Winston's War

by Michael Dobbs

  Now he had to think of another plan.

  It seemed as though the quarrels of men had been taken up by the gods themselves.

  Across the sprawling constituency of Kinross and West Perthshire, polling day, the twentieth of December, dawned bathed in ice and adversity. Snow lay on the ground everywhere, blocking gullies and drifting ankle-high in winds that taunted those forced to step out. The constituency was one of the largest in the country, stretching for eighty miles north to south and nearly seventy east to west, and every square inch of it froze. A day for hiding, not for voting. The sort of day when he who drives, wins. Cars were the best and, in all too many cases, the only practicable means of transport, but along with the support of the Conservative Party Kitty Atholl had lost their formidable organizational powers—their volunteers, their committee rooms, and most of all their vehicles. Tories sat in the back of cars that drove them from door to door with blankets wrapped around their knees, while Kitty's supporters were forced to struggle out on foot into the cruel snow and a wind which that morning had come straight from Siberia. Many refused to leave their young children and their hearths. Many others were forced to turn back.

  Four hundred miles further south in London it was less cold, the snow turning to rain that fell in gray, mischievous sheets. It sent most pre-Christmas revelers scurrying for shelter, yet as always Brendan Bracken had an eye for the opportunity.

  His mind had become possessed by thoughts of Anna. Ever since she had lost that bloody dog, she had refused invitations and rebuffed his every approach. He had thought he might advance matters by explaining with all the sensitivity he could find that she must accept the sad fact that little Chumpers was, to all intents and purposes, lost. Gone. A fond memory. A tragedy which would sit alongside the fall of Rome and the sinking of the Titanic, but which nevertheless would have to be accepted. After all, had he not scoured the streets of Knightsbridge day and night in search of little poochy? Yet his concerns brought him no reward other than a few burbled words of grief and more streams of sobbing down the phone. It seemed she would grieve forever. Now Christmas loomed, and Bracken knew what he wanted for Christmas. He had it clearly in his mind, and at times it seemed to be the only thing he had in his mind. He wanted Anna. He wanted to possess her, he wanted her body, he wanted to have sex without paying for it, he wanted to enter the New Year with a relationship that people would talk about, with a much younger, importantly connected woman, and without all those knowing smirks that crept across people's faces when they discovered he was thirty-seven and neither engaged, espoused, nor actively shagging several actresses.

  So, in the rain, he arrived on her doorstep, but he did not knock straight away. First, he stood in the downpour long enough to make sure he looked bedraggled. A man who had made a considerable effort just to be there. And in his arms, in the manner of a baby rescued from the lake, he clutched a puppy, a brown-and-white King Charles spaniel that his chauffeur had that afternoon obtained at kennels. Around the dog's neck was a new collar, and through the collar was threaded a pink silk bow. Bracken stood long enough on the step to make sure the dog was shivering.

  When Anna opened the door she was confronted with the pitiable sight. A sad and sodden Bracken, and a puppy—not Chumpers to be sure, but a tiny dog that might perhaps have been Chumpers's best friend or even a skinnier sibling—and both seeming in desperate need of affection and a home.

  Irresistible.

  He was in.

  The apartment at 28 Chester Square was already ringing with screams and raucous laughter—early, even by the standards of Burgess's parties. His hospitality was notorious amongst both his friends and neighbors—his friends because he was a shameless collector of people and usually managed to cram into one room a most eclectic grouping, which stretched from Privy Counselors and press men to male prostitutes and poets (including Auden and Spender), and which embraced multiple politicians, a few female professors, and proselytizers of every hue. There was even the odd priest. Their only common denominator was their enjoyments, which by Burgess's strict decree had to be outrageous. It was this aspect that made these gatherings notorious to his neighbors, since inevitably these outrages ended up spilling through the front door and onto the landing where they would frequently dissolve into fights and tearful recriminations. Yet there were few complaints—at least, not directly—since whenever his neighbors knocked on his door they would be cowed by the combination of public figures and disheveled drag artists who appeared behind his shoulder, and Burgess had the irritating habit of responding to their objections by simply laughing and inviting them in. Invariably they refused.

  He would not, however, have invited strangers into his home this evening. In the sitting room the guests had started up a round of Christmas carols, led by a senior Minister, with words taken from a distinctly unauthorized version of the English hymnal, while in the other room an intense and distinctly irregular game of table tennis was in progress. Burgess's newfound friend, Tom Driberg, was playing against a much longer-established companion, Edouard Pfeiffer, the chef de cabinet of the French Prime Minister, Daladier. They were using the dining table as a playing surface and a young delivery boy stretched naked across the table as the net.

  The players began disputing a point, raucously demanding that Burgess decide the issue. A smell of singeing varnish came from the sideboard where the Frenchman's cigar smoldered, while from the other room came the sound of carol singers murdering the Three Wise Men one by one. Chaos reigned, yet, for once, Burgess found no appeal in it. Christmas had come, and for a few days the world would stand still. Men would promise each other peace on earth and, for a few hours, might even mean it. Burgess's Christianity was faded but still sufficient to believe in Hell, and to know that it had arrived, here on earth, waiting for them all across the Channel, come the New Year. He was afraid. His hands trembled because he was a lush, but most of all because he could not rid himself of his fear that they were damned, every one of them, and he above all others, that whatever the outcome of the war there would be no hiding place for him. He was doomed, whichever side won. He wanted to close his eyes, to stop the trembling, to believe in something again, apart from Hell. He desperately wanted his Christmas to last forever.

  So he emptied his glass and awarded the point to Driberg.

  They counted the votes in West Perth that night. Chamberlain had won—by a slim margin, little more than a thousand votes, but it was enough. The Duchess was defeated.

  The Times said the result would be a great encouragement to Mr. Chamberlain, and hinted that it would come as a dire warning to all those who, like the Duchess, opposed him and his policies. They were on their own.

  “Rejoice. Oh, rejoice! Blessed are the Peacemakers.” The Prime Minister's metallic and echoing voice poured from the end of the phone and so loudly that Wilson held it away from his ear. He could almost sense the gleam in the old man's eye, a rekindling of that inner light which he had carried back from Munich and had worn through all those photographs, yet which in the long weeks since had been dulled by the exhaustion of events. He had lost weight, was in need of recuperation, so Mrs. Chamberlain had taken him off to Chequers, his official country retreat, to recharge his batteries. That took longer nowadays.

  Chequers was an ideal place for this purpose, a fine red-brick building of Tudor origins tucked away behind long avenues of Buckinghamshire beech. It was a hideaway, not a nerve center. Indeed it was not a center of any sort. It had only one telephone, which was regarded as an instrument of the Devil and had been hidden away in the pantry in order not to disturb the Prime Minister—even when he was needed. So Wilson had rung and rung, then rung some more, until in despair he had telephoned the local police constable in Princes Risborough, who had clambered on his bike and ridden through the snow to ask the Prime Minister if he'd be pleased to pick up the phone and “take a call from Sir 'orace what's been trying to get 'old of 'im all day, sir.” Chamberlain had discovered the phone hiding under
a pile of freshly starched table napkins.

  Yet now his joy was unconfined. Never mind that the majority was so slim. Mind even less that it had been delivered by snow and storm and outright skulduggery, and mind not at all that it was one of his own colleagues, once a friend, who had been put to the sword. To the elderly Prime Minister it was a victory that seemed inspired by God and, like loaves and fishes, it could be made to go a very long way. He could feed the entire country on this, and in return it would be only right for him to claim the rewards of the peacemaker. His place in history, alongside Disraeli, Wellington, Gladstone. Why, alongside Moses, even, for had he not rescued his nation from the bondage of war? Delivered them from evil? How proud his father and Austen would have been. At last he could show them, show their memories, at least. Oh, but then there were the Churchills, the Attlees, the Edens, the Duff Coopers, the entire ungrateful mess of the vainglorious who had for so long been snapping at his heels. Yes, he'd show them, too, show them all in the new year, in 1939. His Year of Retribution.

  Chamberlain slipped away from the pantry in excellent humor, wondering if there was any more of that excellent hock he had been sent by Ribbentrop. He forgot to replace the receiver on the telephone. He was out of touch for another two days.

  The Duchess cancelled her victory celebrations, went home to her ailing husband, and spent the evening playing Beethoven sonatas on her piano. Her supporters evaporated into the Siberian night, their tears freezing to their faces.

  The following day she received a telegram from a fellow MP, Josiah Wedgwood:

  To Socrates they gave hemlock. Gracoleus they killed with sticks and stones. The greatest and best they crucified. Katharine Atholl can hold up her head in good company. Let the victors, when they come, when the forts of folly fall, find thy body by the wall.

  Blenheim Palace, Monday, December 26.

  Boxing Day. A Black Dog Day. One of those days that came to haunt Churchill and cast him into despair.

  Churchill walked stiffly through the grounds that “Capability” Brown had laid out two centuries earlier to mark the Battle of Blenheim. Brown had landscaped the grounds along the lines of the opposing forces that confronted each other that day; he wanted the memory of that great victory to endure as long as men walked these paths. And Churchill would never forget. Yet there would be no gardens built, no great palaces erected, to commemorate the Meeting at Munich, not in England, at least, nor anywhere in unoccupied Europe. Looking back. He seemed to spend so much of his time looking back. Writing histories. Remembering great ancestors. What else could he do? No one would listen about tomorrow.

  Churchill had been born here, at Blenheim. Prematurely, so his mother said, always in a hurry. Seven months after she had married. The palace was the ancestral home of his cousin and great companion, Sunny, the ninth Duke of Marlborough—a dull man, but family—and Churchill had returned to celebrate Christmas. He had also come to hide, to escape from the miseries of today by clinging to the memories of a glorious past that was, well, precisely that. Past. Out of time. Like him.

  Churchill had never felt more alone. Clemmie was gone—had been gone for weeks—on a tour of the West Indies designed to restore her spirits and her health. She had recently stubbed her toe against the claw foot of an Empire table in Paris and become debilitated; she needed some time away from the difficulties she was forced to share with him at home. So off she had gone, accompanied by another of her outrageously expensive wardrobes, and was now relaxing beneath the Caribbean sun while he trod the damp, leaf-strewn grass of England. He missed her, needed her. She was the only one who came close to understanding, the only one on whom he could rely without question. Yet even she complained—about his impersonal telegrams, about the letters to her he dictated through others, demanding letters be written in his own hand. If only he had time! But he was out of time.

  Her absence had at least allowed him to come to Blenheim to be with Sunny, his chum. Clemmie didn't see it that way—she and the Duke had fallen out over such a silly matter. When Anthony Eden had resigned as Foreign Secretary in protest at Chamberlain's policies she had written kindly to him on notepaper bearing the Blenheim crest. The Duke had objected, and Clemmie had immediately packed her suitcases and left, thereafter finding excuses to see as little of Sunny as she could. So senseless, Churchill mused, to mix personalities and politics, to loathe someone for their rotten opinions rather than their rotted heart. Yet it was a lesson he thought Randolph might never learn. Churchill had arrived at Blenheim with his twenty-seven-year-old son and his youngest daughter, Mary, to be greeted by a host of relatives and close friends, and already Randolph had fallen out with many. It was becoming a habit. Randolph would present himself for dinner, drink, eat, drink much more, then argue and spread insults like salt upon a wine stain. A tongue that hadn't yet understood the difference between irony and pure acid. And the habit had extended to breakfast—Sunny had been forced to order him from the table that morning after he had called another guest “an inexcusable idiot” for suggesting that holidays in Tuscany were far more pleasurable since Mussolini had sorted out the trains. Randolph playing with his tongue was like a toddler discovering a loaded revolver in the middle of a playground.

  And Randolph had asked for another loan. A loan that Churchill, in all honesty, could not afford. The boy would get it, nonetheless. Just as Clemmie had acquired another new wardrobe and Chartwell would gain a new cottage in the grounds. There never seemed to be enough money. He had earned a fortune—several fortunes—and always spent a penny more. He was working tirelessly on his literary ventures, working double shifts, dictating until two or three in the morning, surrounded by secretaries and scurrying research assistants. He was working on the “English-Speaking Peoples,” for which he had been paid the enormous advance of twenty thousand pounds. But that had been in 1933. The money had long since disappeared. Only the work remained.

  And Beaverbrook had canceled his contract with the Evening Standard. “Winston, every time you write about your goddamned war, a hundred thousand of my readers crap themselves and head for the hills.” The contract had been replaced by one with the Daily Telegraph, but the money was less. Yet it was the setting aside of friendship that Churchill mourned, as much as the money. Beaverbrook and he had sat together in the Cabinet of Lloyd George, had conspired and cajoled and caroused and got drunk together. Then they would argue. He and Max fell in and out of friendship as frequently as Max clambered in and out of a young woman's bed, and at the moment he was sleeping with appeasers. One day, Churchill felt, Max would finish with them, as he always did, and come back to him.

  There were fewer friends this year, fewer than ever. The invitations to dinner were less frequent, requests to speak in a colleague's constituency had all but dried up. A sense of formality rather than friendship surrounded his dealings, even with those like Eden and Duff Cooper and Leo Amery who had sat beside him in protest and abstained on the Munich vote. It was as though they sensed he was a drowning man and feared death by association.

  There were some who still supported him, or at least his cause, but they were about as reliable as sunshine in spring. Harold Macmillan rushed around babbling wildly about leaving the party every time he found Boothby in bed with his wife. Not that Macmillan any longer found it impossible to live with his wife's infidelity, but it seemed to provoke in him a need to find other outlets for proving his virility. Boothby himself had been banned from Chartwell by Clemmie for an outburst at the dining table which had concluded in him upsetting an entire decanter and describing Nancy Astor as “nothing but a fucked-up little fart-catcher.” Clemmie was scarcely a shrew, yet she had scrupulously high standards which allowed forgiveness only for Winston. Bracken, too, was barely tolerated by Clemmie. She had no time for his inventions and fantasies. “Brendan,” she had once remarked, deliberately unkindly, “is the type of man for whom two and two make twenty-two.” She endured him only for his dogged loyalty to her husband. Yet even Brendan had beg
un acting queerly, strangely distracted. All queer folk, these elusive allies.

  Churchill passed beneath the towering, bare elms that stood like sentinels by the bridge, disturbing the crows, who flapped away, crying in annoyance. His knees ached in the damp air that clung around the roots of these great trees. Behind him the baroque splendors of the palace had almost disappeared from view, a memorial to times past and ancient victories which now lay hidden in the gray English mist. Yet he felt so comfortable here, like an old relic who had at last found his place. He had already lived twenty years longer than his own father, longer than his uncle, the seventh Duke, longer perhaps than was due to him. Moldering leaves clung to the end of his walking stick; death seemed to surround him. He had just read in the newspapers of the death of Sidney Peel, a man who had courted Clemmie and almost won her hand. Decent fellow, but his decencies hadn't saved him. So many of those Churchill had known when he was young were dying now, and he himself had reached that age of uselessness when old men run out of time. He prayed he might live as long as the squabbling crows, and die before his faculties decayed and grew dark.

  He wrapped the scarf more firmly around his neck and continued on his lonely walk by the shores of the lake. The rest of the company was off hunting, had tried to insist he join them, but today he had no joy in it. Perhaps the chase would exhaust Randolph and the evening would be one of civilized conversation around the dinner table, but usually the excitement only fired him up. By the lake the mists grew thicker, closed in around him. Trees and shrubs appeared like ghosts, until out from the shadows emerged a figure clad in a dark cloak that to his surprise he thought was Kitty Atholl. But it was only a momentary mistake. Soon he realized it was nothing other than Guilt, disguised as a beech tree.