The Last Enemy Richard Hillary (8 page)

I flew down with one halt on the way and arrived in the early evening. I came down low and circled the city, looking for familiar landmarks. I picked out the Isis, a tiny mud-puddle, and the barges dotted along its bank; the Broad, and Trinity, with its well-kept gardens obvious from even that height; Longwall and Magdalen Tower. I made a couple of circuits and came in. This, the first part of my visit, was entirely satisfactory, for my bank manager was a member of the Home Guard and on duty at the time. He was suitably impressed with me as a pilot, and when next morning I called upon him, without much hope, for an extension of my overdraft, he was more than obliging.

On landing I called up Rusty and reported, then I hailed a taxi and drove straight down to Trinity.

Superficially it was unchanged. Huckins, the porter, was still at the gate. ‘Good evening, Mr. Hillary,’ he said, in the same lugubrious tone in which he would announce that one was to be reported to the Dean. The windows of my rooms over the chapel still looked out on the Quad and caught the evening rays of the sun, and a few old college servants raised friendly hands to their forelocks. But, apart from them, not a familiar face. It was of course out of term, but Trinity, unlike most colleges, had not been amalgamated or handed over to the Government, and I had hoped to see a few dons I knew. The old place was tired; it had the left-over air of a seaside resort in winter. I walked into the garden quad and looked around at the uncurtained windows.

There was Algy Young’s old room in which I had spent many an agreeable evening. Algy had looked like playing rugger for the University. Of a serious disposition, he could not make up his mind whether to go into politics or business. I remember how often we had laughed at him for his enjoyment of food and getting fat. Well, it was doubtful if he was enjoying either now in Oflag VII C, having been captured along with the rest of the Highland Division at Dunkirk.

And there was Staircase 15. Alwyn Stevens had had a room there. We had rowed together in the Head of the River Boat for two years. Moody and of uncertain temper as he was, the rest of us had not gone out of our way to understand him, and he had wrapped himself up in his work, surprising everyone when it was understood that he had a good chance of a First in Law. He had been killed flying.

Peter Krabb? had also been on that staircase. Boisterous, amusing, and sarcastic, he had not come back from France.

I climbed to my old room, intending to find someone to make me up a bed for the night. All the furniture lay heaped in a corner, a mounted oar still hung over the fireplace, exaggerating if anything the bareness of the room. Geo. Coles had had the rooms before me. With his enormous shoulders he had been heavy-weight boxer for the University and a Rugger Blue. Of no enormous mental stature, he had not let it worry him and had led the life which amused him. At the beginning of the war he had managed to get a permanent commission in the Air Force: it was only a week since he had been seen going down in flames over France.

I kicked a chair-leg dispiritedly and went back down the stairs, intending to take a room for the night at the Randolph. I had no luggage. I hoped they’d try to stop me. At the bottom of the stairs I ran into the President’s wife. She offered to put me up for the night. I accepted gratefully, explaining that I might be late as I must go to the depot to make some arrangements. I then set off to survey the town. My first stop was the Randolph, where the truth of Noel’s warning was forcibly brought home to me. The bar was full, but of strange faces, and Mary was no longer there to serve drinks. Some harassed creature pushed me a pink gin and forgot my change. I was about to give up and leave when I saw Eric Dehn. Eric and I had been to school together and we had done two years together at Oxford. He was in battle dress, and as amusing as ever. He had been in France but had got out at Dunkirk. He was as depressed as I, but we went along to the George for an excellent dinner and then on to the Playhouse to look up some of Eric’s girl friends, with whom we passed a pleasant enough evening. It was very late when I got back to Trinity and took off my shoes, the more quietly to climb the President’s stairs (one’s education dies hard).

I was slightly drunk as I got undressed and crawled into bed. ‘This,’ I thought to myself hazily, ‘symbolizes everything. Tonight you sleep in the President’s linen in your underpants; tomorrow God knows!’ And with that I fell asleep. I was glad to go back to Montrose.

At this time we were still using Spitfires as night fighters. Now the Spitfire is not a good machine for night fighting. Its landing run is too long and the flames from its own exhaust make the pilot’s visibility uncomfortably small. Shortly afterwards the whole problem of night interception was radically revised (with great success), but for the moment night fighting in Spitfires produced little more than hours to go in one’s log-book. Three of us would spend the night in the Dispersal Hut waiting for a ‘flap.’ When it came, one machine would take off, and I as the junior squadron member would canter down the flare path, putting out all the lamps until the second machine took off some ten minutes later, when I would put them all on again. Meanwhile, there would be the uneven hum of a German bomber circling above, an experience which always gave me prickles down the spine.

For the most part, life at Montrose was very agreeable. We knew that at no very distant date the war would be upon us; but momentarily it was remote and we were enjoying ourselves. In the time when it was possible to get away from the station for a couple of days, most of us motored up to Invermark where Lord Dalhousie had kindly turned over his shooting lodge to us. Here in the deep stillness of the mountains it was possible to relax, and the war, if it penetrated at all, was wafted up as the breath of the vulgarity of another world. We shot grouse and fished on the loch, and on one occasion after an arduous day’s stalking I shot a stag; but I am no sportsman and the dying look in the beast’s eyes resolved me to confine my killing to Germans.

I was therefore relieved and grateful when Stapme and Bubble let me in on their preciously guarded secret. We three flew together and therefore had the same time off. Stapme and Bubble would both come up to Invermark, but neither of them shot. How they employed their few hours of freedom will, I think, come as a surprise to a number of people, for they must have seemed from the outside as typical a pair of easy-going pilots as one could expect to meet anywhere. Stapme with his talk of beer, blokes, and carburettors, and Bubble with his absorption in things mechanical, might have been expected to spend their leaves, respectively, in a too fast car with a too loud blonde, and in getting together with the chaps in the local pub. In point of fact they played hide-and-seek with children.

Tarfside was a tiny hamlet a few miles down the road from Invermark, and to it this summer had come a dozen or so Scots children, evacuated from the more vulnerable towns in the district. They went to school at Brechin, a few miles from Montrose, but for the holidays they came to the mountains, under the care of Mrs. Davie, the admirable and unexacting mother of two of them. Their ages ranged from six to sixteen.

How Stapme and Bubble had first come upon them I never discovered, but from the moment that I saw those children I too was under their spell. That they really came from Brechin, that thin-blooded Wigan of the north, I was not prepared to admit; kilted and tanned by the sun, they were so essentially right against that background of heather, burns, and pine. They were in no way precocious, but rather completely natural and unselfconscious. In the general confusion of introductions, one little fellow, the smallest, was left out. He approached me slowly with a grave face.

‘I’m Rat Face,’ he said.

‘How are you, Rat Face?’ I asked.

‘Quite well, thank you. You can pick me up if you like.’

I gave him a pick-a-back, and all day we played rounders, hide-and-seek, or picnicked, and as evening drew on we climbed up into the old hayloft and told stories, Stapme, Bubble, and I striving to outdo one another.

I lost my heart completely to Betty Davie, aged ten. She confided to me that I was her favourite, and I was ridiculously gratified. She was determined to be a school teacher, but with those eyes and the promise of those lips I did not doubt that her resolution would weaken.

It was with regret that we drove back to the aerodrome, and with a latent fear that we should not get back to Tarfside. We drove always straight to the Dispersal Point, each time expecting the greeting: ‘Tomorrow we move south.’ Out before the huts crouched our Spitfires, seemingly eager to be gone, the boldly painted names on their noses standing out in the gathering dusk. Nearly every plane was called by name, names as divergent as Boomerang, Valkyrie, and Angel Face. Mine I called Sredni Vashtar, after the immortal short story of Saki.

Sredni Vashtar was a ferret, worshipped and kept in the tool-shed by a little boy called Conradin: it finally made a meal of Conradin’s most disagreeable guardian, Mrs. De Ropp. Conradin in his worship would chant this hymn:

Sredni Vashtar went forth, His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white, His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death, Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful.

I thought it appropriate.

The legend of the children at Tarfside soon spread through the Squadron, and no three machines would return from a practice flight without first sweeping in tight formation low along the bed of the valley where the children, grouped on a patch of grass by the road, would wave and shout and dance in ecstasy.

Although our leaves did not coincide, I saw a fair amount of Peter Pease but I found him exasperatingly elusive. I had an urge to get behind that polite reserve, and by drawing him into argument to discover how his mind worked. The more reserved he was the more sarcastically aggressive I became. It was to no avail. I would throw him the ball and he would quietly put it in his pocket. Whenever I thought I had him cornered he would smilingly excuse himself and retire to his rooms to write letters. What I did not know, but might have guessed, was that he was in love.

On occasion, however, we drove up to Aberdeen to see Colin and had dinner together in the town. Once Colin and I conspired to get him into some dance hop. We both expressed an eagerness to go in, and rather than be awkward he agreed to go with us. The smell of humanity was oppressive, and we sat on the balcony watching the closely packed couples slowly circling the floor. A young woman, powerfully scented and with startlingly blond hair, was sitting next to me.

‘You do look mournful,’ she said. ‘Come and have a dance.’

I pointed apologetically to my foot and sighed:

‘Twisted my ankle, I’m afraid, but my friend here is a good dancer.’

I turned to Peter Pease and said, ‘I want you to meet Miss I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name?’

‘McBride. Dolly, my friends call me.’

‘Miss McBride, Mr. Pease.’

Peter got to his feet.

‘I’m afraid I don’t dance a tango very well, but I’d like to try.’

They went off down the stairs, to appear a moment later on the floor. Colin and I craned our necks. Dolly was looking eagerly up at Peter and they were talking and laughing. At the end of the dance Peter led her from the floor, thanked her, and started back up the stairs.

‘It’s no good,’ said Colin mournfully. ‘I might have known: the laugh’s on us.’

I resented Peter’s self-confidence, for while he was shy, he was perfectly assured. I rather prided myself on my self-sufficiency, on my ability to be perfectly at ease with people of any standing or any age, but with Peter I felt, as it were, that at any moment he might discover me wearing a made-up tie. He would, of course, not be so tactless as to mention it, would in fact put himself out to be even more charming than before. But there it would be: no getting round it, the fellow knew. Well, damn it, why shouldn’t I wear a made-up tie if I wanted to?

I resented this assurance, basically because here was a man better orientated than I, and as the result of an upbringing and a system of education which I deeply distrusted and had in the past despised as being quite incapable of producing anything but, at the best, congenital idiots, and at the worst, fox-hunting bounders. For he was a product of the old-school-tie system in its most extreme form. He was more than comfortably off; his father owned property which in due course, as the eldest son, he would inherit; he had been brought up in the orthodox Tory tradition and in the belief that this was as it should be.

I often attacked him and accused him of living in an ivory tower, but he refused to be drawn indeed there was little reason why he should be, for it was only too obvious that he was liked and respected by everyone in the Squadron. It was in fact almost impossible to draw him into an argument on any subject, though I tried everything, from apparently harmless conversation to attempts to make him lose his temper.

I wanted particularly to make him talk about the war, and in this I was determined to succeed. I knew that I need not expect any glib arguments. He was religious, and, I felt pretty certain, would not attempt to put forward any but the orthodox Christian views. Yet I wanted to hear his arguments from his own lips. I had an idea that the issue for him was an apprehension of something related to faith and not to any intellectual concept.

My chance came when we were sent down from Montrose to Edinburgh by train to fly up a couple of new Spitfires. We had the compartment to ourselves. I didn’t temporize but asked him straight out his reasons for fighting the war. He gave me that slow smile of his.

‘Well, Richard,’ he said, ‘you’ve got me at last, haven’t you?’

He sat back in his corner and thought for a moment. Words didn’t come easily to him, and I am bound to confess that in reconstructing his argument I do a certain violence to his expression. He was not as fluent as I shall make him. But what follows is at any rate the substance of his position.

‘I don’t know if I can answer you to your satisfaction,’ he said, ‘but I’ll try. I would say that I was fighting the war to rid the world of fear—of the fear of fear is perhaps what I mean. If the Germans win this war, nobody except little Hitlers will dare do anything. England will be run as if it were a concentration camp, or at best a factory. All courage will die out of the world—the courage to love, to create, to take risks, whether physical or intellectual or moral. Men will hesitate to carry out the promptings of the heart or the brain because, having acted, they will live in fear that their action may be discovered and themselves cruelly punished. Thus all love, all spontaneity, will die out of the world. Emotion will have atrophied. Thought will have petrified. The oxygen breathed by the soul, so to speak, will vanish, and mankind will wither. Does that satisfy you?’