The Fatal Englishman (20 page)

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.