Winston's War

by Michael Dobbs

  “You mean—invade?”

  “Walk in. Just like they're doing everywhere else.”

  “Ah, but we have the Channel, Ian.”

  “Oh, I see. We sit back and pray for bad weather, do we?”

  “It's not like you to be so down, old chap. Don't worry, something'll turn up.”

  “Like the bloody Wehrmacht, you mean? No, Dickie, we can't go on, not like this. Something's got to be done.”

  “First principles, Ian. The time for change is when change becomes inevitable. Not before.”

  “We may be getting close.”

  “Good God, you can't mean—not Winston. Not in the Cabinet.”

  “A testing possibility, I grant you. But a possibility nonetheless.”

  Dickie grimaced as though a knot had formed in his lower intestine. “Not bloody Winston. We need a steady hand on the tiller right now, not some headstrong alcoholic who's still rushing around trying to rescue his reputation from the trenches of Gallipoli. Which is why I thank God for Neville. Even if the whole of Europe goes up in flames, he'll pull us out of the fire.”

  “But will he? That's what I worry about. With this Polish guarantee, it means we don't get a choice. If the Germans invade, we have to go to war, whether we like it or not.”

  “Neville would get us out of it. Somehow.” The words were brave, but there was a chaotic glint in Dickie's eye. They fell into silence for several minutes, staring out at the coal barges billowing their way up river, the tidal waters of the Thames rushing past as if they had somewhere more important to go.

  “You know, from here on a clear day, Dickie, sometimes you can see as far as Clapham.”

  “What'll we do, Ian? What on earth will we do?”

  “Maybe time's up for the likes of you and me. Our day's come and now it's gone. Politics doesn't seem to have much meaning any more, no common ground left. Perhaps time to head for the hills. Have a word in the Whip's ear, remind him how loyal we've been. Years and years of loyalty, stretched out like a tiger skin. Not like Winston and all the other fair-weather friends.”

  “Thought we were praying for storms.”

  “Not the point, Dickie. We've still got years of service left to offer the nation, you and me. From the Lords.”

  “What, the coma ward?”

  “Why not? I wouldn't mind dying a peer. It would make the passage to the afterlife seem so very much shorter.”

  There was a glass-covered lean-to at the back of Carol's house, overlooking the small back garden, where she would sew and knit, darning socks, altering clothes, or letting her hair dry in its curlers, while she watched over Peter and Linda as they played. When it wasn't raining and the glass roof leaking, she would sit with Mac at the little trestle table to read and write.

  She was making excellent progress, all the letters and sounds falling into place, the words coming to life, and her fingers forming the written letters most deftly—but that came as no surprise to Mac, who knew all about her deft and dexterous fingers and the magic they could weave. Her illiteracy, it seemed, had more to do with childhood abuse than ignorance or inability, and she appeared to have put so much of her past behind her as reading opened up worlds full of new ideas. She often laughed as she read and recognized new words; it was like a great game and at last she was winning. The kids laughed when he was around, too—Peter seemed to thrive simply through the presence of another man who was much more fun to chase and to run with than his little sister, and even little Linda showed her joy. Only that morning she had run up to Mac, put her arms around his leg, burbled “uvoo,” and bitten him.

  Yet the attention made Mac nervous. He wasn't used to complications, and babies who expressed their love for him seemed hopelessly entangling. His life had been so simple—eat, work, stay warm, survive—yet love meant being responsible for someone other than himself, and he hadn't been responsible for anyone since the day he'd watched poor Moniek's head being blown apart.

  “What's wrong with you?” Carol demanded.

  “Nothing,” he replied, “just can't concentrate. Do your top button up, woman, it's distracting me. And get on with your magazine.”

  “OK. Another five minutes. Then I've got to get Peter's birthday tea.” Peter was ten today. Mac had bought him a cowboy hat.

  Carol turned the page of the magazine. He'd begun to bring home old copies of the Illustrated London News from Trumper's—the combination of pictures and words along with things she'd heard about on the radio seemed to enliven the lessons and fill in many of the gaps. She examined the page in front of her.

  “So what's an eclipse, love?” She pronounced the new word firmly.

  “It's when the sun disappears during the day. Supposed to be bad luck.”

  “Says we're going to get one in a couple of days. You'd better stay in bed with me, then, dearie. Try your luck there.” She laughed again and began playing with the offending button on her blouse, only to stop suddenly. “And what's this about Musso and his tomato tops?” She examined a photograph of the chaos in Albania and a dockside swarming with troops. “A column of—kick-lists?”

  “Cyclists,” he corrected.

  “—whose mobility was of great assistance during the rapid advance…Sometimes I wish I was back in the old days and couldn't read a bloomin' word.” She turned the page in distaste. “Oh, bloody 'ell. It gets worse.” She was looking at a page of photographs of Madrid at the end of the Spanish civil war. Twisted statues that leaned at drunken angles. Bombed bridges. Rubble that had been homes. Fragments of torn fabric that might once have been bedroom curtains, or tablecloths, or children's clothes, now blowing hopelessly in the wind. But no people. “Where have they all gone, Mac, all the people?”

  He shook his head, struggling to hide the pain in his eyes. He was back in Poland, standing against a crumbling wall beside a smashed chicken coop, the screams of Ashkenazi still echoing in his ears. Ashkenazi was the youngest in their class. He hadn't screamed at first, simply stood examining the intestines that had fallen into his hands when he'd unbuttoned his tunic. Only after a while had he started screaming, until a Russian had put a bullet in him to stop the racket. There was blood on Mac's uniform, too, someone else's blood, neither his nor Ashkenazi's, perhaps Yitzhak's, and Mac remembered how he had rejoiced when he'd realized that the blood wasn't his own. He also remembered deciding he very much wanted to live, and not to die with Ashkenazi alongside that battered chicken coop. He remembered it all now, and desperately wished he didn't.

  “The ravages of war in a city for thirty months in the front line.” She turned to him, insistent. “What does it all mean, love?”

  “Ravages? It means—”

  “I know what the bloody words mean. But all this—the wars, the bombs, the dying. Last month it was Czechoslovakia and now—this.” She pushed the magazine away angrily. “We was promised, Mac, promised. Peace in our time. So what does all that mean?”

  He looked away, trying to hide his eyes once more, and saw Peter in his too-large cowboy hat chasing his little sister round the lawn using the garden rake as a rifle. “I'm ten, I'm ten!” he cried. “Bang! Bang! You're dead.” Oh, little Peter, don't rush, don't rush, for it will all come soon enough. It had been Ashkenazi's birthday, too. He'd turned sixteen on the day he died.

  A fine evening, overflowing with drink and verbal excess. Churchill carried its full weight in the back of the taxi as it bore him home. He rarely missed a gathering of the Other Club, a dining group he'd set up nearly thirty years earlier along with his outrageous parliamentary colleague, R.E. Smith. Its purpose was simple—to dine, drink, debate, and dispute with other men of authority and opinion. “Nothing in the Rules or intercourse of the Club,” said its constitution, “shall interfere with the rancor or asperity of party politics.” And it didn't.

  They gathered in the Pinafore Room at the Savoy. It was decorated with splendid trompe l'oeil reminders of Victorian comic opera, but the discussion that evening had taken a particularly rancorous
turn. The sense of order never sat more than lightly on such evenings, and it had begun to fall apart as soon as one of those present reminded the group that it was nearing the third anniversary of Chamberlain's appointment as Prime Minister. On cue and in the manner of a conductor pursuing the Valkyries, Bracken had started throwing his arms about wildly and denouncing “a Government based on a jumble of old umbrellas and unction.” That had required a response from the only Government Minister present, who had found himself following a route which led him inexorably to the conclusion that Chamberlain's foreign policy, in spite of all its adversities, was above all unambiguously ethical. It was an argument which even the Minister himself suspected went more than a step too far, but alcohol induces politicians to overreach the limits of their own logic and he found himself stuck with it. Having reached the end of his road, he turned to face his accusers and raised his glass in a defiant toast—“To Neville. Happy anniversary!”—challenging the others to join him. Bracken had begun to shout something particularly rude when, to the astonishment of everyone and not least the Minister himself, Churchill had raised his glass. It was a substantial balloon of cognac, which the old man examined in the light of the candles as though weighing the reputation of his leader. He demolished it in a single gulp. “Anesthetic,” he had announced, and belched. The Minister rose and left.

  The evening had grown ever more boisterous, and Churchill seemed disinclined for it to finish. “Celebrating Mr. Chamberlain's success exhausts me so. I need your help,” he had informed both Bracken and Bob Boothby as at last the gathering had broken up. His two young friends now accompanied him, squashed in the back of the London taxi as it bore them through darkened streets towards Churchill's apartment in Morpeth Mansions overlooking the Catholic cathedral. It was beyond midnight when they arrived and, with some unsteadiness, tumbled onto the pavement. Churchill made some attempt at searching his pockets for the change to pay the driver, but his fingers had suddenly become those of an elderly man. Bracken had more money than either Churchill or Boothby combined but was notoriously reluctant to part with any of it, so it was left to Boothby to provide a ten-shilling note.

  It was while they were fumbling on the pavement that a figure emerged from the darkness, calling out Churchill's name. Startled by the intrusion, Bracken sprang forward, moving protectively in front of his master and placing a hand on the advancing man's chest with such force that the stranger was propelled backwards. The raincoat he wore was old, his hair unkempt, and in the gloom he could easily have passed as a tramp—or worse. IRA bombers had been active since the turn of the year and had left a trail of destruction and fire across the major towns of Britain; it was only a matter of time before someone died. The Churchill family's reputation in Ireland made him an obvious target. So Bracken's caution was understandable, indeed commendable, yet appeared unwelcome on all sides.

  “Touch me again and you'll end up on your arse in the gutter,” the stranger growled, showing his teeth like an alley dog.

  “No, no, no, Brendan,” Churchill protested, pushing Bracken brusquely aside, “that's Mr. Burgess, I believe.”

  Bracken stepped back in embarrassment.

  “I'm sorry but—I saw you as I was passing,” Burgess lied. “On my way home—round the corner. Chester Square.”

  Beneath the meager yellow light of the street lamp Churchill looked into Burgess's eyes and recognized the companionship and hard glaze of a fellow drinker. “So, are we neighbors as well as fellow travelers, Mr. Burgess? Splendid. Meet Mr. Bracken, Mr. Boothby. You will join us for a nightcap,” he instructed, taking Burgess's arm and leading him energetically up the steps. Boothby followed, stumbling from the excesses of the night, while Bracken appeared reluctant to follow. He was disconcerted by the arrival of this outsider, not only by its manner but also by the enthusiasm with which Churchill had taken his arm and left the others in his wake. Bracken was intensely proprietorial about his relationship with the old man. Churchill had a passion for life and a grasp on all matters political that Bracken knew he would never match, no matter how much he paid his tailor, so he was content to stand close—closer than anyone else—and bathe in the reflected light. It made him reluctant to share such favors with others, even with a colleague like Boothby, and after an evening's indulgence he had no relish for being pushed aside to make way for a complete stranger. The sense of Celtic disgruntlement only increased when, once inside Churchill's apartment, the old man threw his coat across the back of a dining chair and artlessly instructed Bracken to pour drinks for the rest of them. Churchill could inflict many careless insults; tonight, somehow, it mattered.

  Soon Churchill stood with a glass in hand, leaning against the fireplace, surveying the scene while the rest sat around like a crew before its captain.

  “I miss your columns in the Standard, Mr. Churchill,” Burgess began.

  “So do I, so do my readers. But most of all they are missed by my bankers.” The words came more slowly and with greater sibilance than usual. “Bugger Max.”

  “Never thought he'd turn out to be an arch-appeaser.”

  “He's not. He's an arch-opportunist, nothing more. A wolf in a Canadian winter looking for his next supper. He'll come round, when the winds have changed, bearing his checkbook and wanting to make up again. And we always do.”

  “So you're not writing at the moment.”

  “Oh, but indeed I am. A vast enterprise. A history of the English-speaking peoples.” The brandy glass performed a wide circle in the air and he seemed about to embark on an enthusiastic sales pitch, but suddenly his brow clouded. “Sadly I seem stuck in the Middle Ages.”

  “The years of invasion and conquest from across the Channel.”

  “Ah, you are an historian!”

  “Always wanted to finish off the life of Salisbury that his daughter Lady Gwendolen began. I've been in touch with the family. Perhaps one day…”

  “A fine ambition. And a fine life.” The chin was up, the eyes fixed on a more colorful world. Behind him the army of stiff white invitation cards that crowded the mantelpiece seemed to stand to attention. “I was first elected to Parliament when Salisbury was Prime Minister. The year before the Queen died. We were still doing battle with those devilish Boers. Nineteen hundred…”

  The old man was off. Bracken and Boothby, used to the late-night soliloquies and outpourings of nostalgia, settled down with their drinks for the duration, but Burgess couldn't resist the challenge. “And within five minutes of getting elected you'd deserted him and joined the Liberals.”

  “Steady on,” Bracken intervened.

  “But he is right, Brendan. I jumped ship. Some men change their principles for the sake of their party. I found it more convenient to change my party for the sake of my principles.” He held out his empty glass. Wearily Bracken rose and attended to it. “Ah, but they were tempestuous times and the Tory ship had no idea in which direction to sail, whether to run before the wind or to turn and fight its way through the gathering storm. So—I ratted.”

  “And now you've re-ratted.”

  The old man chuckled. “No one can accuse me of having a closed mind, Mr. Burgess.”

  “Mr. Churchill, I suspect you are something of a bandit.”

  “Indeed I am! We Anglo-Saxons are by our nature bandits and pirates. An island needs stormy seas and a race of adventurers for its protection.”

  “Ah, but those stormy seas won't stop the Hun.”

  “The French will,” Bracken intervened, eager to reinsert himself into the conversation. In the other chair, Boothby had fallen asleep and was gently snoring.

  “The French?” Burgess rounded on Bracken, his tone impatient and dismissive. “You can't be serious. The French won't fight!”

  “Nonsense. They're our allies,” Bracken snorted, repaying the belligerence.

  “They'll hide behind the Maginot Line and hunt nothing but truffles. The smell of rotting fungi's hardly likely to scare off bloody Hitler.”

  “The Fr
ench alliance is fundamental to—” Bracken began, but Churchill cut across him, spurred by Burgess's thought.

  “I wonder. I do so wonder,” the old man chanted, leaning with both hands on the fireplace and looking into a grate of gray ashes. “They have the largest armies in the world. They also have their Maginot Line, the mightiest defensive line Europe has ever known. But whom does it protect? Not poor Czechoslovakia. Nor Albania. Neither will it defend Poland nor any part of the Balkans. I hate to think of it, but what Mr. Burgess says has the unhappy ring of truth. The French have been fooled by their own defenses. They may shout defiance from behind their fortress walls but unless they can be persuaded to advance beyond those walls and hunt down the Hun, then the Line will protect no one but the Nazis as they fall upon their neighbors in the east. Oh, it has become a cruel deceit. I fear the Maginot Line will not stop this war. On the contrary, perhaps it makes war all the more likely and on a much more vast scale.” He turned to face them, his face grown somber. “So what is to save us, gentlemen?”

  Burgess took a huge sip of whiskey, then another, before muttering: “Russia.”

  Bracken sprang to his feet, like a fisherman striking at a pike, except the drink had made him unsteady and it appeared for a moment as though he were slipping on a muddy bank. “Russia? Are you mad? Bolsheviks riding to the rescue of Christianity? What planet were you born on? They want nothing but to sweep us into the sea.”

  “Moscow's nearly two thousand miles from London, Mr. Bracken, they're not in any position to sweep us into the sea. But the Wehrmacht is camped barely two hundred miles from the Russian frontier with only the potato fields of Poland in between. Don't you think the Russians might just have other things on their mind than picking the pockets of a few wobbling English aristocrats?”

  “Mr. Burgess, explain yourself!” Churchill commanded sharply.

  Oh fuck, the drink had driven him over the top. Beneath the glass that lay in his lap, Burgess squeezed his own balls. Hard. Anything to stop his tongue running away with his sense. He didn't like Bracken—a mutual and instant antipathy, perhaps a recognition that they were both fantasists and adventurers—and he had allowed his alcohol-sodden temper to get the better of him. He had loitered outside in the freezing cold for more than an hour waiting for Churchill, wanting to get to him, yet now that he was inside his parlor he was about to get himself thrown out. He squeezed again until the pain had given his brain a thorough shaking. He took a deep breath.