Back to Earth

FALLING THROUGH SPACE--Richard Hillary--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50).

"I had decided on the arm, and not the leg, in order to be spared the bother of shaving my new upper lip. We chose a piece of skin bounded on one side by a vaccination mark and on the other by the faint scar of what are now my upper lids." Thus in January 1941, back again in hospital four months after he had been brought down in flames, ex-Spitfire Fighter Hillary confronted his personal problem of post-war reconstruction. For Richard Hillary the war was over.

He was twenty-one years old. Dull months of R.A.F. training routine during the "phony"' war had left him impatient of routine precautions. For him, no such impedimenta as gauntlets and goggles. Barehanded, open-eyed, through 23 days of combat duty at the peak of the Battle for Britain he went against the Messerschmitts. He had downed his quota in dogfights, learned to "Beware of the Hun in the Sun," to go into a spin when bullets started appearing along his port wing. "There is an appalling tendency," he remarks, "to sit and watch this happen without taking any action, as though mesmerized by a snake." That time he got away, to crash-land safely "in the back garden of a Brigade cocktail party." When, a few days later, crewmen of the Margate lifeboat dragged Hillary, comatose, out of the North Sea, they rushed him ashore to have his burnt flesh caked with protective tannic acid, his eyes with a coating of gentian violet.

Of course they did not tell him the bad news right away. First, the good word: he would see out of both eyes once more when famed Plastic Surgeon A. H. McIndoe, who "had yet to score a failure," could give him new lids. He would move his lips, when the new one healed, without frothing like "a perhaps refined stallion." And not until he was almost strong enough to enter what he calls the "Beauty Shop" for skin-grafting was he told: "Next war for you: those hands are going to be something of a problem."

"A man who has been rejected by death is easily tempted to take up the pen.'' Such is Hillary's avowed reason for writing down at white heat this compact, moving journal. He has, however, a stronger reason, which gives his chapters their impact.

The author has come a long way since the days, three years ago when, under the Munich umbrella, he was a Varsity oarsman and sports editor of Oxford's undergraduate paper; days when he dared not let himself consider the time gone out of his life, "first at school, now at the University, which had been sweated away upon the river, earnestly peering one way and going the other." Today, of all the friendly clique of athletic esthetes, the "long-haired boys" who went down from Oxford to the R.A.F. training camps in the autumn of 1939, Australian-born Richard Hillary is the lone survivor. To tell the story of why and how they fought is his real purpose.

His conclusions are less metaphysical than those of Antoine de St. Exupery but not fundamentally different : "It was impossible to look only to oneself, to take from life and not to give except by accident . . . instinct had served them. Each time they climbed into their machines and looked off into combat, they were paying silent tribute to their comrades who were dead."

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