Churchill's Hour

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘You look tired,’ she said, touching the back of his hand. ‘Do you want to go home?’

  He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t sleep.’ Anyway he was enjoying the sensation of being examined closely by young blue eyes.

  ‘I was in Plymouth two days ago. It was still burning. Little but ruins, places where the day before there had been whole terraces of homes. And in the Naval barracks—’ Suddenly he caught himself. ‘I apologize, Pamela. I’m being a bore. This conversation is not suitable for a young woman.’

  ‘I am not just a young woman,’ she reprimanded gently. ‘I’m a Churchill. You can’t shock or surprise me. And telling me will probably help you.’ Her hand was back on his. He squeezed it.

  ‘They’d hit the barracks,’ he began once again. ‘Lots of damage, many dead. Just young kids, most of them. They’d turned the gymnasium into a temporary casualty station, with all the wounded laid out in their beds. At the end of the gymnasium there was a low curtain, and from behind this curtain came a terrific banging. Hammering. I noticed all the young kids glancing that way, so I went to see what was up.’ Harriman was nearly thirty years older than Pamela, his features worn with experience, carrying so much more emotion and pain than younger men, she thought.

  ‘They were nailing the dead in their coffins,’ he added, his voice snagging on the memory. He reached quickly for his glass. ‘I never had any idea what you people would put up with in order to win this war.’

  ‘You still don’t.’

  ‘Meaning?’ He stared into her eyes. She could see pain, doubt, exhaustion swirling within him, and the smudge of defeat.

  ‘The champagne’s flat,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

  As he gathered their coats, he thought it was the end of their evening, but instead she linked her arm through his and began guiding him through the streets of London by the half-light of the moon. Low clouds were being driven by a cold wind, enough to keep the bombers away that night, and beneath their feet the white-painted edges of the pavement peered dimly through the night. The streets through which they passed gave off only faint details, hiding behind their blackout curtains, and he soon lost his bearings. There was no colour, no light, nothing but different shades of darkness. He sensed more than he saw. Dead streets, abandoned buildings, hollowed eyes where once there had been windows and life. And everywhere the smell of ancient dust and old coffins.

  He asked no questions, content to be led as she held his arm ever tighter, feeling revived by her youth and determination. They had been walking for a considerable time when he thought he could hear signs of life up ahead. The noises of a railway line, whistling steam, the clatter of trains straining slowly through the night.

  And suddenly people, loitering outside the entrance to a railway arch that had been concealed with what even in the dark was a makeshift construction of timber and canvas sheeting. The stench that hit him as she led him inside was enough to make him want to turn and run. Hundreds of people, men, women, children, had crowded beneath the arch, sleeping on rough cots, wooden boards, in old boxes. Many had nothing but blankets on the cold concrete floor. There was no evidence of facilities for washing, and the toilets by the front entrance were nothing more than buckets screened by canvas covers. As he looked, to his disgust, Harriman saw that the buckets were overflowing and effluent was swimming beneath the covers towards those sleeping nearby. Condensation crept down the vast brick walls, winking malevolently in the light of a few hurricane lamps and candles. The scene was almost medieval.

  Near to the latrines, two women in ragged skirts and old woollens huddled around a coke brazier, roasting an onion in the embers, trying to ward off the foul smell of the sulphur.

  ‘Why did you bring me here?’ he whispered.

  ‘This is the front line,’ she replied. ‘The homeless. The people who have lost everything in the bombing.’

  ‘But why here?’ He gazed around in disgust, struggling to resist the temptation to put a handkerchief to his face.

  ‘Railway arches, factory cellars, church crypts—there are dozens of these places.’

  ‘But why don’t you rehouse them, feed them, find somewhere better?’

  ‘I rather think that’s become your job.’

  He looked at her in confusion.

  ‘Averell, the war isn’t going to be won just on the battlefields. It will have to be won right here, too, amongst the people. They have to be given the hope that one day they will have something better than this, or otherwise…’

  ‘How can they put up with this, even for a day?’

  ‘Ask them.’

  Cautiously he crossed to where the women were huddled around the brazier. A filthy mongrel lay curled at their feet. They eyed his tailored overcoat and gloves with suspicion.

  ‘Come to gawp, ’ave we?’ one said, pulling a filthy woollen shawl around exhausted breasts.

  ‘Not to gawp. To help.’

  ‘One of those Yanks, are you?’ the other said, the distrust replaced by curiosity. ‘Wouldn’t have no cigarettes in those expensive pockets of yours, would you, love?’

  He fumbled around and offered up an entire pack. Her eyes grew large with desire.

  ‘Take them,’ he said.

  ‘What, all of ’em?’

  ‘A little Lend-Lease.’

  ‘You mean we ’ave to give ’em back?’

  He shook his head and smiled. ‘Compliments of President Roosevelt and Mr Churchill.’

  ‘Well, if they’re good enough for Winnie,’ the first said, snatching the pack. ‘Likes a good smoke, does ol’ Winnie. Came ’ere last week, ’e did. With ‘is missus.’

  ‘He came here?’

  ‘That’s what I said. Looked at us all and said it was disgraceful. Said ’e was sorry.’

  ‘Did he tell you what he was going to do about it?’

  “Course ’e did. Said he was going to get you Yanks into the war, whip bloody old Hitler and light ‘is cigars on the ruins of Berlin.’

  The evident sincerity of the woman’s faith astonished Harriman. She stood in filth yet talked of victory.

  ‘Do you think you will win the war?’ he asked.

  “Course we will.’

  ‘Why are you so certain?’

  ‘We got to win. Otherwise the ’ole country’s going to be like this. Like one of those camps in Germany.’

  ‘Camps?’

  ‘The camps he’s built. Thousands of people go in, and none of ’em ever seem to come out. Priests, politicians. Jews, of course. All forgotten.’

  ‘Prisoners of the Reich.’

  The woman shook her head slowly. ‘No, not prisoners, love. You Yanks got a lot to learn.’

  She turned her attention away from him and towards the pack of cigarettes, which she began to share carefully with her friend. After the division of the spoils, one cigarette remained. With rough fingers she nipped it in two, compared their lengths, settled one half behind her ear and handed the other across to her friend. When Pamela looked up at Harriman, she found his eyes filling with a mixture of awe and pride. A pack of cigarettes. His first contribution to winning the war.

  As they left, they could hear the woman breaking into a soft lullaby of delight in a voice as cracked as a paving stone. ‘It’s the same the ’ole world over. It’s the poor what gets the blame. It’s the rich what gets the pleasure. Ain’t it all a bloody shame…’

  It was likely to be a difficult anniversary. It was a year to the day since the great parliamentary convulsion that had overwhelmed the Government of Neville Chamberlain and left him bleeding on the steps of the Capitol, and a few were intent on doing the same with his successor. Mutterings about Churchill’s high-handedness had begun during the long nights of winter and had taken vigorous root beneath the spring Blitz. Members of Parliament were feeling excluded, fed up with hearing more about what was going on from the barmen at their clubs than they ever did from the Government, so they had demanded a debate, a chance to put their points, to make the Governm
ent listen. Churchill had responded by turning it into a vote of confidence. This meant that Members would be forced to take sides, to vote for either Churchill or Hitler, so it became inevitable that he would win and win overwhelmingly. Yet this tactic itself smacked of an overly thin skin and—well, even more highhandedness. He would win the vote, but it would make it more difficult for him to win the argument. It was a risk he had decided to take. Some would grasp the opportunity to throw logs beneath his wheels—but, surely, only a few?

  Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, had opened the debate for the Government, standing tall at the Despatch Box, as over-groomed as ever. Before the war he had led a group that became known as ‘the Glamour Boys’, yet somehow his fastidious appearance no longer struck the right note in a city under desperate siege. His speech seemed to struggle, too, so nit-picking that it entirely missed the point.

  Then came the turn of the log-throwers.

  The House was crowded, febrile, with many Members wanting to make their point yet knowing they would have precious little time to do so. It encouraged an intensity of feeling and expression that soon became remorseless.

  One accused the Government of fighting the war ‘with kid gloves’, others said the strategy was wrong, the intelligence lacking, the propaganda misplaced, the Foreign Office outmanoeuvred. They were like abandoned housewives queuing up to complain over the garden fence. The Speaker looked to the right and left of him, calling Member after Member, but none seemed to have much good to say for the Government, even the West Country backbencher who rose to profess that he was an ardent supporter of the Prime Minister, but—that little word that could explode in their midst with the ferocity of a hand grenade—but ‘what we want is a panzer and not a pansy Government!’

  It was far from uplifting rhetoric, but it hit home, and it hurt.

  These were armchair generals who fought over every theatre of war, from the furthest reaches of the Atlantic to the deserts and oilfields of the Middle East. ‘How was it that our Intelligence was apparently taken by surprise by the events in Iraq?’ one demanded to know. ‘Our Secret Service is obviously not comparable with that of the last war…’

  Then the Speaker called John McGovern. He was from the Clydeside, his accent was broad, his vowels long, his anger totally unquenchable. ‘The country is being led to disaster,’ he told the House. ‘The people o’ this country ha’ been misled and lied to, in the most brazen manner.’ He gazed around the packed benches, his eyes burning with fury. ‘There is a growing antagonism to the war. The people themselves canna see light in this war. They canna see the great victories that ha’ been promised to them.’

  Yet these log-throwers had produced mere twigs compared with what was about to follow.

  Leslie Hore-Belisha was a deeply disgruntled man. He was short and portly, a man of few social graces but soaring ambition who had once thought he should be Prime Minister, and let everyone know it. The Bore-Belisha, or Horeb-Elisha, as Churchill referred to him. He had once been the Secretary of State for War, a Cabinet colleague of Churchill’s, a vital and reforming figure, but ultimately always an outsider in the corridors of power, and not solely because he was a Jew. He had never been a team player and as a result had paid the price; now he wore his resentment on his sleeve and had become one of Churchill’s most prominent critics.

  From his first breath, denunciation dripped from his lips. Ministers were misguided. Dangerous. Self-deceiving. Acting on wrong information, and wrongly interpreting it. They had failed to bomb Italy, failed to send enough troops to Greece, failed to build enough tanks, failed, failed, failed! And in his travels across the disasters of recent months, he stumbled across not a single word of support for Churchill, whom he described as ‘almost the only man who can lose the war in an afternoon.’ The Prime Minister had brushed aside Parliament and bemused the press, he said, and had used America as a crutch, leading Britain astray about what help might be expected from across the Atlantic. ‘We ought to thank God for President Roosevelt every day, but it is unfair to him and to his country to overstate what is possible.’

  Churchill squirmed, but only inside. He tried to give the impression that he was enjoying the moment, chin up, even smiling. But he would not look at Hore-Belisha.

  Others did. Even cheered the bastard on.

  Then, oh, then, David Lloyd George rose to his feet. The man was a legend, a speaker of spellbinding powers, a Welsh wizard who had been Prime Minister during the last war, who had taken a devastated nation and led it to victory. He was a man of humour, of grace, of deep mischief, who had befriended Churchill early in his career, guided him, even given him a post in his Cabinet. He was now seventy-eight years of age and well beyond his prime, but even past his best he was still better than most, and fashioned to a far finer quality than Hore-Belisha. Lloyd George knew when to smile, when to applaud, knew how to kill with a quip and to consume an opponent with a word of kindness. He liked Churchill, admired him, you could see the affection twinkling in the old eyes as he looked across the floor of the House at his former protégé, yet he made no attempt to hide his belief that the Prime Minister had got the war hopelessly wrong.

  He didn’t want this motion of no confidence in the Government, he stated immediately. The last thing he wanted was to get rid of the Prime Minister; what he wanted was to get rid of the Prime Minister’s bad habits. And that wasn’t going to happen if Churchill continued to ignore the House of Commons. Growls of support erupted from all sides. He threw scorn at Churchill’s arguments, and his statistics. ‘The Prime Minister has said that Germany has seventy million “malignant Germans”.’ He shook his head. ‘No. There are eighty million Germans. You do not kill ten million Germans with a word, however potent it may be.’ He mocked, and others mocked with him.

  ‘The war is passing through one of its most difficult and discouraging phases,’ he continued in lilting Welsh tones that were drenched in sorrow. ‘We must have an end of the kind of blunders which have discredited and weakened us.’ And although his voice was no longer strong, they heard every biting word. ‘We have to cross a very dark chasm. But there is, of course, America.’ Ah, America, to which Churchill looked at every turn. Lloyd George nodded towards the Prime Minister, as though in agreement with him. ‘Now, I am not disparaging America. We have to hold out until America is ready with her equipment…’

  ‘Tools!’ someone shouted.

  The aged warrior was still staring directly at Churchill, his blue eyes piercing through the long silver-stranded forelocks that fell across his face. ‘But it is most important not to exaggerate what we are going to get, or how quickly we are going to get it.’ He was taking Churchill head-on, using his own words as a lance to prick him. ‘I warn my fellow countrymen not to be impatient, and to see to it that we ourselves do the job, until America is ready—and to do it more thoroughly than we are doing it now!’

  It was crushing stuff coming from a man who had so much experience, who had earned so much respect, and who had once been so close to Churchill. Yet there was more to come, one specific change that he sought. He thought the Government was too much of a one-man show—Churchill’s show. And one man couldn’t—and shouldn’t—try to do it all himself.

  ‘The Prime Minister must have a real War Council. He has not got it. Now, the Prime Minister is a man with a very brilliant mind, one of the most remarkable men who have graced this House. There is no doubt about his brilliant qualities’—he looked around him, smiling wickedly as the claim was greeted with much laughter and cheering from all sides, not all of it meant kindly—‘but for that very reason he wants a few more ordinary persons to look after him.’

  ‘He’s got some already!’ one wag called out, pointing at Eden and the row of Ministers beside him. A collective shuffle of discomfort spread along the Government front bench. Hurl bombs and bullets, they could withstand them all, but the Welshman’s wit was far more piercing.

  ‘The Prime Minister wants men against whom he can check
his ideas,’ Lloyd George continued, ‘who are independent, who will stand up to him and tell him exactly what they think.’ They all knew what that implied: he was accusing Churchill of bullying, of riding roughshod over others. ‘But it’s no use their doing so if they know nothing about it. Now I’m not disparaging the men—at least some of the men—whom the Prime Minister has in his Cabinet’—fingers were being pointed at the Ministers beside Churchill, and the laughter had once more tipped into gentle mockery—‘but,’ he said, in a tone that implied he was letting them all in on a wicked secret, ‘I have seen one or two of them at work.’

  Belatedly, the Ministers themselves began to join in the laughter. If they were to be accused of incompetence, they at least needed to show they had a sense of humour. Yet it was biting, hurtful stuff. This was a Government of one man and a bunch of coconuts and, in Lloyd George’s view, that simply wasn’t good enough.

  The House had grown agitated, restless like a nervous colt, in danger of bolting in the wrong direction. When Churchill rose to his feet, he knew he had to bring them back under control. His notes lay before him on the Despatch Box; they contained copious squiggles and amendments in the margins. He hadn’t come prepared for such a battering, but he was a masterful horseman. He reached for his whip.

  First he had to ride to the rescue of his Foreign Secretary, Eden. It was a pity that he needed rescuing, but he was a refined man with a sensitive nature, not well fitted for the bear pit, better suited to taking tea. That’s why he was in the Foreign Office. Churchill accused Eden’s opponents, baldly and unashamedly, of helping the enemy.

  ‘I did not think the speech of Mr Lloyd George was particularly helpful at a period of what he himself calls’—he checked his notes—‘discouragement and disheartenment.’ He looked up directly at his old colleague, seated only a few feet away, and his voice grew sad. ‘It wasn’t the sort of speech which one would have expected from the great war leader of former days, who was accustomed to brush aside despondency and alarm and push on irresistibly towards the final goal.’