Churchill's Triumph

by Michael Dobbs

  “Then perhaps one day you will permit me to correct your histories, Papa.”

  The old man slowly laid down his knife and fork to look across the table, but said nothing. Others, however, leapt to his defense.

  “Mistakes, Randolph? Surely not,” said the old man’s private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne.

  “Riddled with ’em. It’s not just that they’re self-serving and comically one-sided. As an historian myself I find it difficult to understand the errors. So many, even though they were written by a brigade of researchers. Perhaps that’s why they lacked focus.”

  “Tell me you’re joking,” Onassis growled.

  “Perfectly true. Every word. They’re like one of his paintings. Wobble all over the bloody place. As fiction they’re fine, I suppose, very inventive, probably deserved a Nobel prize. But as history . . .” He shook his head and clasped another cigarette between his lips, delighted at the consternation he had caused.

  “That is one of the most ungrateful comments I think I’ve ever heard,” Montague Browne’s wife, Nonie, said, her voice quivering with indignation.

  Randolph gazed meanly at her, then allowed his eyes to fall like an open hand upon her undersized breasts. “What would a woman know about it? Particularly a woman like you.”

  Nonie’s husband stiffened and was about to launch himself into the argument when she laid her hand firmly on his arm, restraining him. They knew Randolph, understood that he was not a man with the patience for fly-fishing and preferred simply to lob sticks of dynamite into the river. It was one of Montague Browne’s duties to try to calm troubled waters, not to throw himself into them. His wife, however, had no such professional inhibitions. “Even by your standards that’s damnably foul, Randolph. After all he’s done for you.”

  Randolph was after her like a goaded bull. “After all he’s done for me? God! I’d have thought at your age you were old enough to know better.”

  “And at my age, I do,” Onassis intervened. “I’ve read your father’s histories, every one of them. Br-r-r-rilliant. There’s nothing missing, not of any importance. Tr-r-ust me, Randy.”

  It was an instruction, and about as close as the Greek could come to ordering his guest to stop. But Randolph had no brakes. He swallowed another mouthful of alcohol and gathered speed. “It’s full of holes, Ari.”

  “And you’re full of shit, as well as several bottles of my wine.”

  “So let’s wring the neck of another and tomorrow we shall all be friends again. But the histories will still leak like a whore’s knickers.” He plunged once more into his glass. “My God, if he’d put half as much effort into kicking hell out of the Russians as he spent crawling up Roosevelt’s arse we’d be dancing in the Kremlin right now. But no, they led him by the nose. The Special Relationship, he called it, Britain and America standing at each other’s side, faithful to the end. Bloody right. To the end of our empire. The Americans came and raped and plundered their way through us like the Mongol hordes, except they had smiles and silk stockings and barely needed to say please. We just rolled over and let them have their way. Particularly you wretched women,” he spat, turning once again upon Nonie. “What did they say about you all? What was it now, the words on every woman’s lips? One Yank—and they were off.”

  “What utter rubbish,” Nonie broke in. “Do you think we women had no self-respect?”

  “Pamela didn’t.”

  And there it was, the undiminished sin. The beautiful Pamela, his first wife, whom he had married just as the war began and only weeks before he was sent to the Middle East. Randolph, sweating now, his complexion shining like a drying fish, stared across the table at his father. The old man stared silently back.

  “Come and embrace everything English, that’s what you told them.” Randolph’s voice was rising, not just in argument but in wild anger. “You were so desperate to get the Americans into the shooting war that you overlooked all their insults, encouraged any indiscretion.” He pushed away his empty plate as if to leave a clear field of fire. “So when Averell came and embraced your own bloody daughter-in-law, what did you do? Absolutely bugger all. Didn’t raise your voice or lift a finger. You damn well encouraged it!”

  President Roosevelt had sent Averell Harriman to London in early 1941 to take charge of the Lend-Lease lifeline that had kept Britain afloat in those most desperate months of the war. He became the most powerful American in Britain and, within days of arriving, had also become Pamela’s lover.

  “Christ, how could you? While I was away at the war! You. . . you. . . ” Randolph, his red eyes flooding, was trembling on the brink of obscenity.

  “I seem to have heard that you spent a good deal of your time doing battle with the brothel-keepers in Cairo,” Nonie snapped.

  “Were you there, gabby doll? Wouldn’t surprise me, but I don’t remember fucking you.”

  “Enough, Randy!” Onassis barked, too late.

  Randolph was no longer trembling on the brink but had started falling, and no one could save him now. “Enough? You’d have thought it was more than enough when he found out that his favorite American was diving into my wife. So what would you have done, Ari, as a father? What would any self-respecting Greek have done? Cut off the bastard’s balls and sent them back home in the diplomatic bag. But what did my beloved father do?” He was pointing a trembling finger across the table, like a rifle. “He invited them both to Checkers so they could get on with it under his own roof. Provided them with pillows, sheets, champagne, the lot. You talk of brothel-keepers, Nonie. Well, I can tell you that in the Churchill family, remarks like that come too bloody close to home.”

  “Chr-r-rist, Randy, that was more than twenty years ago. You sure know how to screw up a good evening.”

  “But don’t you see, Ari? It’s like the whole stinking war. Americans come over, screw the British, then pack their bags and leave. That’s what happened. And that’s why his histories are bollocks.”

  “What the hell could he have done?”

  They were shouting at each other, as if the old man weren’t even there.

  “Fought back. Cried out in protest. Defended our honor. Wasn’t that what he was supposed to do? Raise his voice in righteousness when we had nothing else to fight back with. But no, he rolled over like a twopenny tart and let Roosevelt have his way.”

  “President Roosevelt was a truly great man,” the American-born princess burbled, much too primly for the circumstances.

  “God, I wondered how long we’d have to wait for the Americans to come to our rescue once more.” Randolph’s brow was erupting in little spots of hate. “Your president was a sanctimonious old shit who dropped promises like crumbs from his afternoon biscuit. All his guff about freedom, about democracy, about decency being delivered on the point of an American bayonet, yet that Old Woman in the White House damned near threw away everything we’d fought for. You ask me, it wasn’t only his legs that were crippled.”

  “We won!” the princess exclaimed.

  “And away fled tyranny and terror!”

  “We. . . won,” she repeated, much less firmly.

  “Go tell that to the Russians. And the Ukrainians, the Latvians, Estonians, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, the Chinks and the Chonks and that half of humanity we lost somewhere along the way.” He turned once more upon his father. “Isn’t that right, Papa?”

  Throughout it all, the old man had said nothing. Now he sat there with his jaw sagging, the folds of his dinner jacket hanging vaguely round his shoulders, a morsel of food clinging to his lapel, a very old man. A trickle of saliva glistened like silver on his chin. Perhaps he was incapable of responding, or had mercifully failed to hear most of it. Yet, as they stared at him, tears of humiliation tumbled from his eyes and he turned to the servant hovering beside him, raising his finger. Moments later, the four crewmen returned and bore him away.

  *** />
  It was a deceit that only Onassis could have conceived. Randolph had to go, and go immediately, but some pretext had to be found to preserve the decencies. After all, it might be the last time he ever saw his father. He shouldn’t leave in anger and he wouldn’t leave in remorse, so that night Onassis made calls on the ship’s telephones and cast spells that seemed most magical. By morning, a message lay on Randolph’s breakfast tray from the King of Greece summoning him for an urgent and exclusive interview. It was a coup: the resulting article would more than justify his time on the yacht and mollify his masters in Fleet Street, so the Christina set course for the island of Corfu where Randolph was ferried to the harbor, guarded by almost every man on board. He would not be permitted to change his mind.

  The Christina’s launch made its way through the ripples of a scented sea, with Randolph standing in the prow, gazing ahead in the manner of some ancient explorer. Montague Browne noticed that he was weeping. As he later recorded in his diary, Randolph turned to him: “I do so very much love that man,” the son whispered, “but something always goes wrong between us.”

  ***

  The day was harsh and brilliantly blue, meant for baking bricks. The other guests departed, the men to form the firing squad for Randolph while the women escaped from the troubled atmosphere of the yacht to a nearby beach. They left the old man alone. He sat beneath an awning on the deck dressed in a blue blazer with glinting brass buttons, his head protected by a Trinity House yachting cap. He seemed a shrunken figure, lost in the arms of a vast cane chair stuffed with cushions, a small table for drinks by his side, and a cold cigar drooping from his short, podgy fingers. He had been asleep for some time.

  Sleep was an escape from a world for which he no longer cared. Infirmity and boredom had pursued him too long and he had grown tired of the chase. It had been a remarkable year, marked by many milestones. During its course, he had become the oldest man ever to have been prime minister, outlasting even the garrulous Gladstone. He had also become the oldest serving brother of the Elder Brethren of Trinity House, the group of men who provided the pilots that brought mariners safe home to port. Many of the telegrams celebrating the occasion had talked of the ships he had brought home, laden with food for a starving nation, but now, in old age, his mind would stray to those other ships that had foundered on his watch, taking their crews with them. On some days, when he dwelt on such things, every banging door would sound like a collapsing bulkhead, every seagull’s cry like a seam about to burst in an imploding hull or the sobbing of a man with no means of escape. Would he meet these men, when his own time was done? And what would they say. . . ?

  Other honors had been poured upon him. He had been made an Honorary Citizen of the United States. It was an historic gesture: the only other man ever to receive that had been Lafayette, the French revolutionary leader who had fought alongside Washington nearly two centuries earlier and done so much to defeat the British, damn his eyes. And in that same crowded year the National Congress of American Indians had declared him a fully fledged heir of the Iroquois tribe in direct descent through his mother, Jennie. Churchill was half American, but eternally English.

  Just occasionally during those lonely watches of the night he would wonder whether such things mattered in the afterlife, if there were an afterlife. He had long ago decided that if he found himself at the gateway to Heaven he would knock politely and hope to be greeted by an enormous number of family and friends, those he had loved and long ago lost, those who had gone before. His mother would be there, shining like a distant star, as she had throughout his childhood, and his brother Jack, along with his infant daughter Marigold. Death would answer so many uncertainties, soothe so many pains. Ah, but his father—would he be there, or was he to be found in what might be termed “another place”? Throughout the extended pain of their relationship the younger Churchill had managed to maintain an almost obsessive devotion for his father; he hoped that one day, perhaps, Randolph would do the same.

  There would be his own time of judgment, of course, and the judgment upon him would take longer than most, balancing the many moments of his life, weighing them. When he had been younger—at least until he had been eighty—he had never bothered with self-doubt. Some things he had got right and others outrageously wrong, yet he had always insisted that the worst sin was not to have done what might prove to be wrong but to have done nothing at all. His motto had been simple, forthright. Keep Buggering On! So he had charged forwards. He had always suspected that History would judge him kindly, if only because he had written so much of it, but what about Eternity? What verdict would that pass upon him? “I am ready to meet my Maker,” he had once declared, “but whether my Maker is ready for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter!” Yet now there was no longer any sense of challenge, only tedium, and the biggest ordeal was waking to face another interminable and pointless day.

  His sleep was restless when he woke—or was this, after all, nothing but a dream? He couldn’t any longer be sure; it was so difficult to tell. It seemed that so much of the last few years had been imaginary, confused, his mind no longer obedient, playing tricks on him. Slowly the shutters of time were closing and would soon be shut tight, and if so much of what he still felt was real, like last night’s kick-about with Randolph, he would much prefer to spend what was left of his days in a state of illusion or outright intoxication. But whether dream or reality, when he next arrived at a point of awareness he found himself in a foul mood. He opened his eyes and was at first blinded by the brilliance of the light that cascaded from every polished corner of the deck and sea beyond, a little like he imagined he would find the entranceway to Heaven. His eyes began to water, his head to ache. He knew his cigar was cold and he found his champagne glass empty. Damn this life. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw the outline of a servant, one of the yacht’s crew, clad in white coat, hovering near at hand.

  “Gimme a drink,” he repeated, his old voice rising.

  Still nothing.

  The old man’s hand went to his head, touching his brow, trying to dispel the fog of confusion. Dream? Reality? Or was he having another infernal stroke? It might be that he was now living only on the inside and had become merely an inert observer at his own death. Terrors such as these prosper in old age. But then again, perhaps the crewman was Greek, or French, spoke no English. He tried another tack.

  “Je suis Churchill!”

  Now the other man stirred. “Et je suis polonais.”

  I am Polish. . . The words rushed at Churchill like a wind across the water, beginning to sink beneath the encrustations of age, to worm their way deep inside, exciting him, stretching the constricted blood vessels that carried purpose to his brain, flexing them, bringing him back. “Then, Monsieur Polonais,” he said, “I would like a glass of champagne. Please.”

  “As you wish,” the man replied.

  Ah, so the bugger spoke English, if with an accent, yet sufficiently well to understand orders. He disappeared for a few seconds, lurching on some crippled leg, and returned with a glass—no, confound him, two glasses! He placed one beside Churchill and was drinking from the other himself. What type of servant was this?

  Something inside Churchill persuaded him not to lose his temper, to ride the insolence, for the moment at least. He still couldn’t make out the man’s features against the brilliant light reflecting from the sea, but the servant held himself like a man of considerable age perched on but one sound leg.

  “So, what happened to your leg?” Churchill inquired.

  “Russia,” the servant replied.

  “Ah, war wound.” It seemed to help Churchill relax a little. The old days. “I used to have a valet like you. Bloody rude. Independent. Name of Sawyers. Bugger of a man. No front teeth, no hair, spoke with a bloody-fool Cumbrian accent that tied all his words in knots. But indispensable, in his own way.”

  “I remember him well.”

/>   “Damned fool, look what you’ve done,” Churchill snapped, as in surprise he spilled wine down the front of his blazer. He wiped himself. “What the devil did you say?”

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  “From where? When?” the old man cried, growing agitated.

  “Nearly twenty years ago. In Russia.”

  SATURDAY, 3rd OF FEBRUARY, 1945

  SAKI AIRSTRIP, SOVIET CRIMEA

  ONE

  This must be, Churchill thought, the most God-forsaken place he’d ever seen, at the very edge of the earth. As they flew in for the landing he could see an army of women bent over the runway, sweeping away the snow with twig brooms. The runway itself was little more than a series of uneven concrete slabs cast upon the frozen ground, with a control tower that had been thrown together from rough-planed timber. It had a machine-gun nest on top. The insistent grayness of it all burrowed inside Churchill and froze his doubts so hard he wondered if they would ever leave him.

  Sarah Oliver, his daughter, a flight officer in the WAAF, sensed his misgivings and squeezed his hand. “Still feeling poorly, Papa?”

  The previous day he’d had a temperature of 103 degrees, not the best way to begin a hazardous journey, not for a man of seventy. But he shook his head. “I never wanted to come here, not to the Crimea. Nothing but lice and typhus plague and. . . blessed Russians. My God, I hope the whisky will last, otherwise we might end up dying in this place.”

  “So. . . why here?”

  “Had no choice. Neither did poor Franklin. A man in a wheelchair has to fly six thousand miles because Stalin refuses to travel more than six hundred. The supreme gathering of the three most powerful men in the world—in a hole like this!” He stabbed his finger at the scene outside. “If we’d researched the matter for ten years with all diligence, I swear we could have found no more miserable spot. Russia in blasted February!”