Winston’s War

‘Pity you have to run off so soon, Winston,’ Kennedy called after the retreating figures, twisting their pain. ‘Say hi to Neville for me. And come again. Come for Thanksgiving. That’s when we normally stuff turkeys.’

‘And don’t forget the air-raid shelters,’ Anna cried out, innocently unaware.

‘Hah! Or your steel helmets. If you can find any …’

Burgess knew it was going to be one of those days when he got drunk, very early, and did something completely appalling. Sometimes he couldn’t help it, he found himself driven, in much the same way that his heart was forced to beat and his lungs to inflate. A friend had once called it a form of madness but it was simply that he viewed the world with different eyes – eyes that were more open and saw more than mere convention and correctness required – which at this moment wasn’t difficult, since convention required the world to be more unseeing and unknowing than ever.

The point had been made most forcefully to him by the Controller of the BBC Radio Talks Department earlier that morning. Burgess had suspected there would be trouble, had even taken the precaution of arriving at Broadcasting House on time and so removing that bone of contention, but punctuality was never going to drain the ocean of irritation that was waiting for him, and neither was argument.

The issue had been Churchill. Burgess had argued quietly, then with growing force, that the inclusion of the elder statesman would add depth and popular appeal to the programme he was preparing on the security problems of the Mediterranean. Admittedly, it wasn’t the most grabbing of topics, but all the more reason to include Churchill. The Controller had simply said no, and returned to his copy of The Times, leaving Burgess standing in front of his desk like an errant schoolboy. He’d bitten his fingernail and stood his ground.

‘Why? Why – no?’

‘Executive decision, old chap,’ the Controller had responded, affecting boredom.

‘But help me. If my suggestion that Churchill be included is an embarrassment, tell me why, so I can understand and make sure I don’t make the same mistake again.’

The Controller had rustled his newspaper in irritation, but offered no response.

‘Is it because he’s an expert in foreign affairs?’

No reply.

‘Or perhaps that he’s one of the best-known historians of our age?’

The rustling grew more impatient.

‘I know. It’s because he has a lousy speaking voice.’

Nothing.

‘Or are you too pig-ignorant or simply too prejudiced to be able to put an explanation into words?’

‘Damn you, Burgess!’

‘Oh, I probably shall be, but I’ll not be the only one. Because you know what I’m thinking? That the reason you can’t tell me why Churchill has been banned is because you don’t know – or don’t want to know. Those that told you didn’t have the courtesy to trust you with an explanation. You’ve just been told to vaseline your arse and keep him off the air and that’s that. Just obeying orders, are we?’

‘Rot in hell! What do you know about such things?’

‘Enough to know that even you aren’t normally this much of a shit.’

‘Look, Guy – these are difficult times. Damned difficult. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t care for.’

‘So not your decision?’

‘Not exactly …’

‘How far up does this one go?’

‘Guy, this one comes from so high up you’d need an oxygen mask to survive.’

‘Know what I think?’

‘Face it, Guy, right now nobody gives a damn about what you or bloody Winston Churchill thinks.’

It was then that Burgess had thrown himself across the desk, his face only inches from the Controller’s. The Controller tried to pull away, partly in surprise but also in disgust. He could smell the raw garlic.

‘Seems to me it’s about time you queued up for your party cap-badge, isn’t it?’ Burgess spat.

The Controller was speechless, unable to breathe, assailed by insult and foulness.

‘Sieg-fucking-Heil!’ Burgess threw over his shoulder as he turned and stormed out of the door, kicking it so hard that a carpenter had to be summoned to repair the hinge.

That was why Burgess decided to get drunk. He’d get drunk, get obliterated, then he’d see what Chance threw his way. But as yet it was a little too early, even for him. He didn’t like to get drunk before noon. He briefly considered going to ease his frustrations in the underground lavatories at Piccadilly Circus, but they’d just stepped up the police patrol so there was no question of his being able to get away with it. Too risky, even for him. So instead he’ll kill some time. Get his hair cut. At Trumper’s.

Which was how he met McFadden.

‘You’ve got good thick hair, sir’ – although in truth it was already beginning to recede and looked as if something was nesting in it. ‘Nice curl. But you should get it cut more often.’

‘There are many things I should do more often,’ Burgess snapped.

‘How would you like it cut, sir?’

‘Preferably in silence.’

Burgess felt suddenly miserable. He’d been unjustifiably rude to the barber, which in itself was no great cause for regret. Burgess had a tongue honed on carborundum and his rudeness was legendary. But McFadden had simply soaked it up, dropped his eyes, shown not a flicker of emotion or resentment. As if he were used to the lash. Which cut through to a very different part of Burgess, for his was a complex soul. Yes, he could be cruel and could find enjoyment in it, particularly when drunk, but there were few men who were more affected by genuine distress. While inflicting wounds freely himself, he would in equal measure give up time, money and his inordinate energies to help heal wounds inflicted by others. And the whole pleasure about insulting people was that it should be deliberate and give him a sense of achievement and superiority, a sort of twisted intellectual game. Kicking a crippled barber was way below his usual standards.

He sat silently, guiltily, listening to the snipping of scissors. Then he became aware of a voice from the next booth, a deep, rumbling voice that evidently belonged to a banker in the City who was coming to the end of a troubled week. ‘I probably shouldn’t mention this, but …’ the financier began as, layer by layer, he discarded the burdens of his business, any one of which might have helped a sharp investor turn a substantial profit. But there was no danger, of course, because there was only a barber to overhear him, and other gentlemen.

Suddenly Burgess understood how much like a confessional these cubicles were, with their polished wood, the whispered tones and almost sepulchral atmosphere. You relaxed, closed your eyes, drifted. Yet when you looked up again the face staring back at you from the mirror would not be your own, not the youthful, virile self you knew so well and took for granted. What you saw instead, and more and more with every passing month, was the face of your long-dead father as though from another world, the spirit world. A world of different rules, where there were no secrets, where everything was shared. It sparked his curiosity.

Burgess stirred himself. ‘Sorry,’ he apologized to McFadden. ‘Bad day.’

‘That’s what we’re here to help with, sir,’ Mac responded, bringing out the words slowly in a voice that was evidently of foreign origin but not immediately traceable, one more accent in a city which in recent years had become flooded with refugees. ‘It is a privilege to be able to serve gentlemen such as yourself. This may be the only time in a hectic month you get to relax. A chance to put aside all those worries.’

‘People often shout at you?’

‘We have all sorts of busy gentlemen – businessmen, politicians. Sometimes they shout, sometimes it’s nothing but whispers. We don’t take offence. And neither do we take liberties, of course. We help them relax. Then we forget.’

‘You get politicians here?’

‘Had Mr Duff Cooper in here the other day, when he resigned. Not a surprise, it wasn’t, sir. He’d been complaining to me about the state of things for months. Rehearsed bits of his speech with me, so he did, while he was sitting in this chair. But you get all sides,’ Mac hastened to add, anxious not to offend. ‘Even the Prime Minister has to have his hair cut sometimes, sir. Foreign Secretary, too, and members of the Royal Family.’

‘They all have their stories.’

‘Indeed they do.’

‘And your story, McFadden. What’s that?’

‘My story, sir?’

‘Where d’you get the gammy leg?’

‘No story at all, really. A crushed pelvis. Unfortunate, but …’ He shrugged his shoulders.

‘An accident?’

Mac continued cutting, concentrating in silence as though he’d found a particularly stubborn tuft, shifting uncomfortably on his damaged leg. But the eyes told the story.

‘So, let me guess. If it wasn’t an accident you must have been attacked. Beaten up in some way. Maybe injured in the war?’

‘A little while after the war, sir.’

‘Where?’

Mac didn’t wish to appear impolite or evasive, but neither did he want to lay himself open. This wasn’t how the game was played. It was the customer who kvetched and prattled, and the barber who listened, not the other way round. Still, English gentlemen were so extraordinarily anxious about displaying their ignorance in front of the lower classes that Mac felt confident he knew how to put an end to the conversation. ‘Somewhere you’ll never have heard of, sir. Abroad. A little place called Solovetsky.’

‘Fuck,’ Burgess breathed slowly.

‘Beg pardon, sir?’

‘The gulags.’

Mac started in alarm and dropped his scissors. ‘Please, sir.’ He glanced around nervously, as though afraid of eavesdroppers. ‘It is a thing I don’t care to talk about. And in an establishment such as this …’

‘You poor sod.’

Mac was flustered. He fumbled to retrieve his scissors from the floor and almost forgot to exchange them for a fresh pair from the antiseptic tray. He stared at Burgess, his face overflowing with pain and a defiance that even half a lifetime of subservience hadn’t been able to extinguish. Burgess stared straight back.

‘Don’t worry, McFadden, I’ve no wish to embarrass you. I’m sorry for your troubles.’

Mac saw something in Burgess’s eye – a flicker, a door that opened for only an instant and was quickly closed, yet in that moment Mac glimpsed another man’s suffering and perhaps even private terror. This man in his chair understood. Which was why, when Burgess suggested it, he agreed to do what no barber who knew his proper rank would dare do. He agreed to meet for a drink.

The entrance to Shepherd Market stood just across from Trumper’s. It was a maze of alleyways and small courtyards hidden in the heart of Mayfair. Here a hungry man could stumble upon a startling variety of pubs and restaurants, mostly of foreign origin, and if he stumbled on a little further he could find narrow staircases that led to rooms where he might satisfy many of his other cravings, too.

When Mac arrived Burgess was standing at the bar of the Grapes, as he had said he would be. He was smoking, cupping the cigarette in the palm of his hand, and drinking a large Irish whiskey. The barber levered himself up onto a bar stool. Mac was short, wiry, his shoulders unevenly sloped as though to compensate for his crooked leg, with a back that was already bent, perhaps through stooping over his customers. The greying hair was scraped neatly but thinly across the skull, the skin beneath his mouth was wrinkled, as though the chin had tried to withdraw and seek refuge from the blows. He was not yet forty but looked considerably older.

‘I thought maybe you wouldn’t come,’ Burgess offered, but didn’t extend a hand. The English never did.

‘I thought so too. Particularly when I saw you drinking in the saloon bar. Bit rich for me.’

‘It’s on me. What’s your poison?’

‘I’d be thankful for a pint of mild, Mr Burgess.’

Burgess noted the obsequious ‘sir’ had gone. This was a meeting of equals. Burgess took out a large roll of notes from his pocket and paid for a glass of flat brown liquid. ‘You couldn’t get that in the gulag, could you, McFadden?’

‘We got many things. Brutality and starvation mostly. But there was always plenty of work to fill idle moments.’ He drank deep, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. An old scar ran across the hand, dulled by time, and he had a crooked finger that had clearly been broken and badly set.

‘How did you end up in Solovetsky?’

‘Who can tell any more? Through a series of other camps, moved from one to another, forgotten about, rediscovered, moved on. I wasn’t a criminal, just unfortunate. That was the problem. You see, they’d completely forgotten why I was there, so they couldn’t release me, could they? Not without the proper paperwork. If they’d let me free and made a mistake, they would end up serving the sentence for me. Such things have to be handled correctly. So they kept me, just in case. The only reason I can recall Solovetsky above the many others is because of this.’ He indicated his leg.

‘How’d it happen?’

‘We were building a new dock. It was February, I think. Winter in the Arctic Circle. We hadn’t seen the sun for weeks. I was ordered to unload a wagon full of heavy timbers. In the dark and the cold, they fell on me.’

‘I thought you said it wasn’t an accident.’

Their eyes met once more, almost as combatants. ‘When it’s thirty degrees below, you’ve already worked nine hours without food, you can’t feel your feet or your hands and the entire pile of logs has frozen solid, you’ve been beaten twice by the guards that day because the work detail hasn’t completed its quota, and they threaten they’ll go on beating you until the timbers are unloaded – I don’t call that much of an accident. Do you, Mr Burgess?’

‘You must hate the Russians.’

‘Why should I? Most of my fellow prisoners were Russians.’

‘The Soviets, the guards, then.’

‘Not especially. They simply took over the camps that had been built by the Tsars and didn’t know any different. And it was a Soviet doctor who in the end saved my life. I was one of the lucky ones, Mr Burgess. At the start of the war I was one of many friends, yet today I am the only survivor. They all died, every one of them. That wasn’t the Bolsheviks’ fault. Except for little Moniek, perhaps.’

Burgess offered another drink but Mac was still less than halfway through his pint and declined. Burgess ordered another large Jameson’s. ‘So whose fault was it?’

‘The System.’

‘What system?’

‘Any System. Happens everywhere. Politicians and rulers who decide, who decree, and who leave ordinary folk like me to pay for their mistakes. At least one thing about the Russian Revolution, Mr Burgess, is that when they shot the Tsar at last they got someone to pay for their own mistakes. It’s progress of sorts, I suppose.’

It seemed an excellent time to start playing the game. ‘In a way that’s why I wanted to see you, McFadden. The System. To ask for your help. Do you know I work for the BBC?’

‘No, Mr Burgess, I didn’t. I know quite a lot about you, but not that.’

‘What the hell do you know about me?’

‘That your job involves a deal of writing – judging by the ink smudges on your fingers and the stain on your jacket pocket. It also involves you in a lot of stress – look at your fingernails. And I know you’re not married. Nor ever likely to be.’

‘What?’ Burgess muttered in some alarm.

‘An observant barber knows a very great deal about his clients. That collar of yours, for instance. Hasn’t ever been near a woman. And if the rest of your wardrobe is like that, you stand about as much chance of getting a woman as Stalin has of becoming Pope. You’re an intelligent man, you must see that, yet it doesn’t seem to worry you. So I conclude you’re not a ladies’ man at all.’

‘You think I’m trying to pick you up?’

Mac smiled gently. ‘No. With the sort of money you just pulled out of your pocket there’d be no need for you to bother with the likes of me. Anyhow, in my experience you gentlemen are perceptive types – is that the right word? You would know from the start that you were wasting your time. You and me, we worship in different churches. But I don’t rush to judgements, Mr Burgess, not at all. In the camps, you see, you learned to survive by any means that were necessary. Any means, Mr Burgess, whatever it took. You did, or you died. You understand me?’

‘I think so.’

‘Not places for moralizing, the camps. So I don’t moralize, not even about my customers.’ Mac was enjoying himself. He was in control, had the upper hand, so different from being on the end of a boot. That was why he’d agreed to a drink. He’d seen in Burgess someone who was suffering more than he was, and had come out of curiosity.

‘So we have established that you’re not after my body, Mr Burgess. Then what do you want?’

‘Proper bloody Sherlock Holmes, aren’t we?’ Burgess snapped, but smiling, offering a compliment and at last persuading his guest to accept another drink.

‘Understand, Mr Burgess, the best time to get to know a man is when you’re polishing his boots – or cutting his hair. That way you get to see all of him, from top to toe. Trouble with most English gentlemen – if I may venture an opinion, Mr Burgess? – is that they never take the time to get to know another man. It’s a class thing. An Englishman only ever looks up – and usually up someone else’s backside.’

‘You don’t like the English?’

‘A certain type of Englishman. I’ve got customers whose hair I’ve cut for years and still they have to ask my name every time they come in. You knew it – wanted to know it – right from the start. Doesn’t matter why, it was enough you took an interest, didn’t patronize me. So I thought I’d take an interest, too. How can I help?’

Burgess knocked back his refreshed drink in one draught. ‘Not sure you can, really, but … I work for the BBC. Political programmes. I like the job, it’s important – more important than ever right now – yet it’s like driving in a fog. The Government tells us next to nothing and what it does say is twisted like a corkscrew. Or it lies, promises peace in our time, yet we’re going to war whether we like it or not.’

The barber’s deep-set eyes held his own, steady, not agreeing, not dissenting either.

‘So I need to understand. If we’re going to war I want to know the bloody reason why. And as I was sitting in your chair it struck me – the people you see every day are the ones who make these decisions. And they talk to you. If you could help me understand what they’re thinking, what they’re planning, I’d be able to do my job a hell of a lot better.’

‘Mr Burgess, I cut the hair of politicians, Cabinet Ministers, all sorts of great men. They entrust me with their confidences because they think I’m slow and stupid and working-class and a little foreign, so they assume I couldn’t possibly understand. And you want me to pass those confidences on to you.’

Damn it, but this man knew what he was about. ‘I’m not asking you to divulge secrets or anything …’

‘I have secrets, Mr Burgess? If they tell me, a mere barber, how could they be secrets?’

‘I’m sorry, if you find this offensive I’ll go …’

Mac was sipping his beer, contemplating. Slowly, gulp by gulp, he drained his glass and gently replaced it on the polished counter. ‘Offensive? Mr Burgess, I don’t find you trying to do your job offensive. I find the gulags offensive, yet what’s going on in Europe right now is going to lead to far, far worse than the gulags. I find that offensive. There’s something else. Just this morning I was reading in the newspaper – it was left behind by a gentleman, he’d only been interested in Court Circular and the horseracing news. It was buried inside, a little report. Not of much consequence, apparently. About how in Vienna they were celebrating Mr Hitler’s victory in Czechoslovakia by rounding up Jews. They dragged entire families from their houses and made the old ladies sit up in the branches of trees like birds, all night long. It snows sometimes in Vienna at this time of year, Mr Burgess. And they lined up old men in front of their daughters in the street and shaved their private parts, saying it was a delousing programme. Humiliated them, not because they’d done anything wrong, but because of what they were. Then they were told they couldn’t go back to their houses, that their homes had been confiscated. If anyone objected, they were told they’d be sent to Dachau. Or worse. An interesting choice of phrase – Dachau or worse. What do you suppose they meant by that. Mr Burgess?’

‘Truly, I hate to think.’

‘But somebody has to think, Mr Burgess. And it’s as plain as a maggot in a slice of meat loaf that Mr Chamberlain’s not going to think about all that.’

‘You’re Jewish?’

McFadden shook his head, as though trying to shake off an annoying fly. ‘Doesn’t matter what I am. Or what you are.’

‘Meaning?’

‘We live in a complicated world. I don’t suppose that cash you’ve got in your pocket was given to you by the BBC to pay for your haircut, was it?’

Burgess covered his alarm with laughter – God, but this one was sharp. ‘Would you believe it if I said I lived off my mother’s immoral earnings?’

‘We are all held hostage by our past.’

‘You’d like payment?’

Mac slowly shook his head. ‘No. You can buy me a drink when it suits you, but I won’t help you for money. I’ll do it because if Mr Chamberlain gets this wrong, a lot of people are going to die. People like me and Moniek. Not people like Mr Chamberlain.’

‘Who is Moniek?’

‘It is no longer of importance.’

‘Have another drink.’

McFadden shook his head once more. ‘No, thank you. It’s been a difficult week and – like you – I am a single man. I feel I need a little distraction. While such things are still allowed, eh? If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take a walk around the Market. See what’s happening.’

‘I’ll be in touch, McFadden. Thanks,’ Burgess offered as the other man slipped off his bar stool and limped away. He turned at the door.

‘You know something, Mr Burgess, at this rate you’re going to end up the best-groomed bugger in Britain.’

That evening on his way home, McFadden stopped by the entrance to the synagogue at the top of Kensington Park Road. He hadn’t entered a synagogue since he was a teenager, but now he hesitated, troubled by memories of Moniek, things he had hidden away for so many years. He put his hand on the door. He seemed almost relieved when he found it locked.

Churchill spoke in the debate on Munich – or European Affairs, as it was called in Hansard. He talked of shame, of a total and unmitigated defeat, of gross neglect and deficiencies, of his country being weighed in the balance and found wanting. He spoke magnificently, a guiding star for the rebels. They were few in number, about thirty, but of considerable standing, men of stature – like the former Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Duffie Cooper, Leo Amery, Bobbety Cranborne, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, Macmillan, Boothby, Duncan Sandys, Harold Nicolson. As Nicolson recorded in his diary, ‘Our group decided that it is better for us all to abstain, than for some to abstain and some to vote against. We therefore sit in our seats, which must enrage the Government, since it is not our numbers that matter but our reputation.’

He was right. The Government was deeply enraged. Even as Chamberlain rose from his seat to acknowledge the wild acclamation from all sides, his mind was made up. The thirty or so rebels had become marked men, every one of them. The reputations which Nicolson talked of with such pride were about to be systematically besmirched.

FOUR

Chamberlain. Chamberlain. Everywhere one went it was that name, Neville Chamberlain. No occasion seemed complete without his presence. His was the name on everyone’s lips. Hospital beds were being endowed in his name, the French had opened up a fund to provide him with ‘a corner of French soil’ in gratitude, while the photograph of him at the Palace adorned the mantelpieces of thousands of homes – The Times even offered copies to its readers as a souvenir Christmas card. So great had the public clamour grown that it was in danger of becoming compromising; Chamberlain felt compelled to issue a statement declining the Bishop of Coventry’s suggestion that a National Tribute Fund be set up in his honour. This was, after all, a democracy.