Another writer would have cut his schedule to the bone and concentrated on his manuscripts. But it was part of the Churchill syndrome that despite diversions he had absolute concentration during the hours set aside for work, and that other activities were actually necessary to fuel this power. One activity was social intercourse; he needed people as ships need water. The Prof’s arrival for a two-day visit delighted him. So did the unexpected appearance of his eldest daughter at a moment when she was most needed. “I was sitting down last night to eat my New Year’s dinner as I thought in solitude,” he wrote his wife, “and in marched Diana looking absolutely lovely. She had come on her own to keep me company.”48
Working with his hands was equally important. Every day he laid bricks, building a wall which, he promised Clemmie, would be completed when she arrived home. That ought to have been enough, but he also launched two major landscaping projects: turning a peninsula on one Chartwell lake into an island, where the geese could nest safe from the fox, and creating a ha-ha, or sunk fence, beyond the swimming pool to permit one’s eye to plunge “across a valley of unbroken green.” All this was to be accomplished in one week by hiring an enormous mechanical digger for twenty-five pounds. He assured his wife the digger would “do more than forty men do.” Indeed, he added, it was capable of feats beyond the competence of people “as he is a caterpillar and can walk over the most sloppy fields without doing any harm.”49
Note: the contraption was a “he.” Winston, the ultimate anthropomorphist, invested every object, animate or inanimate, with a personality and assigned it a personal pronoun. Mary simply described the contrivance as “the monster.” And she was right. The “digger drama,” as it came to be known at Chartwell, began when the machine clanked into view with all the grace of a heavy tank. Winston regarded the creature with admiration, which was transformed into uneasiness, alarm, pity, and, finally, fury. In his next letter to Clemmie he wrote that the project was proving “a bigger and longer business than I had expected. It will take a fortnight in all.” Nearly a month later he reported in exasperation that the digger had broken down, had fallen into a pit and, despite his heroic efforts to extricate it, had been idle for three weeks. Four hydraulic jacks were rented; with their help “the animal emerged from his hole.” Churchill doubted “if I shall get out of it under £150.” Altogether the mechanical digger was on his property, with its expenses mounting, for ten weeks. As the day for its departure approached, it became the object of a profound Churchillian study, the results of which were reported to Chartwell’s absent mistress: “The animal is very strong with his hands but feeble with his caterpillar legs, and as the fields are sopping, they had the greatest difficulty in taking him away. They will have to lay down sleepers all the way from the lake to the gate over which he will waddle on Monday. I shall be glad to see the last of him.”50
At last, on March 8, he wrote: “The digger has gone, thank God.” His wife knew how to restore his spirits. From Singapore she wrote: “What tremendous works you are doing…. I’m delighted about the Ha-ha. Please do not throw back too much earth on the garden side or the slope might look too sudden…. How lovely it will be when your beautiful wall reaches the end.” Thus far in her trip she had been playing a familiar role as Winston’s eyes and ears; she had inspected the great Singapore dockyard and noted how the government’s cuts in defense spending had reduced its effectiveness, and she had marched into the city’s largest bookshop and asked “if there were a brisk demand for your books.” She was told that a condensed version of The World Crisis, his history of World War I, had “gone very well,” and the second Marlborough volume was “going better than the first. They had sold 12 sets of Marlborough & had 5 more on order. I think this is rather good when you realise how expensive it is.”51
At about this time Clementine left civilization, put away the needlework, turned away from her family photographs, and forgot her straightlaced upbringing. The Rosaura was headed for the most exotic islands in the world: Borneo, Celebes, the Moluccas, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, New Britain, and the Solomons. “This is the genuine article!” she wrote in a euphoric burst, “unchartered [sic] seas, unexplored territory, stark naked savages.” Churchill, vaguely troubled, perhaps goaded by a flicker of intuition, replied that it made him gasp “to look at the map & see what enormous distances you have covered… and it depresses me to feel the weight of all that distance pressing down upon us both. How glad I shall be when you turn homewards, & when the mails will be closing up together, instead of lagging & widening apart!” He had reason for anxiety. Clementine was in the presence of danger. That included physical danger; at one point she became separated from the rest of the party, lost in an almost impenetrable patch of dense tropical jungle; she was soaked in a sudden rainstorm, terrified of the lizards and snakes around her, her screams unheard until the yacht’s second officer came crashing through the undergrowth to rescue her. She wrote: “I almost kissed him.”52
She was, in fact, in a kissing mood. And the greater peril lay there. Among the unhappier facts of life is that desire peaks in the two sexes at disparate ages. “The elementary notion of standardization,” Mencken noted, “seems never to have occurred to the celestial Edison.” A male is lustiest at fifteen; the average female reaches the heights of passion in her mid-thirties. Churchill had always been a sublimator. All who were close to him agree that he was weakly sexed, even in youth, and in his sixties his volcano was virtually extinct. In Parliament a fellow MP whispered to him that his trousers were unfastened. “It makes no difference,” Winston replied wryly. “The dead bird doesn’t leave the nest.”53
Clementine, however, was vulnerable. The setting conspired against her. Cruising through tropical seas, past lush, nameless islands heavy with the scent of exotic flowers, she felt transported. Like a Maugham heroine—strong-minded, puritanical, even prim—she met a romantic unattached man and fell in love. The man was Terence Philip, a handsome, wealthy art dealer seven years younger than she. In any affair, La Rochefoucauld observed, one partner is the lover and the other the beloved. Philip was the beloved. Long afterward Clementine conceded that the initiative had been hers, adding, “But he made me love him.” Mary compares the relationship between them to “a fragile tropical flower which cannot survive in grayer, colder climes.” Clementine came to her senses. She was not meant for enchantment; her destiny was inseparable from Churchill’s. Late in life, in a nostalgic letter, she summed up the magic of those three months beneath the Southern Cross, saying, in effect, that she had briefly known the transient rapture of Cinderella at the ball; then the clock struck and she fled. Of course, she missed Philip. They met several times, and that summer she suggested to Churchill that she take another trip. She wrote a friend: “It’s very nice to be back but Oh Dear I want to start out again very badly! Mr. Pug is very sweet but now he says ‘NO.’…” Even before she returned he had written her: “I think a lot about you my darling Pussie… and rejoice that we have lived our lives together; and have still some years of expectation in this pleasant vale…. I feel this has been a gt experience and adventure to you & that it has introduced a new background to yr life, & a larger proportion; and so I have not grudged you your long excursion; but now I do want you back.”54
She brought back one souvenir, an exquisite Bali dove which lived, at Chartwell, in a lovely wicker cage. It could not last there long; perhaps she had known that. After its death she buried it in the walled garden, beneath the sundial. Today one can read the epitaph she had carved round the sundial’s base:
HERE LIES THE BALI DOVE
It does not do to wander
Too far from sober men
But there’s an island yonder,
I think of it again.
By 1937 Churchill’s isolation in the House of Commons was almost complete; as his daughter Mary notes, “his gradual estrangement from the Conservative party’s leadership, due to his… campaign for rearmament and confrontation with the growing power
of Germany, made the probability of his being offered office increasingly remote.” The quarantine of him was effective among and in the organs of entrenched power, notably The Times and the BBC. But Winston reached millions of readers with his powerful articles—over a hundred in 1937 alone, including fortnightly pieces in Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard, which were syndicated in the Glasgow Evening News, the Aberdeen Evening Express, the Belfast Telegraph, the Adelaide Advertiser, the East African Standard, and the Madras Mail; translations in Brussels, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Tallinn, Kaunas, Zurich, Lausanne, Prague, Bucharest, Cracow, Buenos Aires, Trondheim, Lucerne, Budapest, and Belgrade; and a weekly essay in News of the World. News of the World was disdained by the mighty for its sensationalism and its pandering to the working class, but with an audience of four million members it could not be scorned by a man struggling to rouse the country, and Churchill was in no position to pick his forum anyhow. On November 3, 1937, he wrote the News’s publishers, grandly describing it as “a wonderful platform from which to address the stable, sagacious, good-humoured, kind-hearted mass of the British nation, and I value the opportunity of doing so, quite apart from the handsome payments which you make.”55
Handsome was the right word; on December 18, 1937, after he had agreed to write sixteen News of the World articles in 1938, he received a check for £4,500. William L. Shirer knew Randolph as a fellow journalist in the late 1930s and learned something of Winston’s finances from his son. Randolph, he writes, explained that “his father lived mainly from a syndicated weekly [sic] newspaper column sold around the world. There were over two hundred subscribers, he said, who paid a total of around $2,000 a week, of which Churchill received some £300, or $1,500, a fairly comfortable income. But not one that was making him really rich.” Yet Winston insisted upon continuing to live as though he were, and most Englishmen, including some who knew him well, would have been astounded to know that all his life he had been just a few steps—sometimes very few—from his creditors.56
Abroad he was taken more seriously than in Parliament. He was, as he described himself, “a private member of Parliament, but of some prominence.” Newspaper publishers who held him in contempt would have preferred to ignore him, but their reporters gave him celebrity status, knowing he always made good copy. At one time or another, photographs of him laying bricks must have been seen by every Briton. When a British tailors’ magazine deplored his wardrobe, it was news, even in the United States. Léon Blum, the French statesman, visited Chartwell to ask his advice. French generals invited him to tour the Maginot Line. He went and, after inspecting it, painted it. His following in France was large; when George VI and his queen made a state visit to Paris, the Churchills were invited to all the royal functions, always bien placés—better seated, indeed, than the British ambassador. Among Clementine’s papers, when she died, was a Versailles menu dated July 21, 1938, and signed by her partners on both sides: M. Gabriel Hanotaux, a celebrated author, now forgotten, and Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, whose performance in World War II would be less illustrious.57
Among those who recognized Churchill’s potential should war come was the man who was going to make it all happen. Several months before Eden’s resignation Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop, on Hitler’s instructions, asked Winston to call on him at the German embassy in London. The excuse was one of Churchill’s columns in Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard; Winston had written that a recent speech by Ribbentrop had been misrepresented. But there was more to it than that. Envoys of great powers did not deign to discuss articles in newspapers of their host country; lesser men on their staffs did it for them. And when Churchill appeared at the German embassy on May 21, 1937, the column wasn’t even mentioned. The matter discussed was so momentous that they were closeted for over two hours. The Führer, his ambassador said, proposed to guarantee the integrity of the British Empire. Churchill replied that the Royal Navy had been doing that for centuries and needed no help. Nevertheless, Ribbentrop declared that the Third Reich would “stand guard” over it; all he asked in return was a “free hand” in eastern Europe. The Reich, he explained, needed lebensraum for its increasing population. Winston, intrigued, asked how much living space Hitler wanted.58
Strolling up to a wall map, the Nazi blandly ticked off the Reich chancellor’s shopping list: all of Poland, all of the Ukraine, and the Soviet republic of Byelorussia, including the Pripet Marshes. Churchill stared at the map. The Reich’s land mass would be quintupled, from 182,000 square miles to 760,000. Great Britain had less than 89,000. After a long pause he replied that although Britons were “on bad terms with Soviet Russia” and “hated Communism as much as Hitler,” they didn’t hate it that much. He could only speak for himself, but he felt certain that no British government would tolerate German “domination of Central and Eastern Europe.” According to Churchill, Ribbentrop “turned abruptly away” and said, “In that case, war is inevitable. The Führer is resolved. Nothing will stop him and nothing will stop us.” Churchill urged him not to “underrate England,” and particularly not to “judge by the attitude of the present administration.” Britain, he said, “is a curious country, and few foreigners can understand her mind…. She is very clever. If you plunge us all into another great war, she will bring the whole world against you like last time.” The Nazi said heatedly, “Ah, England may be very clever, but this time she will not bring the world against Germany.” Because he thought the incident should be “put on record,” Churchill later wrote, he “reported it at the time to the Foreign Office.”59
It was not news there. The FO was, however, surprised by Hitler’s decision to approach Churchill, his most implacable enemy, apparently in the belief that he could frighten him with Teutonic Schrecklichkeit. It was also noted wryly that this was one of those rare occasions in which Winston arrived in Whitehall as the bearer of news. Usually it was the other way round; the situation map he kept at Chartwell was almost as detailed, and as accurate, as those in Whitehall. He had begun on a small scale, but now his business as the receiver of stolen goods—state secrets not meant for the eyes of a private MP, however prominent—was booming. At Chartwell and in his Westminster flat he pored over classified British documents and reports on the latest developments in eight continental capitals. In London his informants included three members of Chamberlain’s cabinet; in the world of science, technology, and the intelligentsia were Sir Eustace Tennyson-d’Eyncourt and Sir William Beveridge; in the War Office, the chief of the Imperial General Staff (first Sir Cyril Deverell, and then, in 1939, Sir Edmund Ironside), a brigadier, and two colonels; in the RAF, an air chief marshal, a wing commander, a group captain, and a squadron leader; and in the Admiralty, a vice admiral (Sir Reginald Henderson), a rear admiral, a captain, and a brilliant young commander, Lord Louis Mountbatten. He had the support of almost every man in the top echelon of the Foreign Office. Ribbentrop had thought his message would stun Winston, and had been taken aback by his ready reply. In fact, he had only confirmed what Churchill had already known—from Vansittart’s agent in Göring’s office—for several months.
He relied on Van for material from the Wilhelmstrasse, but his data on the RAF’s inadequacies, which created such consternation on the front bench, came directly from officers who were risking court-martial if found out. Group Captain Lachlan MacLean, who had commanded a company of Gurkha Rifles in France before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps in 1916, had drawn up a savage indictment describing the RAF’s obsolete equipment and concluded that were war to come in the next three or even five years, “We shall be powerless to retaliate, at any rate in the air.” Wing Commander Anderson acquired a copy and sent it to Churchill, who replied that he would like to meet the author. According to MacLean’s account, “Accompanying Anderson I was introduced to Winston in his flat in Westminster and he congratulated me on the paper and we discussed the air rearmament.” Subsequently Anderson would tell MacLean that Churchill needed data for a speech in the
House. MacLean would prepare a memorandum “and I would let him have these papers and would perhaps go to Churchill’s flat for a discussion.” The arrangement evolved, he recalled, “into my sending to Winston’s personal secretary, Mrs Pearman, papers on the more significant events in the air rearmament.” In less than seven months the two RAF officers met Churchill, either in Morpeth Mansions or at Chartwell, seven times. Inevitably, they met Lindemann. Papers were exchanged on such arcane topics as RDF and “Times of Flight and Trajectory Tables”—dull to the layman, but essential to Britain’s survival three years later.60
Eminent guests from abroad whose names are inscribed in Chartwell’s guest book include the Rumanian foreign minister Nicolae Titulescu; former German chancellor Heinrich Brüning; Pierre Cot, the French air minister; and Britain’s ambassador to Belgrade, who approved Churchill’s plan to visit Yugoslavia and urge the formation of a European alliance to confront Nazi aggression. These visitors would stay for dinner. British civilian informants would arrive for tea at Chartwell or “elevenses” in his London flat, leaving behind them, when they departed, copies of blueprints, charts, diagrams, minutes of cabinet meetings, and confidential reports to the prime minister, all of which belonged in locked, guarded files at the War Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry, or Downing Street.