Winston’s War

Wilson and Ball glanced at each other uneasily. ‘Right only on the day, perhaps. Not in the overall context,’ Wilson mused. ‘He had to go. Duffie is a man who lives his life on the very edge of disaster. Not a man of sound judgement, Geoffrey – why, just look at his women. Pulls them off the street. Some of them are foreign, with completely inappropriate contacts … I sometimes wonder whether his rather lurid liaisons haven’t weakened his mind.’

‘And The Times of all newspapers can’t go peddling Jew propaganda, Geoffrey,’ Ball added. ‘Heavens, it’s an organ of propriety and eminence. Of the Establishment, not the revolution. We all recognize your newspaper’s special position – just as we recognize your own personal contribution to it.’ Ah, the final twist. All three of them were acutely aware that Dawson was the only man in the room who hadn’t yet been handed his knighthood. It was occasionally the subject of uneasy banter between them, an honour pledged but a promise yet to be delivered. And while he waited, he would behave.

‘That’s why I needed your guiding hand. Is the Duff Cooper story so damned important? Worth the aggravation I’ll get if I play the heavy-handed censor and rewrite the damned copy?’

The expressions of the other two men eased. Ball’s feet swung up onto the desk. The eminent servants of the people smiled at their guest, and expressed their mind as one.

‘Oh, yes, Sir Geoffrey. Please!’

The editor of The Times did as he was told. Destroyed the copy as though he were laying siege to a mediaeval fortress. Then he reconstructed it. ‘Emotional gourmets had expected a tasty morsel in Mr Duff Cooper’s explanation of his resignation,’ he wrote, ‘but it proved to be rather unappetising. Speaking without a note, the former First Lord fired anti-aircraft guns rather than turret broadsides. The speech was cheered by the Opposition, but Mr Chamberlain disregarded it for the moment with only a pleasant word of respect.’

The copy still went out under the name of Anthony Winn, the paper’s parliamentary correspondent. The following morning he resigned. He would be one of the first to be killed on active service in the war that was to follow.

And so the House of Commons gathered to debate the Munich agreement. The arguments continued for four days – far longer than the resistance shown by Chamberlain at Munich. It was a debate awash with nobility and bitterness, defiance and servility, with servility by far the larger portion – although, of course, at Westminster it is never known as that, being dressed up in the corridors and tea-rooms under the guise of loyalty and team spirit. Play the game, old fellow! Chamberlain demanded loyalty and dominated his party – those men of mediocrity who gathered around him knew he had the offices of state at his disposal, along with the substantial salaries and residences those offices commanded. Duffie had thrown away his London home and five thousand pounds a year – a small fortune in an era when those who enlisted to die for their country still did so for ‘the King’s shilling’ plus a couple of coppers more a day. Anyway, an election was due at some point, perhaps soon, and disloyalty to the Great and Popular Leader was certain to be repaid in kind. Appeasement was inevitable, it was argued, and nowhere more vociferously than in the Smoking Room of the House of Commons, where MPs throughout the ages had gathered in pursuit of alcohol and the secret of everlasting electoral life.

‘What’s your poison, Ian? Gin? Tonic? Slice of the Sudetenland?’

‘Make it a whisky, Dickie, would you?’

‘Large whisky coming up.’

A pause for alcohol.

‘You ever been to Czechoslovakia, Ian?’

‘Not even sure I could find it on a map. Faraway places, and all that.’

‘What did Neville say the other night after he came back from Munich?’ Dickie imitated a tight, nasal accent. ‘“And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”’

‘Somebody’s bed, at least. Whose was it last week, Dickie?’

‘I adhere to a strict rule. In the six months before any election I deny myself the pleasure of sleeping with the wife of anyone with a vote in my constituency. Which includes my own wife, of course. Sort of self-discipline. Like training for a long-distance run.’

‘For God’s sake, don’t tell Central Office. It might become compulsory.’

‘It’s good politics. I work on the basis that I shall always get the women’s vote – so long as their husbands don’t find out.’

‘Better than leaving it dangling on the old barbed wire.’

‘Can’t stand all this bloody war-mongering, Ian. Any fool can go to war.’

‘Particularly an old fool like Winston.’

‘Been at it half his adult life. Look where it’s got him.’

Slightly more softly – ‘And if war is to be the question, how the hell can Bore-Belisha be the answer?’

Their attention was drawn across the cracked leather of the Smoking Room to where the portly and dark-featured figure of the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha (or Bore-Belisha or Horab-Elisha, according to taste), was ordering a round of drinks.

‘Do they make kosher whisky, Ian?’

‘Judging by the amount he knocks back it’s a racing certainty.’

‘Fancies himself as a future Leader, you know.’

‘Elisha? Really? Not for me. Always thought it might be helpful if we found a Christian to lead us on the next Crusade.’

‘Precisely.’

‘He’s getting even fatter, you know. Strange for a man who proclaims his devotion to nothing but the public good.’

‘A genetic disposition to –’

‘Corpulence.’

‘I was thinking indulgence.’

‘Christ. Gas masks to the ready. Here comes St Harold.’

Harold Macmillan, the forty-four-year-old Conservative Member for Stockton, drifted in their direction. He was not often popular with his colleagues. Not only did he have a conscience, he would insist on sharing it.

‘Evening, Harold. Dickie here’s been telling us that he’s a reformed character. He’s given up sleeping with his constituents’ wives. Saving it all for the party in the run-up to an election. Suppose it means he’s going to be sleeping with our wives instead.’

Macmillan drifted by as silently as a wraith.

‘My God, you can be a brutal bugger at times, Ian.’

‘What the hell did I do?’

‘Don’t you know? Macmillan’s wife? And Bob Boothby, our esteemed colleague for East Aberdeenshire? Apparently he’s been chasing her furry friend for years – catching it, too. Open secret. Supposed to have fathered Harold’s youngest daughter.’

‘What? Cuckolded by one of his own colleagues? I’ve heard of keeping it in the family, but that one takes the biscuit. Why doesn’t he …?’

‘Divorce? Out of the question. Tied to her by the rope of old ambition. Harold’s reputation for sainthood would never stand a scandal.’

‘Ridiculous man. Won’t fight for his wife yet wants the rest of us to go to war over Czechoslovakia.’

‘He’ll never come to anything.’

Another drink. ‘Neville has got this one right, hasn’t he, Dickie?’

A pause. ‘He knows more about it than anyone else in the country. Got to trust him, I suppose.’

‘Young Adolf’s not all bad, you know, knocking heads together in Europe. A good thing, probably. Needed a bit of sorting out, if you ask me. Get them all into line, sort of thing.’

‘A united Europe?’

‘Going to be good for all of us in the long run. Look to the future, I say.’

‘We had to come to terms. It was inevitable.’

‘Inevitable. Yes. Bloody well put.’

‘What was Winston calling it in the Lobby? “A peace which passeth all understanding …” What d’you think he meant by that?’

‘I have long since ceased either to know or to care. Never been a party man, has Winston.’

‘Always takes matters too far.’

‘Anyway, soon over and out of this place. Any plans for the weekend?’

‘A little cubbing, we thought. Give the hounds a good run. And you?’

‘The wife’s still in France. So I thought – a touch of canvassing.’

‘Anyone in particular?’

‘There’s an English wife of an excessively busy foreign banker who’s asked me for a few lessons in patriotism.’

‘The nobility of sacrifice. For the cause.’

‘But not in my own constituency. You know my rules.’

‘Thank the Lord, Dickie. Everything back in its place.’

THREE

It was business as normal at the residence of the American Ambassador in Princes Gate. Not, of course, that business in the household of Joseph P. Kennedy resembled anything that in diplomatic circles would customarily be described as normal, but Kennedy was barely a diplomat. A man who had only just finished celebrating his fiftieth birthday, he was more at home in the clapboard tenements of Boston’s tough East Side where he was born than this gracious stucco-fronted mansion overlooking London’s Hyde Park, but although Kennedy was intensely protective of his Irish-American roots, they were never going to tie him down.

Kennedy was a man of passion and action, if, at times, remarkably little judgement. His approach to diplomacy in the stuffy Court of St James’s was often very similar to his approach to sex – he didn’t bother with the niceties of foreplay. He was a man always impatient, pushing and grasping. During an earlier life as a movie tycoon he had bedded Gloria Swanson, the most famous sex symbol in the world during the 1920s. She retained a vivid recollection of their encounter. Afterwards she told friends that Kennedy had appeared at her door and simply stared for a while, before letting forth a moan and throwing himself upon her. He was characteristically direct. She compared him to a roped horse, rough, arduous – and ultimately inadequate. ‘After a hasty climax, he lay beside me, stroking my hair,’ she recalled. ‘Apart from his guilty, passionate mutterings, he had still said nothing coherent.’

It was an approach the British Foreign Office would have recognized. Yet for all his lack of orthodoxy he had taken London by storm since his arrival earlier in the year. In a world of quiet fears and ever-lengthening shadows, an old world coming to its long drawn-out end, his brashness was a joy and his lack of respect for social cobwebs a source of endless entertainment. He called the Queen ‘a cute trick’ and dashed across the floor to dance with her, scattering courtiers and convention in his wake. His language was borrowed from the Boston stevedores of his youth. He had a natural flair for publicity but perhaps the strongest basis of his appeal was his nine children – ‘my nine hostages to fortune’, as he called them, ranging in age from Joe Junior and Jack in their twenties to the infant Edward. It was like 1917 all over again; the Americans had sent an entire army to the rescue. So the corridors at 9 Princes Gate were turned into a touch-football field, the marbled patio was transformed into a cycle track while the elevator became an integral part of a vast imaginary department store run by young Teddy. And if observers believed Kennedy was using his self-claimed status as ‘the Father of the Nation’ as a platform to challenge for the presidency in 1940, no one seemed to mind – except, perhaps, for President Franklin Roosevelt, who had sent him to London hoping never to hear of him again. It was one of the President’s classic misjudgements.

Yet, four days after the declaration of peace in our time, the residence was unusually quiet. There was no sound of children echoing around the hallways, no clatter of dropped bicycles bouncing off the marble, and even the Ambassador’s dinner guests were restrained. Churchill seemed burdened, while Brendan Bracken, seated next to Kennedy’s niece, appeared uncharacteristically tongue-tied. On the opposite side of the table to Churchill sat the aggressively isolationist correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, who was proving something of a disappointment since his mastery of the arts of aggression appeared to be entirely confined to his pen; he had done nothing more than mumble all evening and disappear into his glass. A Swedish businessman named Svensson was courteous but cautious, preferring to listen and prod rather than to preach himself, almost as if he was a little overawed by the company. Meanwhile the Duke of Gloucester at the far end of the table was on his usual form, anaesthetizing guests on every side. This was not the effect Kennedy required. He enjoyed confrontation, the clash of words and wills. The English were so bad at it, but the Irish of East Boston – ah, they were a different breed entirely.

‘Mr Ambassador, where are the little ones?’ Churchill’s head rose from his plate. Kennedy noticed he had dribbled gravy down his waistcoat, but the politician seemed either not to have noticed or not to care.

‘Sent most of them to Ireland last week. A chance to search for their roots.’

‘Ah.’ A pause. ‘I see.’ So the hostages to fortune had fled. Churchill returned his attentions to his plate, indicating a lack of desire to pursue the line of conversation.

‘You don’t approve, Winston?’

‘What? Of sending the little birds abroad at a time of crisis?’ He considered. ‘For men in public positions there are no easy choices.’

‘But you wouldn’t.’

‘There is a danger of sending out the wrong sort of signal.’

‘You’d keep your kids here, beneath the threat of bombs?’

‘There is another way of looking at it. The presence of our loved ones serves as a constant reminder of what we are fighting for. And perhaps a signal to the aggressor that we are confident of victory.’

‘But we Americans have no intention of fighting. And as for victory …’

‘You doubt our cause?’

‘I doubt your goddamned air defences.’ He attacked his pudding as though he were redrawing frontiers. ‘You know what I hear, Winston? Last week as you were all digging in around London and waiting for the Luftwaffe, you guys had less than a hundred anti-aircraft guns for the entire city.’

Churchill winced, which served only to encourage the other man.

‘Hey, but that’s only the headline. Of those hundred guns, less than half of ’em worked. Had the wrong size ammo, or the batteries were dead. And you know what I found when I chatted to the air-raid guys in the park?’

‘Why bother with conjecture when surely you are going to tell me?’

‘They didn’t have any steel helmets. After all these years of jawing about the bloody war, you think the guys in command might just’ve figured out that the troops needed some steel helmets? Just in case Hitler decided to start dropping things?’

Churchill seemed, like his city, to be all but defenceless. ‘I have long warned about the deficiencies of our ARP,’ was all he could muster.

On the other side of the table Kennedy’s niece whispered in her companion’s ear. ‘What’s ARP?’

The question caused Brendan Bracken to chew his lip, and not for the first time that evening. He was a man of extraordinary features, his vivid red hair cascading down his forehead like lava from an exploding volcano. He had a temperament to match, conducting his outpourings with a wild swinging of his arms. Yet this evening, in the presence of the Ambassador’s niece, he had become unusually subdued. Women – apart from his mother – had never played much of a role in his life, his singular energies having been devoted to making money and climbing the political ladder. And what did women matter in an English Establishment where rumours of homosexuality circulated as freely as the port? Yet Anna Maria Fitzgerald was different. Most other young women he found frivolous and teasing, viewing him either as a potential wealthy match or an object of sexual curiosity, or both, at which point he would hide behind his bottle-end spectacles and invent a new story about himself to suit the situation. But American girls – and Anna in particular – seemed so much more straightforward. He didn’t feel the need to put on an act, but since role-playing had been the habit of his adult life he found it difficult to know what to put in its place. So he grew tongue-tied. Now she was whispering in his ear, smelling fresh, not like a tart, with her fingers brushing the back of his hand.

‘ARP?’ she whispered again.

‘Um, Air-Raid Precautions,’ he explained. ‘You know, ducking bombs.’

‘Horrid!’ Her fingers remained briefly on the back of his hand. ‘I’ve only just arrived in London, to be a sort of assistant to Uncle Joe, and already they’re threatening to destroy it.’

‘I hope you’ll allow me to show you around. I know all the best air-raid shelters.’ It was a clumsy and unintended joke, reflecting his unease, but she laughed it off.

From the end of the table, her uncle finished off his apple pie and slice of American cheese, and decided it was time for the after-dinner entertainment. He had wanted to invite the German Ambassador, Dirksen, but he was engaged elsewhere, so had had to make do with his Spanish Fascist counterpart, the Duke of Alba, instead.

‘Tell me, Duke, some people argue democracy’s finished in Europe. What do you think?’

Instantly Churchill’s head came up. ‘Finished?’ he growled, cutting across the Spaniard.

Kennedy was already in his shirtsleeves; now he slipped off his braces. Time for a scrap. ‘What I mean is, the Brits and the French tried it after the last war, imposing democracy all across Europe, but look around you. It’s been shot to hell – or disappeared completely. Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria – now Czechoslovakia. It never even got started in Russia. And what’s left is so pathetically weak.’

‘Is that the language of the New Diplomacy?’

‘Come on, you’ve been saying yourself you should’ve picked Hitler’s pecker years ago.’

‘Democracy is like a great play. It lasts more than one act. You must be patient, Mr Ambassador.’

‘You mean, like those ARP guys still waiting for their helmets?’

A cheap debating point, or an intended slur? Churchill ignored it.

Kennedy prodded again. ‘But democracy can be a hard mistress, too, you know that, Winston, as well as anyone. And the Germans elected Herr Hitler. You can’t dismiss that fact.’

‘At which point he promptly dispensed with elections.’

‘He’s offered a referendum in the Sudetenland.’

‘Hah! A referendum simply to confirm that which has already been resolved. Thrust upon the poor Czechs. A peculiarly twisted notion of democracy.’

‘But I think you’re forgetting, Winston. British politicians like you and Mr Chamberlain got elected with a few thousand votes. Hitler got elected with millions. Makes Herr Hitler more legit than you, don’t it?’

‘Power is not seized through the ballot box, Mr Ambassador, it is shared. It comes from the people. It is a remarkably infested form of democracy which takes that power in order to enslave its own people.’

‘Aw, come on. You telling me it’s slavery? Slavery don’t get millions of people out on the streets waving banners and torches to give thanks that their country’s no longer starving. German governments used to be chaotic, criminally incompetent. You might have called that democracy, Winston, but to the Germans it was a dung heap. They were dying in the gutter. So Hitler’s replaced the bread lines with armies of workers building autobahns. Where the devil’s the harm in all that?’

‘One day, in a very few years, perhaps in a few months, we shall be confronted with demands that we should become part of a German-dominated Europe. There will be some who will say that would be efficient. Others already say it is … inevitable – a word I do not care for, one that has no place in the dictionaries of a democracy. They argue it will make us all the stronger, that we cannot remain an off-shore satellite of a strong and growing Europe. We shall be invited to surrender a little of our independence and liberty in order that we may enjoy the benefits of this stronger Europe. In a word, we shall be required to submit.’

Churchill was into his stride now. He had pushed his plate away from him, making room on the tablecloth as though preparing to draw out a plan of battle. ‘Soon we shall no longer be ruled from our Parliament but from abroad. Our rights will be restricted. Our economy will be controlled by others. We shall be told what we may produce, and what we may not. Then, a short step thereafter, we shall be told what we may say, and what we may not say. Already there are some who say that we cannot allow the system of government in Berlin to be criticized by ordinary, common English politicians. They claim we are Little Englanders, xenophobic, backward-looking. Already we are censored, sometimes directly by refusing to allow us access to the BBC, at other times indirectly through the influence of the Government’s friends in the press. Every organ of public opinion is being systematically doped or chloroformed into acquiescence and – step by step – we shall be conducted further along our journey until we find, like silent, mournful, abandoned, broken Czechoslovakia, that it is too late! And we can no longer turn back.’

‘Hell, that’s democracy for you. The people want to do a deal with Europe, so that’s what they get,’ Kennedy goaded. ‘You said it yourself, Winston, it’s the people who get to decide. And you saw how they greeted the Prime Minister. The man of the moment. Cheered him all night outside Downing Street.’

‘There was a crowd to cheer him in Munich, too.’

‘Doesn’t that make you think for one moment you may be wrong? There’ll also be a crowd in the House of Commons tomorrow, voting on his policy. You can’t deny he’s gonna win, and win big.’

‘He may win tomorrow. But I shall warn them! And perhaps the day will come when they will remember. Soon we shall discover that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, without firing a single shot in our defence.’ He swept crumbs from the table in front of him like imaginary tank divisions.

‘Winston, you got whipped ’cos you got nothing to fight with. Face up to it, you’re gonna get whipped in any war. That’s why you had to run away.’

Two clenched fists banged down on the table, causing every piece of silver to jump. Churchill’s wine spilled over the rim of his glass. It spread on the cloth like a dark stain crossing the map of Middle Europe. ‘Hitler demanded to feast upon poor Czechoslovakia, and instead of resisting his demands we have been content to serve it to him course by course! At the pistol’s point he demanded one pound. When that was given, the pistol was produced again and he demanded two pounds. Finally, Mr Chamberlain waved his umbrella and consented to offer one pound seventeen shillings and sixpence and to make up the rest in promises of goodwill for the future. My country is shrivelled with shame.’ There were tears in the old man’s eyes. He rose in his seat. ‘I apologize. I am too passionate. But the Ambassador should not have spoken as he did. We have passed an awful milestone in our history, Europe is held at the pistol’s point, and the Western democracies have been found wanting. But this is not the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. The first sip, the foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless we, by a supreme recovery of will and vigour, dash it from the dictator’s hand!’

Silence gripped the entire gathering. It was theatre, of course; and Winston always overplayed his role. A candle guttered, dripping wax onto the table cloth where it piled up like a thousand sorrows. Churchill took several moments to recompose himself.

‘There is much to be done. And so little time.’ His eyes searched around the guests, defiant. ‘At Munich the Government had to choose between war and shame. They chose shame. I tell you, they shall get war, too.’ He nodded curtly in the direction of Kennedy, a gesture trembling on the brink of scorn. ‘Come, Mr Bracken. We must set ourselves to our duties.’

Before he knew what he was doing Bracken, too, was on his feet, muttering apologies to Anna and bidding a hurried farewell to the Ambassador, fuming that once again Churchill had taken him for granted. Dammit, he didn’t want to leave, not right now. Churchill always treated those around him as barely better than altar boys, waiting to serve him. They said that about Winston, that he was like Moses, except being more modest he made do with only one commandment: ‘Thou shall have no other god but me.’