Churchill's Hour

by Michael Dobbs

  Averell watched as Pamela counted off her forebear’s conquests on the elegant fingers of both hands. Jane had been the daughter of a Digby admiral who had fought with Nelson at Trafalgar. She seemed to have inherited much of her father’s adventurous outlook. She married in turn an English lord, a Bavarian baron, a Greek count and a Bedouin sheikh, and between times became the lover of princes and at least two kings. Pamela was running out of fingers.

  ‘Quite a girl,’ Harriman observed, uncertain whether it was appropriate to applaud or condemn.

  ‘Caused a terrible scandal, of course.’ Pamela smiled. ‘England expects every man, but not their womenfolk, too.’

  ‘Wickedness is everywhere,’ Harriman concluded as the wailing of the sirens forced its way between them. The waiter was back, bowing and offering to show them the way to the shelter. Pamela’s face froze in disappointment.

  ‘The bloody shelters,’ she whispered. ‘How I hate them.’

  ‘We could take the bottle. Go back to my room,’ Harriman suggested. ‘Much more comfortable.’

  ‘If a little more adventurous,’ she added primly, ‘with all these bombs about.’

  ‘What would Jane have done?’

  ‘For half a bottle of wine?’ Pamela shrugged. ‘Almost anything.’

  ‘I never know when you are teasing me, Pam.’

  ‘You and that incomplete education of yours.’ She swept up the bottle from the table and rose. ‘You lead. I follow. Isn’t that the way you stuffy old men are supposed to like things?’

  By the time they had reached his suite of rooms on the first floor, the bombs were already falling. His hand went to the light switch but she pulled it gently away.

  ‘I can’t sit and talk with all that going on outside,’ she said, ‘and Jane would never have tried. Let’s watch for a while.’

  So the curtains were pulled back and they gazed out upon the opening scenes of a great dance of death. The fires and flashes of light grew quickly in intensity, drawing Pamela like a moth ever closer to the window until she was pressing up against it, crying gently as fresh explosions from guns and bombs began to rattle at the panes. Harriman was behind her, peering over her shoulder at the splendours and the horror that lay outside, until he was standing very close with his arms cast protectively around her.

  ‘Is this safe?’ he enquired. ‘So close to the window?’

  She wondered if it was her turn to be teased, until she remembered he was American.

  And suddenly their world was thrown upside down. Afterwards, Pamela couldn’t remember which sensation came first—the brilliant flash, the overwhelming roar, the ripping at her eardrums. There must have been some sort of warning, for even as the bomb exploded outside Harriman had picked her up and thrown her away from the window. As the force of the blast hit the building, the room was instantly filled with dust; all the windowpanes cracked—they were taped and didn’t completely shatter—but small shards of glass were sent flying around them. One of the thick curtains was pulled half off its rail, and the room somehow seemed to have too much air in it, then almost none at all. Pamela struggled for breath. The echo of the blast seemed to rumble on for ever, and when at last it faded all she could hear was the gentle gurgling of an upturned bottle of wine and the pounding of her heart.

  She found that she was under a table. The American had thrown himself on top of her. Her dress had been torn from her shoulder. It had allowed her breast to tumble free, a fact made all the more obvious by the heaving of her chest as she struggled to control her fright.

  They lay together, breathless. Bombs were still falling outside, but they seemed to come from a world that had suddenly grown more distant. For a moment she thought she might have been injured, for needles of heat were spreading remorselessly up the insides of her legs until they began to feed the smouldering fire that had taken hold at the top of her thighs. He was struggling to speak; she could feel the brushstrokes of his breath on her cheek, her neck, on her unconstrained breast, every fresh gasp like bellows upon a fire.

  ‘Damn near miss, Pam.’

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t think so.’

  A ploughman heard the aircraft passing low overhead, followed seconds later by a huge explosion. He rushed outside to see a parachute falling from the night sky and, armed with nothing more than a hayfork, soon captured the airman. The pilot of the Me-110 offered no resistance, not least because he had badly damaged his ankle on landing.

  The Scotsman helped the injured pilot back to his cottage, where his mother offered her unexpected guest a mug of tea. In excellent but accented English, the pilot asked instead for a glass of water. He seemed to be particular about everything. He was at pains to emphasize that he was not armed and that his plane had carried neither ammunition nor bombs. He announced that his name was Alfred Horn. He said he had flown from Munich and had come to see the Duke of Hamilton. He showed no signs of hostility.

  Soon soldiers from the Home Guard began to arrive. They came in a collection of vehicles and had little idea of what to do, so after much confusion they took the prisoner to their headquarters in a nearby scout hut. From there he was passed up the chain of military command much like a fire bucket until, in the early hours of the following morning, he ended up in the hospital wing of Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow, where his ankle was treated. Throughout the night he continued to repeat his name, and also his request that they should summon the Duke of Hamilton. He seemed to know that the Duke’s home was nearby.

  The prisoner was a man of striking appearance. He had prominent brows, eyes that were exceptionally deep-set and a chin so square it seemed to have been fashioned from the end of an anvil. He also had the demeanour of a man used to issuing orders rather than being questioned by the likes of ploughmen and Home Guard privates. He showed no signs of submissiveness, and began to grow irritable when the Duke of Hamilton failed to appear. He was unlike any other prisoner they had encountered, and he quickly became an item of considerable interest, with many people arriving to peer around the door of the hospital barracks at this strange arrival.

  It was one of these inquisitive visitors, a squadron leader in the Royal Observer Corps, who was the first to begin unravelling the mystery.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked the guard on duty.

  ‘Horn, sir. He’s called Alfred Horn.’

  The squadron leader was about to say something else, but shook it from his mind and went away, looking troubled. He was back a few minutes later.

  ‘Who did you say he was?’

  ‘Name of Alfred Horn, sir.’

  The squadron leader stared at the patient with the intensity of a hunting cheetah, then retreated into the corridor, looking grim.

  ‘That’s no flaming Alfred Horn,’ he snapped.

  ‘No?’

  ‘It seems scarcely credible, but I think I recognize him from his photograph.’

  ‘Who is he, then, sir?’

  ‘Damn it if that man’s not Rudolf Hess.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hess. Adolf Hitler’s deputy!’

  SIX

  There was awkwardness the following morning as they walked through the fresh ruins of London. The sights they saw made their tumbling through the hours of the previous night seem not only indulgent but also selfishly irrelevant. Although the bombers had long gone, the fires still burned ferociously, filling the air with smoke. The sky glowed red.

  Great gaps had been torn through the buildings of London. Homes had been ripped open to show their pathetic guts; half-rooms with pictures set at crazy angles and furniture peering over the abyss, and ducks still flying across the wallpaper. Broken rooms, broken lives.

  The rubble stank—of ash, cinder, tar, burnt hopes. Families clawed at the still-smoking embers, scrabbling for clothes, blankets, sheets, dolls, past lives. Tarpaulins covered the gashes, turning entire streets into tented encampments. Women with exhausted faces boiled water in kitchens that had neither walls nor windows, while children sa
t around in shabby, worn clothes, their eyes empty, their soot-covered faces streaked with tears. Shreds of burnt paper fell all around like autumn leaves, and dark brown tea spilled from cracked mugs.

  They passed a double-decker bus. It was resting at a jaunty angle, its face buried in the roof of a building more than a hundred yards from where it had been travelling. There was blood streaked across its windows. Firemen and volunteers worked tirelessly to damp the flames, but many buildings were left to burn themselves out and die alone. The bells of the ambulances and other emergency vehicles tolled ceaselessly. The casualties were horrendous.

  They felt ashamed.

  ‘Pam, about last night.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I guess…What I mean…’ His embarrassment was momentarily covered by shouts of alarm as a roof collapsed nearby, sending an angry fist of smoke and dust punching into the sky.

  ‘Hell, Pam, you’re married, I’m married, I’ve got a daughter your age. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?’

  She looked around her. ‘Nothing makes a lot of sense right now.’

  ‘It can’t continue.’

  ‘The war?’

  ‘Us.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  They walked a little further, their shoes crunching on a carpet of broken glass.

  ‘We should regard last night as a one-off,’ she said, her tone leaving it up to him to decide whether it was proposition or question.

  ‘I guess so,’ he replied, after a long pause and with evident reluctance.

  ‘I had a good time.’

  ‘So did I!’

  ‘A little Lend-Lease, then.’

  ‘You’re a hell of a girl, Pam. I hope we can still be…’

  ‘Friends?’

  A broken main was spilling water down the gutter. Nearby a grocer, his shop destroyed and still smoking behind him, had set up a stall on tea chests and was selling oranges, potatoes and eggs, which was all he had left, to a line of dark-eyed women. Beside the stall a young boy was ladling milk from a churn into empty bottles. The women glanced suspiciously at the state of his hands.

  A girl no more than seven years old approached Pamela. Her smock was torn and she was clutching a rag doll under one arm. ‘Have you seen my mummy?’ she asked. ‘Daddy says we’ve lost her. She’s got hair the same colour as yours. Do you know where she is?’

  A gaunt-eyed man came running after her and muttered something in her ear before leading her gently away.

  Pamela, surrounded by a flood of so many sorrows, burst into tears. She sobbed on Harriman’s shoulder as they stood surrounded by the wreckage of people’s lives.

  ‘Surely this can’t go on,’ he whispered.

  ‘Of course it can,’ she said, shaking herself out of her grief. ‘War isn’t a bloody one-night stand, Averell. Or is that the only thing you Americans are any good at?’

  Héloise, the new French maid, was also in London. She had asked for permission to spend a day shopping and sightseeing, and Mrs Landemare had thought it an excellent idea to show her around the other end of operations, in Downing Street and the Annexe. She deserved her day off, for she was proving to be a willing worker. Churchill usually spent three nights of the week at Chequers, arriving on Friday and not leaving until the following Monday morning. He was always accompanied by an endless retinue of guests, some who stayed for only one night, others for only one meal, and as soon as they had left, their place was taken by new arrivals. This imposed a huge burden upon the staff, whose task was made all the more difficult as the Prime Minister’s demands bounced between the extravagant and the outrageous. Yet somehow they coped. He arrived with secretaries tumbling in his wake and left with assistants rushing to ensure everyone had their place in the cars, but even when Churchill was no longer there the pace of activity at the old house grew only slightly less frantic. There was cleaning and clearing to be done, laundry to be ironed, larders to be stocked, and the pressing knowledge that, in a few days, he would be back.

  So Héloise had earned her day in town. It was a pity that London was still in a state of chaos, but it was a warm day, she had on a fine spring dress and even in the confusion there were still many young men who had the time to spare her a smile. She seemed not to mind as the bus she was on made painfully slow progress through the streets of the West End. Héloise sat on the upper deck, which gave her a good view of the English capital, and she made no objection when a well-dressed young Japanese man chose the seat next to her, in spite of the fact that the upper deck was far from crowded. Indeed, she seemed almost to welcome his company, for within a few moments she had dropped deep into conversation with him.

  Churchill’s return to London was accompanied by even more commotion than usual. It wasn’t every day that the Deputy Fuehrer dropped in. As soon as his car had stopped outside the door of Downing Street the Prime Minister leapt from his seat, scattering papers to every side, rushing across the threshold, barking instructions, summoning colleagues, stirring the blood of everyone around, but as he headed for the Cabinet Room he found that two men were ahead of him, waiting by the door.

  ‘Prime Minister.’ Sir Stewart Menzies nodded in greeting as he struggled with a bulging file.

  Max Beaverbrook was puffing at a cigar that was even larger than the Prime Minister’s own. ‘Winston,’ he growled. ‘Bloody thing, this Hess business.’

  ‘How does Max do it?’ Churchill asked himself, awe mingling with suspicion as he strode inside the Cabinet Room. Menzies had the intelligence services under his command and was in a position to know, but Max…Max was one of his oldest friends, and in the same breath one of his greatest rivals, a Canadian entrepreneur who had left behind a murky past to seek better times in Britain. And how well he had succeeded. His lists of achievements were legendary—politician, peer, press magnate, Cabinet Minister along with Churchill during the last war, and now Ministerial colleagues once again in this. He was a man who treated his friends with extraordinary generosity and ran his newspapers with outstanding ruthlessness. In short, a man too powerful, too rich and too graced by good fortune ever to be completely trusted. Now it seemed he also had an intelligence service that was every inch as effective as Menzies’.

  ‘Max, not a bloody word in your newspapers,’ Churchill began as they settled themselves around the Cabinet table. ‘Not a bloody word, do you hear me? Not until we figure out whose arse Hess has come here to kick.’

  Later, Churchill was to record that from the start he had never regarded the Hess affair as one of serious importance. This was what he usually claimed when he had lost the argument.

  And the argument was fierce. Was it really Hess? Beaverbrook said it was, for he knew Hess well from before the war and had already identified him from photographs wired down from Scotland, but Churchill insisted that Menzies send one of his intelligence officers to Glasgow to confirm the matter.

  ‘This could be the greatest propaganda coup of the war,’ Churchill told them, ‘and we don’t want to bugger it up before we start.’

  Yet confirmation of the Deputy Fuehrer’s identity proved to be only the start of the debate. It came to a head later that night as they met around the table in the Cabinet War Rooms that were buried in the basement beneath the Annexe—Churchill, Menzies, Beaverbrook, Eden the Foreign Secretary, Margesson the War Secretary, and several others. No one felt comfortable here; the ceilings were too low, the reinforced beams too red and bright, the atmosphere too much like that of a tramp steamer’s engine room, but after the terrible pounding that London had taken in recent nights it would have been folly for so many powerful men to have gathered together in the same place above ground.

  ‘So, it’s confirmed,’ Churchill began. ‘The man is Hess. And he wants to stop the war.’ He nodded at Menzies, who began reciting a brief outline of the facts, so far as they had been put together. Hess had come alone, unarmed, wanting to meet with the Duke of Hamilton whom he had met briefly before the war and whom he believed to be a friend of
the King.

  ‘Knows you too, doesn’t he, Max?’ Churchill prodded.

  ‘I know all sorts of scoundrels, Prime Minister,’ the Canadian offered in reply, returning Churchill’s stare.

  ‘Have we come to any conclusion about his mental state?’ Eden enquired.

  ‘No indication that he’s mad, if that’s what you mean, Foreign Secretary,’ Menzies replied.

  ‘And thank heavens for that,’ Churchill said. ‘Spoil all the fun if he were frothing at the mouth.’

  ‘Fun, Prime Minster?’ Eden asked, perplexed.

  ‘I propose to make a statement,’ Churchill began, ‘to the effect that Hess has fled to Britain in the name of humanity—and where else in the whole of Europe would any humanitarian flee other than to this country? Hess hopes to bring an end to the war. It is a sure sign that a collapse of morale is under way in Berlin and that the Nazi hierarchy is split. If his Deputy chooses to flee, how long will it be before the rest of Germany deserts Hitler? They know they can no longer win this war.’

  ‘If only that were true.’

  ‘What?’

  Beaverbrook’s gnome-like head came up from drawing doodles on his paperwork. His colonial accent was strong, his words typically blunt. ‘You can’t say that. It’s all wrong.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘You go round suggesting Hess is a peacemonger and that there are many more like him back home, and you’ll blow a hole in the entire war effort.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘How do you think this will play on Pennsylvania Avenue?’ Beaverbrook replied. ‘The only way Roosevelt and his men are going to get involved in the war is if they think every German is a rabid maniac who’s thirsting to get his hands on their firstborn. You tell them that they’re all really kind and cuddly, and America goes back to sleep.’

  Churchill was silent for a moment, disappearing behind a cloud of cigar smoke.

  ‘It’s certainly a point to be considered,’ Eden offered cautiously.