The Last Enemy - Richard Hillary

Hillary was born in 1919, an Australian brought up and educated in Britain. He joined the RAF on the outbreak of war, shot down five enemy aircraft and then, on his fifth mission, was blown out of the sky over the Channel by a Messerschmitt.


The canopy of his Spitfire was faulty and he couldn't bail out as quickly as he should. His hands and face were badly burnt before, ultimately, the plane rolled and he fell out of the cockpit into the water. He was rescued by the local lifeboat and taken to a series of hospitals, ending up in the care of pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe.


That's as far as Hillary takes us in this memoir, written in 1942. He goes into no detail of how bad his disfigurement was and this slightly crappy edition provides no preface or introduction to tell us what happened to him in later life.


Considering the book itself, Hillary starts with his shooting down. He then backtracks to his idle days at Oxford and enlistment, with his varsity pals, in the RAF. He describes training in Scotland and the long wait to achieve a Spitfire posting. It gets a bit dull, to be frank. However the second section, in hospital, turns out to be surprisingly effective. Hillary finds an engaging tone somewhere between modesty and extreme heroism (which, modestly, he focuses on the other patients, all of them burnt airmen). There is no real end, presumably because he was still receiving treatment when he wrote the book.


This is where a capable introduction or appendix would have come in handy. Hillary certainly was receiving treatment, from another specialist, in 1942. His disfigurement was so bad that Lord Halifax had refused to let Hillary be seen on a propaganda tour. Naturally this was a massive blow to a young airman full of testosterone and it seems he lost confidence. Hence he was taken to New York - to the Ritz Towers Hotel, where legendary Anglo-Indian actress Merle Oberon is said to have administered two weeks of specialist reassurance. Soon Hillary had blagged a return to flying, even though his hands were so maimed that he couldn't handle a knife and fork. He crashed his light bomber in January 1943. He was still only 23 years old.

Toby's Room - Pat Barker

It's a follow-up to Life Class, apparently, but it is, inescapably, an offshoot of the magnificent Regeneration Trilogy which made Barker's name and won her the Booker Prize.

The trilogy was about World War I, poetry and mental illness.  Toby's Room is about World War I, painting, and facial disfigurement.  The art school chums who met at the Slade in Life Class are now exposed to the full horror of mechanised warfare.  Kit Neville, the Christopher Nevinson clone, has his face blown off in France and is brought home to Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup where the plastic surgery pioneer Harold Gillies does his best to make the facially disfigured acceptable and 'Harry' Tonks, professor at the Slade, draws meticulous records of the process.  Gillies and Tonks are obviously real whereas the 'students' are thinly fictionalised.  The Bloomsbury Set make a brief cameo appearance - notably and memorably Lady Ottoline Morrell.

The titular Toby is Toby Brooke, brother of the artist Elinor.  They are very close - too close, indeed. Toby goes to war as a doctor and is posted missing, presumed dead.  Elinor feels compelled to find out the truth.  Neville was a stretcher bearer in Toby's unit.  Elinor contacts him through fellow student Paul Tarrant, himself invalided out of the front line.  They visit Neville at St Mary's where Elinor is recruited by Tonks to assist with his "Rogue's Gallery".

The problem is, the book is in two distinct halves - pre-war and towards the end of the war.  It may well be that Life Class forced this structure onto Toby's Room.  I don't know but will certainly find out. It makes Toby's Room, as a standalone novel, clumsy and disjointed.  The characterisation is, nevertheless, excellent, especially with Neville himself, who is far more interesting than our apparent heroine.  And the writing, as always with Barker, is exquisite.

Not perfect, then, but a fascinating addition to the canon.