The Ka of Gifford Hillary (8 page)

I gather she was rather a hoydenish young woman with neither beauty nor charm, and that her one passion was motor racing. Apparently this led to her spending a great deal of
time with my father’s chauffeur, who was also an enthusiast, and in his off duty hours was jigging up an old car that he had bought with a view to doing a little amateur racing himself. They became secretly engaged and when they broke it to my father that they intended to get married there was hell to pay.

Not unreasonably, perhaps, as Betty was such a plain girl, he assumed that Norton was after her for what he could get out of it; so he sacked him on the spot. Betty declared that she meant to marry him anyhow; and her papa said that if she did her husband could keep her, for he certainly would not, and that if she even saw Norton again he would cut off her allowance. She made a pretence of giving in, but one morning about a month later her room was found to be empty, and a few days after that she wrote from an address in London to say that she had become Mrs. Norton.

It was natural enough that my father should have been averse to his only daughter marrying a working man, but I am sure that in threatening to cut her off he believed that he was protecting her from an adventurer; for he was by no means hard-hearted by nature. He told me himself, years later, that, if at the end of a year she was still happy with Norton, he had meant to forgive and forget, buy them a house and take Norton into the business at a decent salary. But he felt that their having to make do for twelve months on a chauffeur’s wages first would prove a real test for both of them; although as far as they knew he was through with Betty for good.

Unhappily, Fate forestalled my father’s good intentions. Ten months after her marriage Betty died in giving birth to Johnny. When my father was informed by Norton of her death, he was terribly upset by the thought that she had died in some poor lodging, and might not have died at all had they had the money for her to have the baby in a nursing home attended by a Harley Street gynaecologist. He wrote to Norton bitterly upbraiding him for not letting him know that Betty was about to become a mother, but offering to take full responsibility for the baby; and Norton wrote back with equal bitterness, asserting that his wife’s death had been due to her father’s snobbery and meanness. He added that as her father had done nothing for her while she was alive he need not expect to have any share in her son now she was dead,
and that he was quite capable of bringing the boy up without any assistance from his Hillary relatives.

Later, my father made an attempt to patch matters up with Norton so that he might at least arrange for his grandson to receive a good education. It was learned then that Norton had come into a little money, so had returned to his native town of Huddersfield and opened a garage in one of its suburbs. Johnny had been there since an infant in the care of Norton’s mother; and I have since learned that the garage business prospered to a degree that enabled his father to send him to a Grammar School and give him a very respectable middle-class upbringing. But Norton remained adamant in his refusal to accept any assistance from my father, or even to let him see the boy.

As far as I was concerned the whole affair was one of hearsay and dim memories; so I had virtually forgotten that I even had a nephew when, by pure chance, I was introduced to Johnny some three years ago. I met him while having drinks before dinner at the Royal Air Force Club with another regular R.A.F. officer with whom I had become friends during the war. He is what used to be considered a naval type; fair-haired, intensely blue-eyed and with a square chin having a slight cleft in its centre. He is nearly as tall as I am, but slimmer and, again like the naval type, has that quiet good-humoured manner of the man of action who makes little fuss but sees things through.

Our names, of course, rang bells in one another’s minds, and as both our fathers were by then dead we saw no reason whatever to prolong the family schism. Moreover we took to one another at once, so I asked him down for the weekend. My sister having been so much older than myself he would really have fitted better into the role of a younger brother than a nephew, and during that first week-end we came to like each other a lot.

Before he left on the Sunday night he said that sometime he would like to see over the family business; so I asked him down again and took him round the yards. James Compton knows the family history as well as I do, and being twenty years older remembered much more about poor Betty’s affair than I did myself; so naturally he was most interested to meet Johnny, and he went round with us.

Both James and I were greatly impressed by the intelligent questions Johnny asked, and the shrewd comments he made on this and that; and this tour of the yards he had made with us set me thinking. James had no sons and my own boy is set on becoming a chartered accountant; so there is no one to take the place of either of us should one of us drop out. When the routine flying days of R.A.F. officers are over quite a high proportion of them have to be axed, and Johnny was already a Squadron-Leader; so in a few years’ time he might be only too glad of the chance to go into business. Moreover, ours was his own family concern, and but for circumstances over which he had had no control he would have been given the chance to go into it as a youngster. Had he done so he would by then have been far better off than he was, as he had not even been mentioned in my father’s will, and the proceeds from selling his own father’s garage brought him only a little over a hundred a year; so he was practically dependent on his pay.

The more I thought about it the more I felt that, having been left nearly the whole of my father’s fortune, it was up to me to do something for Johnny. When I spoke to James about it he agreed at once that Johnny would be an asset to the business, and had at least an ethical right to some share in it. We agreed, too, that even if he was not prepared to leave the R.A.F. right away, we might, with future possibilities in mind, run him in by making him a Director.

When I put it to Johnny, he said that he wanted to go on in the R.A.F., but that as he had recently returned from two years in Malaya, and previously to that done a tour of duty at Gibraltar, all the odds were on his being stationed at home for the next few years; so he should be able to attend most of our monthly Board meetings. He was keen as mustard about the idea; and most charmingly grateful when I told him that he need not sell out any of his capital to buy qualifying shares, as I meant to make over to him five hundred of mine.

During the past three years he has more than fulfilled his promise, and now has an excellent grasp of all the Company’s affairs. Whenever he attends a meeting he always spends the night at Longshot Hall, and we are no longer like uncle and nephew, but the closest friends.

These, then, were the six men whom I had to do my best to persuade to join me in refusing a valuable order for what
I was convinced were patriotic reasons, but might well appear to some of them to be very far-fetched ones.

As I took my seat at the head of the table I felt inwardly excited and a little nervous. It was not that I lacked confidence in myself; but I knew that I was in for a battle, and the thought that what I was about to do might even lead to an open quarrel with men I liked and respected was a far from pleasant one.

On glancing down the agenda, I saw that ‘Sales report by Admiral Sir Tuke Waldron’ was item number five. That meant that I would have to control my patience for at least an hour; for, much as I should have liked to plunge into the matter of the E-boats right away, and get it over, I had to wait until he told us about the new contract. To have done otherwise would have given away the fact that I had previous knowledge of it, and it was of the utmost importance to avoid giving them grounds for suspecting that I had been put up to the line I meant to take by anyone associated with the Government.

The clock ticked round with maddening slowness to three-forty, while I strove to concentrate on the normal affairs of the Company; but, at last, I was able to call on the Admiral for his report. Even then a further ten minutes elapsed while he told us about the past month’s activities by his sales staff. Evidently he was saving his own coup for a
bonne bouche
, and, at length, with pardonable satisfaction, he produced it.

A murmur of congratulation ran round the table, then I said: ‘To have landed us this order is a fine feat, Admiral; and you certainly deserve the thanks of the Board. But recently I have been giving a lot of thought to this question of E-boats, and I have come to the conclusion that we ought not to accept contracts to build any more of them.’

It would have been more truthful to say that for the greater part of the past forty hours I had been wondering how the Board would take my bombshell, and rehearsing in my mind what I should say in an endeavour to bring as many as possible of its members round to my view.

They reacted much as I expected. Toiller, McFarlane, Lord Wiltshire and Johnny all stared at me in swift surprise. The Admiral exclaimed: ‘Lord alive, man; why ever not?’ And the good solid James, who was seated on my right, said:
‘I haven’t a clue what’s in your mind, Giff; but perhaps you’ll enlighten us?’

Looking at old Toiller, I asked: ‘As Secretary of the Company, would you say that its financial situation is a satisfactory one?’

‘Why, yes, Sir Gifford,’ he replied after a second. ‘You must know yourself how well we’ve been doing since the Conservative Government brought prosperity back to the country, and that during these past few years we have been able to put large sums to reserve. Our affairs are in better shape now than they have been for a very long time.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and turned to James. ‘Will you tell the Board how we stand about work to keep our people going for the next twelve months or so?’

He shrugged. ‘We’ve plenty of that; and the demand for small boats is still on the up and up. My problem is to get enough skilled labour.’

‘What’s all this to do with it?’ the Admiral exclaimed impatiently.

He was on my left, and glancing at him I replied: ‘It is just that I wished to have recorded in the minutes what we all already know. Namely that the financial position of the Company will not be seriously impaired, or a number of our people thrown out of employment, should the Board decide to decline this Admiralty contract.’

‘But why should we?’ he asked in a puzzled voice. ‘What the devil are you driving at?’

I gave him the works then. My heart was beating a little faster but I said quite calmly: ‘No doubt you have seen a lot of the articles that have appeared in the papers in recent months, stating that in any major war our only hope of victory lies in the use of thermo-nuclear weapons and that in order to develop them to the maximum extent we must sacrifice everything which in a nuclear war would prove obsolescent. Personally I accept that view. But it means that, among other things, the whole of the Naval building programme should be scrapped.’

Naturally, that put the fat in the fire. His rubicund face went two shades redder, and he burst out: ‘What; scrap the Royal Navy! Good God, man, to advocate such an idea comes damn near to treason! Those scribblers you’ve been
reading ought to be locked up. I’m amazed that anyone of your intelligence could take them seriously. They are talking through their hats, and don’t know the first thing about such matters. Neither do you.’

I had been expecting something of the sort, so I proceeded to say the piece I had mentally prepared for the occasion. It was, of course, a brief résumé of the arguments in the papers I had read, to the effect that we could not hope to defeat the Soviet colossus with orthodox weapons, and that the country’s finance would break under the strain if we continued the present policy of trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.

Only the good manners that were natural to Sir Tuke enabled him to hear me out without interruption. The moment I had finished he burst forth into a swift series of denials, assertions and general counterblast.

‘It was nonsense to say that we could not face up to the Russians if they used only orthodox weapons; and that was the type of war it would be. Fear of reprisals, and of much heavier stuff than they had themselves being launched from the United States, would deter them from starting a nuclear war. And anyway, if they did, it would not be all over in a few weeks, as some of these morons who wrote in the papers predicted. Whatever happened, we should fight on, just as we had always done. But the country must be fed, and our convoys could not survive without naval escort. In either type of war the Navy would play a leading role. The Soviet Fleet was not the second largest in the world. Only by increasing our numbers of aircraft carriers, submarines and E-boats could we hope to prevent it from blockading us. The Fleet Air Arm, based on the carriers, would be both the eyes of our intelligence and the modern equivalent of big guns. The carriers and many other types of vessel would also prove far less vulnerable than land sites for launching guided missiles. The whole matter had been gone into with the greatest thoroughness and eighteen months ago a White Paper had been published on it. The Army, of course, had had to accept considerable weapon cuts, but the Navy had been fully vindicated, and an increased building programme authorised. These more recent attempts to upset those decisions were little short of criminal, because they were playing into the hands of the
enemy. The Prime Minister and his advisers were not a pack of fools. During the past year or so there had been no major new development to cause them to alter their last publicly-expressed opinions; and on matters of Service policy it was up to all decent people, whatever their politics, loyally to support the nation’s leaders.’

In my turn I heard him out. Then I made the blunder which was later to have such serious repercussions. Having said my piece, I should have stood my ground. I should simply have replied that I counted myself just as patriotic as himself, but could not agree with him; and that it was upon those very grounds of patriotism that my conscience would not allow me to accept the contract. As I had never had any hope of winning him over, and could look for backing only to some of the other members of the Board, I ought, as a next move, after letting him blow off steam, to have asked them for their opinions.