Churchill's Hour (5 page)

All that is necessary for victory—short of actual help. They'd sent those ancient destroyers, of course, but demanded their thirty pieces of silver in return. Many of those much-vaunted destroyers had been useless, little more than rusting barges with clappedout engines and rotting hulls—although someone had taken the trouble to ensure that the washrooms were equipped with towels and fresh soap. When would the Americans learn? You couldn't fight a war with clean hands.

In the last war the United States sent two million men across the Atlantic. But this is not a war of vast armies firing immense masses of shells at one another. We do not need the gallant armies which are forming throughout the American union. We do not need them this year, nor next year, nor any year that I can foresee.

He swallowed his shame, telescope to unseeing eye, even as he uttered these profound deceits. He had no choice. Step by step, as he had explained to Randolph. He had to pretend to be at one with Roosevelt, to be alongside him, joined to him at the hip—otherwise he would never be able to lead him astray.

In order to win the war, Hitler must destroy Great Britain. He may carry havoc into the Balkan States. He may tear great provinces out of Russia…

Yes, an attack on Russia, that would happen some time, of that Churchill was certain. It was the nature of the Nazi beast, couldn't restrain itself. But when? Would it be in time to save Britain?

He may march to the Caspian; he may march to the gates of India. All this will avail him nothing. It may spread his curse more widely throughout Europe and Asia, but it will not avert his doom. With every month that passes the many proud and once happy countries he is now holding down by brute force and vile intrigue are learning to hate the Prussian yoke and the Nazi name as nothing has ever been hated so fiercely and so widely among men before. And all the time, masters of the sea and air, the British Empire—nay, in a certain sense the whole English-speaking world—will be on his track, bearing with them the swords of justice.

‘In a certain sense the whole English-speaking world'? In what sense, pray? Roosevelt and his Americans might pretend they were up to wielding the sword of justice, but the last place they intended to bury it was deep inside the guts of the German war machine.

The other day President Roosevelt gave his opponent in the late presidential election a letter of introduction to me, and in it he wrote out a verse in his own handwriting from Longfellow, which he said applies to you people as it does to us. Here is the verse:

Sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

Roosevelt was sending poetry and bars of soap when what Churchill wanted was guns, more guns and bloody shells! But he must turn it, use the cascade of words to excite the passions and dull their wits, to avert their gaze so that he could launch his monstrous deception…

What is the answer that I shall give, in your name, to this great man, the thrice-chosen head of a nation
of a hundred and thirty millions? Here is the answer I shall give to President Roosevelt.

Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessing and, under Providence, all will be well. We shall not fail or falter. We shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the longdrawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down.

He paused for the briefest moment. His voice lifted.

Give us the tools—and we will finish the job!

Oh, it was true Churchillian splendour, rhetoric that rang around the world. Yet he meant not a word. It was a promise he never had the smallest intention of keeping. Like blossom before the frost, it would vanish before the day was done. The bombardment of words was intended for one purpose only, to encourage the Americans to move forward an inch upon a slippery slope. After that, he would drag them the other three thousand miles.

The blue waters of the Mediterranean had been turned into a shooting range, one in which the enemy had many more guns than the British, so the troopship conveying Randolph's unit was required to take the long and laborious route to Egypt—round the tip of Africa and up through the Red Sea. The
Glenroy
was desperately overcrowded, and matters were made worse by the constant bickering that took place between the naval and army elements on board. In the view of No. 8 Commando, the captain was incompetent and soon was being referred to as ‘the bugger on the bridge'. The ship's crew, in turn, regarded Randolph's unit as ‘long-haired nancies'. It was partly a clash of class. The seamen were roughhanded workers—social underdogs, often from the slums—while many of those who formed No. 8 Commando had joined up straight from the bar of White's Club in St James's. Amongst these ill-mixed men who were crowded onto the ship, Randolph stood out most prominently of all, for no one could
forget that he was somehow different, and if the point managed to slip anyone's attention Randolph was always on hand to remind them. He and his closest friends were impossible, articulate, extravagant, impertinent, and took great pleasure in being gratuitously bloody rude. Long before the voyage was over, one of the crew had daubed a slogan on the lower deck: ‘Never in the history of humankind have so many been buggered about by so few.'

Randolph loved his father, and perhaps too much, almost to the point of destruction. He had been brought up at his father's table and encouraged to be his own man, yet by insisting so stridently on his uniqueness Randolph turned himself into no more than a pale shadow. He would bicker and abuse, ignoring all criticism, just as he had learnt from Winston, but he had failed to capture the essential counterbalance, that elusive quality of grace. In any event, what can be intriguing from an old man is inexcusable from the young; what was seen as drive and determination in the father appeared as little more than bloody-mindedness in the son. And Randolph, like Winston, would never, never, never give in.

He'd promised he would stop gambling but it was a long voyage—three weeks—cooped up on the
Glenroy
in the growing heat and with little else for distraction, apart from alcohol. Just like White's Club. There was poker, roulette, chemin-de-fer
every night—and for very high stakes—hell, they were probably going to die, so what did it matter? They would gamble on anything: the number of empty bottles in a barrel or the number of peas on a plate, double or nothing.

In spite of being his father's son, Randolph was a rotten gambler and a worse drunk. And when he was drunk he never knew when the time had come to walk away.

In three weeks at sea, Randolph lost three thousand pounds. Enough to pay the rent on the family home until the baby was well into old age. A small fortune, even for someone who wasn't already broke.

Up until the baby had been born, Pamela had spent much of her time at Downing Street with Randolph's parents. During air raids she had slept in the wine cellar, in a bunk below Winston—‘one Churchill inside me, and one Churchill above,' as she told it. It was a relationship that drew her close to her father-in-law and at times even made Randolph's sisters envious, for while their lives seemed always to be touched by chaos, Pamela grew fat with her child and became almost a good-luck charm for the old man as he fought to keep the bombers at bay and the invasion unlaunched. ‘You are what this war is all about,' he once told her, placing his hand on her protruding stomach.

The previous September, at the most crucial hour in the Battle of Britain, Churchill had driven with Pamela and Clemmie from Chequers to the RAF's headquarters at Uxbridge in order to see for themselves the progress of the extraordinary conflict that was taking place above southern England. They had watched in the operations room as, one after one, squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes had been thrown into the sky against the onrushing enemy. There came a moment during that afternoon when not a single aircraft was left in reserve, when it would have taken just one more wave of bombers to have swept Britain aside. But it hadn't come.

Afterwards, as they had driven back towards Chequers, Churchill had seemed buried deep within his own thoughts, exhausted, his chin sunk low upon his chest. After a while he had stirred and turned to Pamela.

‘Do you keep a diary?'

‘No,' she had replied, startled.

‘You should. These are moments that, if we survive, we should allow no one to forget.' Then he had fallen back into silence for several minutes, until the chin came up once more. ‘Anyway, if you don't have a diary, what the hell will you live on when you get tired of Randolph?'

‘I shan't get tired of Randolph.'

‘Everyone gets tired of Randolph,' he had told her.

But she hadn't. Randolph was a handful, of
course, garrulous, bibulous, fond of reading the histories of Macaulay to her in bed. When she had visited him at his commando training headquarters in Scotland, she'd been alarmed to discover that he had run up a hotel bill of gargantuan size, but he was unabashed. ‘
Morituris bibendum,'
he had hollered, which he loosely translated as: ‘Those who are about to die deserve a bloody drink.'

Anyway, he told her they could afford the occasional drink, and a little light gambling, too. It was only amongst his close friends, he explained, and he won more than he ever lost. After the baby had been born he'd found them an old rectory in Hertfordshire, rented for a pittance with the help of his father's name. It was their first home; Pamela loved it, and him. When he was there the walls echoed with excitement, and when he was away she felt nothing but draughts and missed him with a power that at times astonished her. During the day she would wander around the house in one of his old uniform jackets, smelling him, touching him, trying to imagine him beside her, and at night she would turn off the gas fire and go to bed early under a pile of blankets and with a copy of Macaulay beneath the pillow.

She missed him all the more when she discovered she was probably pregnant again. Christmas at Chequers.

She was young, not yet twenty-one, lacking in
experience of things, but she wanted so much to show him that he had found the best wife, mother and housekeeper he ever could.

Then his letter arrived. It offered an apology, of course, and a renewed vow of eternal self-denial which this time, he told her, he meant. But the self-denial Randolph required was, in truth, all on Pamela's part. He sent her detailed instructions that she was to pay off his gambling debts by instalments of perhaps ten pounds a month, to a list of names that seemed endless. He didn't suggest any way in which this sum might be raised. It was to be her problem—and exclusively her problem, for he forbade her to breathe a word of this to his father. He made it sound as though somehow it were all her fault.

Three days after the letter arrived, the bleeding started, accompanied by excruciating pain that left her bent in two and crying for mercy. It was only with the greatest difficulty that she made it to the bathroom, bleeding profusely.

She had been pregnant; she was no longer. And would never be again.

Yet another American had appeared on Churchill's doorstep. In the last few weeks the Prime Minister seemed to have done little but charge up and down the stairs of Downing Street to the tune of ‘Yankee
Doodle', but he didn't complain. It was far better than being marched up and down Whitehall to the sound of a glockenspiel.

John ‘Gil' Winant had been sent to replace the excruciating Joe Kennedy as Ambassador to the Court of St James's. Kennedy had been as crooked as a fish hook, but the new man was of altogether finer construction, the sort you could invite to dinner without having to count the spoons. He was a tall, brooding figure, painted with an expression of profound earnestness. Some thought he looked a lot like Abraham Lincoln, but whereas Lincoln was a wordsmith as glorious as any his country had produced, London had just discovered that Winant was a lamentable public speaker. He had delivered his first address in Britain, to a luncheon of the Pilgrims' Club, an Anglo-American friendship society. The members of the audience assumed the sentiments in the speech were excellent, but no one could tell, for it had been impossible to make out a word he had said. They had hoped for someone of a different cut to the mean-mouthed outpourings of Kennedy, but this was going to the other extreme. Was America's new voice to be no more than a whimper?

Churchill had attended the lunch. As they were leaving the Savoy Hotel, he decided to take matters into his own hands and grabbed Winant's arm.

‘Your Excellency, a fine speech.'

‘Did you truly think so?'

‘Worthy of many plaudits—and a little celebration. Do you have time for several whiskies?' And before the ambassador could muster an audible answer, he was being led towards the Prime Minister's car.

‘That is on two conditions, of course,' Churchill continued. ‘The first is that we become the greatest of friends. As you know, I am half American, on my mother's side. A Jerome from New York. I even lay claim to a little Iroquois Indian blood, at least an armful, I'd say.'

‘Half American. But I suspect entirely English,' Winant returned, smiling. He had a most attractive smile, his dark, deep-set eyes glowing with sincerity. His hair was unkempt, a little like a distracted schoolboy, while his suit was crumpled and sat awkwardly on his gaunt frame—as did his marriage, so rumour had it. Clearly he lacked a woman's touch.

‘The second condition I insist upon is that you call me Winston, and I be permitted to call you Gil. No formality between us, no barriers. We are brothers. I want to like you very much indeed.'

That, as Churchill knew, might be no easy undertaking. Winant had a long career as a liberal activist and labour organizer that seemed to pit him against so many of the interests Churchill's life had embraced. ‘Doesn't matter,' Churchill had growled, ‘so long as he hates Hitler.'

They drove to the rear entrance of Downing Street, which nestled against the parade ground of Horse Guards. There were many signs of recent bomb damage—hurriedly filled holes, empty windows, scarred buildings, blasted trees in the park. A long section of the garden wall at the back of Downing Street had been toppled, leaving bricks lying in forlorn piles. A gang of workmen was carrying out repairs. As soon as his car had stopped, Churchill sprang from his seat and began clambering over broken bricks and through piles of sand until he was in the midst of the workers. He seemed not to notice that he was standing in a puddle of cement.

‘My dear Gil, let me introduce you to the men who are the backbone of the British Empire. The bricklayers!' He thrust his stick at one of the men in exchange for a trowel, and then began loading cement and bricks upon the new wall, eyeing their line, tapping them to a level, and all the while puffing great clouds of smoke from his cigar as he chatted in great animation to the workers. They gathered closely around him, laughing at his jests, shouting their encouragement, and taking care to keep him supplied with fresh bricks.

‘You see, Gil, I, too, am a bricklayer, a member of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers. And proud as punch of it. Lady Astor, one of your American compatriots, a woman with a notoriously sharp tongue, once told me that I was as common
as muck. I was able to tell her that she was entirely wrong, that I was not as common as muck—but as common as brick. And I had a trade union membership card to prove it.'

He was playing them like an audience at a music hall.

‘Ah, I am forgetting my manners,' he said when at last he stepped back. ‘I must introduce you men to my very great friend, Mr Gil Winant. He is the new American Ambassador, which makes him your great friend, too.'

‘Last one wasn't, was he?' a voice sounded from the back of the huddle.

‘On the contrary, I was very much attached to him,' Churchill said, smiling. ‘Like my appendix.'

‘But you ‘ad that cut out years ago,' the voice came back, to general laughter.

‘And you, sir, will get me into a great deal of hot water making baseless accusations like that,' Churchill replied, grinning broadly.

They cheered him as he stepped into his garden through the hole in the wall. He turned to wave his stick at them. ‘Londoners—are we downhearted?'

‘No!' they cried as one.

It was a piece of theatre, typical Churchill, the sort of thing he'd made sure his other visitors like Hopkins and Willkie had witnessed. Reality wasn't as simple as that, of course. For every Londoner who could still summon up the spirit of defiance, there
were those who were gradually weakening, being ground down by yet another winter of war. In his heart, Churchill knew they would not go on—couldn't go on—through another winter unless somehow he could find new hope to sustain them. But he couldn't even feed them properly. The shipping losses in the Atlantic were enormous and the prospect of starvation still hovered over every meal. He had to give them hope, some taste of victory, not an endless diet of setback and evacuation.

Every week brought a new nightmare and another battlefield. So far the Balkans had remained undisturbed, but it was about to be turned into a slaughterhouse. Hundreds of thousands of German troops were massing to swallow up Yugoslavia and Greece, taking advantage of feuding local leaders who, rather than taking on the Wehrmacht, seemed more intent on fighting each other—‘Cvetkovic, Markovic, Simovic, Subotic and every other damned sonofabitch,' as Churchill had complained in frustration. Meanwhile a new commander had arrived to breathe fresh life into the German campaign in the North African deserts. Someone called Rommel.

And the Japanese, that unfathomable, unknowable race on the far side of the world—what in damnation were they planning?

His concerns pursued him everywhere, through his days, through his dreams, no matter what he pretended to the bricklayers. By the time he had
crossed the garden and reached the back door of Downing Street, they were weighing heavily on his heart once more. He threw open the door and kicked off his shoes.