Re: au revoir to a young writer

    Tim is doubly welcome - principally for himself but also
    for the sweet balm of his rain in this apparently unending
    Christmas wilderness where no voice is heard, no human
    trace is found. (Yes, CHRISTMAS dammit - & all you yids,
    wogs, chinks & hand-wringing atheists can fuck off.)

    The Grealy life is obviously one to be noted. The writing,
    as presented in the extracts, seemed a bit wrought for
    my taste but the story itself has an inevitable power.
    (You can never go by photographs, of course, but in
    the teeny portrait provided I thought she looked - apart
    from a certain curtailment of the right jaw - something
    of a smasher.)

    What this all brought back was another book that played
    a great part in shaping my own adolescent consciousness:
    'The Last Enemy' by Richard Hillary.

    Hillary was one of the golden, 'long haired boys' of the Thirties
    Oxford generation who in the autumn skies of 1940 over Kent -
    & in the company of rather less gilded chaps - gave the Luftwaffe
    its first severely correctional lesson. In the course of it, Hillary
    was trapped by the jammed canopy of his burning Spitfire &
    lost the skin from most of his face & hands.

    Unlike the innumerable other war memoirs of the time where
    the urgency derived more from the events than from the writing,
    Hillary's book - written during the long months in hospital
    when he was not yet 22 - had all the marks of a natural.
    He was a lovely writer: vivid, ironic, & with all the reined-in
    power of a very high intelligence. The book is about flying
    in the Battle of Britain, of course, but more importantly about
    his journey from unthinking privilege through awful suffering
    to compassionate awareness - while the great Archie McIndoe
    rebuilt his face.

    He went back to squadron service & was killed one winter's
    night when his damaged hands failed him as he tried to raise
    the undercart of his Beaufighter. He was 23 & I was 13 &
    when the news came I would have wept - except that British
    boys did not weep in 1942 any more than they do in 2002.

    He left his mark though. It can't be wholly coincidental that
    in a happy life, four of the happiest years were spent wearing
    the same uniform as Hillary's, doctoring to his successors -
    & even emulating his own quest to become a writer.

    Scottie B.

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Received on Mon Dec 23 05:43:41 2002