May 6 and 10, 1940
London and Hertfordshire, England
“Come, Clemmie. We’ve got a vessel to launch,” Winston bellows.
I am finishing up my instructions to a secretary, so I hold up a finger. A collective gasp, quiet but still audible, emanates from the staff members scurrying around the room, carrying out Winston’s orders. No one but me would dare shush the lord admiral.
Handing over the list of donors I’m targeting to raise money for minesweepers—civilian boats that have been commandeered and outfitted for military purposes—I look up at Winston. He waits for me near the door to the office outfitted with many desks now, though it had formerly been one vast office just for the lord admiral.
From the moment war was declared and Winston assumed the lord admiral role, the entire country moved forward alongside us with a sense of urgency and purpose. Within days of Winston’s appointment, we’d moved into Admiralty House with Mary in tow and settled into a routine of working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, surrounded by government staff used to only working for five to six hours a day under the lassitude of the Chamberlain administration. But how could they reasonably complain? Their new leader kept to this pace, as did I, and it seemed that the Germans would be moving at a rapid-fire clip as well. Since Winston took office, the Nazis bombarded British vessels, and we lost the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous in the North Sea, the ocean liner SS Athenia, and the HMS Royal Oak in the Orkney Islands, along with sixty thousand tons of British shipping loads. And we all understood that this was just the beginning, even when a lull set in after the initial wave of attacks.
Immediately upon moving from our apartment at Morpeth Mansions to Admiralty House, I knew we’d need a modern-day center of control with a suitable office for a hardworking first lord, not a bastion of old-world entertainment. We converted the expansive stateroom space and many living and entertaining rooms into a naval command center, moving our flat into the upper two floors of the building. What used to be our main apartment was cut into workrooms. Instead of the frivolous naval-themed and nautical-colored decoration with which the prior Lord Admiral Duff’s wife had festooned Admiralty House, we simplified the fabrics and furniture into a somber style, more appropriate for laborious wartime. Chartwell had been boarded up, leaving only Orchard Cottage open for Moppet, Diana, and her two young children, Julian and Edwina, who’d been evacuated from London. Winston and I will be in London for the long haul, no matter how brutal this becomes, and we will have Mary at our side for now, attending school and working in a canteen and for the Red Cross.
The infectious sense of urgency permeating the nation even prompted Randolph to action, although not of the sort for which Winston and I had longed. After quitting his job to join Winston’s old regiment, the Fourth Hussars, he focused his attention on securing a bride and an heir in the event he was killed in the war. He showered proposals all over London to any marginally appropriate girl he encountered—a rumored eight proposals to eight different women in the span of two weeks, much to our embarrassment—and received a resounding round of nos until he met Pamela Digby. The voluptuous auburn-haired eldest daughter of Lord and Lady Digby had grown up in the rather tedious world of the Dorset countryside, and while she professed to adore the equestrian life, I saw from our first encounter that she was thrilled to be at the epicenter of power. Even during the wedding we hastily arranged—along with so many other British families whose sons were about to deploy—at St. John’s Church in Smith Square with a party in one of the Admiralty House staterooms afterward, in which the bride wore a dark-blue dress, beret, and matching dyed fur as there was no time for a gown, I saw that it was becoming a Churchill that intrigued her, not necessarily becoming Mrs. Randolph Churchill. Still, I found the girl endearing, and I resolved to support this new member of the family, which I knew she’d need in a marriage to Randolph. And I had trouble enough with Randolph as it was to not befriend his bride.
* * *
“Clemmie, the frigate will not wait,” Winston chides, although softly. I am accompanying him to launch a new airship carrier, which he still insists on calling by the archaic term of frigate.
“Are you all set then?” I ask the secretary.
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll reach out to these prospective donors today,” she answers with a nod, and I hope I’m leaving this important project in capable hands.
When Winston received his appointment, I’d decided that I would no longer wait for him to include me in his work but that I would seek out critical projects of my own. For every battleship I inspect at his side and boat I launch alongside my husband, I undertake projects for which Winston does not have time but that I think merit attention, the running of Fulmer Chase Maternity Hospital for soldiers’ wives, for example. I forge ahead on meritorious tasks, unwilling to be solely ceremonial, joining Winston on those difficult meetings with relatives who’d lost their sons and arranging a special enclosure for bereaved families on the Horse Guards Parade, for example. The long-lasting legacy of the Rosaura means that I will wait for no one to invite me into history.
This may well be our last chance to serve close to the inner machinations of Britain’s power, I realize, and I do not want to lose this opportunity. As I assume this mantle—again becoming the lord admiral’s wife after almost thirty years—I experience an almost embarrassing sense of exhilaration and calm. Strange how I thrive under the stress of crisis and falter under the weight of normal existence.
“Clemmie,” Winston says again, his voice more impatient.
“Coming,” I call back and stride toward my waiting husband.
* * *
I dab away Nellie’s tears with my damp white handkerchief. How well my poor sister is bearing up under the burden of her dual loss, I think. Her long-suffering husband, Bertram, who had been enduring the pain of his injuries from the Great War for decades, died only four days ago from cancer, and then, a mere two days later, she received word that her son Giles was captured in Norway by the Nazis. Although Winston hadn’t wanted me to leave his side, my sister deserves my consolation and assistance, so I went to her home in Hertfordshire as soon as possible after Giles’s capture.
“Has Winston found out more about Giles’s situation?” Nellie asks, her heavy, inky eyebrows casting a shadow under her eyes, making the dark circles there even darker. As soon as I reached Hertfordshire, she’d begged me to have Winston do some digging into Giles’s whereabouts, and the housemaid had just delivered a letter from the morning mail.
“The note I received this morning contained no new information.” I do not tell Nellie that the missive didn’t even mention Giles, only a series of tasks for me to handle and a query about how best to manage the challenge by Conservative Leo Avery to Chamberlain’s fitness to serve. Should he join in the chorus of members of Parliament calling for Chamberlain to step down, he wondered, or stay uncharacteristically silent. These are the matters most pressing in Winston’s mind; sadly, not Giles.
It is only a matter of time before Chamberlain is forced out, I’d cautioned a very impatient Winston before I left. The rumblings about the prime minister had turned into a roar, and Winston needed to allow that roar to grow even louder on its own, without his prompting. But forbearance has never been Winston’s strong suit.
“Giles wasn’t even a soldier. He was just a reporter for the Daily Express, for God’s sake,” Nellie says. I’d heard this lament many times over the past two days.
“I know, Nellie.” I take her into my arms. “Sadly, I think it was enough for the Nazis that Giles was British. All we know is that Giles is classified as Prominente because of his relationship to Winston. That should get him better treatment and some protection, at the very least.”
The phone rings, and we jump. “It could be someone about Giles,” Nellie says.
Nellie’s young housemaid, a pretty girl with bouncy chestnut hair who reminds me a bit of my new daughter-in-law, Pamela, enters the parlor. “Mrs. Churchill, the call is for you. It is the lord admiral.”
My sister gives me a hopeful glance as I scuttle out of the room, into the hallway where the phone is located. I place the receiver to my ear. “Pug, is that you?”
“Cat.” Winston is breathing heavily. Why is he so winded? “Thank God, I’ve got you.”
“Of course. Is everything all right?”
“The Nazis have initiated an offensive through Holland, Belgium, and France—with the goal of invading the channel. It is only a matter of days or weeks before the Germans could be beating down our door.”
“Oh God.” I feel sick. From all the secret military information to which I was privy, I knew, of course, that this was possible. But I never fathomed that it could come this soon. “What is to be done?”
“I’ve just come from Downing Street. Chamberlain summoned me and Halifax.”
My heart begins to beat quickly, and I find I cannot speak. Winston and Halifax are the two natural contenders for Chamberlain’s position, so I can guess about the reason for the summoning. Is this the moment to which we have been building our whole lives? Has Winston been called to save his country, as he predicted decades ago on our engagement day?
“Clemmie, are you there?”
I force myself to speak. “I am, Winston. I’m here.”
“Chamberlain advised us that he has decided to stand down as prime minister, albeit reluctantly. He asked Halifax and me who we thought should be his rightful successor. My natural instinct was to throw my hat in the ring—point out my long-standing arguments about the Nazi threat and the dangers of appeasement—but I thought of you. All your warnings about letting the rumble turn into a roar and all that. So I stayed quiet.”
“And what happened?”
“Halifax acknowledged that the war leader needed to be a member of the Commons, which effectively put him out of the running. Chamberlain’s eyes turned on me. The duty to save the country, it seems, has fallen to me.” His labored breathing is audible. “I feel as if all that I’ve imagined for so long ago is finally coming to fruition.”
“Oh, Winston, I knew it would. You are the only one who can do the job.”
“How Mother would have loved to see me assume this role, although I wish it had not come at this cost,” he says with a sigh. “But I can only do it if you’re by my side. The summons to attend the king at the palace—and transfer power—will come soon.”
“I will get on the next train to London. I should be there by late afternoon.”
“Hurry, Cat. I’ll want you with me at the palace. Your Pug needs you. And so does your country.”