THE DELAY IN the release of the Dam Busters movie had increased public interest, and receipts. It topped the British box office for 1955, and restored Associated British’s fortunes. The news was of little comfort to Brickhill. In early 1956, he had a mental relapse and was again admitted to an Italian hospital.
By the spring, he’d recovered sufficiently to drive Margot to Fiesole from Florence along a narrow mountain road. Inevitably, they fell into an argument en route. When she praised her mother, Brickhill’s temper flared.
‘Your mother, and all women, are useless,’ Brickhill declared. ‘With the exception of my mother, of course.’
‘How did you come to except your mother?’ she snorted.
Brickhill’s mother was, to him, beyond reproach, and his anger rose like an erupting volcano. Without warning, the back of his hand collected Margot on the side of the face.282
Flying in from Italy for five days, Brickhill and his wife were among the guests of honour at the world premiere of Reach for the Sky at Leicester Square’s Odeon Theatre on 5 July. Among the VIP guests were Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies and two senior British cabinet ministers. Brickhill would later say that Margot ‘vindictively humiliated’ him at the event. He wouldn’t describe the nature of that humiliation, but, because of it, he vowed to never take Margot to another premiere. He kept his word, going alone to the film’s Edinburgh and Paris premieres.283
Douglas Bader declined the Rank Organisation’s invitation to attend the London premiere. He had visited at least one location during filming, and prior to the shoot he’d seen the first draft of the screenplay and had played a round of golf with Kenneth More, the actor cast to play him. More, who’d recently starred in Genevieve, a popular comedy about a man and his antique car on a rally to Brighton, didn’t mind that Bader beat him on the golf course. He was taking in his legless companion’s gait, which he would get down pat in the film. More had wanted the part the moment he’d read Brickhill’s book, but Richard Burton had initially been cast as Bader. Only after Burton dropped out did More’s agent receive a call from producer Danny Angel.
Bader would not only stay away from the film’s premiere; bitter because he didn’t make a penny from the film – as a consequence of the renegotiated deal he’d pushed through with Brickhill – he would never see the movie in a cinema. Not even the fact that Thelma’s composer stepbrother John Addison wrote the film’s score would induce him to see it. Eleven years after its release, with Thelma, Bader would watch the film for the first time, on television. From that time forward, Bader referred to the film, and the book, disparagingly as Reach for the Sticking Plaster.
Reach for the Sky became Britain’s top-grossing film of 1956, breaking box-office records. It also won ‘film of the year’ at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards. It cemented Bader as a national celebrity, and made More a major star. More would tour America to promote the film on its US release in 1957, but, seen as another film about Brits winning the war, like The Dam Busters, it didn’t do well in the States. Released in Australia a year after its British release, it emulated The Dam Busters in becoming a major hit in Brickhill’s homeland.
Brickhill’s accountant had advised him he could now resettle in England, and as soon as the couple returned to Italy they commenced packing their twenty trunks. Still seething over Margot’s perceived humiliation of him at the movie premiere, Brickhill then drove back to England in the Alfa, leaving his wife to make her own way back. Hers was a leisurely return, interspersed with stays at several French resorts.
They rented in South Ascot, and in August Brickhill went to Deauville to sail the Mediterranean with Stalag Luft 3 chum Johnny Dodge. On his return in September, Brickhill took his wife to a ball at the Savoy Hotel in aid of Leonard Cheshire’s charitable home, with pianist Winifred Atwell among the entertainers. An Ashes cricket Test series was underway, and Australian and English players attended the ball, among them Keith Miller, Ray Lindwall, Tony Lock and Fred Trueman. A new dance craze, the Kangaroo Hop, had arrived in town with the Aussies, and a magazine photographer snapped Margot in the act of energetically kangaroo hopping with her husband’s colourful publisher Billy Collins, who loved to dance.
Now, after years of renting in five countries, Brickhill committed to buying a house of his own. Overjoyed, Margot went scouting in the Alfa Romeo. With mind-blowing financial and critical success for Brickhill, and on the quest for their first real home, the Brickhills had every reason to be happy. And, for a time, their stormy arguments subsided. Their love life was reborn; Margot would later say that she had only started enjoying sex after she gave birth to Timothy.284 In December, Margot again fell pregnant.
In early 1957, the Brickhills found their dream home, in Surrey’s exclusive Wentworth Estate, outside Virginia Water. Set on 700 country acres, the estate was dominated by a golf course set around a nineteenth-century house, the Wentworths. Once owned by a brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington, the Wentworths was now the golfing clubhouse, its championship course noted for hosting the first Ryder Cup. As a house owner here, Brickhill could play a round whenever he fancied.
The estate had been developed in the 1920s by W. G. Tarrant, who’d had the first houses built on large lots and in grand style. Most were half-timbered, with tall chimneys, gables, dormer rooms, leaded lights and handmade bricks and tiles. The largest houses featured stonework around their front doors and fireplaces, plus marble-floored entrance halls. The Great Depression had hit Wentworth Estate hard, sending Tarrant into bankruptcy in 1931, the same year that George Brickhill’s disastrous financial decline had begun.
Paul Brickhill’s company purchased ‘Little Barr’, a Wentworth Estate house with a large, mature garden for young Tim to play in. That garden backed onto the golf course, with a hedge separating the two. The Alfa Romeo would be joined in the garage by a new company car, a two-year-old Mark II Jaguar bought second hand by Brickhill in an attempt to excuse a long-held ambition with the gloss of economy.
Struggling to write his own work of fiction in 1957, Brickhill helped Morris West with his novel The Backlash, later filmed by Hollywood as The Second Victory. West, now Europe-based, set his book in Austria in 1945, just after the war, a time and place Brickhill knew well. When the book was published in 1958, West’s dedication page would read: ‘For Paul Brickhill.’
By this stage Brickhill was lusting after an exotic Northern Hemisphere residence with a warm climate, and considered Malta, Ghana, even Beirut. While on a scouting visit to Malta, he left Margot to entertain his visiting brother Lloyd and his South American wife, who spoke no English. After Margot showed no interest in any of Brickhill’s foreign destinations, the idea was dropped. In April, with a brainwave for a new novel, set in France, Brickhill drove to Cannes. Staying a month on the Riviera researching the book, he spent time in Marseilles, home of Algerian immigrants, who would play a key role in his plot.
On his return to England in May, the family moved into ‘Little Barr’. Brickhill employed a full-time children’s nurse, a daily charlady and a part-time gardener, but Margot astonished him by working in the garden herself. She seemed happier than Brickhill could remember. Alas, by July, they were again fighting. When Margot, eight months pregnant, became overwrought, Brickhill twice slapped her face. The arrival of daughter Tempe Melinda in August should have been the highlight of 1957 for Brickhill. But following Tempe’s birth, he became ultra-jealous, privately accusing Margot of improper behaviour with one man in London and publicly accusing a Wentworth neighbour of seducing his wife.
‘If you continue your behaviour towards me, Paul,’ a fraught Margot declared, ‘I’ll break down under the strain!’285
As Brickhill continued to wrestle with his latest attempt at a novel into 1958, his marriage disintegrated around him. Margot could not understand why he was not able to simply sit down at his typewriter and bash it out, the way he’d always done. And the more he said he was unwell, the less she believed him.
This year, John Sturges again came courting the film rights to The Great Escape. Still unaware that Fred Coe held the option, he was again sent away, unsuccessful. Brickhill was by this time living almost entirely on his investments. Book income had dropped significantly after his meteoric sales earlier in the decade. He would have been interested in talking to Sturges, but Coe’s option still had more than two years to run.
In September, Brickhill came to his wife, eyes sparkling. ‘I’ve had a breakthrough with the novel!’ he declared.
‘Too late!’ she retorted. ‘I’m leaving you.’286
She moved out on 21 September, rented a farmhouse at Croyde in Devon, and had a lawyer initiate a six-month legal separation. Margot much later revealed that she would have filed for divorce, but she hadn’t lived back in England long enough to do so under English divorce law. A legal separation was her only option at that time. Brickhill, as he had in the past, tried to woo back his wife. In October, he undertook to take them back to Australia the following year. And he made a vow: ‘Never again, under whatever provocation or circumstance, will I strike you. I’ll prove to you I’m not totally evil.’287
Still they remained legally estranged. By December, Margot had moved to a house at Ascot. Brickhill paid her rent, and paid for a live-in maid. When Margot invited him to visit the children, he arrived with a £200 diamond brooch as a Christmas gift.
‘What will the judge think?’ Margot joked, as she accepted the offering.
Over Christmas they twice made love, but Margot asked him not to tell anyone. ‘I wouldn’t want this to happen too often,’ she said.288
In the new year, they agreed to give the marriage another try. With the marital waters calmed, and as they began planning the trip to Australia later in the year, Brickhill had an idea for yet another book, a novel about British immigrants going to Australia. Approaching the Australian Government, he convinced them to agree to pay for Margot, the two children, a nanny and himself to travel on an immigrant ship to Sydney free of charge, in return for writing the immigration novel, which would have to be completed by a set date in 1960.
Through the first half of 1959 he made progress on his French novel, finding Margot mature and agreeable despite occasional tantrums if she didn’t get her own way. Selling Margot on a ten-day trip to Paris as a second honeymoon, Brickhill took the family there in June. As Brickhill trawled Parisian backstreets to trace their layout, haunted sleazy bars to study their clientele, and applied a forensic eye to the work of the French police, he was in his element. Margot, meanwhile, complained there was almost nothing to do but eat. After Paris, in preparation for the trip home, Margot gave up potatoes, went to the hair salon every five days for blonde tips, and toasted herself under a sun lamp.
On 26 October, accompanied by twenty-two-year-old German nanny Margarete Haselwander, forty-two-year-old Brickhill, his thirty-one-year-old wife, and their five- and two-year-old children boarded the Fairsky at Southampton, and sailed for Australia along with 1400 British migrants.