The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

  ‘That film. Bulldog Breed. It’s a lie, like people have been saying. The history books aren’t wrong. He did kill himself.’

  ‘You think so? It doesn’t sound like it from this.’ She held up a slim volume. ‘This is a piece of history, Harry. A piece the world doesn’t know about and would have long ago destroyed if it did. Read the last two pages and tell me if it’s written by a man about to commit suicide.’

  She handed him the little book, an old, dog-eared leather-bound diary. He opened it at the end and read:

  The War Room, September 1949

  The empire is not dead. Its heart may have been ripped out but the distant limbs are still inviolate. The fight can and will go on.

  The King is dying. He was forced into this job by the abdication and has never been in good health. He will not survive this final collapse. But his two daughters, the young princesses, are at his side, already safe and well in distant Canada.

  There will be no coronation in Westminster Abbey. Charred stumps, I fear will be all that remain of its great Gothic buttresses and Hawksmoor’s elegant towers. Some church in Ottawa will serve the purpose just as well.

  A new Elizabethan age will arise, nurtured on the fertile soils not just of Canada, but Australia, India and Africa. One day – however distant – the loyal sons of empire will reclaim the motherland. I only hope that I will live to see it.

  I will not let the enemy take me, nor will I take my own life as some have feared. I have made mistakes. I have learnt the hard way that no matter how immovable the object, in the end irresistible force prevails. So be it, for the moment. We must now retreat, to build an irresistible force of our own.

  I must for now throw myself, and our cause, onto the mercy of our great ally. I do so in confidence, though not without some trepidation. Had Adolf Hitler not, in an act of loyalty to Japan, declared war on the United States the day after Pearl Harbour, I cannot be wholly convinced that, for all my efforts, Washington would have joined the European war as well. Yet the result has been only to see the Communists’ red flag rather than the Nazi Swastika over London.

  The landings on the Normandy beaches were a titanic undertaking, far beyond Britain’s might alone. But the fighting in northern France and in the Ardennes proved tougher than we had anticipated, the road to Berlin was not the ‘Sunday afternoon drive’ some of our American allies had imagined. In the meantime the Soviet juggernaut rolling westwards had obtained the proportions of a force of nature.

  We watched this steamroller flatten not just the Nazi opposition but the native resistance too, most notably the patriots of Poland for whose sake this country went to war in the first place. When the Poles in Warsaw saw the Red Army on their doorstep in July 1944 and rose against the Nazis, Stalin held back his troops on the far bank of the Vistula until they had been crushed, the better to prepare for the country’s subjugation to a new master. One alien totalitarian regime was rapidly replaced by another. It was our first glimpse of the future.

  The time had come to think the unthinkable. In July 1941, when I signed the ‘mutual assistance’ pact with Stalin, I had been moved to reflect that necessity made strange bedfellows and many decent women into whores. I had been in bed with one devil, now it was time for the other.

  The Stauffenberg bomb plot against Hitler might never have succeeded without the covert help of our intelligence. But with the dictator gone the men of honour in the German army offered to turn their troops east in the hope of saving their nation, their continent, not to mention their skins. In the end they saved none. Our troops, their former enemies, were welcomed across the Rhine. It was too little, too late. The tide of history had become a red tsunami, particularly after the pro-Communist revolution in France cut the ground from beneath our feet.

  The Manhattan Project, designed to deliver us a super-weapon, turned out to be infiltrated with spies, though against our expectations they were not Nazis but communists, including one, Klaus Fuchs, a German to whom we in Britain had mistakenly given shelter. It was not laboratories in Berlin or Dresden that were hard on the heels of the men at Los Alamos but those in Moscow and Novosibirsk.

  Only now, when the Stalin tanks have chewed up the Kent and Sussex countryside and penetrated into the heart of London are our allies ready to test an atomic bomb. But they believe the Soviets are at a similar stage. Last week there was a meeting in Malta between envoys of Washington and Moscow. I was not invited. What it signals I can only speculate. And hope. And trust. I have remarked before that one can rely on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have tried everything else.

  The world is changing fast. I can only pray I may provide leadership to our far-flung dominions to fight for a better future. In this I must place my trust in those who were the first rebels against the British empire, and today are its last hope.

  WSC

  Stark looked up in astonishment. ‘Is this real? I don’t believe it and if it’s true, what happened?’

  Lizzie took a deep sigh, looked behind her to where, Stark noticed for the first time, a stooped little old lady with her arm in a sling sat, and said: ‘Tell him, Gran.’

  Chapter 48

  The operation had gone like clockwork. Unfortunately these days clockwork wasn’t quite enough.

  Colonel Charles Marchmain was studying a map of the London Underground, a map with which even he was unfamiliar. A map that showed a network that extended into what was now another city, another country. And this map from the distant past, from another world had been written on. Recently. By someone in a hurry, someone who had disappeared into a tunnel underneath St Bride’s. Marchmain had every reason to believe that person was Harry Stark. What he didn’t know was the significance of the two square boxes drawn in pencil on a spur of the old Northern Line, a spur nowadays used only by trains from the other side.

  Instances of closed stations and through tunnels being used by deserters had fallen to zero since the above-ground entrances had been demolished and their location, or very existence, faded from popular memory. Marchmain showed the map to his oldest officer, a man on the brink of retirement who had been in the Military Police during the war. Did it mean anything to him. The old man had looked at the colonel with some surprise, then delight in being able to provide his superior with important intelligence so late in his professional life: ‘I can’t be certain, sir. And I don’t really understand the significance of the little squares, but I do know what is down there: the old Deep Shelters. Including the one used by General Eisenhower.’

  Marchmain’s eyes lit up. Was it possible the people Stark had got involved with, the dissident scum who had escaped his men in the raid on the church, had a hideout he knew nothing about, improbably close to Stalingrad Square. Today of all days he was extremely uncomfortable about that. He had deliberately allowed Stark a slack rein, knowing the risks of the policeman becoming a loose cannon, in the hope that his past would work in Marchmain’s favour, giving him an ‘in’ to the so-called ‘underground’ that his own men had failed to achieve.

  But the possibility could not be ruled out that he had somehow been deluded – or deluded himself – into playing his father’s game, or whatever he might have been led to believe that was. Within minutes – a call to the Ministry of Works records office from Social Security was an event seldom enough to warrant immediate attention – Marchmain was perusing ancient plans, drawn up in 1942, for a shelter he had no idea existed. He all but snarled. Whatever was going on down there required attention, and now.

  Within less than forty minutes a dozen armed DoSS operatives were assembled on the platform of Covent Garden Underground station. The veteran military policeman aided by a rapidly co-opted member of the London Transport Cooperative led Marchmain and his men down to a passageway behind the main lift shaft to a locked door that had not been opened in decades. The Tube man said he was certain he would be able to find a key somewhere. Marchmain blew the lock away. The door swung back to reveal an antechamber to a lift, d
escending beneath the main shaft. On the wall was an ancient red trip switch of the sort used for emergency power cut-offs. The colonel nodded to one of his men who flipped it. Against expectations there was a low hum and a light came on in the lift.

  Nonetheless, Marchmain led his men, and their muzzled dogs, in single file down the stairs.

  Chapter 49

  St James’s Park, 1949

  The old man stood, in his mind’s eye, like the last warrior on the field of Armageddon, amidst the smouldering ruins of the empire he had loved and cherished.

  The hour had come. He stared out at the wasteland of St James’s Park, briefly remembering distant sunny afternoons when he had walked beneath the shade of the trees and fed the ducks. There were no ducks now. No trees either.

  The desolation of the parkland was an advantage; the trees would have been obstacles. To the south ran Birdcage Walk. King James I had had an aviary nearby. Now it would help this caged bird fly free. It had been broadened into a makeshift runway, as usable as The Mall leading down to Buckingham Palace had once been but less obvious and as a result less pitted by enemy shelling.

  Already the aircraft was waiting, barely fifty yards away. He recognised it at once, a Boeing L-15 Scout two-seater, straight off the production lines, an experimental model specially designed for short take-off and landing.

  A fresh peal of artillery thunder shook the ground. Only a core of American forces remained in the metropolis, in the western half of the city, defending all approaches to their own embassy. The rest had pulled north, ‘the better to regroup’ he had been assured. He could not really complain. It was little more than he was doing himself; but it still somehow left the sour taste of abandonment. Would his ‘flight’ leave the same taste in the mouths of those he left behind?

  If he had seen the small, slight figure who had emerged timorously, in awe of the destruction around her, from the blackened blast doors he had used just a few moments before, he might even have stopped for a few minutes and tried to explain to her, in the hope that she, in turn, might explain to others.

  But he did not. His eyes were on the plane and the man who came to meet him as he stomped towards it. For a moment he flinched. The uniform was unfamiliar. Then he remembered: the new president had renamed the Army Air Corps as the US Air Force. A new name for a new age. Now they had new tailoring to suit. It was typical of the uneven relationship all along: the British forces had barely enough ammunition; the Americans were buying new uniforms.

  The empire still had style, though. He put his hand into his greatcoat and found what he was looking for. At times like these a little theatre was called for. As the air force officer came up to him, he pulled out his last Havana cigar, and asked for a light. Something the man would remember. Something to tell his grandchildren.

  It was to his immense surprise, therefore, when the pilot produced not a Ronson cigarette lighter but a Colt automatic.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said with that slow accent that marked him clearly as coming from south of the Mason-Dixon line. ‘I regret to tell you there’s been a change of plan.’

  Chapter 50

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘What do you think? He shot him. Between the eyes. Then put another into the skull to be sure. Went back to his little plane and came back with a jerrycan of petrol. Poured it all over the body and set fire to it. I can still see it today.’

  ‘But how …?’

  ‘I was there, Detective Inspector Stark. I was his secretary. One of them anyway. I followed him out when he left the War Room. I shouldn’t have but I wanted to give him that,’ the old lady pointed to the diary in Stark’s hand. ‘He’d left it on his desk. Probably deliberately I now realise. But I didn’t know. I’ll have it back, please.’

  Stark handed it over, his mouth still gaping in astonishment, turned to Lizzie and said, ‘The Americans killed him? Why?’

  ‘Wrong question, Harry,’ she replied as if it was the easiest thing in the world. ‘Why not? They’d changed the plans. Roosevelt was dead. The new people in Washington didn’t feel under the same obligation. How much love do you think America has ever really felt towards England. The relationship might have turned upside down at one stage but in the eyes of most of them we were still the empire they’d rebelled against. Look at their movies even today – the bad guys always have English accents.

  ‘This was their big chance and they weren’t going to share it. And certainly not their nuclear weapons. It would be so much easier if there were just two superpowers, not three. Especially if one of them was governed by an old man hell-bent on revenge. With no Churchill – and no British empire – it would be a hell of a lot easier to divide the world into two new empires.’

  ‘But it was all over. We … they’d lost.’

  ‘No, you were right first time. We’d lost. They won. Both the Russians and the Yanks. Think about it. Think how inconvenient it would have been if the old man had survived. He had no intention of surrendering, of giving up the empire, just because the capital had fallen, no more than the Russians had with Napoleon or the Nazis at the gates of Moscow. He would have had the young princess, Elizabeth,’ she blushed slightly at the name, ‘crowned in Canada, as Queen and Empress, and used North America as a base to carry on the struggle on a global scale. It could have meant another ten, twenty, thirty even forty years of conflict.’

  ‘But that’s what we’ve had. The cold war.’

  ‘Not cold, Harry, cool. A comfortable temperature. Small wars by proxy in parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa nobody cares much about. Afghanistan, Angola, but not Coca-Cola. Weapons testing with human guinea pigs. It’s all been light entertainment. The real business was done back then. Think about it. For forty years the world has been neatly divided in two: Europe, mainland Asia and North Africa under Soviet influence. They already had Europe. With Britain out of the picture, the Chinese took Hong Kong back while the rest: India, Singapore, Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan, Egypt, all fell under the sway of Moscow, given ‘independence’ with communist governments: dictatorship by delegation.

  ‘The western hemisphere, Australia, South Africa, Rhodesia, all the way up to the Sudan all became dependent on American money and muscle, not to mention the whole of the West Indies including Bermuda, the Bahamas, Barbados and Jamaica all joined Cuba and Puerto Rico in the United States’ Caribbean co-prosperity zone: a protection racket by proxy.

  ‘It was a carve-up, right from the beginning, a deal done between Washington and Moscow the minute they realised they both had nuclear weapons, and nobody else did. And it’s served them very well, until now.’

  Stark’s mind was reeling. He wondered how much if any of this Fairweather was hearing, wherever he was, or what he would make of it.

  ‘And that’s why the Department, the DoSSers killed the American journalist, because they didn’t want him reporting it? But he was American. Why would he?’

  Lizzie looked at him almost pityingly as if he were a small child with learning difficulties. In a small, quiet but firm voice, she said: ‘The DoSSers didn’t kill him. We did.’

  ‘I did,’ said a deep voice forcefully. Malcolm, the Museum Man, the one with the floppy hair and the flabby hands.

  ‘You. You did that to him. Blew half his head off and hung him under a bridge like a bit of meat on a butcher’s hook. And you have the nerve to talk about inhumanity.’

  ‘You watch your mouth …’ the Museum Man growled.

  ‘Quiet,’ barked Lizzie. ‘Okay, Harry, your point is valid. Malcolm does get carried away sometimes. There are reasons for it. But it was self-defence. Sort of. He tried to kill my gran. To shut her up and take the diary. To destroy the evidence of what they did. And he would have done it too. The bullet would have gone straight through her heart if Malcolm here hadn’t had a premonition and jumped him just as he fired. As it is at her age, she may never have the use of one arm again.’

  Stark looked and saw the dark brown stains around the shoulder
of the old lady’s sling.

  ‘In any case, we wanted to send a message. To the CIA or whoever he was working for. Don’t try it again. We thought that if it looked like it was the DoSSers had done it, it would scare off the ordinary plod, that the PP would leave it alone. But oh no, we hadn’t counted on Harry bloody “hero” Stark.’

  ‘The young lady’s right, Harry. There’s no more room for heroics.’ The sudden interjection, out of nowhere, startled them all, as much as the old lady’s scream that accompanied it.

  ‘Okay guys, don’t move, not anybody, not a muscle, and the old lady here’s gonna be a-okay.’

  To his horror Stark recognised the American accent at the same time as he saw – but barely acknowledged – Benjamin T. Fairweather, his angel Gabriel, the bearer of great tidings, metamorphosed into Lucifer with a drawn handgun held hard against a frightened, wounded, old lady’s head.

  Chapter 51

  ‘Just move back, all of you, back towards Harry over there. Don’t worry, he won’t hurt you. He packs a mean rabbit punch, but I don’t think he’s carrying anything but my penlight torch and he’s as surprised as you are. Just look at him.’

  Stark’s face was ashen. The immensity of the global strategy Lizzie had unveiled slowly sinking in, along the with the realisation that if even half of it was true, he had betrayed his calling not to side with the angels, but with a representative of the devil. In the world she had described, there were no angels. No saints. Only different shades of sinners.