Churchill's Hour (13 page)

‘What about those Havanas—you know, man, the cabinet full of 'em that came through the other week? You remember. Had a little brass plaque: “A
tribute of admiration from the President and People of Cuba.”'

‘Gone away, they have. Like pheasants in firing line.'

‘What? I want a cigar, not a bloody riddle.'

‘Your security service was concerned they might've been interfered with, like. Poisoned, mebbe. So they've took 'em away fer testing.'

‘What in Hell's name do they think they're doing?' Churchill shouted, jumping to his feet, all lethargy forgotten.

‘Mebbe they're thinking along same lines as Lloyd George.'

‘What?'

‘That you can't go doing the whole lot by yerself.' He stared directly at his master, daring him to contradict. ‘But wi'out yer, job simply won't get done.'

Sawyers closed the door behind him. Even before he reached the end of the corridor, he could hear Churchill back on form, energies restored, bellowing for his staff.

10 May 1941. The night of the full moon. In brilliant moonlight, they tried to bomb the heart out of London. They almost succeeded.

More than 1,400 Londoners were killed that night, including the mayors of Westminster and
Bermondsey. Five thousand houses were destroyed and twelve thousand Londoners made homeless. It was the worst single night of the Blitz. The Luftwaffe's bombers made nearly six hundred sorties, using the shimmering waters of the Thames as their unmistakable route to the heart of the city. Only fourteen German bombers failed to return.

It was to change the face of London. St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey were hit, as were many other churches. Whole swathes of Westminster were flattened, and across the bridge St Thomas' Hospital was left burning, along with the British Museum, Bond Street, five docks and more than thirty factories.

The Parliament building was hit, too. A bomb passed clean through the structure of Big Ben, although the clock continued to strike. Incendiaries fell on the debating chambers of both the Commons and the Lords, and also upon the towering medieval oak-beamed roof of Westminster Hall that stood beside them. Fires broke out and grew in every corner; it was a hopeless task for the volunteer firefighters. Soon it became clear that if they were to save anything, they would have to make a choice. They could save the home of the politicians, or they could save the royal hall, but not both. The chamber of the Commons was a modern construction, less than a hundred years old, while Westminster Hall had stood for almost a thousand. It was a place
where crowds had cheered King Henry playing tennis and mocked as King Charles faced the axe; it was a place that had survived riot and revolution, and had struggled through every kind of iniquity concocted in the chamber next door. So, for Englishmen, it turned out to be not much of a choice at all.

They hacked through the locks on the vast oak doors of the Hall and began playing their hoses upon the timbers of the roof. Soon the tenders and water pipes had run dry, so while the bombs were still falling around them they manhandled a trailer pump down the steps of Westminster Pier to draw water from the river. In the flagstoned belly of the hall they found themselves up to their waists in water, even as smouldering chunks of the roof fell about them, making the water seem as if it would boil. But, in the end, they won. The Great Hall was saved.

While this was happening, the chamber of the House of Commons, the home of the politicians, was left to burn to the ground.

It was the night that would change everything.

A little earlier on the evening of the tenth of May, the main dining room of the Dorchester Hotel was thronged with guests. Pamela sat at one of the best tables in a quiet corner with Harriman, wondering
at this strange man who had come all the way across the Atlantic to become a warrior. He was a most unlikely man of war. It seemed he had everything: a railway, many houses, the ear of the President, two doting daughters—although only the most passing mention of a wife—and even a ski resort in Idaho. He seemed to want for nothing, and yet he had an air of sadness about him that made his eyes unnaturally dark. As she listened more closely to his patrician mid-Atlantic accent, she thought she could detect the hint of a childhood stammer.

They were well into the first bottle of wine before he started to relax, the creases around his eyes slowly dissolving and reforming at the corners of his mouth. He talked about his father, excessively—were there ghosts?—and about his parent's ability to make both money and enemies. A rigid upbringing, she guessed, that had left something unbending in him.

As he talked, she began comparing him with her own father, who was dull where Harriman was dynamic, whose vision stretched no further than the gates of his estate while this man had flown across an ocean to help build something new. Harriman was also older than her father, yet was centuries more youthful.

It was as though he could read her mind, for suddenly he was asking about her family.

‘My father? Oh, just another country lord. Horses,
foxhunting, cold bedrooms and crumbling plaster. Usual thing. My family are all either black sheep or desperately boring.'

‘Black sheep?'

‘One tried to blow up the King and the whole of Parliament in the Gunpowder Plot.'

‘What happened to him?'

‘A traditional little ceremony we call hanging, drawing and quartering.'

‘Christ,' he said, almost choking on his beef. She had his attention now. ‘A real villain, eh?'

‘A real Digby. Insisted on having the last word. Apparently, as they plucked out his still-beating heart and held it up to the howling mob, his lips moved and he said: “
Veniam, vincam.
” Which loosely translated means “Next time I win.”'

‘Seriously?'

She smiled. Americans were so wonderfully gullible.

The moment passed as the wine waiter returned to pour the last of their wine.

‘Another bottle, Pam?'

Before she could respond, the wine waiter interrupted. ‘Sir, it's such a splendid choice, but I'm sorry to tell you we've only got one more bottle in the cellar. It may be the only bottle left in the entire country,' he added mournfully. ‘Heaven knows when we'll get more. The Germans are drinking it all now.'

‘Then we'd better have the last bottle before they get here,' Harriman said.

The waiter stiffened. The moment froze. ‘Being an American, sir, perhaps you don't understand.'

‘Understand what?'

‘Even if, as you say, the Germans do get here, I can assure you that we shall hold out.'

Harriman went pale with humiliation. ‘Yes. Of course. I'm so sorry,' he muttered as the waiter withdrew.

‘Please forgive me, Pam. Foolish of me. I meant nothing by it,' he continued.

‘Averell, you still have a lot to learn about the war.'

‘And, it seems, about British waiters. And wicked relatives. Teach me?'

At around the same time as Pamela and her dinner companion were finishing their dessert, operators in the radar station at Ottercops Moss on the Northumberland coast began arguing amongst themselves about the nature of a signal they had been tracking for the best part of an hour. It didn't make much sense. A single unidentified blip on their scanners had been spotted flying westward out of the North Sea. There was so much other action in the skies that a solitary plane didn't raise many eyebrows, but as it drew closer to the coast, two
Spitfires from RAF Acklington were ordered to intercept. It was a night filled with confusion; the Spitfires failed to make contact with the intruder, and at one point were even instructed to intercept each other.

Fighter Command Headquarters in Middlesex were also plotting the action on their map table, but they responded with nothing more than a shrug of their shoulders. Those bumpkins in the radar station at Ottercops Moss had a reputation for false alarms. Anyway, the solitary marker was one amongst literally hundreds that were flooding across their maps; it would have to take its place in the RAF's long queue of concerns.

The signal continued to advance, and crossed the north-east coast of England at 22.12 hours. Then it altered direction, swinging north towards the Scottish border, which it crossed some twenty minutes later, before resuming a westerly course and heading in the direction of Glasgow. It had the characteristic speed of a Messerschmitt 110, a twin engine long-range fighter, but this tentative identification was treated with derision. The track of the aircraft was way beyond the range of an Me-110; it could never make it back to base.

What they didn't know was that the pilot had no intention of returning to his base.

Shortly after eleven o'clock, the signal disappeared from radar screens, and an explosion was seen near Floors Farm on Bonnyton Moor, south of Glasgow.
An underwhelmed newspaper reporter later wrote that the crash had resulted in one casualty, a young hare.

But the pilot was not killed. He had already baled out.

When the sirens kicked in, Pamela and Harriman were halfway through the second bottle of wine and the life of Jane Digby, sister of the ninth Baron Digby and Pamela's ancestor. Another black sheep.

Averell watched as Pamela counted off her forebear's conquests on the elegant fingers of both hands. Jane had been the daughter of a Digby admiral who had fought with Nelson at Trafalgar. She seemed to have inherited much of her father's adventurous outlook. She married in turn an English lord, a Bavarian baron, a Greek count and a Bedouin sheikh, and between times became the lover of princes and at least two kings. Pamela was running out of fingers.

‘Quite a girl,' Harriman observed, uncertain whether it was appropriate to applaud or condemn.

‘Caused a terrible scandal, of course.' Pamela smiled. ‘England expects every man, but not their womenfolk, too.'

‘Wickedness is everywhere,' Harriman concluded as the wailing of the sirens forced its way between them. The waiter was back, bowing and offering to
show them the way to the shelter. Pamela's face froze in disappointment.

‘The bloody shelters,' she whispered. ‘How I hate them.'

‘We could take the bottle. Go back to my room,' Harriman suggested. ‘Much more comfortable.'

‘If a little more adventurous,' she added primly, ‘with all these bombs about.'

‘What would Jane have done?'

‘For half a bottle of wine?' Pamela shrugged. ‘Almost anything.'

‘I never know when you are teasing me, Pam.'

‘You and that incomplete education of yours.' She swept up the bottle from the table and rose. ‘You lead. I follow. Isn't that the way you stuffy old men are supposed to like things?'

By the time they had reached his suite of rooms on the first floor, the bombs were already falling. His hand went to the light switch but she pulled it gently away.

‘I can't sit and talk with all that going on outside,' she said, ‘and Jane would never have tried. Let's watch for a while.'

So the curtains were pulled back and they gazed out upon the opening scenes of a great dance of death. The fires and flashes of light grew quickly in intensity, drawing Pamela like a moth ever closer to the window until she was pressing up against it, crying gently as fresh explosions from guns and
bombs began to rattle at the panes. Harriman was behind her, peering over her shoulder at the splendours and the horror that lay outside, until he was standing very close with his arms cast protectively around her.

‘Is this safe?' he enquired. ‘So close to the window?'

She wondered if it was her turn to be teased, until she remembered he was American.

And suddenly their world was thrown upside down. Afterwards, Pamela couldn't remember which sensation came first—the brilliant flash, the overwhelming roar, the ripping at her eardrums. There must have been some sort of warning, for even as the bomb exploded outside Harriman had picked her up and thrown her away from the window. As the force of the blast hit the building, the room was instantly filled with dust; all the windowpanes cracked—they were taped and didn't completely shatter—but small shards of glass were sent flying around them. One of the thick curtains was pulled half off its rail, and the room somehow seemed to have too much air in it, then almost none at all. Pamela struggled for breath. The echo of the blast seemed to rumble on for ever, and when at last it faded all she could hear was the gentle gurgling of an upturned bottle of wine and the pounding of her heart.

She found that she was under a table. The
American had thrown himself on top of her. Her dress had been torn from her shoulder. It had allowed her breast to tumble free, a fact made all the more obvious by the heaving of her chest as she struggled to control her fright.

They lay together, breathless. Bombs were still falling outside, but they seemed to come from a world that had suddenly grown more distant. For a moment she thought she might have been injured, for needles of heat were spreading remorselessly up the insides of her legs until they began to feed the smouldering fire that had taken hold at the top of her thighs. He was struggling to speak; she could feel the brushstrokes of his breath on her cheek, her neck, on her unconstrained breast, every fresh gasp like bellows upon a fire.

‘Damn near miss, Pam.'

‘No,' she whispered. ‘I don't think so.'

A ploughman heard the aircraft passing low overhead, followed seconds later by a huge explosion. He rushed outside to see a parachute falling from the night sky and, armed with nothing more than a hayfork, soon captured the airman. The pilot of the Me-110 offered no resistance, not least because he had badly damaged his ankle on landing.

The Scotsman helped the injured pilot back to his cottage, where his mother offered her unexpected
guest a mug of tea. In excellent but accented English, the pilot asked instead for a glass of water. He seemed to be particular about everything. He was at pains to emphasize that he was not armed and that his plane had carried neither ammunition nor bombs. He announced that his name was Alfred Horn. He said he had flown from Munich and had come to see the Duke of Hamilton. He showed no signs of hostility.