Churchill's Hour

  ‘Papa.’

  He stirred, but did not look round. The scent of jasmine and sweet Havana hung between them.

  ‘We must talk, Papa.’

  She came closer, her footsteps gliding across the weathered York-stone paving. Still he did not move, a silhouette against the night sky. When at last he spoke, it was with reluctance.

  ‘I can never understand why young people find marriage such a problem,’ he began. ‘In my day, all you needed was champagne, a box of chocolates and a double bed. You got on with it and sorted things out.’

  ‘I wish I could have been as happy as you and Mama.’

  ‘Happiness—now there’s the problem. Everybody rushing around like March hares looking for happiness. But marriage isn’t about being happy. It’s about rubbing along. Why, if Clemmie had demanded happiness she’d have upped and left me years ago. Anyway, how on earth could you have expected to be happy with Randolph? Even I don’t like him at times.’

  ‘Averell says he likes him.’

  ‘Is that what he said? But what else would he say? He’s a diplomat.’

  She was at his elbow. She put her hand on it; he didn’t object.

  Something else he said, Papa.’

  Still he looked at the star and not at her.

  ‘He said he thought you were expecting too much from Roosevelt. That the President is the sort of man who prefers making conversation to making war.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’

  ‘Averell wants America in this war, Papa. Even if San Francisco has to be bombed to make it happen.’

  ‘Now that is not very diplomatic of him,’ Churchill said testily, still scoring points.

  ‘But he’s afraid. He thinks that the summit won’t reach nearly high enough for you.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ he asked, his voice soaked with unease.

  ‘Because I thought you needed to know. My problems with Randolph don’t change my loyalties towards you.’

  ‘Loyal to the father, but not to the son. It’s an awkward balance to attempt.’

  ‘Loyalty is a two-way affair, Papa, particularly between husband and wife.’ Her tone was sharper.

  ‘Are you suggesting that Randolph is not loyal to you?’

  ‘Oh, in his way,’ she replied, unable to hide an edge of contempt. ‘But Randy has an unfortunate habit of banging his brothel doors ever so loud. I find the noise keeps me awake at night.’

  ‘It would seem that is not the only thing that keeps you awake at night!’ he snapped in retaliation.

  ‘Oh, Papa, don’t let’s argue. I’m only trying to help.’

  ‘Help? Somehow I suspect that history will be churlish and not smile upon your affair with Averell as being motivated by a desire to help the war effort.’

  It was a cruel, unfair jibe, but he was torn inside about her affair with Harriman. He felt soaked in guilt every time he thought of it. So he was taking it out on Pamela.

  ‘Oh, Pamela, why must you be so headstrong?’ he asked, trying to evade his own complicity. ‘Why can’t you wait until Randolph gets home, be more patient?’

  She drew back, affronted. ‘Why can’t I be patient? Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent so much time in the Churchill family that I have become like them.’

  She was angry, and turned to go. The night had suddenly become chilly, the heavy scent of honeysuckle and cigar overpowering.

  ‘I was only trying to help you, Papa,’ she repeated, her voice full of hurt.

  He said nothing—didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Goodnight, Papa.’

  Only then did he turn.

  ‘Pamela!’

  But already she was gone.

  ‘The Presence’, as he was sometimes known to his staff, had many manifestations: sombre, triumphant, emotional, abusive, always argumentative, sometimes vulgar. He was mercurial and melodramatic, and rarely restrained. While he waited for Operation Riviera—his meeting with Roosevelt—Churchill grew ever more unpredictable.

  He paced the lawns, ate for England, bellowed from his bath, worked his staff to exhaustion. ‘I shall need two women tonight!’ he would roar as he prepared to dictate memoranda and instructions until the first light of dawn had begun to creep into the sky. The relentlessness never flagged, even at Chequers. In the evenings he would skip around the Great Hall, cat in hand, twirling to the music of the gramophone, barking out instructions to a servant or secretary, pausing at the fireplace to test whether some overpitched phrase might take wing and fly, then dance another lap. He drove himself—and others—on and on. And, in his desire to push history around, he also grew more arrogant.

  He continued to be acerbic towards the military, and to their face. He demanded initiatives and victories, while they seemed always to argue for delay. He never took time to understand why the tanks he sent them got stuck up to their axles in the sand or why the new American bombers spent more time on training flights than bombing runs. He always insisted there was a better way—his way.

  He could be pitiless. He attacked the dead and defenceless Chamberlain, calling him ‘the narrowest, most ignorant, most ungenerous of men’, even as he finished off the last drops of the man’s hock. He denounced the French through mouthfuls of champagne. He reserved the worst of his temper for the Russians, but not to their face. He listened patiently to the demands of their ambassador, Maisky, and sent his new ally away laden with praise and promises, yet once the door had closed the prime ministerial expletives reached a pitch that would have done justice to a Liverpool docker. Diplomacy was, of necessity, a game of two hands.

  Only the Americans escaped his venom.

  The maelstrom of his emotions threatened to overwhelm him. Late one evening at Chequers he decided that he wanted to watch his film about Nelson and Emma Hamilton once more. For Churchill, their story of deliverance had become a creed, a well of inspiration and reassurance from which he drank ever more greedily. Yet the crew with the projector equipment had already left. When this was discovered, he lost all sense of proportion. He became like a child deprived of a favourite toy, stamping, wild-eyed, shorn of all reason. He demanded that the police set up a roadblock on the route to London so that the crew could be stopped and turned around. When still they did not arrive, his temper was volcanic.

  To those who knew him best and loved him, such behaviour was untypical; to many others, it seemed more like a hardening of Churchill’s emotional arteries. One of these was Beatrice, the wife of the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden.

  ‘Damn the man!’ she muttered as the bedside telephone clattered into life. ‘Is he drunk again?’

  With a sigh, her husband switched on the bedside light and rubbed his eyes.

  ‘It’s almost three o’clock,’ she complained.

  ‘There is a war on, my dear,’ Eden replied, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Even the Germans have to sleep!’

  Eden was an elegant man, handsome, well educated, much experienced, a man of considerable personal and political courage. He had fought the first war, foreseen the second war, and had resigned as Neville Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary in protest at Chamberlain’s meddling. It was inevitable that he should have been recalled by Churchill, and many saw him as Churchill’s natural successor. He was a man of exceptional talents yet also of considerable inner turbulence. In spite of an exceptional war record, some saw the uncertainty as a lack of fibre; his wife was one.

  Eden reached for the phone, but it did not still his wife.

  ‘Isn’t it enough that we have to put up with his interminable speechifying—without this?’

  ‘I suspect it’s about the Roosevelt thing.’

  ‘Hah! His moment in the limelight. And I notice he intends to grab it all for himself and leave you behind, Anthony. All the others, too, except for Beaverbrook. Why is Max going to meet the President and not you? You’re the Foreign Secretary, for pity’s sake. You should insist.’

  But already he wasn’t listening, his attentions conc
entrated on the telephone. It did nothing to deter her.

  ‘He treats you like a naughty schoolchild. Bellows at you constantly. Never trusts you an inch. You’re not a Foreign Secretary, Anthony, you’re nothing but an errand boy.’

  Eden turned, covering the mouthpiece. ‘He told me the other day he regarded me as his son,’ he whispered, trying to deflect the scorn.

  ‘His son? But he’s loathsome!’

  He went back to the telephone while she proceeded to beat her pillow with frustration. When he finally put the phone down, she turned on him, as she had done so many times during their marriage.

  ‘I’ve supported you throughout your political career, Anthony. I’ve been a loyal and devoted wife.’ They both knew that hadn’t been the case, but for the moment it wasn’t the issue. ‘I will not stand by and watch you publicly humiliated.’

  ‘I don’t see it that way.’

  ‘No? Then there are many others who do. There are mutterings everywhere about Winston, about his follies, his rudeness. His refusal to listen to anyone else. Least of all to you.’

  Eden couldn’t argue the point. It was no longer possible to open a newspaper without finding complaints—not outright attacks, but an incessant dribble of grumbles and grievances of a kind that would never have appeared a year ago. There were even gentle hints that Churchill should be thinking about the right time to make way for a younger successor—and the name that kept coming to the fore was that of Anthony Eden. Was that why he had been excluded from the list of those asked to attend the summit? Perhaps his wife had a point.

  ‘So what did he have to say?’ she asked.

  ‘It wasn’t Winston. It was one of the aides.’

  ‘He doesn’t even have the decency to do his own dirty work?’

  ‘They’re sending round a paper. Apparently it requires immediate attention.’

  ‘So you will get up from our bed and answer the door in the middle of the night to do his bidding. As you always damned well do.’

  ‘He is the Prime Minister, Beatrice.’

  ‘Yes. As once I had hoped you might be.’ Her words were drenched with personal disappointment and spite.

  She rose from the bed.

  ‘I am going to the guest room, Anthony. I don’t propose to be disturbed again tonight. Or any night. Not by Winston Churchill.’

  She left the bedroom. And such was the state of their marriage that she never returned.

  When finally he left, on Sunday the third of August aboard a special train, he did so with a retinue fit for a medieval king—generals, admirals, air chief marshals, diplomats and doctors, press men, policemen, secretaries, servants, and, of course, the ubiquitous Sawyers. But no ministers, not even Max Beaverbrook, who was travelling separately.

  The train took them to Scotland, pausing in Inverness to pick up twelve brace of grouse, and so laden they proceeded by lifeboat and destroyer to Scapa Flow where, riding on a fretful sea, they found the ship that would take them to their rendezvous. The Prince of Wales. The ship that had fought with the Hood, watched her die, fired the shells that had struck and fatally slowed the Bismarck, and which still bore the scars of the encounter. She was one of the finest warriors afloat. The British wanted to make an impression.

  It was early on the first full day of their voyage, a day of gales and grey turbulence, that they received a message marked Most Urgent. The Germans had found out. Transozean Wireless, the mouthpiece of the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin, was already broadcasting the news that Churchill and Roosevelt were to meet. Somehow, the security surrounding the summit had been blown to pieces.

  The message caused consternation on board, and the captain ordered an immediate change of course, just in case. Yet Churchill remained remarkably unaffected. He lay upon his bed in the Admiral’s quarters above the propellers and chewed at an unlit cigar.

  ‘It would seem that some rascal has opened up a direct line of communication with the enemy,’ he suggested to Sawyers.

  Then, curiously, he smiled. For a moment, and for the first time in weeks, he seemed almost content.

  It was while they were on the voyage that Churchill at last got to see his film. Every evening after dinner the projection equipment would be set up in the wardroom and they would watch a film of his choice. Inevitably, one night was spent with Emma and her Nelson.

  Once more he watched as the sailor’s life unfolded in flickering scenes that he knew so well: defying the threats of his superiors to banish him to the wilderness; rising through the jeers of a hostile Parliament to warn against those who would appease Bonaparte; shining a light that would lead England through its darkest times. Nelson had been the embodiment of everything that England needed but he had been ignored, reviled, and rediscovered only in the nick of time.

  Just as Churchill had been.

  Yet, as the Prince of Wales forced its way through heavy seas towards her destination, Churchill began to see the story through different eyes. There was more to it than Nelson and his half-blind love of England. There was also Emma.

  She was adulterous and despised, and they mocked her: ‘the oldest story in the world, the most sordid and the most contemptible. Find a public hero and there you’ll find as sure as fate a woman parasite.’ Yet as much as they abhorred her she was devoted to him, and her passion that had ignited in the heat of battle grew to last a lifetime.

  Without Emma, the story of the admiral couldn’t have been told, his victories never won.

  And how much she looked like Pamela.

  If Pamela made a mockery of her marriage, she mocked no more cheaply than had Emma, or, indeed, Churchill’s own mother.

  Suddenly he was no longer involved in a story of duty and honour but of sorrows and ruination. He was watching a once-beautiful woman lying old and neglected on the cobbles of a French gutter, having knowingly sold her life’s happiness for a few moments with the man she loved in order to give him both the courage and the cause to do what needed to be done.

  Wars weren’t won simply through fighting and dying, but by holding fast to something that made sense of it all. Nelson and Emma had found that, in England, and in each other.

  ‘They told us of your victories, but not the price you had paid,’ Emma whispered to her beloved sailor. Emma had won her own victory, but the price she had paid, in living long and alone, seemed so much greater than the price paid by Nelson in dying.

  As he sat in the semi-light of the wardroom, tears flowed freely down his face and he did nothing either to stem or to hide them. He knew now that he had wronged her. In his confusion, he had been too harsh, but he would stand by Pamela. He would not cast stones. Sometimes it took more courage to seduce and to deceive than to spend all one’s nights sleeping in the tents of the righteous. He would remember that, and he hoped others would, too, when the time came for them to judge him.

  TEN

  Dawn, six days after they had left London. The Prince of Wales had slackened her speed. Her passengers woke to find low, churning clouds off the starboard bow, through which they could see the outlines of peaks and dense forests. The beam of a lighthouse reached out to greet them, and overhead they could hear the sound of circling aircraft.

  Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. The point where the North American land mass stretched east as far as it could reach until it toppled into the grey ocean. A place of mists and old mariners’ tales—and of muddle, for it was discovered that the Americans were operating on a different time zone to the British, and the Prince of Wales had arrived too soon. She was forced to turn around and sail away to eat up an unexpected hour. But when, finally, she dropped anchor, she did so amidst the vastest fleet the bay had ever seen: the American cruisers Augusta and Tuscaloosa, the old battleship Arkansas, the destroyer McDougal, the Canadian warships Restigouche and Assiniboine, the Hood’s own escort, HMS Ripley, and many others. Every ship seemed to overflow with cheering seamen and the air rippled with the music of marine bands. As the sun burned away the mists, a small figure co
uld be seen waving from the deck of the Augusta. It was the President.

  Churchill stepped into the admiral’s barge and, accompanied by his military chiefs, crossed to the Augusta. He was dressed in his uniform as the Warden of the Cinque Ports, all blue serge and brass buttons with a plain peaked cap. Strangely for the extrovert Churchill, it seemed remarkably restrained amidst the gold braid and naval gloss that surrounded him. In his pocket he carried a letter of introduction from the King.

  Roosevelt waited in his light and loose-fitting civilian suit. It hid the braces and leg irons that encased his crippled body, while a broad smile hid the pain that came with standing so long to greet his guest. They met on deck, political leaders of great nations that shared a common language, a religious faith and an extraordinary history. Only time would tell to what extent they might also share the future.

  Churchill bounded eagerly up the walkway like an impatient suitor. For days he had fretted, asking repeatedly: ‘Do you think he will like me?’ Now the moment had come when the veils and mysteries would be lifted and they could face each other as men.

  ‘Mr President, I am so very glad to have this opportunity to meet with you at last.’

  Roosevelt flinched. ‘Why, Mr Prime Minister, we have met before. Don’t you remember?’

  They came from different worlds, and from different directions. They dined, they drank, they discussed, they prayed together and grew to know each other better. Yet Churchill came panting for war, while at their first meeting Roosevelt started to talk about peace. He wanted a document drawn up, a joint declaration of principles about the sort of world in which they hoped to live. A Foreign Office official concocted a draft over a breakfast of bacon and eggs.

  It contained eight clauses of high principles about the right of all people to choose the Government under which they live, about equal access to trade and raw materials, about collaboration and cooperation, about freedom from fear and want, about free access to the high seas and the abandonment of the use of force.