My father never said it. He was a naive man through and through. One of those rare people who know they are naive; one of the even rarer people who cannot be hurt by that knowledge. He would have liked to have been a clown. Had the talent for it, too. He was glad to see his son become one. He never said it, no, but I know, I know he was convinced he’d saved our home town from destruction. – God bless the clowns!
PART FIVE
39
William Knott kept the fact that he was married a secret from his master, and he kept the nature of his service a secret from his wife. He lied to his master that he had separated from his fiancée shortly before the wedding, having admitted to himself that he didn’t love her, and he fibbed to his wife that it was his duty to note down what the prime minister said off the record, and to order these notes by date and topic, because Churchill intended to use them for his memoirs one day. He told her the reason he almost never had any time for her now was that his master was almost always saying things off the record.
To my father, he was honest. Knott’s first letter repeated the grandiloquent confession he’d made to him – a complete stranger – during their conversation in Aachen: “For thirty-five years, I have been lying: that is my story, and it is my contribution to the history of the twentieth century.” He initiated the correspondence in order to finally set things straight. It was William Knott who made the suggestion; my father would have been too shy. He was content with having lunched with the “very private private secretary to a very prime prime minister”, and then taken a stroll with him in the Westpark and asked him a few questions, on exclusively political and historical themes – my father had no interest in psychological matters.
“For thirty-five years, I have been lying,” William Knott burst out during this walk. (Later, he recalled that the mechanical, colourless way my father spoke – written English translated into sound – made it easier to confide in him, as if he were confiding in the anonymous air. I should like to add: my father also had an expressionless face, with a suspicious similarity to Buster Keaton’s physiognomy; suspicious because very few people who knew Keaton believed that that was just the way nature had made him. They always felt for some inexplicable reason that they were having their leg pulled.)
In his very first letter, Knott granted my father a glimpse into “the innermost chamber of my heart” – “The lie has become a second, or rather a first, existence for me. I live like an immigrant who has learned to speak another language and has forgotten his own. I think in this foreign language, I even dream in it. I lie when I don’t need to. When I’m travelling, I telephone my wife, and without being asked I mention that I am wearing the blue suit, when I can see the trouser legs and sleeves of the beige one in front of me. I say I’ve been to dinner when I’ve been out for a walk. I say I went to the cinema when I spent the whole evening sitting on a bench by the lake, feeding the swans. Even when I am telling the truth, I speak with the accent of the lie.”
My father wanted to be close to someone who for a time had been close to the man he revered. William Knott wanted to be close to someone who could help him get away from this same man. The things William Knott told my father in all those long letters about his time with Winston Churchill – most of which my father had no desire to know – were supposed to unspool the thread that would lead him back into his own life.
William Knott was born on 22 May 1911, in Lambeth, behind the knee of the Thames. His father held a senior position in City Hall, and his mother taught in a primary school and gave piano lessons. William studied physics, though he gave up his degree when he was offered a position as an engineer in the newly-created television department of the BBC. After England declared war on Germany – two days after the German Wehrmacht’s assault on Poland – Churchill gave an address on television. The prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had brought him into the cabinet: the long spell in the wilderness was over, and Winston returned to the office of First Lord of the Admiralty. John Reith, the director of the BBC, decided that people out there should hear Winston and see Winston – Winston Churchill, not Neville Chamberlain. The new old head of the navy had never spoken on television before. The camera made him nervous, as did the make-up he had to wear, the lights, the people, the fuss, everyone treating him like the Messiah – nobody was interested in what any other politician had to say about England becoming embroiled in another war, they wanted Winston, Winston, Winston, only he understood what it meant to wage a war – all of this made him nervous. That day of all days he had dropped his denture on the tiles of the bathroom floor, bending it so much that it now fitted badly and made him hiss more than usual when he spoke. This made him particularly nervous. Somebody should call a dentist, he said, get him to come immediately and bend the thing back into shape, the morale of the British people was at stake here. He saw a young man in the crew shake his head. He pointed at him and asked him rather abruptly why he was shaking his head. The young man came over, bent down and whispered in his ear that he mustn’t change a thing – under no circumstances should he change anything. That was exactly how the future prime minister of a country at war should speak to the people: hissing like a dangerous snake. The future prime minister? That’s right, the future prime minister. So he spoke with a hiss. There wasn’t a single member of the crew who didn’t feel a shudder run down their spine. That young man, the BBC engineer – he was somebody the commander wanted at his side. He lured him away from the BBC. Which is to say: he requisitioned him. The next day William Knott embarked upon his highly remarkable service with Winston Churchill. A few months later, on 10 May 1940, Churchill was elected prime minister. He formed a National Government and took charge of the Ministry of Defence, which was now a war ministry. That same day, Germany began its Western offensives, with attacks on Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland.
William Knott, who had just turned twenty-nine, was Churchill’s private private secretary. He was introduced as such, and that was how he introduced himself as well. His salary – he was now earning less than he had done at the BBC – was paid from his employer’s own pocket.
The private private secretary had no correspondence to answer and no appointment diary to keep. He didn’t have to take phone calls, and his presence was not always required at the prime minister’s meetings. If anyone asked him exactly what he did, he was to say: “Everything”. He should then take a much more aggressive tone and ask: “And you? Who are you to ask such a question? What’s your interest in the matter? Who put you up to this? I shall have to report you.” And he should take this approach with everyone, no exceptions: self-confident, arrogant, looking down his nose at them. Not with Clementine, obviously. But he could do it with Randolph. Diana and Mary were smart enough not to ask any questions.
Churchill hid nothing from him. “You are to look after me,” he said, as he showed him the little room that had been cleared out for him at 10 Downing Street (he also had a room at Chequers, the prime minister’s traditional country seat, and at Chartwell). “Neither I nor England can afford to have me fall prey to the black dog.” And he gave him the lowdown on this animal. “If, in spite of your efforts, I should still find an opportunity to shoot myself, you will take the gun, wipe off my finger prints and claim you are a murderer hired by Hitler. At least I will still be of some use as a martyr. That sort of thing carries some weight in war. Nothing motivates and mobilises people like a martyr. Not forever, admittedly. Not even for very long. But hopefully long enough to find a successor. They will probably execute you. That comes with the job. So look after me well. You’re looking after yourself at the same time. A lot depends on you. If people learn that Winston Churchill has taken his own life, then nothing will stand in Hitler’s way. It will be the end of England. It will be the end of civilisation.”
That was exactly what Churchill had said, wrote Knott in his first letter to my father. In the beginning, the prime minister found an hour every day to talk to him.
“The two of us,”
the boss said, “are joined by a single bond: the truth. You are the only person to whom I will tell the truth and nothing but the truth. And you must do the same with me. Can I rely on that?”
“You can rely on that,” replied his very private private secretary.
“And everything we say to each other between these four walls: lie about it, to everyone. Can I rely on that?”
“You can rely on that.”
40
Alcohol was the director of Churchill’s life. “A director, though, not a dictator,” he punned. “The people who mix those two up are our enemies.” William Knott suggested structuring his drinking. He didn’t mean that the prime minister should drink less; it was just a matter of keeping an overview of when he would drink and when he wouldn’t, during this exceptional period. Every morning after breakfast – which master and servant always took separately – Knott would hand him half a sheet of writing paper on which he had entered the drinking times for that day. Churchill never demanded more time – or less, of course.
There was an ugly argument over the issue of alcohol with Churchill’s new physician, Lord Moran. “He was shorter than me by a head, and still he managed to look down on me.” His task was similar to William Knott’s: to be there for the prime minister, exclusively and at all times. Some cabinet members were so convinced Winston was indispensable that they believed his health had to be monitored constantly, as Lord Moran writes in his memoirs. He knew precisely what they were “concerned” about; he himself found the quantities of alcohol consumed by the prime minister (the PM, as he calls him throughout the book) more than a trifle concerning. During a thorough physical examination – in the presence of William Knott, he had insisted on that – Churchill responded to the question of exactly how much he drank with: “A bottle of champagne in the morning, and one in the evening. Whisky, watered down during the day and straight in the evening – one or two bottles. And of course wine with dinner, and brandy after.” And, naked as he was, he turned to his secretary. “Is that right, Willnot, or am I a bottle short?” While the PM got dressed behind the folding screen, the doctor took the secretary to one side, rather too roughly, and asked him – or as Knott put it, ordered him – to visit him at his practice. He noted down the address and an appointment on a prescription sheet and tucked it into Knott’s coat pocket.
“Lord Moran was impertinent because he was envious,” writes Knott. “He didn’t even offer me a seat when I arrived at his practice. He accused me of currying favour with the PM.” It was well known, he said, that during his long period of absence from politics, Churchill had developed a soft spot for hard-drinking members of the lower classes. Because they couldn’t tell the difference between happiness and unhappiness, and could therefore be tormented by neither the one nor the other. All of London, said Lord Moran, knew that “on certain nights” the great descendant of Marlborough went about with draymen and other riffraff. There had to be an end to it. England was at war! Knott replied: firstly, most draymen were not riffraff; his parents’ next-door neighbour Benjamin Winkler was a drayman and a respectable fellow through and through, a family man and a philosopher who could most certainly tell the difference between happiness and unhappiness; and secondly, as for himself, he never touched a drop. He had drunk less in his whole life than “my boss” did in a single day; and in any case, “my boss” was old enough to decide what and how much he drank, and as long as he didn’t drink all day without a break, it hurt neither him nor England. After all, “my boss” had reached the age of sixty-six and was still in the best of health.
“Oh yes?” said Lord Moran. “And how do you know that? Are you a doctor? A colleague of mine, are you? Where did you study? What’s your specialism?”
William Knott looked him straight in the eye from under half-closed lids and said: “And you? Who are you to ask me such questions? What’s your interest in the matter? Who put you up to this? I shall have to report you.”
At which Lord Moran turned a deathly white.
A little while later – Churchill was at a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff Committee and William Knott was waiting outside the door in an armchair (which a House of Commons attendant had carried down the long corridor on the PM’s orders) – Knott suddenly found himself surrounded by five men in top hats and tails, who smiled at him, and even lowered their heads, though it was admittedly only the suggestion of a bow. They stood in front of him like a black wall, fanning out their coats so he couldn’t be seen by passersby. First, they apologised for the doctor’s behaviour. Lord Moran really hadn’t known what good work he was doing, they said. He nodded. Went to get up. They took a step closer and leant over him. He had no need to be afraid of them, they said. He wasn’t afraid of anybody, he said. Well, that wasn’t very clever of him, they said: the whole world was afraid of Adolf Hitler, for instance; only stupid people weren’t afraid of anyone. Very well then, he was afraid of Hitler too. A man who was working for the good of the country should be afraid, they said. That was just some friendly advice, they said. Did he remember a particular turn of phrase that Lord Moran had used in connection with the PM and his lifestyle – “certain nights”? Mhm, he did remember that. Did he know what Lord Moran meant by it? No, he didn’t. Could he guess what Lord Moran meant by it? He didn’t answer that.
“Our concern, then, or call it our fear,” said one of the men, whom he judged to be the eldest – and now he no longer sounded friendly – “is that you, Mr Knott, are supporting the PM in his dark drive, or whatever one calls this unpleasant folly dreamed up by some Austrian clever-clogs with too much time on his hands – that you are even urging him on in this direction. What do you think England is? A debating society? A whimsical tea party? A backwater full of old codgers? A racecourse? Why do you think William the Conqueror was called William the Bastard? We know why. Because he was a bastard. When someone comes to us with morality and religion, we found a new church and smash the old one into smithereens. Why do you think more blood flows in Shakespeare’s plays than runs in the veins of the whole audience? Because the English delight in chopping off heads, cutting throats, putting out eyes, stabbing the women and children of our enemies, poisoning brothers and nephews and locking up other relatives and letting them rot. If someone stands in our way, we don’t just kill him – no, we destroy everything around him, as far as his eye has seen. We’re not playing Dr Jekyll against Mr Hyde here, Mr Knott, we’re playing United Kingdom against German Reich. Winston Churchill is our most senior soldier. We won’t tolerate somebody putting a bee in his bonnet. Hitler is right: our PM has no soul. There’s nothing there to be stimulated on certain nights. Quit your service! You have no master in this house. No one needs you here. We could drive over you without even noticing!”
He got up without a word, William Knott writes, pushed past the men and went to stand on the other side of the door. Remarkably, that seemed to confuse them. They looked at each other, tutted and hurried off. Parliamentary ravens.
That evening he reported the incident to his boss. Churchill clapped him on the shoulder and laughed. “Excellent strategy!” he cried. “Don’t debate. Change where you’re standing, but not your standpoint!”
In truth, the ravens had intimidated him. He could think of nothing to throw back at them. In his agitation he had even forgotten the words Churchill had drummed into him. And the reason he had gone to stand on the other side of the door rather than taking to his heels was simply that his knees had turned to butter.
Churchill knew that there were a few people – particularly in the ranks of his own party – who thought him “inconsistent”, and a few who thought him “unpredictable”, and a few who just thought he was mad. Interestingly, they were the same people who believed they had a great enough hold on the state to push him forward as a figurehead, beloved of the people, while they pulled the strings behind the scenes – for the good of England, naturally. To remove any doubt about who had the final word from now on, he issued the following decree:
There must be total clarity in this matter: all instructions issued by me will be in written form, or will be immediately confirmed in writing, and I shall take no responsibility for matters relating to national defence upon which I have made decisions, if these decisions are not set down in writing.
He added a hand-written note:
This also applies above all to staffing decisions relating to my person. That is to say: those employed for my protection, drivers, cooks and secretaries.
The prime minister greatly reduced his alcohol consumption. He discussed this with William Knott, displaying the same seriousness with which he had listened and responded to his Chiefs of Staff an hour before, as they gave him their report on the situation in France. The drinking diary sheets from this period show that his breakfast champagne was limited to a single glass. He gave up brandy after dinner entirely, and doubled the amount of water in his whisky during the day, effectively halving the quantity he consumed. In his letters to my father, William Knott emphasised that this had nothing to do with repentance or resolution; it was because of an increase in work – and even in a desk job, more work entails a greater number of hand movements, leaving the prime minister fewer opportunities to reach for a glass to drink from, and a bottle to top up his glass; his mouth, too, was significantly more occupied with speaking than it used to be. (“Which,” adds William Knott, “those close to the prime minister assured me was hardly possible, but which was in fact the case, as they were forced to admit after spending a morning in his presence.”) Even though his days were longer, his alcohol consumption was lower. The prime minister slept less than before he was elected. But he slept more deeply. And he didn’t dream. He “had no need for cheering dreams,” he said (and wrote in The Second World War), “facts are better than dreams”.
Two Gentlemen on the Beach Page 18