JOHN COLVILLE WAS ENTRANCED. BOMBS fell and cities burned, but there was his love life to attend to. As he endured the persistent aloofness of his yearned-for Gay Margesson, he found himself increasingly drawn to eighteen-year-old Audrey Paget. On Sunday, November 17, a brilliant fall day, the two went riding on the expansive grounds of the Paget family’s estate, Hatfield Park, roughly an hour’s drive north of central London.
He described the afternoon in his diary: “Mounted on two spirited and good-looking horses, Audrey and I rode for two hours in brilliant sunshine, galloping through Hatfield Park, walking through the woods and bracken, careening wildly over fields and ditches; and all the time I found it hard to take my eyes off Audrey, whose slim figure, sweetly disordered hair and flushed cheeks made her seem a woodland nymph, too lovely for the world of reality.”
He was torn. “Actually,” he wrote the next day, “if I were not in love with Gay, and if I thought Audrey would marry me (which she certainly would not just at present) I should not at all mind having a wife so beautiful, so vivacious and whom I genuinely like as well as admire.
“But still Gay with all her faults is Gay, and it would be silly to get married—even if I could—at this moment of European History.”
FOR PAMELA CHURCHILL, there was mounting anxiety about money. On Tuesday, November 19, she wrote to her husband, Randolph, to ask him to pay her an additional £10 a week in allowance (roughly $640 today). “I enclose a sketch of the expenses here which I hope you will look into carefully,” she wrote. “I don’t want to be mean & beastly, but my darling, I am doing everything I can to run your home & look after your son economically, but I can’t do the impossible.” She listed all the family’s expenses, down to the cost of cigarettes and drinks. Together these consumed nearly all the income she received from Randolph and from other sources, namely the rent her sister-in-law Diana paid and an allowance from her own family.
These, however, were merely the expenses she could anticipate with reasonable accuracy. Her deep fear was about Randolph’s spending and his weakness for alcohol and gambling. “So try & limit your expenses to £5 a week in Scotland,” she wrote. “And darling, surely you’re not ashamed of saying you’re too poor to gamble. I know you love Baby Winston & me, & won’t mind making a sacrifice for us.”
She cautioned that it was vital for them to get control of their expenditures. “I simply can’t be happy, when I’m sick with worry all the time,” she wrote. She was by now deeply disappointed in her marriage, but not yet irrevocably. She softened her tone. “Oh! my darling Randy,” she wrote, “I wouldn’t worry if I didn’t love you so deeply & so desperately. Thank you for making me your wife, & for letting me have your son. It is the most wonderful thing that has happened in my life.”
CHURCHILL’S WEEKEND STAYS AT Chequers and Ditchley provided him with invaluable opportunities for distraction. They took him away from the increasingly dreary streetscape of London, where each day another fragment of Whitehall was incinerated or blown away.
During one weekend at Ditchley, his full-moon refuge, he and his guests watched a film in the mansion’s home cinema, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Late the next night, exhausted, Churchill mistimed his landing on a chair and fell between it and an ottoman, wedging himself with his rear on the floor and his feet in the air. Colville witnessed the moment. “Having no false dignity,” Colville wrote, “he treated it as a complete joke and repeated several times, ‘A real Charlie Chaplin!’ ”
THE WEEKEND OF NOVEMBER 30 brought two particularly welcome diversions. That day, Saturday, the family gathered at Chequers to celebrate Churchill’s sixty-sixth birthday; the next, the christening of Pamela and Randolph Churchill’s new son, Winston. The child was round and robust and from early on struck private secretary John Martin as being “absurdly like his grandfather,” which prompted one of Churchill’s daughters to quip, “So are all babies.”
First came a service at the little parish church in nearby Ellesborough, where Clementine was a regular attendee. This was Churchill’s first visit. Their three daughters came—Mary despite a sore throat—as did the baby’s four godparents, among them Lord Beaverbrook and reporter Virginia Cowles, a close friend of Randolph’s.
Churchill wept throughout the service, now and then saying, softly, “Poor infant, to be born into such a world as this.”
Then came lunch back at the house, attended by the family, the godparents, and the church rector.
Beaverbrook stood up to propose a toast to the child.
But Churchill rose immediately and said, “As it was my birthday yesterday, I am going to ask you all to drink to my health first.”
A wave of good-natured protest rose from the guests, as did shouts of “Sit down, Daddy!” Churchill resisted, then took his seat. After the toasts to the baby, Beaverbrook raised a glass to honor Churchill, calling him “the greatest man in the world.”
Again Churchill wept. A call went up for his reply. He stood. As he spoke, his voice shook and tears streamed. “In these days,” he said, “I often think of Our Lord.” He could say no more. He sat down and looked at no one—the great orator made speechless by the weight of the day.
Cowles found herself deeply moved. “I have never forgotten those simple words and if he enjoyed waging the war let it be remembered that he understood the anguish of it as well.”
The next day, apparently in need of a little attention himself, Beaverbrook resigned again.
BEAVERBROOK WROTE THE LETTER on Monday, December 2, from his country home, Cherkley, “where I am alone, and where I have had time to think about the direction which I believe our policy should take.” Further dispersal of aircraft factories was vital, he wrote, and required an aggressive new push, though this would certainly mean a temporary decline in production. “This bold policy,” he warned, “means much interference with other Ministries, on account of the need for suitable premises already earmarked for other services.”
But then he wrote: “I am not now the man for the job. I will not get the necessary support.”
Once again he veered toward self-pity, citing how his reputation had diminished as the fighter crisis had begun to ease. “In fact, when the reservoir was empty, I was a genius,” he wrote. “Now that the reservoir has some water in it, I am an inspired brigand. If ever the water slops over, I will be a bloody anarchist.”
Someone new must now take over, he said; he made a couple of recommendations. He suggested that Churchill explain his resignation to others as having been prompted by ill health, “which I regret to say is more than justified.”
As always he ended with flattery, applying what he often called “the oil can.” He wrote: “I cannot conclude this very important letter without emphasizing that my success in the past has come from your support. Without that backing, without that inspiration, without that leadership, I could never have accomplished the tasks and duties you set me.”
Churchill knew that Beaverbrook’s asthma had flared anew. He felt sympathy for his friend, but he was losing patience. “There is no question of my accepting your resignation,” he wrote the next day, Tuesday, December 3. “As I told you, you are in the galleys and will have to row on to the end.”
He suggested that Beaverbrook take a month to recuperate. “Meanwhile I will certainly support you in carrying out your dispersal policy, which seems imperative under the heavy attacks to which we are subjected,” Churchill wrote. He told Beaverbrook that he regretted the return of his asthma, “because it always brings great depression in its train. You know how often you have advised me not to let trifles vex and distract me. Now let me repay the service by begging you to remember only the greatness of the work you have achieved, the vital need of its continuance, and the goodwill of—
“Your old and faithful friend,
“Winston Churchill.”
Beaverbrook returned to the galleys, and took up his oar once again.
IN THE MIDST OF it all, everyone got sick. A cold raced through the family. Mary sensed its onset on Monday night, December 2. “Have temperature,” she wrote in her diary. “Oh hell.”
Churchill caught her cold, or another, on December 9.
Clementine, on December 12.
Bombs fell all the same.