Manhattan proved a revelation, but putting together general news stories and features about American life became humdrum. While Brickhill professed to be totally disinterested in politics, the power that came with money proved a recurring theme in his articles, and one of his American features was about corrupt American politicians. Influenced by writers around him, Brickhill displayed the breezy, unfettered and insightful writing style that would later make his books so readable. About Huey Long, Governor of Louisiana in the 1930s, he wrote: ‘Huey started as a poor farmer’s boy, began to peddle books, gulped down a law course in seven months, and climbed on the political bandwagon. Before you could say “Chiseller”, he was a bread and circuses demagogue, sitting in the Governor’s chair and proclaiming, “I am the Constitution in Louisiana.”’162
Brickhill quickly made several female friends in Associated Newspapers’ New York office, including Pat Dunne, a married woman. Very early on, too, he found himself a New York literary agent to hawk Escape to Danger to American publishers. Mike Watkins at the Ann Watkins Agency on Park Avenue became his agent. The Watkins agency handled several British authors, among them Roald Dahl. Like Brickhill, Dahl had been shot down and wounded in North Africa, but unlike Brickhill he hadn’t fallen into enemy hands. From 1942, Dahl had been based in Washington DC as assistant British air attaché and an intelligence officer, ending the war a wing commander. Watkins would fail to interest American publishers in Escape to Danger, but he would become a valuable future ally.
Late in the year, Brickhill received a despairing letter from his parents in Sydney. Their rented house at 41 George Street at Greenwich Point was being sold from under them. George, who was still working as Sydney correspondent for the Newcastle Sun, was approaching retirement age, and he and Dot couldn’t bear the thought of upping and moving yet again, leaving the little house by the water they loved. Paul made a momentous decision. From New York, he put in a bid for the George Street house. That bid was accepted. Pooling his advance for Escape to Danger and his saved RAAF back pay, Brickhill put down a deposit, and via the Manhattan branch of an Australian bank, arranged a mortgage.
By early 1947, the sale was settled, and Paul Brickhill was the proud owner of 41 George Street. He would always be responsible for the mortgage payments, ensuring there was never again financial pressure on George and Dot. To make his parents’ occupancy official, he charged them an annual peppercorn rent of a pound or two, and he vowed that never again would they have to worry about losing the roof over their heads. It was a promise he would not break.
By this time, too, Escape to Danger had been published in England in hardback. Receiving encouraging if restrained reviews, even making it into the London Review of Books, it sold out the modest first print run. To cash in on Christmas book sales, Faber & Faber released a new edition on 1 December. But the book wasn’t a runaway bestseller by any means. Brickhill would have to keep his day job. The lack of spectacular success as an author, the paucity of friends in the US and the drudgery of his reporting work all combined to sap his spirits. In the second half of 1947, Brickhill succumbed to homesickness. He hadn’t seen his parents in more than six years, and had yet to see the house he’d bought for them. After he asked Associated Newspapers for a transfer back to Australia, he was offered a subeditor’s position with his old paper, the Sydney Sun.
Come December, Brickhill had arrived back in Australia for a tearful reunion with parents and siblings, and his first Christmas at home since 1940. All his brothers had survived the war. Russell had married, returned to the University of Sydney to become officer of works, a post he would hold for decades, and had bought a house in Greenwich Point not far from their parents. Geoff had also married. Lloyd was flying for Australian National Airways. Clive had settled in Toowoomba, Queensland and was working as a laboratory assistant. Brickhill moved in with his parents in his Greenwich Point house, and in the first week of January 1948 began work once more at the Elizabeth Street offices of the Sun. One of the first people he passed in the corridor was John Ulm, who was back at the paper as a reporter. The pair’s paths had come full circle. Their tale of coincidence had one more chapter to play out – Ulm would end up living at Greenwich Point.
Prowling Sydney’s bookshops in his spare time, Brickhill was soon broken-hearted. Nowhere could he find a copy of Escape to Danger on sale. When he asked Faber & Faber’s local agents the reason, they responded that paper shortages meant that very few copies had been shipped to Australia. Determined that his work, and the story of the mass escape from Stalag Luft 3, would not go unrecognised, Brickhill contacted former Sun journalist and Department of Information executive Lionel ‘Wiggy’ Wigmore. He’d heard that Wigmore would be putting together a history of Australia’s involvement in World War Two, and wanted to bring to his attention the important information his book contained. Wigmore put him in touch with his editor, and Escape to Danger would be duly added to the masses of source material for that work.
Brickhill was now back in the Australian sunshine, and back with his family. But he found the work as a subeditor stultifying. It was ‘a bloody misery’ of a job, he would later say.163 He’d known, when he’d enlisted in the RAAF seven years before, that slogging away as a press hack was not what he wanted to do for the rest of his days. And, from across the world, England, and one particular Englishman, began tugging at him. During 1948, David Higham wrote to tell Brickhill that he’d been contacted by John Pudney.
Pudney, an erudite man who’d gone to school with W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, was an editor, short-story writer, novelist and noted poet – his wartime ode to British airmen, ‘For Johnny’, became celebrated. At this time Pudney was an editor with London’s News Review, but he’d worked for the BBC as a writer-producer before the war and was trying to get into the fledgling television business as a producer. As Pudney told Higham, he was a fan of Brickhill and Norton’s Escape to Danger, and was keen to turn its content into a series for BBC TV.
Conrad Norton was back in South Africa, where, this same year, he had a new nonfiction book published, Opportunity in South Africa. From the southern corners of the globe, both he and Brickhill enthusiastically told Higham to give Pudney permission to pursue the televising of their book, in their minds picturing their work on the revolutionary small screen. Pudney’s concept was, however, an ambitious idea for the time. BBC TV was then only broadcasting to the London metropolitan area, and the budget for the sort of program Pudney had in mind was well in excess of what the ‘Beeb’ could afford. Yet unbeknownst to Brickhill, the Pudney association would before long change his life.
In February 1949, Brickhill received an approach from John Nerney, head of the Air Historical Branch at Britain’s Air Ministry. Nerney wondered whether Brickhill would be interested in writing the history of the RAF’s 617 Squadron, which gained wartime fame for Operation Chastise, a raid against the Ruhr Valley dams, after which the unit had garnered the swashbuckling title of ‘the Dam Busters’.
Nerney had initially approached Leonard Cheshire VC, commanding officer of 617 Squadron following the dams raid, to write the squadron’s history. But Cheshire had turned him down, citing other work commitments and health issues – he was running a hospice for the dying which he’d set up in an old Hampshire house left him by an aunt. In declining the offer, Cheshire had recommended former 617 Squadron intelligence officer McGowan Cradon in his place. Cradon’s commitment to such a task was questioned by the RAF; he’d been considered too interested in buzzing about in Lancasters during the war and unfocused on his desk role.
As Brickhill would only learn several years later, Nerney had then spoken with John Pudney, who’d promptly recommended Brickhill. Although an Australian, Brickhill had been an officer and pilot with the RAF, and was a well credentialled writer, having worked as a journalist in London and New York. The Air Ministry would do all it could to facilitate his research, but Nerney’s offer entailed only a small honorarium, and there was no guarantee of p
ublication beyond a government-produced edition. There was also a significant hurdle – to research the squadron, its men and its missions, Brickhill would have to base himself in the UK.
Despite the drawbacks, Brickhill jumped at the offer, seeing this as an opportunity to dump his boring day job and set the foundations for becoming a full-time author – if he could interest a publisher in the book. And it would get him back to England. To satisfy British Air Ministry requirements, he applied to the RAAF for written confirmation that he’d been a serving officer attached to the RAF. But how, he wondered, could he afford to get back to England, especially as he had to keep up mortgage payments on his parents’ home?
It occurred to him that if he could interest an Australian publisher in a commercial Australasian edition of the book, he could generate an advance that would pay his fare, while retaining the potentially much more lucrative UK rights. Touting a Dam Busters book proposal around Australian publishing houses, he pointed out that a number of Australians had served with 617 Squadron and taken part in the dams raid. To his disgust, not a single Sydney publisher saw any merit in the idea. As Brickhill told Brisbane Courier-Mail journalist Roy Connolly, they all turned down his proposal, advising that it was ‘unsuitable for publication’. Unable to see how he could afford to get to England, Brickhill unhappily declined Nerney’s offer.164
Then, in March, just as Brickhill received the paperwork he’d requested from the RAAF confirming his commission, war service and service medals, agent David Higham again made contact. John Pudney was proving to be Brickhill’s guardian angel. Having just joined London publishers Evans Brothers as an editor, he was looking for new books, and had approached Higham with a proposal that Brickhill write an extended version of the Stalag Luft 3 mass escape covered in Escape to Danger, to be entitled The Great Escape. The commercially canny Pudney knew that Eric Williams’ novelised Stalag Luft 3 escape adventure The Wooden Horse had sold very well for William Collins and Sons, and he also knew that a film version was in the works, for release in 1950. To Pudney’s mind, The Great Escape book could ride on the back of the success of the Wooden Horse movie.
Brickhill was thrilled. He hadn’t been happy with the job he’d done on Escape to Danger. Years later, he would confess, ‘It bore all the marks of haste.’165 Not only would Pudney’s offer allow him to do justice to the mass escape story and its participants, it could give him the wherewithal to get back to England and get down to work as an author. Cabling Higham with his agreement to write The Great Escape, he pushed for a swift contract and a publisher’s advance large enough to get him to England. If need be, once in London, he could turn to freelance journalism to boost his income.
In April, once Higham had agreed contract terms with Evans Brothers, Brickhill threw in his job at the Sun and prepared to sail to the UK. In the end, it wasn’t until May that all was finalised. Brickhill was the second-last passenger to book a tourist-class passage to Southampton aboard the next sailing of the SS Largs Bay. Brickhill was on his way, to England, and to the top of the writing profession. Years later, when he sailed back into Sydney Harbour, he would return as one of the most successful authors in the world.
16.
Back in England
PAUL BRICKHILL SAILED out of Sydney’s heads to return to England on 14 May 1949 aboard the 14,000-tonne SS Largs Bay. Launched in 1921, she had been a troopship during the war. Returned to her owners, the ship had been refitted during 1948–49 and was once again sailing the Sydney–Southampton route via the Suez Canal as a combined passenger and cargo vessel. Half the size of handsome liners such as the Orontes and Strathaird, which had sailed out of Sydney Harbour in April, England-bound, the Largs Bay’s attraction was the economy of its fares. The day would come when Brickhill would deeply regret choosing this ship and this sailing.
Unlike larger liners on the England route, which routinely carried a thousand-plus passengers each, the Largs Bay had just 164 passengers aboard. It made for a more intimate voyage, with passengers soon mixing as if the ship were a private club. Among the tourist-class passengers strutted a striking, pencil-slim twenty-year-old girl with boyishly short dark hair and hazel eyes. Margaret Olive Slater hailed from Richmond on the Hawkesbury River, to the near west of Sydney. When younger, she had given herself the French-sounding name of Margot. Now, Margot Slater was travelling to England on holiday with her sister Jeanette, two years her junior.
Within hours of the ship clearing Sydney Heads, Paul Brickhill had spotted Margot and made her acquaintance. They were soon deep in conversation. Margot told Brickhill that she had been born at Narrabri in northern New South Wales, growing up in Richmond. Her mother, Olive, was a country girl, her father, Edric, an importer, making a name for himself in his spare time as a nature photographer. After attending Parramatta High and Homebush High, Margot had been an art student at East Sydney Technical College for two years, and enjoyed painting. Margot was two inches taller than Brickhill, taller still in high heels. Despite this, and the fact that Brickhill was twelve years her senior, she was attracted to the cheeky yet worldly journalist who’d worked in London and New York and told her he was going to London to become a successful author. Brickhill’s nervous stutter dissolved away in her company. Affectionately, he was soon calling her Maggie.
Margot told Brickhill that she had sailed to England two years earlier, on a trip with her mother, also visiting Germany’s British zone to see elder sister Beth, who lived there with her husband, British Army chaplain Thomas Yates. Brickhill told Margot about his writing projects, mentioning that he’d turned down the 617 Squadron history after receiving a negative reaction from Australian publishers. Margot suggested he not be so hasty, feeling that British publishers must surely be interested in the subject. She urged him to approach the RAF when he reached the UK and tell them he had reconsidered. Brickhill would later credit Margot with convincing him to revisit the book that was to become The Dam Busters.166
Brickhill was impressed by Margot’s interest in him, and his work. In the past, his stammer and shyness had meant he’d rarely shared his dreams and aspirations with anyone other than boyhood friend Peter Finch. Margot was a great sounding board, and he looked forward to relaxing in the young woman’s company each evening. By day, he worked. Having brought his trusty typewriter along, he used the four weeks at sea to commence rewriting his mass escape chapters from Escape to Danger to create the beginnings of The Great Escape. By the time the Largs Bay docked at Southampton on 14 June, Brickhill had the foundations of an 80,000-word book. Meanwhile, the chemistry between writer and art student was obvious. As they departed the ship, Brickhill and Margot agreed to keep in touch.
While Margot and her sister set off on a trip around Britain, Brickhill immediately resumed work. Staying at a cheap London hotel, he met with David Higham and John Pudney to plan the course necessary to bring The Great Escape to fruition. Pudney made several recommendations. This book should have the feel of a novel. Eric Williams had novelised his Wooden Horse escape, even changing his name and those of his fellow escapees, which helped boost readership. Brickhill was determined to stick to the facts and to retain the real names of the men involved; anything less would be an insult to the memory of his mates the Fifty, to whom he would dedicate the book. Nonetheless, he was open to making the book read like a novel.
Brickhill would write the book in newspaper style, using short sentences, short paragraphs and short chapters. He and Pudney agreed the book could do without an index, a stamp of nonfiction likely to discourage fiction readers. Escape to Danger had been almost devoid of conversation, but, with snappy dialogue a staple of popular fiction, in The Great Escape Brickhill would include conversations as they’d occurred, taken from his memory and the memories of other participants. And he would use his writer’s licence to insert occasional witty asides.
Pudney talked him into discarding unfamiliar terms and abbreviations that would be a barrier to readership. In Escape to Danger, Brickhill had frequen
tly referred to POWs as kriegies. This term was now obliterated from the narrative. So influential would Brickhill’s book become, ‘kriegies’ would disappear from the popular POW escape lexicon despite being commonly used by prisoners. Brickhill also omitted reference to the depressed NI individuals he’d mentioned in Escape to Danger, and the many men who didn’t cooperate in escape activities. He likewise failed to mention homosexuality. Fellow Stalag Luft 3 inmate and author Robert Kee, in his 1947 book A Crowd Is Not Company, had said there were known homosexual couples in camp, while one or two homosexuals preyed on handsome young new arrivals. None of this, Brickhill decided, contributed to the heroic escape narrative.
Two other important editorial decisions were made by Brickhill, one prompted by insecurity, the other by modesty. As in Escape to Danger, he wouldn’t mention that he was Australian, fearing that British critics would not take his tale of RAF prisoners seriously if perceived to be coming from the pen of a ‘colonial’. Rather than irritate that sore, Brickhill stepped over the matter of nationality, and let it be assumed by Brits that, as a former RAF fighter pilot, he was ‘one of them’.
Then there was the matter of his modesty. Like his grandfather James Brickhill, he was ‘unobtrusive and retiring’. Like his father, George, he was ‘quiet’ and ‘unostentatious’. While, in the years to come, Brickhill would use the press to advantage, his self-publicising would invariably be about selling books, not selling himself. As he had in Escape to Danger, he would refrain from making all but the most passing reference to his own part in The Great Escape. Only a dozen years on would he add a foreword to the American edition in which he mentioned his role: ‘Of my part in the show – little enough to say. I am a sort of Boswell, not a hero. I was a cog in the machine, boss of the gang of “stooges” guarding the forgers.’167
The Hero Maker Page 17