AT A CABINET MEETING AT eleven-thirty that Thursday morning, Churchill, who had worked through much of the night’s raid, noted—accurately—that the damage to the Admiralty building had improved his view of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.
It perturbed him, however, that once again the bombers had come with virtually no interference from the RAF. Darkness remained the Luftwaffe’s best defense.
Perhaps by way of offering encouraging news, the Prof that day sent Churchill a report on the latest tests of his anti-aircraft mines, these involving a variant in which the mines—tiny microbombs—were attached to small parachutes and then dropped from planes. The RAF “Egglayers” had made twenty-one sorties during which they managed to set out six curtains of mines. These, the Prof claimed, had destroyed at least one German bomber, but perhaps as many as five.
In this, the Prof was engaging in an uncharacteristic behavior: wishful thinking. The only evidence that the bombers had been destroyed was the disappearance of their radar echoes. The action had taken place over the sea. No witnesses provided visual confirmations. No wreckage was found. It was “clearly not feasible to get the evidence we might have demanded overland,” he acknowledged.
He saw none of this, however, as sufficient cause to stop him from claiming all five German bombers as successful kills.
ON THURSDAY, APRIL 24, Mary raced home to Chequers from her volunteer work in Aylesbury and had tea with a friend, Fiona Forbes. She and Fiona then rushed off, with piles of luggage, to catch an evening train to London.
Mary looked forward to a relaxing bath at the Annexe before dressing for the night’s fun, but telegrams and telephone calls from friends intervened. She stopped in to talk with “Papa.” At seven-forty she at last got her bath, though it was less leisurely than she had hoped. She and Fiona were due to attend a party set to begin at eight-fifteen but planned first to have dinner at the Dorchester with Eric Duncannon and other friends, as well as Mary’s sister Sarah and her husband, Vic.
She was quite taken with her date. In her diary she wrote, “Oh tais-toi mon coeur.” (“Be quiet, my heart.”)
They moved on to the party, at a club, and danced until the band stopped playing at four A.M. Mary and Fiona returned to the Annexe by dawn, with Mary recounting to her diary, “It really was a completely perfect party.”
She spent the next day, Saturday, at a friend’s country home in Dorset, recuperating in leisurely fashion, in bed—“Very long delicious ‘lie’ ”—and reading a long poem by Alice Duer Miller, “The White Cliffs,” about an American woman who falls in love with an Englishman only to have him die in France in the Great War. In the poem, aptly enough, the woman chronicles her love affair and rails against America for failing to immediately join the war. The poem ends:
I am American bred,
I have seen much to hate here—much to forgive,
But in a world where England is finished and dead,
I do not wish to live.
Mary wept.
IN LONDON THAT FRIDAY, John Colville had his medical interview with the RAF. He underwent more than two hours of medical testing and passed every category except eyesight, for which he was rated as being “borderline.” He was told, however, that he might yet be able to fly, if he got fitted for contact lenses. He would have to pay for that himself, and even then there was no guarantee that he would succeed.
But staying at 10 Downing Street no longer seemed appropriate. The more he thought about joining the RAF, the more dissatisfied he felt, and the more he needed to get away. He pursued it now the way he pursued Gay Margesson, with a futile mix of longing and despair. “For the first time since war broke out I feel discontented and unsettled, bored by most people I meet and destitute of ideas,” he told his diary. “I certainly need a change and think an active, practical life in the RAF is the real solution. I am not anxious to immolate myself on the altar of Mars, but have reached the stage of thinking that nothing matters.”