Two Gentlemen on the Beach

by Köhlmeier, Michael; Martin, Ruth;

  41

  The air raids on England began in September. Following a British counter-strike on Berlin, Göring raised the pressure, and from then on, two hundred German bombers thundered over London every night. The city was unprepared. Churchill had taken every opportunity in the preceding years to call for rearmament from the back benches, and had had to put up with being called a warmonger, even by his own people. Now these people were expecting to feel his wrath. “They are expecting to feel my wrath,” he told William Knott. “And they have enough imagination and experience to work out for themselves all the things I might do to them. So I say nothing. Anything more would be a waste.” But of course he didn’t say nothing. He railed against the pitiful efforts of the British night fighters and flak guns. He berated General Pile, the head of Anti-Aircraft Command, as the general sat in front of him, twisting his cap in his hands until the tears began to run down his cheeks. After that, the number of anti-aircraft guns in the capital was doubled within forty-eight hours. The cannonade may have brought down no more than a few enemy planes, but it gave London great satisfaction and fuelled its zeal. German spies reported to Berlin that after some initial confusion, life in the city of eight million had more or less returned to normal – to which Göring and his officers reacted with rage, astonishment and admiration. Hitler threatened: “If they attack our cities, we will raze theirs to the ground!”

  The government buildings around Whitehall were also hit. The ministerial offices and the prime minister’s private rooms were moved to the more solid government buildings on Storey’s Gate. A little room was made available there for William Knott (an application was both made and approved by Churchill). A day bed and a study were also reserved for Frederick Lindemann; he was Churchill’s closest advisor on the development and expansion of the air force, and the prime minister insisted on having him within shouting distance, in case an idea came to him in the middle of the night and he wanted to discuss it.

  Cabinet meetings were held every evening in the basement of the prime minister’s private apartment, often by candlelight, whenever the power failed and the diesel generator had to be repaired once again. Churchill commanded an army of informants, meaning he knew just as much about the work of individual departments as the minsters responsible for them. This led to tensions when one minister or another felt he had been passed over, and it culminated in a heated debate with threats of resignation when the prime minister merged the Home Office and the Ministry for State Security with no prior discussion, and reallocated the jobs there. The day would come, people joked – and they weren’t always joking – when there would be only one ministry, his ministry, and that would be the day the roles of prime minister and king would be merged.

  Every Tuesday, Churchill went to luncheon at Buckingham Palace with George VI, to discuss the latest developments and take care of state business. Several times they had to pick up their plates and glasses and go down to the air raid room, which was still being finished. Churchill came in uniform, which bothered the king at first. Could he carry a submachine gun, Churchill asked. Of course not, the king retorted indignantly. The monarch regarded the sub-machine gun as a vulgar weapon, a weapon of mass destruction, unseemly and impractical in chivalrous fighting. Churchill talked him into taking a lesson at the shooting range. Afterwards, the king raved about “his” Thompson, his voice falsetto with excitement. The next time he visited, Churchill brought a carbine, a pistol and an American hunting knife with him. And a year later, when the significantly lighter Sten Gun was developed, a British submachine gun with a muzzle velocity three times higher than the American version, the first one off the production line went to the king, and the second to his prime minister.

  William Knott writes that he had the impression Churchill had stopped sleeping. He himself never slept for more than four hours on Blitz nights, but when he got up at five in the morning and tiptoed across the corridor to the improvised bathroom, he would hear the prime minister droning a song through his cigar. The door to his study was open, so he could give his orders to whomever he wanted at any time. On one of the nights when the bombing was heaviest, the boss woke Knott and Professor Lindemann, and the three of them went up to the roof and watched the spectacle from beside the dome. It looked like the end of the world. As though the city was screaming, he said, that’s what it was like. There was no emotion on Professor Lindemann’s face, but Churchill cheered. Wearing his uniform jacket over his pyjamas, his officer’s cap on his head, he stood at the parapet, and at every hit he cried out: “Tenfold in return! Tenfold in return!” The majority of Pall Mall was on fire. Fires were blazing in St James’s Street and Picadilly. On the other side of the Thames they could see a chain of conflagrations. Churchill, his wife, Professor Lindemann and William Knott spent the nights that followed in the basement. Against Churchill’s will. “England is our ship, and I am its captain,” he said. Lindemann said that was sentimental nonsense, England didn’t need dead heroes; it needed living strategists to wreak revenge.

  The Germans lacked the resources to bomb a city like London to smithereens. But they had enough resources to wound and destroy souls. In addition to the conventional explosive bombs, the planes dropped delayed-action bombs. They burrowed into the earth, vanished into houses and back gardens, and had to be found, dug out and defused – if they could be defused before they exploded. It was painstaking, enervating, dangerous, demoralising. The uncertainty wore people down, drove them mad. Amid the general noise of an air raid, nobody dared say if and where a “silent” bomb had fallen. They could be anywhere. There was a rumour they were armed with nails. There was a rumour they were brightly painted to attract children. When lives were lost, people blamed the state’s civil defence. That bred discord. It was intended to breed discord. This was psychological warfare. Churchill quickly drafted a detailed organisational plan to deal with this new threat: in every city, town and district, he ordered special companies of volunteers to be set up, who would search for ticking bombs, dig them out and defuse them. Young men and young women were given a crash course – in a discipline that even the instructors didn’t understand. “Volunteers,” Churchill writes laconically in his memoirs, “pressed forward for the deadly game”. England had its first martyrs. People said: “If only we’d listened to Winston earlier!”

  Churchill appointed Herbert Morrison, an experienced Labour politician who had once been a fierce opponent of his, as Minister of Supply and chief fire officer for London, demanding nothing less of him than a reduction of deaths and injuries by at least half. Not twenty hours later, he summoned him to the “war office” (his bedroom) in the middle of the night to hear his response. They were working on it. That wasn’t good enough. So the prime minister laid out his own plan: an air raid shelter, simple and quick to manufacture, easy to transport, and cheap. He had even prepared a drawing, to scale, in minute detail. When? It was a thing to be mass-produced, a large steel box with strong side walls made of wire mesh, shaped rather like a kitchen table, and “capable of bearing the weight of the rubble from a small house.” The objects should be placed in cellars, in an easily accessible spot. There would be room for five to six adults or eight to nine children in each.

  “But those are cages,” said Morrison. “You want to put our people in cages?”

  “Like wild animals, yes,” said the prime minister. “The Germans have made wild animals of us. Shut a wild animal in a cage, and it gets even wilder. What do you have against Britons becoming beasts in such times as these? The state will of course cover the cost of production. Prepare a motion for it! Right now! You can sit over there at the typewriter. I’ll approve the motion and sign it. The people can keep the cages. After the war they can do what they like with them. I’m already curious to see what they come up with.”

  To put a halt to his chief fire officer’s head-shaking, Churchill suggested calling the cages Morrison Shelters. “The king will give you an honour for that.” Which he duly did.

  O
n 14 November 1940, Göring gave the order for Operation Moonlight Sonata. That night, 568 people died in the city of Coventry, and more than four thousand houses were destroyed. Goebbels spoke of “coventrification”, meaning the destruction of cities from the air. Marshall Arthur Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command from 1942, would later speak of “hamburgisation” following the obliteration of Hamburg in a fire storm. Cologne, Kassel, Dortmund, Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Pforzheim, Dresden – it’s a long list – were hamburgised. By the end of the war, the majority of German cities were eighty or ninety per cent destroyed, and some had been flattened completely – Lindemann’s method.

  42

  At that time, William Knott writes, Churchill was living like three people, who divided up the day between them. And he tried to fill every last bit of breathing room in the corset of his day with meaningful activity – and by meaningful, as he frequently lectured his very private secretary, he didn’t mean politics, and certainly not the war, but “occupying oneself with beauty”. When he had dinner with the Canadian foreign minister at the Turkish Pera Palas Hotel, newly built before the war (in December it was hit by an SC 2000 bomb, collapsed, and was never rebuilt), he was quite taken with the little fountains in the toilets, which were installed above the sinks in place of taps and were operated by pressing a button. The point of dispensing water in this manner, he concluded, could only be that when one drank from the tap, one wouldn’t come into contact with the germs of the previous user. The meeting with the Canadian was his eighth appointment that day, and he had another three ahead of him, one of which was with the general manager of the Rolls Royce factories. Still, he couldn’t resist: he hurried back to the dining room, fetched a notebook and pencil from his pocket, asked his guest to excuse him for another five minutes, went back to the toilets and drew the tap – that would be the very thing for the bathroom of the guesthouse at Chartwell, when the house was extended after the war. As he organised the defence of English cities, planned the destruction of Germany, pressed the American president with gentle but constant exhortations to enter the war, as he took care of the usual state business, which was the same in wartime as it was in peacetime, as he travelled to the launches of new warships and new aeroplanes; in short, as he did the work of captaining the ship of England, he was also planning and drawing and building cardboard models of this guesthouse. On top of this, he developed a system for reorganising his library: hole-punched index cards, hanging on several thin metal rods, which could be pushed back or pulled out to find key words – the primitive ancestor of the search engine.

  Once, after a long cabinet meeting, he called William Knott into his office. He told the secretary he didn’t want to be disturbed for the next hour. Even if Herr Hitler himself came knocking to offer Germany’s surrender, he would have to wait. He shut the door and told William Knott to take a seat opposite him. That was their very private seating arrangement: knee to knee. Churchill’s alternative to Freud’s couch.

  The boss seemed unusually serious, writes William Knott. Churchill began: “When one man dies, the whole world dies.

  Do you know that saying?”

  He didn’t know that saying.

  “It’s what the Jews say. What do you think of it, Willnot?”

  He replied that he couldn’t fault it.

  “It’s a good saying,” Churchill went on. “We must never stop thinking that way, Willnot. Especially in wartime.” He pulled out his notepad from the inside pocket of his coat. “We must never stop thinking that way,” he repeated. “That was something which became clear to me during this incredibly dull meeting just now. We talk and talk and talk. Even in the midst of war, Halifax can’t keep that note of sarcasm out of his voice – every word he utters sounds like it should have “so-called” in front of it – the so-called agreement, the so-called treaty, the so-called war. Clement, precise and succinct as ever. And then Kingsley Wood starts up, in his slow, deliberate manner, and after four words I know what the seventeenth word is going to be, and it makes me think, I hope the bomb that’s going to fall on our heads would hurry up and fall before Mr Wood has finished saying his piece – everyone will have forgotten what he was talking about by the time he gets to the point, to the so-called point, as Halifax would say. But if that bomb does hit us, I thought, then all these worlds will be obliterated. Do you see, Willnot, everyone has said something, something unimportant or important. We tend to think that in the face of death, everything is unimportant. But that’s not true. These last words, however banal and boring they may be, suddenly contain everything. Everything. Life. Life, plain and simple. They were talking, and now they’re lying dead. They formed words, and these were their last words, and they didn’t know it. Imagine, Willnot, if a poet knew how to use words as if they were being spoken for the last time. Wouldn’t that be the very definition of poetry? To speak as if it were the last time! Each word a treasure from a lost world. Proof that there was life here, once. That’s exactly what poetry is. If anyone tries to give you another definition, box his ears! I couldn’t help it, I wrote down what these gentlemen were saying. And I set it out as a poem in free verse.”

  In October Sarah returned from the States, alone. Her husband, Vic Oliver, had too good a job in Hollywood to accompany her, so a “certain newspaper” reported. It was midday, the sun shone above the city, and people were waiting for the evening air raids, using the peace and quiet and the last warm rays to go outside and shop, or to take a stroll, or just to sit in the sun. Churchill beckoned William Knott over – he had seen him in the hallway of 10 Downing Street – and asked him to go up to the roof with him: he needed to talk. The boss’s face was moist and bluish white. Up on the roof he showed him the article. The impertinent hacks at this particular paper had not only placed “too good a job” in inverted commas, but also “her husband”. The editor, Harold Moore, was a personal enemy of Churchill’s, a Nazi sympathiser who had congratulated Hitler the year before on his invasion of Czechoslovakia. The final sentence of the article said that Victor Israel (sic!) Oliver most likely wanted to get shot of “our” prime minister’s daughter, who was known to be as stubborn as a mule; and to quote the article: “The way he is going about it is shabby, of course, as is only to be expected from his kind; on the other hand, it is perfectly understandable.”

  “It’s impossible for her to divorce him now,” said Churchill. “She wanted to divorce him, and now she can’t.”

  The boss told him, William Knott writes, that for the past year he had been paying a detective to follow Sarah’s husband in Hollywood, hoping to uncover something that could be used against him in a divorce. And he did uncover something. He uncovered more than enough. But that was all worthless now.

  William Knott said nothing.

  “You think it was dishonourable of me to spy on my son-in-law?”

  Again, William Knott said nothing.

  “I knew she would be unhappy with him. I knew it. Just as I knew there would be war between Britain and Germany. There was war. She was unhappy. If you had a daughter, Willnot, wouldn’t you do something dishonourable to free her from her unhappiness?”

  And this time he replied: “Yes, I would.”

  “A rotten, dirty, dishonourable thing?”

  “The rottenest, dirtiest, most dishonourable thing.”

  The prime minister reached up to his head and pulled it down to his and pressed it to him. For a long time.

  They sat down on the wooden bench that Ed Thomas, the valet, had dragged up to the roof weeks earlier so that the prime minister and his guests could sit in comfort and watch the air raids. The street below teemed with people, some on bicycles, some pulling handcarts, women with prams, the milkman with his horse and cart. Couples arm-in-arm. Hurrying loners. Strolling idlers. Music was coming from somewhere, a brass band. A policeman’s whistle silenced the birds, but only for a little while; a chorus of sparrows soon began twittering again.

  “I haven’t told you my whole life story yet, Willnot,�
�� said Churchill. “And we probably won’t have time for that, now. But I’ve told you more than anyone else. I mean, beyond the things that are general knowledge round here. And let me add that the roof is out of bounds to everyone from now on. You and I, Willnot, are the exceptions. Just you and I. If I can’t find you, I have to know that you’ll be up here. Can I ask that of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well then.”

  “May I ask something of you, Sir?” he said to the prime minister.

  “Please would you stop calling me Willnot? My name is William Knott.”

  43

  On one of those nights when the sirens were droning and the bombs were detonating – William Knott writes – he couldn’t sleep.

  He went up to the roof and found the boss there, sitting in front of his easel in the dark, painting. Without whisky! It was so dark that he couldn’t possibly have been able to tell the colours apart. Now and then a flash would light up the sky, but all it did was blind them. Churchill told him to sit down and watch him. He dipped a brush in the paint without looking, and applied it to the canvas in fast, sweeping strokes. Did he know Kandinsky’s “Untitled Watercolour”? he asked. It was said to be the first abstract picture in the history of art. But he didn’t believe that. He didn’t believe Kandinsky meant to paint an abstract picture. Nobody means to do such a thing. Why would they. His theory was that Kandinsky had had no light, just as he had no light now. Of course Kandinsky had wanted to paint something figurative. But he couldn’t see anything. And so what came out, came out, namely the “Untitled Watercolour”. Theory was applied to things after the fact. Always. The same in art as it was in politics. And it was just the same in war. In battle, inexplicable chance events made the difference between victory and defeat. First people said history was God’s plan; then they said history was created by people. And what if neither of these were true? The theologians’ answers had always seemed absurd to him, if only because of the words in which they were dressed – spirit instead of bread, providence instead of the invention of winter clothing. Even as a child he had been marked out by a failure to be beguiled by shadow puppetry.