The Fatal Englishman (19 page)

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.