Home from the Hill

Colonel Hilary Hook has returned to England after an absence of nearly fifty years to rest his bones after a life time of soldiering and safaris in the tropics. “I’ve never had such a pig of a journey-missed my connection, lost my gang, lost my baggage, lost my temper. I might have made a great mistake,” he says on arrival. In this portrait of this extraordinary, eccentric englishman we see how colonel Hook faces up to an unfamiliar new world. Hilary Hook was 19 when he left Devon, to join the Indian Calvary. “I didn’t join the military for the sound of fife, and drum,” he recalls. “I joined the military so I could play polo, go pig sticking, have a jolly time with a lot of jolly fellows.” He served for 26 years in the far east and finally as military attached in Khartoum before retiring to Kenia to run magnificent safaris. But the idyll comes to and end when his african landlord gives him only a few days notice to leave. Colonel Hook dismisses his six servants, and looks to the place of his birth. “Kenia,” says Hilary Hook “is rather like an old and beautiful mistress who one once was dearly attached to, who’s turned sour on you. So I’m tottering back to my wrinkled battered, bloody old first love—England.” Back the old country, he unpacks his hunting trophies in a little cottage in Warminster, Wiltshire. Problems soon arise. Hilary Hook has never before had to boil an egg, change and plug or open a can, and shopping is a challenge. He buys thermal underwear, a remote control television, rather too much alcohol and tinned ravioli which finds he can’t cook. The contrast between his colonial past and his current situation is summed up by Hook with characteristic self irony. “Poor old tiger,” he says as he unpacks the last of his skins from his hunting days, “he’s been all over the world and he’s had his chips.” As a result of the film, and the enormous amount of media coverage Hilary received, whether or not Hillary was now able to cook became a cause for national concern. Offers from elderly, single women wishing to look after him poured in from all over the country some even turned up on his doorstep with their dish cloths. He appeared on 3 television chat shows: “Open Air,” a live phone-in, “After Dark,” a group discussion program entitled “Is Britain working,” and as a guest on the Wogan Show. He captured the hearts of the British public. The original, longer version of the film also showed in a number of other countries and CBS took edited highlights for their program, 60 minutes. A book he’d written earlier in his life and shoved into a drawer, was resurrected, published and became a best seller. Now, a year and a half later, he is still fending off invitations to lecture the WI and take the salute from the local branch of the British Legion.