941, accepting the invitation to write the jacket notes or ‘blurb’. Publishers commonly ask authors to do this: it saves them time and the possible embarrassment of making clear, if they write the blurb themselves, how completely they have misunderstood the author’s intentions.

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:

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 with 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.’

So the key to fellowship was physical action. The most important difference between Hillary and Lawrence was that Lawrence’s nostalgie de la boue involved no more danger than the chance of lice or sore heels, but Hillary’s reimmersion of himself in the active world of male comradeship was likely to cost him his life.

To Kennington Hillary wrote: ‘The Mint helped to clear up something that had been worrying me for months. To fly again or not. I had got to the stage when I could rationalise no longer, but relied on instinct to tell me when the time came … I have despised these men I have lived with in messes – pilots too – despised them above all drunk, and have felt a longing to get away from them and think. But Lawrence is right. Companionship such as this must depend largely on trivialities (the wrong word), ordinary things is perhaps better.’

It is one of the tender paradoxes of Richard Hillary’s life that a man rightly described by his senior commander as ‘excessively individualistic’ should yet have chosen to sacrifice his life to some vague idea of comradeship.

Mary Booker wrote to him: ‘I am glad, darling, that you are nearly out of the tunnel concerning your decision [to return to flying], yet I find myself with Linklater. We on the outside could not help finding ourselves on the same side. True justice should not have put the decision on you at all.’

She dined with him on 22 October, the day of his speech at the Foyle’s literary lunch. Any bitterness there may have been seems to have been forgiven; there may even have been a final re-consummation of their feelings. A week later on 30 October, Mary wrote in her diary: ‘Dine Richard. Miracle.’ It was the last word she wrote about him.

Hillary’s life had until this point played in a resoundingly major key. There had been comedy and pain, despair and excitement, but there had not been much ambivalence or mystery. From the day the Medical Board passed him fit for flying in November 1942, the whole tenor of his life shifted. It became cloudy, frightening, and harder to understand.

The Board essentially left the decision to him; and when he had declared himself fit he returned to compel Sir Sholto Douglas to keep his promise, which, against his better judgement, he did. Douglas sent him to an Operational Training Unit in Berwick-shire with a view to becoming a night-fighter pilot. He later commented: ‘I should never have made him that promise.’

Rosie Kerr, Hillary’s friend and a former patient at East Grinstead, was outraged at the RAF’s ‘Boys’ Own’ attitude, not only to Hillary’s life, but, if he was to be in night-fighters, to the life of his navigator/radio operator: ‘Incomprehensible. He was not fit. They only had to say, once and for all, that they could not afford to lose more planes, let alone two lives, and reject him. After a few weeks he would have accepted it, and found something else.’

But the RAF, for all its talk of ‘wizard prangs’, was a peculiarly – perhaps irresponsibly – sophisticated service. They allowed their men to fight alone, with as little pressure from the institution as possible. They may have even taken the view that it was healthier for the service as a whole for men to risk their lives than to infect others with their frustrations.

Richard Hillary then had the dreadful task of breaking the news to his mother. He wrote to her: ‘I just want to thank you for always having faith, for not questioning my decision, for never betraying that you feel unhappy and, above all, for your unfailing sense of humour … Finally one must listen to one’s own instinct, and the time will come when I shall know that my instinct was right and my reason wrong. You must try not to worry about me and to have the same faith I have that I shall be all right, for I know it… There are few things to which one can cling in this comic war. To see straight and know where one is heading is perhaps the most important of all. God bless you always. Richard.’

He wrote the letter on the evening of 19 November at the Oxford and Cambridge University Club. When he had finished it he wrote out his will.

It was an odd little document, but very eloquent of its author. It included these clauses:

The words ‘the stupidity of those who left me that decision’ are particularly characteristic. They refer not to Eric Linklater, Lovat Dickson and others who had tried to dissuade him, yet had finally let him go; they are a half-affectionate reference to the men of the Medical Board. Hillary implies that he knew he was not really fit; but the RAF had allowed him to fight the War in the way he had first desired when at Oxford: exciting, individual and disinterested.

It was almost midnight by the time he had finished writing both the will and the letter to his mother. He left the club and walked through the cold, blacked-out streets to his parents’ flat in Knightsbridge. He went and sat on his mother’s bed, as he had done when he was a child, and told her of everything he had done during the day.

He did not tell her of the content of the letter that was in the post, nor did he tell her of the third letter he had written: to his new commanding officer, asking him that in the event of his death they should first inform Mary Booker, then allow four hours before officially contacting his mother.

‘You will be all right,’ he told Mary. ‘You can take it.’ They dined together on 23 November, and the following day Hillary’s father Michael took him to the train at King’s Cross. The station was filled with servicemen, the majority of them RAF men bound for Grantham in Lincolnshire from where the bomber squadrons flew at night to pound the German cities. The Berwick train was filled almost as soon as it had drawn into the station; the corridors were packed with men sitting on their kit bags. Here were the reluctant, unbelieving men that Hillary had backed against ‘Hitler’s dogma-fed youth’.

Hillary, his hands hidden in his greatcoat pocket and with a porter carrying the bag he could not manage himself, was unable to find a seat. His father saw him into a carriage and attempted to say goodbye from the platform as Richard leaned out through the window with his habitually sardonic smile. It was another boarding school goodbye, but it threw the others into bitter relief. Michael Hillary, as usual, could find no gesture of physical affection, nor even gentle words. He made an awkward goodbye and walked away. As he was leaving the station he was overcome with remorse and foreboding. He stopped. He bought a packet of cigarettes, went back to the train, and thrust them stiffly through the window.

Hillary arrived at Berwick at six in the evening and changed on to a chain for Reston. There were two young men fresh from training school in his compartment, but when he examined them Hillary did not feel the bond of comradeship that had made him so anxious to return. They seemed to him callow and less worth dying for than Colin Pinckney and Peter Pease. At Reston he moved into a compartment of his own and felt the weight of a great loneliness. There was a final change of trains and then half an hour in a van to RAF Charter Hall.

It was the end of the world. Freezing winds swept across the tarmac from the North Sea; the sleeping huts had damp walls and no fires; someone had stolen all the plugs from the baths. Hillary wept into his pillow. The next day he was given an armament lecture which turned out to be an exact repeat of the one he had described at Kinloss in The Last Enemy. He raised his head from the desk and half expected to see Noel Agazarian and the ghosts of the long-haired boys, but there was only a pinched-looking lad who picked his nose.

Every day at Charter Hall was a new abandonment; the atmosphere was like a boarding school Sunday, only colder and more sinister. Hillary’s depression was intensified by a book he found in the small library. It was T.E. Lawrence’s letters; and what struck him was a passage in which the editor, David Garnett, wrote of Lawrence’s return to the ranks at Uxbridge: ‘One wonders whether his will had not become greater than his intelligence … The courage of the boy too proud to make a fuss is something we admire; in an educated man it is ridiculous and a sign of abnormality.’ Hillary was starting to believe that his own decision had been ‘ridiculous’. What was he trying to prove?

Many of the other pilots on the station looked up to Hillary as a Battle of Britain ‘hero’. They could not extend to him the fraternity he craved because they were in awe of him. Some showed their feelings by apparent disdain. They queried his lack of experience at flying by night; they pointed out coldly that it was not just his own life he was risking, but that of his navigator/radio operator.

Hillary questioned his own feelings and motives in much the same way. He felt fear in a way that he had never acknowledged before. He wondered whether it was flying at night that scared him, or whether it was some more fatal awareness that his life was coming to a close. ‘This is a queer place,’ he wrote, ‘for journey’s end.’

In December he managed to get leave to go to a wedding in London. Here he saw his friends Rosie Kerr and Archie McIndoe. It was clear to them that something had gone badly wrong. McIndoe was alarmed at Hillary’s mental condition. He had had to deal with Hillary’s aggression and resentment in hospital, but at least they had been emotions that derived from a hunger for life and anxiety about its healthy continuation. The sight of a meekly compliant Richard Hillary was frightening, and McIndoe eventually wrote a letter to the Medical Officer at Charter Hall, strongly warning him that he thought Hillary unfit for duty.

On his return to Charter Hall after the wedding, Hillary made a last, great effort to lift his spirits. ‘Much better today,’ he wrote to Mary Booker, ‘for I have finally flown; with no particular distinction and only dual, nevertheless I have flown. My greatest difficulty is taxiing these heavy brutes. I find that I have not the strength in my right thumb to work the brakes, so I am to have an extension fitted to the brake lever.’

Once Hillary was up in the air again, the truth became quite clear: he was not fit to fly. Not only was his mental attitude wrong, but his hands were too weak to work the cumbersome levers of the heavy night-fighters. His eyes were insufficiently protected by their new lids, and he suffered persistent and acute headaches.

Through the pain rang the word ‘coward’, uttered by Kathleen Dewar. He did not believe he was going to survive; his old fighter-pilot’s instinct lent him some absurd hope while he was up in the air, but his reason told him otherwise. Yet while he glared across the frozen airfield waiting for his death, he found at last some of the old comradeship and mutual loyalty he thought had been lost to ‘the one who is left’.

The other pilots began to lose their awe of him and to treat him as one of their own. He responded with desperate relief: ‘I feel a new-old warmth begin to course through me; the potion is already at work. I pick up the newspaper-Beveridge Report. Oh, the fellow is thinking about after the War: we’ll probably all be dead anyway. Let’s find out what Jane’s doing in the Daily Mirror. We turn the page; we comment on her legs, and I look more closely at the faces around me, and what I see pleases me. I am happy.’

His battle now was with the machines. Gales howled across the runway; clouds sank down to only 600 feet; the brake lever ripped the soft skin from his hands, and still he couldn’t hold the heavy plane on landing but bogged it into the soft mud beside the outer track. Hour after hour he ploughed through the grey Scottish cold with no landmark to guide him, flying on his instruments alone; and like all Spitfire pilots he was used to seeing rivers, fields and churches beneath the twitching rudder bars: to trust a needle in a glass dial was against all his fighter instincts.

He felt the eyes of Pease and Pinckney on him; he felt the expectation of all young men who had died, as he fought to justify ‘my right to fellowship with my dead’. If in some celestial dispersal hut they might have watched him they would have laughed and told him to get the hell out of it and back to London; but the need to prove himself worthy of them closed his mind to reason. Although he did not seek death, he did, in some incoherent way, long for its release.

His performance in the air made it likely that his wish would shortly be fulfilled. His instructor, Wing Commander James Benson, DSO, DFC wrote: ‘I sent him solo and it was terrible. I gave him further instruction and then he challenged me to stand behind him whilst he flew and tell him what he did wrong. I did. He nearly killed us both. But somehow we eventually got it sorted out and he got the hang of it. He thought a lot of me for that.’

Hillary was moved from Bisleys to Blenheims, which were even more awkward to fly. Another Blenheim pilot wrote: ‘I have a strong hunch that the designer of the cockpit had a perverted sense of humour as … the airscrew pitch and petrol controls were behind the pilot’s back where he groped in the dark, tearing fingers and thumbs on every sharp piece of metal that could be cunningly concealed to catch the unwary.’ Where the Bisley had a switch to shut the gills, the Blenheim had a wheel behind the pilot’s head that needed to be turned about fifty times; where the Bisley had a simple lever to raise the undercarriage, the Blenheim had a catch that needed to be released with the thumb. Even able-bodied pilots frequently found their fingers immovably trapped by this catch when they most needed a free hand elsewhere in the cockpit. Hillary’s thumb was clawed too deep into his palm to be able to work the lever at all, and on his first Blenheim flight he received a radio message telling him his undercarriage was still down. Unable to do anything about it, he was forced to land again straight away. Even then the RAF did not deny him the chance to fly; they merely sent someone with him to operate the undercarriage.

Night flying began at five o’clock each evening, though frequently the weather was so bad that pilots would be hauled out of their planes and sent back to the dispersal hut to wait either until the gale had dropped or the snow had lifted. Hillary strained his watering eyes to see through the muddy, unwashed perspex of the canopy, but could see neither the fitter, nor his torch, nor anything at all but the deep darkness of the night.

From his hut he wrote letters in which he described Charter Hall as ‘the forgotten man’s last stop’. He formed a close friendship with a navigator/radio operator, Wilfrid Fison, a man whose job was onerous enough in such conditions without the added burden of an incapacitated pilot. Fison had, however, been specially chosen to accompany Hillary, because, according to the Station Medical Officer, he was, ‘an old Cambridge Blue, of a temperament just calculated to suit Hillary, and the prospects were that they would make a good pair.’ However, Fison was thirty-seven, had no combat experience, and had joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve only a year before. He was known as a kind and selfless man, and there is no evidence that he was frightened of flying with Hillary. However, since Hillary made it clear that he was aware of Fison’s shortcomings as a navigator it is inconceivable that Fison could not have seen how far short Hillary fell of the standard required to fly a Blenheim safely. Perhaps the Medical Officer hoped the crippled pilot and ageing navigator could console one another with talk of sporting events at the ancient universities.

On 17 December McIndoe wrote to the Medical Officer at Charter Hall. He pointed out that Hillary’s left eye was not standing up to the strain of night flying. He believed that if he continued to fly it ‘can only end one way’. Since there was more work to be done on the eyelid, McIndoe asked if Hillary could be sent to East Grinstead ‘at an early date’. ‘In the meantime,’ he wrote, ‘I do feel that if you could restrain him from further flying, it might save him from a very serious accident. After I have dealt with his eye, I can reopen the matter with the Central Medical Establishment, and a more satisfactory disposal could be made for him.

‘Would you be so good as to treat this letter as private and confidential to yourself. The feelings of these young men are very apt to be hurt in relation to this vexed question of operative work following an injury. I feel however there is a strong case for intervention.’

The Medical Officer, however, was away on leave and McIndoe’s letter remained unopened on his desk.

Charter Hall was known to the men who were sent there as Slaughter All. The Blenheims were old, shaky, and skimpily serviced by a sullen groundstaff. The Flight Commander told Hillary: ‘I wouldn’t fly one of these Blenheims at night for any price – tried once – shook me to the tits. Can’t even see the instruments and fuck all outside … Tomorrow you’ll have all that and your engine’ll cut out too just for full measure, and if you prang they’ll say it was your fault.’

The airfield was laid out in accordance with the lessons learned from air raids about the need for dispersal. It was a German bomber raid on Hornchurch that had caused the damage to Hillary’s Spitfire canopy which prevented his escape above the Thames estuary. At Charter Hall there were therefore icy miles to cross between mess and billets with further long walks to the flights. The permanent staff were indolent and malicious; while the trainees had all known the rigours and comedy of service discipline, they found the attitude of these superiors curiously dispiriting. ‘They are machines, not men,’ wrote Hillary. The instructors themselves were of a higher calibre, but they were only on six-month postings as rest from operational duties and many of them resented being there. The pupils, too, were transient and were unable to make any impact on the morale or safety of the airfield.

The mechanics worked mostly in the open. It was not surprising that the only enthusiasm they showed was for getting indoors as quickly as possible and huddling round a brazier with tea and cigarettes. There was nothing of the rapport between pilots and ground crew that had helped win the Battle of Britain. The best electricians and mechanics had been taken by Bomber Harris for his nightly missions over Germany; the mechanics at Charter Hall and similar airfields were merely filling in time. Consequently the ageing planes showed a full range of defects in the difficult weather conditions. Sometimes the pilots were irritated by small things: the oxygen bottles were not refilled, brakes leaked, pitch levers failed to respond. Sometimes it was more serious: the engines would seize or ignite. When one of the Blenheims had landed safely with its starboard engine on fire the navigator initiated a subsequently much-imitated practice by bending down and kissing the runway.

Hillary came down to London again for his Christmas leave and stayed with his parents. He went to visit Denise Maxwell-Woosnam and stayed for dinner with Denise and her brother. He seemed remote, almost stunned. He told Denise several times in the course of the evening that he had finally found the answers to the problems that had been troubling him; that he had finally got things ‘sorted out’. She begged him to stop talking in such a way as she felt it indicated that he had given up hope. About midnight he asked her to change out of her uniform and into her prettiest dress. When Denise had done this, he looked at her for some time, sadly. Then he thanked her and left.

Michael Hillary saw his son the next day.

Richard wanted to see no one this time except those to whom he felt particularly close: his parents, Denise, Mary Booker, and Tony Tollemache. It seemed as though he was gathering his friends around him and binding them to him. On 27 December he returned to Charter Hall.

On New Year’s Eve there was a dance and ‘gramophone recital’ in the Radio Transmission hut. The radio speech officer, an elderly ex-choirmaster, played some Rossini to the assembled airmen and a few WAAFs. It was a long way from louche evenings in the Café de Paris after a summer’s day in Spitfires.

On 3 January Hillary wrote to his mother. ‘Time is very short and there are a great many people in the world. Therefore of these people I shall try to know only half a dozen. But them I shall love and never deceive.’

On the same day Hillary undertook a night flight with Wilfrid Fison. They went in a Bisley because Hillary was ‘scared stiff of the old Blenheims at night – you can’t even see your instruments – and also as I was to do a height test the cold would have been too much for me – quite apart from fighting with the undercarriage.’ Fison sat up front with Hillary and, somewhat to their surprise, they became airborne with no problem. Soon afterwards the heavy plane started plunging to starboard, but they could see no obvious reason. At 10,000 feet the pitch control of the port engine jammed, and at 19,000 feet the radio stopped being able to transmit to the ground.

Hillary pushed down the nose and told Fison to get a ‘homing’ from the airfield. The radio gave out various homing vectors and Fison repeated them solemnly, slowly, and wrong. Then the radio packed up altogether. Hillary pressed down slowly through the cloud until he saw the flare-path of the runway. He flashed his navigation lights at 1,000 feet, but there was no answer. Then he rechecked the dial: 11,000 feet. He descended and circled the airfield, put down the wheels, throttled back and waited to land. Then he stalled. He was not at 100 feet, but at 1,000 feet, and spinning.

Finally he got the plane to 800 feet and received an affirmative flash from the green lamp on the airfield. Above the runway the unmasked lights flooded the bottom of the plane and made him turn away his vulnerable eyes. With Fison on his knees, holding his hand across the glare, Hillary found the plane being buffeted by a heavy cross-wind. He fought the stick with his weak hands and landed like a crab, the sweat pouring down inside his icy flying suit.

Twice in the air he promised himself that if he landed safely he would tell the Wing Commander that he could not go on; but back on the ground the thought of quitting merely amused him. He was hungry; he wanted to get into the crew room, have a cigarette and talk flying. The ambulance that had been waiting for them, watching their jagged descent, was dismissed. Hillary went off to find some supper, and on the way went past four men, drunk, carrying a barrel of beer. He could hear a piano playing. Somewhere there was a party. Somewhere, miles away across this dispersed, unhomely airfield, McIndoe’s letter was still waiting.

Then on 7 January the Medical Officer opened it. ‘I agree with you that intervention is suitable in such a case,’ he replied to McIndoe, ‘but I am also sure that Hillary’s self-respect is an enormous obstacle.’ The Medical Officer made Hillary promise that he would visit McIndoe when he next went to London. He did not intervene himself because he found Hillary ‘difficult to deal with’ and thought that any suggestion on his part that Hillary’s health was not good would lead him to conceal his true feelings.

While the letter was in the post to McIndoe, Hillary was required to fly. In the evening a Polish pilot noticed Hillary looking ‘tired, strained and very red about the eye’. He and Fison went up before midnight. There was intermittent sleet with a strong wind occasionally breaking up the cloud. The flight passed without incident, and the two men went back to the hut for a cup of tea and a cigarette before their second flight.

Shortly after take-off Hillary was told by radio to circle a flashing beacon. This was a normal procedure, in which the pilot would gently orbit the airfield while keeping the beacon on his port wing. The weather varied locally between little cloud with starlight to periods of 10/10ths cloud at 2,000 feet. The R/T asked him: ‘Are you happy?’ This was the standard operational word. Hillary replied: ‘Moderately.’ There was not necessarily cause for alarm in his choice of word. A former Spitfire pilot, bestselling author and reformed Oxford rake could not honour-ably answer ‘yes’ when he was flying a heavy, unreliable old hulk through cloud above a place he had described as the end of the world.

‘Moderately,’ he said. ‘I am continuing to orbit.’ The official report of the flight recorded that when R/T called him again there was no answer. An officer on the ground noticed that he was losing height. The report said that he lost control while circling in cloud. Wing Commander Benson wrote: ‘I must have overestimated him because I liked him and admired him for what he’d been through. He wasn’t happy so we recalled him. I was watching his navigation lights, and he spiralled straight in from a thousand feet.’

If, however, he was in cloud, it is difficult to see how an officer on the ground could make out his navigation lights and thus see that he was losing height. In any case, navigation lights were not generally used in night flying at Charter Hall. If anyone had perceived that the plane was falling, he ought to have contacted Hillary to warn him. It looks as though radio contact, as so often, had been lost. What may have happened is that Benson did not see, but heard the plane coming down.

The noise was loud enough. A shepherd in a nearby village heard the great machine lumbering and screaming overhead, causing his children to wake up in alarm and plaster to tumble from the ceiling of his cottage. The plane buried itself in the ground with a shattering impact that was heard for miles around in the freezing night. The explosion, in Benson’s words, ‘lit up the entire countryside’.

It was impossible to rescue anything from the flames. Hillary and Fison were annihilated. Hillary was identified by his wristwatch.

In London on the morning of 8 January Mary Booker received the telegram. ‘Deeply regret to inform you Flt/Lt Richard Hope Hillary No.74677 killed in flying accident today.’ She went at once to break the news to Edwyna Hillary, who was working for the Red Cross at St James’s Palace. She looked up as Mary entered the room. ‘Is it Richard?’ she asked. Mary took her home and spent the day with her and Michael Hillary.

At Charter Hall the story went round that Richard Hillary’s was a coffin they had to fill with sand.

The flames, as Hillary had anticipated, had their man in the end. On 12 January 1943, at 10.30 am, he was cremated at Golders Green. But before the ashes were scattered, before his parents had emerged from their shock, strange things started happening to the memory of him. It was as though, despite the finality of his end, the elements that had made up his existence remained unstable.

Richard Hillary’s brilliant and short ascent to fame, the disfigurement of his handsome features and his violent death in a broken-down trainer made him the fit subject for a myth that the writing of the previous decade had been preparing. When Hillary himself spoke of ‘the pilot’ and the mysterious role the figure played in society he was aware of the literary associations he was invoking. In his poem ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ Yeats understood and helped articulate something of the sense of mastery, of escape and of fatal indifference that airmen commonly experienced.

Hillary’s attempt to express his version of the same thing in The Last Enemy was, by comparison, almost incoherent:

It is not surprising that Hillary wrote less well than Yeats. What is significant is that he recognised, in a literary way, the mythic potential of what he was writing.

Throughout the previous decade, when Hillary had been studying literature at school and university, English writers had puzzled over the role of the man of action. Many of them confessed to feeling themselves in some way unmanned by the fact that they had not faced the trial of the Great War. The influence of Wilfred Owen was important, not only in the way he wrote, but because as well as being a poet he had been a soldier who conquered shell shock, returned to the front, and won the MC. The writers Hillary referred to dismissively as the ‘Auden group’ were aware as early as 1931 and 1932 that they were entre deux guerres, and their work was sometimes a contemplation of the next war before it was an accommodation of the last.

The literature of the 1930s was concerned with what to do next. The figure of the pilot kept recurring. In October 1931 an Italian anti-fascist poet called Lauro de Bosis flew in a light plane from Marseille to Rome to drop political leaflets. He never returned, and his flight took on some poignant significance. When the poet John Cornford, one of the most celebrated English volunteers, was killed in Spain in 1936, his obituarist wrote: ‘I could not but think, when I heard of his death, of Lauro de Bosis – the young Italian who went to Rome in his lonely aeroplane, delivered his testimony, and died.’

A man was to make his point, alone, then die. His action should preferably be politically motivated, but there was the possibility that action itself could redeem. In 1932 Auden published The Orators, the longest part of which, Book II, is ‘The Journal of an Airman’. The character is weak and troubled; the mission he flies is a political one against a class enemy. Auden was helping to create the idea that there was something symbolic in the figure of the pilot: that he above all other people epitomised the private man forced by calamitous events into a public role.

Day Lewis referred to Auden himself as a pilot in a poem in New Country: ‘Wystan, lone flyer, birdman, my bully boy!’ One aspect of the reflexiveness and self-reference of English writing in the 1930s is the irritating, clubby way the poets refer to one another in their poems. However, the self-consciousness and awareness of ‘action’ and of political developments in Europe also meant that public events were quickly scrutinised, turned over, and transformed into verse. By the time Richard Hillary died in 1943 there was an established technique in overnight myth-making.

In 1934 Day Lewis included in his poem ‘A Time to Dance’ a narrative section based on a flight from England to Australia made by two Australian war veterans called Parer and McIntosh. They flew in a condemned and ill-serviced DH-9, its condition something like that of the wretched Blenheims at Charter Hall. The poem is remarkable among contemporary works in that it seems to have no political content at all. Day Lewis was at this time a Communist, but the poem is about the thrill of flying. The following year another Communist, Christopher Caudwell, edited a book called Great Flights. He worked under the pen-name C. St John Sprigg, while as Caudwell he wrote a Marxist study of poetry called Illusion and Reality. His interest in flight was uncoloured by his political beliefs. Flying was seen as a feasible form of heroism and individual self-assertion that survived the degradation of the infantry slaughters of the Western Front. It was already depicted by these writers as what Richard Hillary later called it: exciting, individual, disinterested.

Auden had anticipated Hillary’s interest in T.E. Lawrence; in fact it was Lawrence who was the inspiration for Auden’s Airman in The Orators. The year before Lawrence’s death in 1935 Auden wrote: ‘To me Lawrence’s life is an allegory of the transformation of the Truly Weak Man into the Truly Strong Man, an answer to the question “How shall the self-conscious man be saved?” ‘ Auden returned to Lawrence as the basis of Michael Ransom, the main character in The Ascent of F6 the following year. Auden saw in Lawrence’s life the dilemma that Hillary saw: the problem of heroism and of what a self-aware man should do. The complication is that only decisive action itself appears capable of revealing such a man’s true motives. In The Ascent of F6 Auden complicated matters further by introducing a Freudian element. Ransom acts heroically to please his mother, but is then destroyed by her. Edwyna Hillary, far from being destructive, tried hard to protect her son, though it is possible that in his emotional reliance on her rather than on his father, Hillary developed unconsciously a desire to please and impress her, comparable with Christopher Wood’s drive to honour and vindicate his mother’s love. The pity is that both should have finished by producing the last consequence that either mother wished to see.

By the time he came to write The Last Enemy, Hillary had put the writers of the Auden group at arm’s length. He had by then undergone his change of conviction about the War and wished to distance himself from people who had been pacifist or non-combatant. Auden and Isherwood had gone to America, Stephen Spender was in the London Fire Service: these men were not fighting and dying. Hillary’s life and writing, however, fit comfortably into the cultural setting the writers of the 1930s had helped to define. He may not have been aware of it, but he shared many of their assumptions, and in his writing about ‘the pilot’ he acknowledged that literary background. His attitude to the outbreak of war was not very different from theirs. They believed that war would bring Western civilisation to an end and that the only fate worse than that would be to live in a fascist state. They felt themselves to be a generation without ancestry, because the Great War had killed ten million men and irrevocably cut them off from the past. A new war, they believed, would eliminate also the possibility of a future. Hillary came to share this belief, though with the important qualification that victory by the Allied forces against the Nazis would ‘stamp for ever on the future of civilisation’ the values for which his comrades had died.

Under Mr McEachran at Shrewsbury and later at Oxford Hillary had read widely. His cultivation of an ‘alert philistinism’ did not prevent him from invoking Pound, Eliot and Auden in The Last Enemy. Since the whole enterprise of English literature in the 1930s had been devoted to the question of the private faces in public places, to the dilemma of what action a person should take in troubled times, and since a talent as great as Auden’s had been involved, it is hardly surprising that Hillary was both influenced by it and remembered in the terms that it had denned.

If Hillary’s life fitted the high cultural patterns these writers had created, his death appealed to a more popular taste: the mystery story.

Three months after Hillary died Arthur Koestler published an article about him in Horizon under the title ‘The Birth of a Myth’. Koestler had known Hillary quite well in London in his brief period of literary fame and they had corresponded. Koestler had an image for the growth of a myth. He compared it to the formation of crystal. The public and artistic backgrounds – books, newspapers, the word on the street – were like molecules trying to find a coherent pattern; the individual was the core about which they crystallised. Koestler had seen some, but not all of Hillary’s letters to Mary Booker from Charter Hall and he quoted selectively to show Hillary’s submission to a death he believed had become inevitable. Koestler made much of Hillary’s distinction between his ‘instinct’, which told him he would survive, and his ‘reason’, which told him he must die. What Koestler was trying to do was to suggest a degree of volition. Perhaps he had not read Saint-Exupéry, who used the same word, ‘instinct’, about his desire to fly as a fighter pilot. Koestler suggested that Hillary was a more or less willing victim of the forces of myth. He rightly identified the sceptical, reluctant way in which such men as Hillary fought at first and fairly showed from his letters to Mary how difficult he was finding it to fly the machines at Charter Hall.

‘But why then, in God’s name, did he go back?’ Koestler asked. He looked at the influence of T.E. Lawrence, about which Hillary had written to him personally. He was scornful of the idea that Hillary could have returned only for the hope of comradeship, and quoted Hillary himself: ‘I ponder Koestler’s theory that l’espoir de la fraternité is always a wild goose chase unless one is tight or physically exhausted in a crowd – as after long marches.’

Koestler came to no simple conclusion about Hillary’s motivation, preferring ‘a pattern composed of all the threads we have picked up, and followed for a short while and dropped again. For the pattern is more than the sum of the threads; it has its own symbolic design of which the threads know nothing.’ This was the nub of what Koestler was suggesting: that while Hillary’s motives were mixed, he was affected by the pressure of public expectation into making some kind of exemplary death.

Koestler again quoted Hillary quoting him, about the distinction between the two planes on which people live: ‘Usually we live and move on the plane of the vie triviale, but occasionally in moments of elation, danger, etc we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the we tragique, with its uncommon-sense cosmic perspective. One of the miseries of the human condition is that we can neither live permanently on the one nor on the other plane, but oscillate between the two.’ Thus the casual, downbeat slang of the mess was the only way the pilots could deal with their experiences in the air. Artists, Koestler argued, have to move constantly between the two planes. He analysed The Last Enemy in the light of how well Hillary succeeded in viewing the trivial from the perspective of the eternal and was generous in his estimate of Hillary’s success. He compared him with, among others, Hemingway, Malraux, Saint-Exupéry and Raymond Radiguet. To Thomas Mann’s opinion that to survive a writer must leave bulk as well as brilliance Koestler had the elegant rejoinder: ‘This slim volume of Hillary’s seems to have a specific weight which makes it sink into the depth of one’s memory, while tons of printed bulk drift as flotsam on its surface.’

Koestler’s essay ended, like Hillary’s book, rhetorically. He could not answer the question he had set himself: ‘What makes this young author-pilot’s life into a symbol?’ His last, approximate answer is that it is something to do with causes: ‘a man’s longing for the Holy Grail may become so strong that he flies like a moth into the flame; and having burned his wings crawls back into it again.’ He suggested that Hillary was lost for something in which to believe – a redeeming emotion and an unembarrassing faith. This is not how Hillary himself presented his state of mind. Out of literary distaste at its rhetoric, Koestler seemed to ignore the meaning of the final paragraph of The Last Enemy.

Koestler’s essay, if occasionally self-indulgent, is often shrewd and appears to have been written in good faith. The following year John Middleton Murry published an essay entitled ‘Richard Hillary’ in his magazine Adelphi in which he accused Hillary of ‘faking the record’. Murry was not concerned so much with material inaccuracies as with what he believed to be the falsehood of Hillary’s conclusions. He could not accept that Hillary really believed the War had become a moral crusade. Murry presented Hillary as a figure from tragedy who was pursued by the fates for his ‘dishonesty’ and forced to pay the ultimate price. Murry’s essay was too self-admiring to state anything so plain as a thesis, but what he appeared to believe was that any glory there might have been in the Battle of Britain was gone by late 1942 when the bombing of German cities had begun. Because, according to Murry, he had lied about his feelings, Hillary was condemned to tread the world in a ‘phoney literary role’ from which his only escape was through a willing death. Since Wilfrid Fison went down with Hillary, what Murry was suggesting was more than a sensational literary gesture. Murry was himself a pacifist and reprinted the essay in his own imprint in the hope of influencing the conduct of the War. However reasonable an aim that may have been, it seems now as though it was Murry not Hillary who ‘faked the record’. ‘In Hillary’, he concluded, ‘the deep urge of contemporary society towards death is made visible.’ He judged Hillary’s ‘self-inflicted’ death to be a fitting expiation for the sin of seeing war against the Nazis – or any war – as justified, and recruited him, cleansed by his ultimate act of literary self-criticism, to his own side. There was a rattle of tambourines in his evangelical climax: ‘What Hillary foreknew as an individual, Britain will discover as a nation.’

Murry’s essay had little influence except to give further currency to the idea that Hillary had killed himself: ‘It was no crusade on which he was flying. He was seeking death.’ If Hillary had wished to kill himself he could have done so in the early part of his course when he was flying solo. There is also the matter of Fison. Hillary could certainly be obnoxious (‘that shit Hillary …’), but he was not a murderer; indeed by January 1943 he had become obsessed by notions of fellowship. His letters from Charter Hall are frightening because they show a very young man contemplating his imminent and unheroic death. In some unconscious way he may have accepted this fate, or at least feared to go back on his decision; but that is not the same thing as seeking to die.

Middleton Murry was right to draw attention to one thing, however, and that was the effect on Hillary of being the author of a successful book. He took his success modestly, laughing incredulously at the queues of people at the bookshops. The popularity of it, however, had a perverse consequence. He had written the book to honour the memory of men such as Peter Pease and Colin Pinckney and to celebrate the efforts of the ‘Carburys and Berrys’, the men ‘who have come up the hard way’. He missed their company after his crash, and more than anything he wanted their approval: he craved ‘my right to fellowship with my dead’. Yet not only did he feel himself less of a human being than Peter Pease and less of an airman than Brian Carbury, he had, by telling their story, by breaking ranks and becoming famous, put himself beyond the circle of their downbeat comradeship. It was almost as though he were guilty of ‘shooting a line’. Although the book was modest enough about his own flying, to write a memoir was a showy, individual thing to do. He had lost the natural right to talk shop in the mess and read the Daily Mirror, now he was condemned to dinner at the Garrick with Koestler, Linklater and Rebecca West. Peter Pease’s family was outraged at the portrait of their son, which they took to be an invasion of their privacy. Hillary had sought the love of his fellow pilots but had ended up in exile from them.

Hillary gave Denise Maxwell-Woosnam a copy of Wilfred Owen’s poems, explaining that Owen was a poet he much admired, and Owen’s life helps illuminate the dilemma at the end of Hillary’s. When war broke out in 1914 Owen was working as a tutor near Bordeaux and made no hurry to enlist. A passive, gentle man with a soft, velvety voice, Owen did not respond to patriotic calls. Eventually, however, he did join up and spent the bitter winter of 1916-17 on the Somme. His battalion had been involved in prolonged fighting and had operated from shellholes for twelve days. One night Owen was taking cover against a railway embankment when he was blown into the air by a German shell. He lay for several days in a hole by the cutting, with the dismembered body of a fellow officer all about him.

Two weeks later, his colonel noticed that Owen was confused: his hands were shaking and his memory was unreliable. The Medical Officer diagnosed ‘neurasthenia’. Owen wrote to his mother: ‘Do not suppose that I have had a “breakdown”. I am simply avoiding one.’

He was sent to Craiglockhart, a hospital for officers near Edinburgh that had been converted from a hydropathic spa. Here he met Siegfried Sassoon, and the meeting had a powerful effect on Owen’s poetry. When he arrived he was writing sub-Decadent whimsy, full of gloomy gardens and fake archaisms. By the time he left he had written ‘Duke et Decorum Est’ and a draft of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. Sassoon had helped him find his subject – war, and the pity of war – and Owen was on the way to becoming one of the most substantial British poets of the twentieth century.

Owen’s compassion for other men was not a gentle feeling, but a fierce and positive emotion. His determined apprenticeship as a poet meant that he had most of the technical means to control and express it. His life changed and became fulfilled. His voice was the most glorious and the most celebrated of those raised against the inhuman slaughters of the Western Front; he was the only writer who could justifiably call one of his greatest poems an ‘anthem’.

Yet he went back. Willingly, almost eagerly, he chose to rejoin the men of his battalion. He felt that he belonged with them; that while such terrible things continued he had no right to hold himself apart. To stay in England was simply to beg the question.

This finally was what Hillary felt too. Of course there were differences: Owen was a front-rank creative writer and Hillary was not; Owen had become an officer and felt a fatherly duty to protect the young men under his command; his sexual feelings were also for men, and this may have complicated the issue in a subtle way. But the main reason for Owen’s return was that he felt, like Saint-Exupéry in 1942, that he could not be a spectator – ‘Je ne peux plus rester témoin.’

In the Great War many men joined up from a sense of patriotic duty and were then disillusioned. Their motivation after that point was sometimes no more than a will to survive, but in many cases the lost cause of patriotism was replaced by a desire to honour their dead friends: only by seeing it through to the end, only by enduring, could they make some sense of the sacrifice that had been made by so many.

This feeling was less common in the Second World War because in 1939—45 most men felt they had a proper moral cause to fight for; they therefore had less need of the subtler claims of the dead. Hillary, however, made it quite clear that this ‘14-18 feeling was a powerful if not primary motivation for him.

On his return to the Western Front, Owen participated more eagerly than before. His war records are lost somewhere in the Ministry of Defence, but reading what one can between the lines of his letters to his mother (he was another mother-dominated boy) it appears that he almost ran amok. After leading one assault beyond the call of duty he was awarded the MC and was killed crossing the Sambre Canal under heavy machine gun fire in November 1918.

Owen had been forced by circumstances into an unbearable position, from which only physical action offered some redemptive escape. He felt that in moral or existential terms he had no alternative. So it was with Hillary-not because he had in Murry’s sinister phrase ‘faked the record’, but because he had filled it in. He had set down what he and his fellow-pilots had done and their reasons for doing so. He had no choice but to ‘finish the job’ that Peter Pease and Colin Pinckney had started.

Denise Maxwell-Woosnam was among those who agreed with him, and encouraged him to return to action. Admittedly she and his other friends did not realise how heavy the planes would be, how badly serviced, and how lethally dangerous; but in the general matter of the question of whether to fly or not to fly, they were not, like Arthur Koestler, perplexed. Mary Booker did not try to prevent him. Eric Linklater shied away at the moment he thought he might dissuade him.

At the end of The Mint Lawrence gave a lyrical evocation of the joys of service life. It takes away the anguish of individual responsibility; it removes the doubts and questions that can plague a man:

Lawrence talks of a lazy afternoon in the sun, in the mouth of an open hangar and concludes:

No loneliness any more. In some ways going back was easier for Richard Hillary than staying out.

Michael and Edwyna Hillary formed a trust, based at Trinity College Oxford, to keep the memory of their only child alive. They became close to Mary Booker, who sent flowers each year on the anniversary of Richard’s death, as Winifred Reitlinger remembered Kit Wood to his mother. Michael Hillary refused to appear in a radio programme about Richard because Arthur Koestler had also been invited and he believed Koestler was responsible for having started the suicide/murder theory. Mary Booker eventually married Michael Burn, a writer and journalist. She died in 1974, and in 1988 Burn published a selection of her letters to Hillary and his to her, which he found in a leather-bound album with a brass lock in the boxroom of their house. Mary had written out some lines from Swinburne as a preface:

Richard Hillary is remembered by those of his friends who are still living. They feel uneasy with the literary process that tried to make a symbolic figure of him in the years after his death. As time has passed the mythic encrustations have largely fallen away, and people are left with a memory of someone very individual, very forceful and very young. The Last Enemy is out of print, but it has survived in the culture because it has, in Koestler’s brilliant phrase, ‘specific weight’.

Denise Maxwell-Woosnam overcame her grief at the death of Peter Pease and married happily. She is well, untroubled in her faith, and still lives in England. She remembers Richard Hillary and his kindness to her.

Brian Carbury became one of the greatest fighter-pilots of the Battle of Britain, recording fifteen and a half kills between July and October 1940, including five Me-109’s in a single day.

Archie McIndoe was knighted for his services to plastic surgery. In 1950 he declared that he would divorce his wife and marry Jill Mullins, but changed his mind at the last moment. The second Lady McIndoe turned out to be a widow he met while waiting for the divorce to come through. Jill Mullins’s long wait was disappointed.

Shortly after VE Day two German doctors went to visit the hospital at East Grinstead. They had heard of McIndoe from German prisoners who had been treated by Red Cross doctors using his techniques.

The German doctors were allowed into the surgery one morning when McIndoe was about to operate on a particularly mutilated Czech pilot called Frankie Truhlar. McIndoe spent slightly longer than usual washing up, then went into the theatre where Truhlar, already anaesthetised, lay covered in green towels.

Instead of picking up the scalpel, McIndoe ripped back the towels that covered Truhlar’s ravaged face and legs. ‘This,’ he said, rounding on the German doctors, ‘is what your war has done.’ The two men left in silence.

Compared to Truhlar or Edmonds, Richard Hillary was not so very badly burned; but he was only twenty-three when he died, and he spoke like an old man.