The Last Lion

THE FIRST olive moments of daylight, anticipating the imminent appearance of the sun over the English Channel, disclose a wide, misty, green plain descending to the South Downs and the sea. This is the great Weald of Kent. It is a peculiarity of the Weald’s terrain—demonstrated in the shrouded past by Romans, Saxons, and Normans—that it would be quite defenseless should an enterprising foe cross the Channel. Were any force to prepare for an invasion, its campfires on the far shore would be visible from nearby Dover. But now, fourteen years after the Armistice of 1918, the Weald is an idyll of peace, and the explorer on foot finds that it possesses camouflaged delights. Its smooth breast, for example, is not entirely unbroken. The pastureland, sloping upward toward London, is cleaved by a shallow valley. This combe rises to a timbered crest. There, among eighty sheltering acres of beech, oak, lime, and chestnut, stands the singular country home of England’s most singular statesman, a brilliant, domineering, intuitive, inconsiderate, self-centered, emotional, generous, ruthless, visionary, megalomaniacal, and heroic genius who inspires fear, devotion, rage, and admiration among his peers.¹

At the very least he is the greatest Englishman since Disraeli, a quaint survivor of Britain’s past who grapples with the future because he alone can see it. His past is illustrious; in the House of Commons he has, at one time or another, held every important ministry save those of prime minister and foreign secretary. Now, however, he is a backbencher—an elected member of Parliament excluded from the cabinet. In his fifty-eighth year, he is already regarded as an anachronism. He first became a household word as a gallant young British officer, a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, handsome and recklessly brave, serving alongside the Buffs in battles on India’s northwest frontier, with Kitchener at Khartoum, and in the Boer War—all symbols of the nation’s imperial pride, which he fiercely defends despite flagging allegiance elsewhere in the realm. He is mocked for failures which were not his, notably his strategy to force the Dardanelles in 1915. He seems less a figure of the twentieth century (which he loathes) than of the nineteenth—or, reaching even farther back, of Renaissance versatility. The wide sweep of his interests and activities embraces literature, painting, philosophy, hunting, polo, military science, the history of the United States—even architecture, bricklaying, and landscaping. Indeed, many of the shining ponds and pools and the happy waterfalls between the Weald and the manor were created by him, wearing hip-high Wellingtons and excavating the rich earth with his hands.²

Tree-locked and silent at dawn, Chartwell’s immediate grounds further testify to his stamina. On the south side of the mansion, a garden surrounded by pleasant red brick—walled by him—invites his guest to peer inside the “Mary Cot,” a brick playhouse which he built for his nine-year-old daughter. Between the playhouse and the great house lie his orchard of fruit trees and a tennis court of barbered grass he shaped for his wife, Clementine. Eastward, the flushed sky reveals a lawn terrace; northward, his heated swimming pool and ponds inhabited by black swans and “Churchill’s goldfish” (actually golden orfe). He is planning to cement into Chartwell’s north wall, overlooking the pool, the family’s coat of arms and its Spanish motto, so appropriate in these years of his political exile: Fiel Pero Desdichado—Faithful but Unfortunate.

On the grounds are various lesser buildings. A painting studio. A white cottage with two bedrooms houses Maryott White, Mary’s governess—“Nana” to the little girl but “Cousin Moppet” to the others. She and Nellie Romilly, Clementine’s sister, are two of Mrs. Churchill’s relatives in residence, sharing the household tasks. Another cottage is planned; Winston expects to finish it in 1939; then he and Clemmie will move into it, leaving the mansion to their son, Randolph. It is startling to realize that all this is less than twenty-five miles from Hyde Park corner. There men on soapboxes tell crowds, who nod in agreement, that society is rushing toward catastrophe. In eight years it will be upon them, but here all is serene. The sound of heavy guns, the roar of hostile bomb-laden aircraft overhead, arrowing toward London, are unimaginable. Quietude lies like a comforting veil over the house and grounds; Winston’s 1932 Daimler 35/120 six-cylinder Landaulette seems an intrusion. He would do without the motorcar if he could; he despises automobiles, and if he encounters a traffic jam on one of those infrequent occasions when he himself is at the wheel, he simply drives on the sidewalk.

The house is a metaphor of its squire. It is above all staunch. On the outside the red bricks meet neatly; within, the walls are upright. Studs join beams with precision, doors fit sensibly. Like the householder it is complex, and, like him, steeped in the past. Most of the existing structure dates from the fifteenth century, but annals record an owner in 1350, and the oldest part of the building, now occupied by Churchill’s study, was built twenty years after the Battle of Hastings, making it ten years older than Westminster Hall. After acquiring it for £5,000 in the early 1920s, he spent £18,000 on renovations. The front is stately, almost classic in its simplicity. The door frame, which Winston acquired from a London dealer, originally belonged to some other great country home when Victoria was a very young queen; the wood is silvered by age, and its pilasters and scrolls strike a baroque note. The back of the mansion is craggy, a consequence of the master’s many accretions.

At daybreak the air is fresh and cool, but by midmorning it will be uncomfortably warm, and the mullioned, transomed windows are open. There is an exception. Those in Churchill’s bedroom are puttied shut. He likes the country, but not country air; drafts, he believes, invite common colds, to which he has been susceptible since childhood. There is also the matter of noise. Any noise, especially if high-pitched, is an abomination. The jangling of cowbells will destroy his train of thought. But whistling, notes W. H. Thompson, the Scotland Yard detective who serves as his bodyguard from time to time, is the worst: “It sets up an almost psychiatric disturbance in him—intense, immediate, and irrational. I have seen him expostulate with boys on the street who were whistling as he passed.”³

Daybreak brings movement to Chartwell’s grounds. Sleep still envelops master, mistress, and their four children—Diana, twenty-three and about to be married; Randolph, twenty-one and already a problem (he has been drinking double brandies since he was eighteen); titian-haired Sarah, dreaming of fame on the stage at eighteen; and, in the bedroom above her, little Mary, who mercilessly taunts Sarah about her beaux. The pets are up and about, however. Trouble, Sarah’s chocolate-colored spaniel, Harvey, Randolph’s fox terrier, and Mary’s Blenheim spaniel Jasper, a gift of the Duchess of Marlborough, are investigating the rosebushes and anointing them. Winston’s pet cat, a marmalade named Tango, stretches himself; so does Mickey, a tabby cat. A fox trots up from the studio; horses begin to snort; a small black goat strides across the orchard; a goose wanders about aimlessly.

Presently people appear. Because today is a special occasion—all the children are home—the cook is Mrs. Georgina Landemare. These days Mrs. Landemare is here on and off, but like many other Westerham folk she will eventually be absorbed by Chartwell and the needs of its master. Already there are eighteen servants, including a butler, a footman, and an assistant gardener, who now arrives from his home in nearby Westerham to prowl the grounds in his daily search for the cigar butts Winston discarded yesterday, to use in his pipe. Most of the staff are natives of nearby Westerham. Both his secretaries, Grace Hamblin and Violet Pearman (“Mrs. P.”), live within walking distance. Since childhood they have known Frank Jenner, the Westerham taxi driver who sometimes carries Churchill to Parliament and back and also serves as Chartwell’s handyman; and Harry Whitbread, the laborer who taught Churchill to lay bricks and returns from time to time to work beside him. All of them, regardless of political persuasion, are proud of their eminent neighbor, though far from awed. Whitbread lectures him on how workingmen see social issues; Winston is attentive and thanks him afterward. The town delights in Churchillian lore. Once a month Westerham’s barber trims his fringe of hair in his bedroom. Recently a temporary replacement asked him how he would like his hair cut. Churchill replied: “A man of my limited resources cannot presume to have a hairstyle. Get on and cut it.”⁴

Chartwell is Churchill’s sanctuary, his great keep. All his forays into tumultuous London politics are made from this sure base. However harsh the storms in the House of Commons, or the attacks on him in the press, here he is among friends and on grounds which, to him, epitomize his island nation. To him the essence of Chartwell is that it is completely, utterly, entirely English.

As one of the great advocates of the British Empire, he remembers the dictum of Queen Victoria: “I think it very unwise to give up what we hold.” His struggle against England’s pledge to free India has cost him much. But on matters of principle he has never learned how to compromise. He does not know how to give in.

Had he yielded on India, he could have looked to broader, brighter horizons. But he believes in his star. And if he can be spectacularly wrong he can also be terrifically right. If we are to follow his victories and his defeats—they will be many—we must try to define him, to identify him. One way is to follow him through a typical day at Chartwell. It is worthwhile if only because he will be forever remembered, not only as a great statesman, but also as one of history’s great originals.

The spacious cream drawing room overlooks the Weald. Beneath the prismatic gleams of its eighteenth-century chandeliers, an exquisite little clock stands upon a mahogany Louis XVI bureau à cylindre. Now, at 8:00 A. M., it chimes. Above, in the householder’s study, the sound is echoed as another clock also tells the hour. Simultaneously a sibilant rustle of Irish linen sheets breaks the hush in Churchill’s bedroom a few feet away, as he sits bolt upright and yanks off his black satin sleep mask. He, not the sun, determines when he will greet the new day. Fumbling on the bedside table, he rings the bell for his valet-cum-butler, or, as Churchill calls him, “my man.”⁵

Churchill’s man is called David Inches by the rest of the household, and like his master he is considered eccentric, “a tremendous character,” in the words of Grace Hamblin, Winston’s chief secretary, “always overworked, always perspiring, sometimes drunk!” Awaiting him, Churchill peers around, rumpled but remarkably alert in view of the fact that he retired, as is his custom, only six hours ago. Poised thus, he is surrounded by Churchilliana. Elsewhere, Chartwell’s decor reflects Clementine Churchill’s understated upper-class elegance; but her husband is a flamboyant swashbuckler, a throwback to the Cavaliers or the Elizabethan patriciate with its aristocratic disdain for the opinions of others. Thus this most personal part of the mansion is decorated, not with implicit grace, but with explicit flourish—an ornate Fabergé cigar box, engraved plates of gold and silver, and, standing in solitary splendor, a gold-headed walking stick engraved “to my youngest minister.” This last was his wedding present from King Edward VII and a reminder of the 1880s, when Edward was Prince of Wales and he and Winston’s mother, Jennie, were intimate—an evocation of the first decade of the new century, when young Winston was a rising power in the Edwardian Parliament.⁶

A minute passes; two minutes. No valet. Winston fumes; the Churchillian lower lip juts out. His bizarre daily schedule deceives visitors who think it disorderly. Those who live at Chartwell know better. Though very odd, it is a schedule—is, in fact, a rigid one. Young F. W. D. (“Bill”) Deakin will soon leave his don’s rooms at Christ Church, Oxford, and become chief researcher (at a mere £300 a year) for Winston’s multivolume biography of his great ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. Long afterward Deakin will recall: “He was totally organized, almost like a clock. His routine was absolutely dictatorial. He set himself a ruthless timetable every day and would get very agitated, even cross, if it was broken.” He is very cross now. His valet is often dilatory, though today the blame is not his. Lately the bell has not been working properly. And though Churchill is now bellowing, his shouts are unheard. That is partly his fault. The walls in this part of the mansion are thick. By puttying all the crevices he has effectively soundproofed the room.⁷

Raging, he flings aside the counterpane, leaps out, stamps his bare foot like a spoiled child, and then stalks dramatically across the room, crossing the threshold and reaching the landing in pursuit of his man. This happens from time to time, and the effect is sometimes spectacular, for Churchill sleeps naked and remains so on such sorties. He will don a robe when visiting other homes, “in deference,” as he puts it, to his hosts’ “views of propriety,” but at Chartwell he feels free to roam around nude; as one of his servants will later explain, it seems “completely natural to him.” It did not seem natural to a young housemaid who has just left his employ. Looking up the stairwell one morning she beheld, on the top step, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill in the buff—all 210 pounds of him, a massive pink man with a bald, smooth dome and broad if slightly stooped shoulders, glaring down at her, as one of Winston’s secretaries remembers, “like a laser beam.” The girl fled the house shrieking. She has sent for her belongings and her pay.⁸

At long last Inches arrives, sweating and offering profuse apologies. The Churchill children delight in mimicking him, but their father values his man; despite his tippling and other flaws, the valet knows the daily Churchillian drill. He opens the day properly, carrying in a tray bearing his master’s first meal of the day: orange juice from a bottle (Winston detests freshly squeezed juice), and a cooked English breakfast, with, as the pièce de résistance, a small steak, a chicken leg, or a cutlet Churchill ordered set aside at last evening’s dinner for this very purpose. There is also a small dish of jam, usually black cherry. If the jam has been forgotten Winston will lie there propped up on pillows, pouting and refusing to touch anything on the tray until it appears.⁹

Rising, he moves toward the bathroom with an alacrity surprising for his age and weight and quickly shaves himself with a safety razor while his valet draws the first of his two daily baths. Like preparing the breakfast, this requires precision. Churchill will not enter the tub until it is two-thirds full and the bath thermometer registers 98 degrees. Once in, he demands that the temperature be raised to 104 degrees. Inches, obedient, again opens the hot spigot. The water has now reached the brim. Winston likes it that way; on his instructions the bath’s overflow drain has been sealed off. This is splendid hydrotherapy, but like his immodest excursions beyond his bedroom door, it invites disaster. He likes to play in his bath, and when on impulse he turned a somersault, “exactly like a porpoise,” a spectator recalls, the tub overflowed, damaging the ceiling below and, worse, drenching the frock coat of an eminent Frenchman there who called to pay his respects. Now a special drain has been installed. Churchill lolls in his bath, reciting Kipling, rehearsing speeches or lectures he will soon deliver, or singing, not in the virile baritone familiar in Parliament, but in a soft, high tone.¹⁰ Elsewhere in the great building Sarah (“Mule,” he fondly calls her) has risen and is playing the most popular hit of the season on her phonograph:

Sarah’s father prefers to recall melodies which evoke the England of his youth, long before 1914 and Armageddon, when, as he wrote afterward in his history of the Great War, “the world on the verge of catastrophe was very brilliant,” when “nations and empires crowned with princes and potentates rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace”¹¹—when young patricians like Lieutenant Winston S. Churchill, subaltern of horse in Her Britannic Majesty’s Fourth Hussars, lived like gods here and throughout the vast British Empire. Talleyrand once observed that those who did not live under l’ancien régime did not know what true douceur de vivre meant. Being an aristocrat in the Victorian and Edwardian eras had been fun, and Winston never tires of singing the great hit of the Boer War, when his escape from an enemy prisoner-of-war camp made him a national hero:

Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave you,

Though it breaks my heart to go;

Something tells me I am needed

At the front to meet the foe!

It’s the soldiers of the Queen, my lads,

Who’ve been the lads, who’ve seen the lads,

In the fight for England’s glory, lads,

Of her world-wide glory let us sing!

In the England of 1932, glory has become a discredited word. After “the glorious dead” of 1914–1918, the word “glory” now soils the air. Therefore, when he warns of a Germany obsessed with a yearning for vengeance, crowds heckle him or drift away. He is no tribune of the people now. Although he believes in radical social solutions, he remains a traditionalist in all else. And tradition, he holds, begins at home. The ritualistic unfolding of a Chartwell day, from dawn to Kent’s long blue twilight, is for him a kind of private pageant. He enjoys it; he considers it as efficient as it is delightful, and he never doubts—nor does anyone else sleeping beneath this roof—that he alone is qualified to be the playwright, producer, director, stage manager, and, of course, hero of the performance.

It is time for the star to don his first costume. Emerging from his bath pink and clean, he waits impatiently until Inches has toweled him dry and then slips into one of two worn-out cherished dressing gowns. The more subdued is dark blue velvet; the other, a riot of green and gold displaying a scarlet dragon coiled sinuously around his plump torso. His valet has been busy during his bath. Churchill will remain in bed all morning, and for a man with his tender skin this invites bedsores. Therefore Inches has brought a basket of large sponges, which he now deftly thrusts between the sheet and the most vulnerable parts of the Churchillian anatomy as his master yaws this way and that.¹²

The tray has gone. Remaining within reach are the jam and a weak (three-ounce) scotch and soda—always Johnny Walker Red—which the prostrate Winston will sip occasionally over the next four hours in the tradition of Palmerston, Pitt, and Baldwin. However, the legend that he is a heavy drinker is quite untrue. Churchill is a sensible, if unorthodox, drinker. There is always some alcohol in his bloodstream, and it reaches its peak late in the evening after he has had two or three scotches, several glasses of champagne, at least two brandies, and a highball, but his family never sees him the worse for drink. He remarks: “We all despise a man who gets drunk.” And, after an exchange of views on drinking: “All I can say is that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” He encourages absurd myths about his alcoholic capacity, however, partly to furbish his macho image, which needs it because he cries so often in public (“I’m a blubberer,” he cheerfully tells friends), and partly because Europeans still like to think that their leaders are men who can hold their liquor. Winston tipples off and on all day but never gets drunk.¹³

Having tasted this first scotch, he is ready for one of the children’s pug dogs, who leaps upon the bed, trembling with joy, tail wagging furiously. Churchill then lights his first cigar of the day. His valet is custodian of Chartwell’s cigar hoard, which will eventually grow to over three thousand, all from Havana, mostly Romeo y Julietas and La Aroma de Cubas, kept in a tiny room between this chamber and his study on shelves labeled “wrapped,” “naked,” and “large.” Friends and admirers have sent Winston countless cigar cutters, and he carries one on his watch chain. He never uses them, however. Instead, he moistens one end of a fresh cigar, pierces it with a long match, blows through it from the other end to clear a passage, and lights it from the candle that always stands by his bed. During the course of a day he may consume ten or more cigars, but he seldom smokes one through. Indeed, most of the time they will be unlit. He simply chews them and never inhales. If one becomes hopelessly frayed, he may wrap it in gummed brown paper, calling this improvisation a “bellyband.”¹⁴

The morning papers are neatly stacked by the bed, with The Times and the Daily Telegraph on top and the Daily Worker on the bottom. Editorials are read first, frequently with such intense concentration that the newsprint may become hopelessly smeared with jam. That is a servant’s problem, not his; when Winston has finished a page, he simply lets it slide to the floor. All in all, he devotes two hours to the press, occasionally stepping into his slippers and striding toward his wife’s bedroom to call her attention to this or that item. It may be a mere statistic representing an increase in Germany’s mineral ore imports, but he sees significance in it. Or she may arrive at his bedside on a similar errand. Although they never breakfast together, each starts the day with the same rite.¹⁵

As he glares at the last pages of the Worker, Mrs. P. or Grace Hamblin—later to be joined by Kathleen Hill—enters the room. It is important that she do so boldly, even noisily; her employer is not deaf, but he dislikes surprises. If someone glides in, he will rise wrathfully and roar: “Goddammit!” As she prepares to take dictation, he riffles through the morning mail, which she has sorted into three piles: affairs of state, private correspondence, and letters from the general public. As a young author he had written his mother, “My hand gets so cramped. I am writing every word twice & some parts three times.” Now he seldom puts a word on paper himself—except when affixing his signature, correcting galley proofs, or writing close friends and his immediate family—and he normally uses fountain pens, blue ink for correspondence, red for proofs. The humblest correspondent receives a reply, but the secretary writes it. Winston merely outlines in the most general way what he wants said and she, familiar with his style and his love of anachronistic phrases (“sorely tried,” “most grieved,” “keenly elated,” “pray give me the facts,” “highly diverted”), fills it out. Important letters require more thought and longer searches for the right word. Once the mail has been cleared away, memoranda dictated, and visitors greeted—he will receive anyone except the King in his bedchamber—he may summon a researcher after glancing through proofs, and say: “Look this up,” or “Find out about this.” The researcher may be asked to read certain documents aloud. Or Churchill may turn to speeches. By noon the cadences of his prose have begun to trot; by 1:00 P.M. they are galloping. In the words of Mrs. Hill, he would often be “dashing around in shorts and undershirt and a bright red cummerbund while I trotted behind him from room to room with a pad and pencil struggling to keep pace with the torrential flow of words.” One has the impression of a man in a desperate hurry, not even dressed yet, already behind the day’s schedule—which is, in fact, the case.¹⁶

He is approaching his daily lunch crisis. The meal is to be served at 1:15 P.M.; often, eminent guests are arriving. And he is never there to greet them. He deplores this tardiness in himself yet cannot break it, though everyone at Chartwell knows the explanation: he systematically underestimates, usually by about five minutes, the length of time he needs to do everything, from shaving to wriggling about while his valet dresses him. Its most hair-raising consequences come while he is traveling. Once at Coventry station a close friend was pacing the platform beside an infuriated Clementine. The conductor was signaling all aboard when Winston finally came in sight. Clemmie told the friend: “Winston’s a sporting man; he always gives the train a chance to get away.” Even at Chartwell his dilatoriness is a source of distress for both his family and the manor’s staff. Once a manservant conspired against him by setting his bedroom clock ahead. It worked for a while, because he scorned that offspring of trench warfare the wristwatch, remaining loyal to his large gold pocket watch, known to the family as “the turnip,” which lay beyond his grasp. After his suspicions had been aroused, however, the game was up; he exposed it by simply asking morning visitors the time of day.¹⁷

Eventually a communal effort by all available servants propels their master, roughly dressed, down into the drawing room, which he enters with a beaming Here-I-am-at-last expression. If the assembled guests include newcomers under the impression that it is a normal upper-class British home, they are swiftly disillusioned by the greetings exchanged between the Churchills. Instead of “Hullo,” they utter elementary animal sounds: “Wow-wow!” or “Miaow!” In the family, Christian names are replaced by exotic petits noms. Clementine addresses her husband as “Pug,” he calls her “Cat.” The children are “Puppy Kitten” (Diana), “the Chumbolly” (Randolph), “Mule” (Sarah), and “Mouse” (Mary).

At the round oaken dining room table on the floor below, Churchill chooses to sit facing eastward (making that the head of the round table), looking out across his terrace toward the largest of his artificial lakes. The servants place a candle in a silver Georgian holder by his setting. He will need it when, after one of his long monologues, he finds that his cigar has gone out. As he approaches his chair it is evident that he anticipates the meal with relish. Although he scorns exercise, his appetite is always keen. He cannot, however, be considered a gourmet. Intricate dishes are unappreciated by him; for lunch he prefers Irish stew, Yorkshire pudding with “good red beef,” as he calls it, or an unsauced whiting with its tail in its mouth. Furthermore, he is a confirmed anthropormorphist; he has adopted many of Chartwell’s chickens as pets, has even given them names and speaks of them as his “friends.” So there is no fowl. He would be troubled by the thought that he was devouring one of them.¹⁸

To Churchill a meal without wine would not be a meal at all. In his ten years as squire of Chartwell he has yet to pass a day without confronting a shining bottle of champagne, always at dinner and often at lunch also. As a youth he declared: “A single glass of champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration. The nerves are braced; the imagination is stirred; the wits become more nimble.” A bottle produces the contrary effect: “A comatose insensibility.” He confines himself to a single glass now. Apart from his contempt for the fiction that red meat and white wine do not mix, his drinking habits are characteristic of upper-class Englishmen. He regards the American martini as barbaric, and when Jan Christiaan Smuts arrives and presents him with a bottle of South African brandy he takes a sip, rolls it around on his tongue, then rolls his eyes, and, beaming at his old friend, says: “My dear Smuts, it is excellent.” He pauses. “But it is not brandy.” At the end of lunch, after a glass of port with a plain ice and a ripe Stilton, he greets the appearance of Hine, real brandy, with a blissful smile and the reaming of a fresh cigar. Brandy, he believes, is essential to a stable diet, and the older the bottle the better. Although uninebriated, he becomes more genial, more affable, more expansive, radiating reassurance.¹⁹

Sir John Colville, who will later serve as private secretary to three prime ministers, including Churchill, may well have been right in arguing that Churchill’s friends are—except for the absence of boors and the garrulous—notable for their variety. They include the witty, the ambitious, the lazy, the dull, the exhibitionists, the talented, the intellectual, and above all the honorable. But the most gifted will appear at dinner. And his guests are all friends. In London, even in his pied-à-terre at No. 11 Morpeth Mansions, where he stays while attending Parliament, he is embattled. He needs no snipers here.

But neither are guests confined to lickspittles and sycophants. Himself a celebrity before the turn of the century, before the word had entered common usage, Churchill relishes the company of others in the public eye. His favorite American, the financier Bernard Baruch, visits here whenever in England. T. E. Lawrence, now serving in RAF ranks under an assumed name, roars up on his motorcycle and, knowing that the spectacle will enchant Mary, appears at dinner in his robes as a prince of Arabia. Charlie Chaplin entertains them all with his pantomime and mimicry. Winston asks whether he has chosen his next role. “Yes,” Chaplin replies: “Jesus Christ.” Churchill pauses, then asks, “Have you cleared the rights?”

Among the regulars at the table are two MPs who remain loyal to Winston in these years of his political eclipse: the handsome young Robert J. G. (“Bob”) Boothby and Brendan Bracken, a brash adventurer and self-made millionaire notable for his pug nose, granny glasses, disheveled mop of flaming red hair, and the extraordinary rumors, which he encourages, that he is his host’s illegitimate son. Winston finds this gossip highly amusing. Clementine does not. (She once confronted her husband and demanded to know whether the stories were true. He replied: “I’ve looked the matter up, but the dates don’t coincide.”) Clemmie is the only participant who is never intimidated by her husband’s deep frowns and hissing wrath, and her dislike of Bracken, revealed by gesture, glance, and edged voice, is stark. Churchill admires her spirit—“God,” he later confides in a friend, “she dropped down on poor Brendan like a jaguar out of a tree”—but remains silent. Others at the table wonder why. Undeniably Bracken is gifted and able. But his behavior, even in this most tolerant of homes, is atrocious. Recently he went through Clementine’s scrapbook with shears, scissoring out articles of Winston’s career.²⁰

And Winston, for reasons which reveal more about him than Bracken, enjoys the younger man’s company. Men who have done something with their lives interest him—indeed, they are the only men who do. He is particularly impressed by military men; any winner of the Victoria Cross is embraced, and when he meets Sir Bernard Freyberg, the New Zealand war hero, Churchill insists that the embarrassed Freyberg strip so that his host can count his thirty-three battle scars. Similarly, men who have amassed fortunes while he has struggled year after year with creditors, hold enormous appeal for him. That is part of Bracken’s charm.

It also explains, in part, Winston’s fondness for Baruch, though Baruch’s appeal is broader. He is an American, he is Jewish, he recognizes the menace of an aggressive Germany, and Churchill is indebted to him for an extraordinary act of shrewdness and generosity. Winston was badly hurt in the Wall Street Crash three years ago. Had it not been for Baruch, however, it would have been much worse; he could have spent the rest of his life in debt. He is not a born gambler; he is a born losing gambler. In New York at the time, he dropped into Baruch’s office and decided to play the market, and as prices tumbled he plunged deeper and deeper, trying to outguess the stock exchange just as he had tried to outguess roulette wheels on the Riviera. In Wall Street, as in Monte Carlo, he failed. At the end of the day he confronted Baruch in tears. He was, he said, a ruined man. Chartwell and everything else he possessed must be sold; he would have to leave the House of Commons and enter business. The financier gently corrected him. Churchill, he said, had lost nothing. Baruch had left instructions to buy every time Churchill sold and sell whenever Churchill bought. Winston had come out exactly even because, he later learned, Baruch even paid the commissions.²¹

Bracken can’t match that. Being British and in Parliament, however, he can serve his idol in other ways. In the House he is scorned as Winston’s “sheepdog,” his “lapdog,” or—this from Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin—his faithful chela, the Hindi word for minion. But uncritical admiration is precisely what Churchill needs. He is in the third of what will be ten years of political exile to the back benches. No other statesman in the country’s political history will have served so long a Siberian sentence, and he would have to have a heart of stone not to be grateful for Bracken’s steadfast, unquestioning allegiance.²²

Churchill may even be flattered by the stories that he fathered a son on the wrong side of the blanket. Those closest to him agree that he is undersexed; some suggest that the explanation lies in the promiscuity of his beautiful, wanton mother. The historian A. J. P. Taylor will reflect: “She moved from one man to another. And it’s possible, I don’t say this is the only explanation, that Churchill’s really almost extreme chastity was a reaction to his mother’s lack of it. There are other possibilities. He may have been weakly sexed biologically, or the explanation may have been psychological. He once remarked: ‘The reason I can write so much is that I don’t waste my essence in bed.’ ” Winston didn’t marry until his thirty-fourth year, and there is every reason to believe that he was a virgin bridegroom. Despite frequent separations from Clemmie, who disapproves of the lush Riviera and spends her holidays with the children at spartan resorts on the North Sea, or a hotel near Rugby, he has committed but one act of infidelity, at Golfe-Juan, on the Mediterranean, with a divorced, titled Englishwoman whose seductive skills and sexual experience far exceeded his. To one who cherishes his reputation for mischievousness, whispers that a fellow MP is his bastard may not be altogether unwelcome.²³

Bracken is one of his two most striking disciples. The other, in many ways Brendan’s opposite, complements him. Born in Germany of an American mother, Frederick A. Lindemann took his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1910, continued his scientific studies in Paris and Brussels, confirmed Einstein’s refinement of Planck’s quantum theory, and, as a member of the Royal Aircraft Establishment in the Great War, organized London’s kite balloon barrage. After the Armistice he was appointed professor of experimental philosophy at Oxford and recognized as one of Europe’s leading physicists. Now in 1932 “the Prof,” as everyone in the Churchill family calls him, has just published his Physical Significance of the Quantum Theory. His Oxford colleagues now believe that his best work is behind him; Professor Derek Jackson notes that the younger generation regards him “as more of a theoretical physicist devoid of experimental ability.” Churchill disagrees, and so will history.²⁴

Lindemann’s achievements cannot be impeached, but in his own way he can be trying. Even by Chartwell’s standards he is odd. Indeed, he seems to be everything Winston is not. Tobacco in any form is anathema to him. He lives largely on the whites of eggs and is a vegetarian and teetotaler, except when as a guest here, he bows to his host’s insistence that he consume exactly 32 cubic centimeters of brandy a day. He always wears a bowler, even on a warship or in the cockpit of an RAF fighter. His valet and secretary, Harvey, who drives his huge, unwieldy limousine, is his double, matching his attire of the day shirt by shirt, sock by sock, and bowler by bowler.²⁵

The Prof will follow Churchill anywhere. Winston’s motives for cultivating him are very different. Lindemann’s many talents include a matchless gift as an interpreter of science for laymen. In the words of Sir John Colville, Lindemann can “simplify the most opaque problem, scientific, mechanical or economic,” translating technical jargon into language which provides “a lucid explanation” and sacrifices “nothing of importance.” Churchill loathes scientific terminology. He never even mastered public school arithmetic. The Prof provides him with the essential facts when he needs them without disrupting his concentration on other matters. Like radar, Lindemann’s “beautiful brain,” as Churchill calls it, will prove worth several divisions in the struggle to save England from Adolf Hitler. Less than ten years from now he will arrive at No. 10 Downing Street with clear, accurate charts which, by replacing statistics, present displays showing England’s stockpiles of vital raw materials, the rate at which ships are being launched on the Clyde, the Tyne, and Barrow, and Britain’s production of tanks, artillery, small arms, and warplanes in terms the prime minister can understand with what Colville calls “infallible skill and punctuality.”²⁶

It is a measure of Churchill’s own accomplishments that he can inspire a man with whom he shares little except a common affection for Americans. The Prof has little use for others. Like many of his laboratory colleagues, he never applies the scientific method in judging society. He is in fact a snarl of prejudices. So profound is his misogyny that he has not spoken to his only sister for fifteen years. His sole recreation is tennis. He is a champion of Sweden, an achievement all the more remarkable because, to discourage women from regarding him as a sex object, he plays in the hottest weather wearing thick black ribbed socks and a heavy shirt tightly buttoned at the wrists.²⁷

This is not at all Churchillian, though modern feminists would regard Winston as a stereotype of male chauvinism. He opposed woman suffrage until Clementine converted him, wouldn’t dream of soliciting a woman’s advice on matters of national policy, and dropped the idea of writing an article for Collier’s on the prospects of a woman becoming prime minister of England because he thought the idea laughable. Nevertheless, he admires Englishwomen of his class and enjoys their company—provided, of course, that they are attractive and don’t attempt to discuss topics reserved for members of his own sex. As a man who reached his majority in 1895, when Victorian gentlemen never used the words “breast” or “leg” if ladies were present, he assumes that they are innocents who must be shielded from the brutal facts of life and that feminine beauty is unaccompanied by carnal desire.

If Chartwell’s guest book is a reliable index, the only ladies who will be invited to lunch in Churchill’s heaven—with the one great exception of his longtime friend Lady Violet Bonham Carter, née Asquith—will be escorted, and even they will be required to confine themselves to smiling when their host makes a clever remark, nodding vigorously when he has expressed an opinion, and expressing no opinion of their own. This is not sexist, however, because it also applies to gentleman guests. Winston means to dominate them and cheerfully acknowledges it; his own idea of a fine meal is to dine well and then discuss a serious topic—“with myself as chief conversationalist.” It isn’t even conversation; unlike Lloyd George he is a poor listener, has little interest in what others have to say, and, if he is not the speaker, withdraws into silent communion with himself while his interior monologue, the flow of private rhetoric, soars on. His daughter Mary will recall that “small talk or social chitchat bored Winston profoundly—but he rarely suffered from it, since he completely ignored it, pursuing his own themes.”²⁸

In London he will give those who disagree with him a fair hearing; two of his favorite aphorisms are “I would rather be right than consistent” and “In the course of my life I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.” But at Chartwell, with a pony of brandy in one hand and a cigar in the other, he is inclined to bully those who challenge him. And the fact is that few dare try. Lords Birkenhead and Beaverbrook could. Birkenhead—F. E. Smith before his ennoblement—would cross foils with Churchill and win as often as he lost. It is perhaps significant that F.E. became Winston’s best friend. And the man has not drawn breath who can intimidate Beaverbrook, the great press lord, known to the Churchills as “the Beaver,” who, when he first met Churchill in 1911, was plain Max Aitken, a Canadian upstart. During one visit here he declined wine with his Stilton. “Port is the brother of cheese,” his host said in lordly reproach. “Yes,” Max flashed back, “and the sister of gout.” But Birkenhead has lain in his grave two years, and Beaverbrook, though Churchill’s once and future ally, will seldom be seen at Chartwell in this decade. The feisty Beaver, for all his shrewdness, shares the almost unanimous conviction of England’s ruling classes that Winston—whom he calls a “busted flush”—exaggerates the emerging Nazi menace; like his fellow press lords he believes Hitler’s friendship worth cultivating and assures his readers—he will reassure them every year, even when the sands are running out in 1939—that “there will be no war.”²⁹

Lacking peers in colloquy, Churchill rules his table as an absolute monarch. His expression radiates benevolence, his arms are spread to embrace everyone there; then, having opened all hearts, he speaks of today’s guest of honor, usually an old friend. Then his visage darkens, he points a threatening finger, and all await the inevitable consignment of a transgressor—never present—to his doom. Today’s wretch turns out to be Thomas Babington Macaulay, who dared slander John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. The great duke’s great-great-great-great-great-great grandson thunders his verdict: “It is beyond our hopes to overtake Lord Macaulay. We can only hope that truth will follow swiftly enough to fasten the label ‘liar’ to his genteel coattails.”³⁰

Guests say afterward that the host is so fascinating they cannot remember what they ate. Political scientist and historian Harold Laski observes that many of them, in trying to remember all Winston’s mots, overlook the flaws in his reasoning. Other critics note that Churchill has no small talk, though as the American writer Virginia Cowles asks, “Why should anyone want small talk when Churchill is at the peak of his form?” Certainly no one here tries to stop him. Later, biographer Lady Longford will write that “his set-pieces were… so brilliant that few listeners wished to interrupt. Similarly, they recognized that he was self-centered precisely because he had an interior vision which must be brought to the light of day. They felt privileged to assist.”³¹

Absolutely secure here, he can laugh at himself and encourage others to join him. “Megalomania,” he says, referring to his domineering manner, “is the only form of sanity.” He has just published a collection of his magazine articles under the title Thoughts and Adventures (Amid These Storms in the United States) and, as usual, he has sent copies to friends and acquaintances in high places. Opening an envelope bearing the royal crest, he reads aloud an acknowledgment from the Duke of Gloucester: “Dear Winston. Thank you for your new book. I have put it on the shelf with the others.” And he relishes and retells the story of how F.E., his adversary when Winston was the Liberal member for Dundee, set a Tory rally roaring with laughter by interrupting his speech to say: “I see from the Dundee Advertiser—I mean the newspaper, not the politician….” Like a man trying on neckties, he tests his phrases at lunch, watching faces to measure their effect. “An immense responsibility,” he ruminates, “rests upon the German people for this subservience to the barbaric idea of autocracy. This is the gravamen against them in history—that, in spite of all their brains and courage, they worship power, and let themselves be led by the nose.”³²

The last drop of brandy is gone. He gives the empty bottles a glance, not of regret, but of affection; he will paint them, he announces, and call the completed canvas Bottlescape. Through the meal his visage has been kaleidoscopic: somber, mischievous, bored, proud, arrogant, magnanimous, despairing, indifferent, exalted, contemptuous, adoring. Now it screws up, creasing his laugh lines, and he makes a crowing, expiratory sound in his throat—signs, as his friends know, that he is about to amuse them, perhaps with that odd brand of self-mockery to which British soldiers and parliamentarians alike turn in times of adversity.³³

They are right. He tells of taking his annual Riviera holiday without his valet. This, for a patrician of his generation, was a momentous decision. He had never even been on a bus or even seen the tube. In traveling alone he felt he was “striking a blow for equality and fraternity,” but misadventures plagued him all the way, and he describes each, relishing the details. His guests laugh; it is a good story. But it is more. Winston cannot get through the day without servants, and he assumes this is true of all gentlemen. It was true in his youth, but is no longer. Later Colville, his assistant private secretary, will ask leave to become an RAF fighter pilot. Winston hates to see a valuable member of his staff go, but it is a request he, of all men, cannot refuse. Alone together, “Jock” and Winston are equals; the first Lord Colville became a peer in 1604. The younger man, like Winston, is a Harrovian; his Cambridge college is Trinity; his club, White’s. Churchill, the quondam hussar, grandly declaims: “The RAF is the cavalry of modern war.” But he is shocked when Colville tells him he will first serve in the ranks as an aircraftsman, second class. Winston protests: “You mustn’t—you won’t be able to take your man!” It hasn’t crossed his mind that a civil servant earning £400 a year, about $32.30 a week, could hardly afford a valet.³⁴

Should his visitors include a guest of great eminence, Churchill will offer to show him round Chartwell’s grounds. Otherwise, he proceeds with his first afternoon activity: feeding his golden orfe, ducks, and swans. Donning a Stetson—if there is a chill in the air, he will also wear an overcoat—he heads for a broad wicker chair beside the goldfish pond, calling ahead, “Arf! Arf!” or “Yoick! Yoick!”

They rush to greet him, though a servant, a step behind him, has what they want. Twice a month Frank Jenner collects a blue baby-food tin at the local railway station. Within, packed in sawdust, are maggots, the caviar of goldfish gourmets. Winston offers a lidful of maggots to the fish; when it is empty he holds out the lid to be refilled. Nearby a wooden box contains bread crumbs. These Churchill feeds to the ducks and swans.

The feeding is an integral part of the Churchillian day. After it, he sinks into the wicker chair, dismisses his servant, and remains, companionless and immobile, for at least a half hour. A table beside the chair bears another weak Johnny Walker and soda, a box of cigars, a pagoda-shaped ashtray, and a container of long Canadian matches, useful in a rising wind. The squire of Chartwell prefers solitude here. Long afterward, servants will recall his reciting Housman and Kipling to himself, or reading, or simply staring out across the Weald, alone with his reflections, a great hunched figure whose cigar smoke mingles with the many scents of an English country home, including, in season, the fragrance of freshly cut grass.

His interest in all creatures on his estate is unflagging. As a young Colonial Office under secretary he had been an enthusiastic hunter of wild game, but those days are past. Now he holds a kitten to his face and murmurs, “Darling.” It is true that he kicked a large tabby cat who played with the telephone cord when he was speaking to the lord chancellor of England, shouting, “Get off the line, you fool!”—and hastily telling the chancellor, “Not you!” But afterward he offered the cat his apologies, which he never extends to human beings, cajoling the pet, cooing, “Don’t you love me anymore?” and proudly telling his valet at breakfast next day, “My Mickey came to see me this morning. All is forgiven.”³⁵

In his reverence for all living creatures Churchill approaches ascetic Jainism. Butterflies are sacred. So are predators. He loses two Siberian geese to foxes, but when a fox trap is proposed, he shakes his head, saying, “I couldn’t bear to think of them being hurt.” Similarly, when a heron raids his ponds he merely covers them with wire netting, forbidding his staff even to scare the bird away. A sheet of frosted glass occupies one wall of the guests’ bathroom in a friend’s Mediterranean villa. During one of Winston’s visits there, he observed that the bathroom light attracted night moths, who, fluttering against the glass, were easy prey for lurking lizards. He winced and gritted his teeth when the lizards chewed up their victims, but vetoed his valet’s suggestion that the lizards be frightened away by tapping on the window. They were obeying a law of nature, he said, and ought not be punished.³⁶

When a black swan falls ill, he does not hesitate to summon the keeper of the London Zoo. A goat sickens, and Whitehall’s Ministry of Agriculture is consulted. Arriving home at 3:00 A.M. after a late session of Parliament and learning that there has been no afternoon feeding at the pond, he rouses a maid to hold a flashlight while he makes amends to his piscatorial friends. All this is vexing to the sleepy maid. She is relieved when a new secretary becomes an overnight heroine in Winston’s eyes. Something extraordinary has been happening to the fish. They are turning white and dying. Winston is stumped; so is his gardener. Then the girl pipes up: “I know what’s wrong. They have fungus.” Churchill gives her a lowering look. How, he rumbles, does she know? She replies that her parents have an aquarium. He asks: “And how do you treat it?” She answers: “You put in a salt solution and gradually the fungus drops off. If you act quickly enough they can be saved.” He does, they are, and during the healing period he drives up to London and consults experts at the zoological gardens in Regents Park. On his return he summons the young secretary. “Do you know what they told me?” he asks. “They said exactly what you said.” He beams at her. “Oh, I think you are a very clever secretary! You know what goes wrong with fish. Henceforth, you will attend them.” He is delighted, the staff is delighted. The feelings of the girl, who has been at Chartwell long enough to know that her other duties will continue, are mixed.

Winston is, among other things, a dog’s best friend. Observing one manservant’s poodle limping, he tells him to send it to a veterinarian, and when the pet returns well two weeks later, he pays the bill. One of Chartwell’s animals vexes him; Mary’s dog, it seems, has never been properly housebroken. Winston mutters darkly: “He commits at least three indiscretions a day.” Mary is worried about her dog. But her father cannot bring himself to intervene, and the pug continues to enjoy his unsanitary ways.

Still recuperating from a traffic accident he suffered months before in New York, Churchill lays no bricks these days. But he cannot remain idle. He is, Bill Deakin notes, “incapable of inactivity,” and Cousin Moppet writes: “Winston has so many irons in the fire that the day is not nearly long enough.” During one of his Johnsonian lunches he remarks: “Broadly speaking, human beings may be divided into three classes: those who are billed to death, those who are worried to death, and those who are bored to death.” Though heavily billed (he has just settled £1,600 of his son’s debts), and deeply worried about the events stirring central Europe, he is never bored. To Virginia Cowles, a weekend guest, he says: “With all the fascinating things there are to do in the world, some people while away their time playing Patience. Just fancy!”³⁷

Since his physician has banned bricklaying, he heads for his studio, telling a member of his staff to fetch his brushes, easel, and palette. He intends to paint “one of my beloved cats” or to re-create on canvas a still life from photographs taken from their latest visit to Cannes or Marrakech. “If it weren’t for painting,” he tells a friend, “I couldn’t live. I couldn’t bear the strain of things.”

Winston designed the studio. Inside, it is small but very lofty, providing maximum light. In constructing it, he put wooden slats along the interior walls; incompleted canvases went there. Eventually the slats will become shelves, supporting some five hundred finished paintings. He paints few people and no violence, but the full body of his work provides an overview of his travels: the Acropolis, Stromboli, the canals of Amsterdam, Scandinavian fjords, Pompeii, Rome, Rotterdam, Passchendaele, Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Messines, Menin, Waterloo, Scapa Flow, Ulster, Balmoral, Devonshire, and Kent. Cathedrals fascinate him. So do ruins; he had to be dragged away from Pompeii. And he finds waterfalls irresistible. He spent days at his easel by the roaring Jordan. On his finished canvas there is an illusion of moving water; one can almost catch the sound of it.

His painting methods are purely Churchillian. Confronted by a virgin canvas, he moves rapidly and decisively, giving the scene a swift appraisal and then slapping on the oils, reacting instinctively to a single theme: a villa, a temple, sailboats at low tide. Inspector Thompson, after hours of watching him at his easel, writes: “I would think that the man’s inner spirit is superbly calm and that he paints from it—never from the mind or intellect.” Thomas Bodkin, director of the National Gallery of Ireland, thinks successful professional painters might learn a lot from Winston: “He does not try to say two things at the same time…. The dominant motive is never obscured by irrelevancies.” After a careful examination of Winston’s canvases, Sir John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery and one of England’s most eminent art critics, judges them to be works “of real merit which bear a direct and intimate relationship to his outlook on life. In these pictures there comes bubbling irrepressibly up his sheer enjoyment of the simple beauties of nature.”³⁸

If he has chosen not to paint this afternoon, he may summon a “Miss” and enter the study to make a start on the day’s work, an article for an American magazine, perhaps, or a piece for Fleet Street. Or he may read in his bedchamber, listening to BBC music, provided it is his kind of music—H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado, or French military marches. Once more Chartwell hears the poignant counterpoint of father and daughter. Sarah is playing the nostalgic:

Billy McCoy was a musical boy…

And then the hammock starts a-swingin’

And the bells begin a-ringin’

While he’s sittin’ at that ‘pianna’

There on the Alabama,

Playin’ the Oceana Roll!

MGM pioneers the renting of films to those who can afford them, other studios follow, and Alexander Korda sees to it that Churchill has priority. His taste in films, as in music, is middlebrow—Lew Ayres in All Quiet on the Western Front, Fredric March in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Richard Barthelmess in The Dawn Patrol, and Charles Laughton, Winston’s favorite actor, in The Sign of the Cross. His taste in literature is more eclectic. Here his interests are professional. His leisure reading, serious and frivolous, strengthens his grasp of his mother tongue. In Chartwell’s library one can glimpse the landscape of his mind. Among the books he has read, and often reread, are Gibbon’s five-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, J. A. Froude’s History of England, Sir Richard Burton’s sixteen-volume Arabian Nights, the King James Bible, and C. S. Forester’s biography of Nelson. Later he will devour Forester’s Hornblower novels, John Paget’s The New “Examen,” Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Mankind. He likes to dip into books of verse and later quote them at meals. His favorite poets are Kipling, Housman, and Rupert Brooke. If in the mood for mere amusement, he plucks out novels by the Brontës, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Scott’s Rob Roy, Trollope’s political novels (particularly The Duke’s Children), P. G. Wodehouse’s fatuities, or the tales of Kipling, R. L. Stevenson, and Somerset Maugham, the only modern novelist whose skills he admires.³⁹

He enjoys being cosseted—F. E. Smith said “Winston is a man of simple tastes; he is always prepared to put up with the best of everything.” But although the grandson of a duke could move in the highest social circles, his leisure is largely confined to Chartwell and its grounds. Only rarely can he be coaxed away for a weekend elsewhere. His greatest pleasures lie here. On a bright afternoon he will stroll around the grounds, greeting those who are home. He is an indulgent father. Like many another man who suffered in his childhood, he has spoiled his children, especially Randolph, despite their mother’s pleading, sowing winds from which he will later reap whirlwinds. Diana is sorting out the first of her trousseau. Sarah is mooning about, playing her records, savoring memories of her success in the Kitkat Players, an amateur troupe; sulking because her parents refuse to support her yearning to become a chorus girl. Randolph is growing a beard, which, his father writes, “makes him look perfectly revolting. He declares he looks like Christ. To me he looks like my poor father in the last phase of his illness.”⁴⁰

Mary has just returned from the local school, where she is a day student; Cousin Moppet will now read to her. Like the others she hails her father as “Pa-pah.” After replying (“Puppy Kitten,” “Mule,” etc.) he may examine his firearms. He likes them; he has never forgotten the Mauser that saved his life in the last great charge of British cavalrymen at Omdurman. He is also an extraordinary marksman, perhaps because a weapon, like a paintbrush, does exactly what it is told to do and never argues back. Automobiles quarrel with him; he is the worst driver in England. When he tried to fly he nearly killed himself; if he takes to the dance floor all other couples leave it. But with his Mannlicher, .32 Webley Scott, or Colt .45, which require only a keen eye and a steady hand, he is a dead shot. Later, at the age of seventy, he will challenge the accuracy of guards officers and General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower. Of Winston’s ten shots, one will hit the fringe of the bull’s-eye; the other nine will be dead center. The elite guardsmen will scatter theirs. Poor Ike will miss the target completely.

Now Churchill may withdraw and don a silk sleeping vest for a siesta, a custom he had observed in 1895 as a young war correspondent in Cuba, where the climate imposed it and custom sanctioned it. The temperature in his bedchamber is always exactly 74 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet he insists on the vest. Slipping into it, and drawing the sleep mask over his eyes, he slides between fresh linen sheets. He never requires more than a few seconds to drift off. Moments after his cheek touches the pillow, before his valet has even left the room, Winston is slumbering. He can do this almost anywhere. In automobiles or aboard planes he carries a special pillow; he dons the mask, curls his head down into his chest like a mother hen, and enjoys absolute rest until the journey’s end. At Chartwell his siesta may last two hours. Refreshed, he joins his family at 5:00 P.M., usually playing cards with Clemmie or Randolph in the drawing room. Bridge is rarely played because he never wins. Furthermore, it is a relatively new game and therefore suspect. He prefers mah-jongg, backgammon, gin rummy, and bezique, a forerunner of pinochle. Usually played with two thirty-two-card packs, bezique can be traced to the 1600s; its antiquity qualifies it for Churchillian amusement.

As the drawing room clock strikes 7:00 P.M., he mounts the stairs for his second daily bath. During these ablutions he likes an audience, old companions who at appropriate moments will laugh, murmur approval, express indignation, and understand his arcane references to political upheavals on the Continent and parliamentary intrigue in London. If no close friends are among his guests, he may send for a research assistant and review their progress with Marlborough. As a last resort, Winston will summon a Miss to sit outside and take dictation during pauses in his soaping, rinsing, and splashing. Before his valet guides him into his dinner jacket, he signs the day’s mail and then dawdles, putting on another record, or fashioning a bellyband, or singing “Abdullah Bulbul Amir” to the thirty-eighth verse. Dinner, the day’s main event, is scheduled to be served at 8:30. He may reach the drawing room by 8:45.

It is lunch on a far grander scale, with more guests, of greater distinction, silvery buckets of iced champagne, Churchill presiding in his grandest manner, and several courses. Among the foods likeliest to be served are clear soup, oysters, caviar, Gruyère cheese, pâté de foie gras, trout, shoulder of lamb, lobster, dressed crab, petite marmite, scampi, Dover sole, chocolate éclairs, and, of course, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Winston never eats tripe, crumpets, sausages, cabbage, salami, sauerkraut, corned beef, or rice pudding. Clemmie, who knows his preferences, has briefed the cook on what is to be on the menu. He decides when meals are to be served, he determines who is to be invited.

If he has been in London recently, different versions of his latest witticisms have been repeated in the clubs of Pall Mall and St. James’s, in drawing rooms of the West End and the City’s counting rooms. Asked now to confirm them, he nods as he gropes for a match or the stem of his wineglass, pausing occasionally to correct a verb or alter syntax. He tells of how, crossing Parliament Square, he ran into Lord Londonderry, his cousin and frequent adversary. Londonderry, hoping to drive home a point, had asked him: “Have you read my latest book?” Winston chortles his reply: “No, I only read for pleasure or profit.” In the House of Commons he had remarked upon Sir Stafford Cripps’s “look of injured guilt.” So many cabinet ministers wanted ennoblement that he had protested: “They can’t all have peerages; there ought to be some disappearages.” One member of the government had protested that this was a slur; Churchill shot back: “I know of no case where a man added to his dignity by standing on it.”⁴¹

It is difficult to keep up with a host who can set such a pace. Nevertheless the dinner is not a one-man show. Guests have been invited for luster, not servility. David Lloyd George has been in Parliament ten years longer than Churchill and an awesome prime minister for six. Sir Archibald Sinclair—who, when Churchill led a battalion in the trenches, served as his second in command—is about to assume leadership of the Liberal party, which, with fifty-nine seats in the House, holds the balance between Labour and the Conservatives. Alfred Duff Cooper and Anthony Eden, both of whom were decorated for bravery in France, hold subcabinet posts in the government and will soon become full-fledged ministers, Duff Cooper at the War Office and Eden as foreign secretary.

Late in life Mary will recall: “The ‘basic’ house party, enlarged by other guests, usually formed a gathering it would be hard to beat for value. There was little warming up; the conversation plunged straight into some burning or vital question. But the talk was by no means confined to politics; it ranged over history, art, and literature; it toyed with philosophical themes; it visited the past and explored the future. The Prof and his slide rule were much in demand on all scientific problems. Sometimes the conversation was a ding-dong battle of wits and words between, say, Winston and Duff Cooper, with the rest of the company skirmishing on the sidelines and keeping score. The verbal pyrotechnics waxed hot and fierce, usually dissolving into gales of laughter.” Then, she remembers, conversation “usually dwindled” as everyone wanted to “share the main ‘entertainment,’ ” which was almost always “a dramatic and compelling monologue from Winston.” Frequently he would recite “Horatius,” and “this was very popular with the children, as we could join in ‘the brave days of old’ bits.”⁴²

All his guests meet his conversational standards: “The man who cannot say what he has to say in good English cannot have very much to say that is worth listening to.” None hesitates to speak up when he pauses for breath. Winston is unresentful of this. As Sir David Hunt, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, will recall long afterward: “He has been accused of excessive addiction to the monologue; there was certainly a tendency that way but he was always tolerant of interjections from his listeners if they were relevant or amusing.” Collin Brooks, the newspaper editor, in comparing Churchill in the House with Churchill at Chartwell, notes that the style of his public speeches, “slow in pace and heavy in emphasis,” yields, in the privacy of his home, to “a quicker flow.” Winston’s casual quips “sparkle and sting, but the talk is unhurried, with occasional pauses, for effect or to hold his listeners while he gropes for the right word.” Intense or gay, he infuses his discussions of grave issues with gusto and what one guest will recall as “verbal gymnastics and mental pyrotechnics… often rounded off by a sudden colloquial that from most other people would be an anticlimax.”⁴³

Brooks sets down one of Winston’s observations about politics: “Our weakness today is not in the decline of Parliament itself, but in the diminished interest which the press gives to it. It is, indeed, heartbreaking for any man to go down day after day in these turbulent times to deliver speeches which, by the content, if not by their form, are of great importance, and to realize that they are heard by but a few hundreds of his fellow Members, and read by but a scattering of people who habitually read Hansard.”⁴⁴

But he did not invite them here to complain about his political isolation. He introduces other themes, and, being completely uninhibited, will from time to time burst into song. One guest recalls attending the theatre in 1926 on the evening the general strike ended. He sat directly behind Winston and Clemmie. Now he wonders whether Churchill remembers the show. Churchill not only remembers Lady Be Good, starring the Astaires; he can, and does, croon the lyrics of all its tunes. His memory is extraordinary. Lady Violet will remember how “he could quote back to me words of which I had no recollection, and when I asked: ‘Where does that come from?’ he replied: ‘You said it’ or ‘You quoted it to me’—sometimes remembering the time and the place. He could not forget what he liked, except occasionally on purpose, when his own past utterances conflicted with his present attitudes.” To illustrate a point he quotes a poem he read in Punch fifty years ago and has not seen since.⁴⁵

After the ladies have left and the men are gathered around him for port, brandy, and cigars, he will sit until 10:00 P.M., or later, talking of his school days, the great political issues of the past, the MPs who fought over them, battlefields of his youth, strategic innovations in the American Civil War. Using salt shakers, cutlery, and brandy goblets, he can reenact any battle in that war, from Bull Run to Five Forks, citing the troops engaged on either side, identifying the commanders, describing the passage at arms, the aftermath. Reflections on any conceivable subject succeed one another in his racing brain. The plight of mankind, he muses, is “all the fault of the human mind being made in two lobes, only one of which does any thinking, so we are all right-handed or left-handed; whereas, if we were properly constructed, we should use our right and left hands with equal force and skill according to circumstances. As it is, those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace, and those who could make a good peace never win.”

At least one guest finds it difficult to picture Churchill as a peacemaker, noting Winston’s account “of how he first came under fire when he was twenty-one, of his boyish delight in the proximity of danger, or his glee that he was actually ‘seeing the real thing.’ ” The hazards and discomforts of war, Winston argues, strengthen a young man’s character. Certainly they had strengthened his. But war was very different then. The industrial/technological revolution had not yet cranked out the appliances of death—machine guns, shrapnel shells, land mines—which were taking so frightful a toll in the twentieth century. In South Africa, at the crucial battle of Majuba in 1881, the British lost just 92 men. By contrast, over 400,000 young British soldiers had fallen in 1916 and 1917 in the Somme and Passchendaele campaigns—in vain, with no strategic gains. In 1932 few Englishmen know that as a young war correspondent he had written: “War, disguise it as you may, is but a dirty, shoddy business, which only a fool would play at,” or that he declared after the Armistice in 1918: “War, which was cruel and magnificent, has become cruel and squalid.”⁴⁶

But in his youth he had thought it magnificent. In his first book he wrote: “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result,” and “There are men who derive as stern an exaltation from the proximity of danger and ruin, as others from success.” It is this very trait—and his longing to be on a battlefield, watching what he calls “the fun of the good things”—which worries all but the most devoted of his followers. His critics call him “a genius without judgment,” a man with “a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain,” the only cabinet minister who gloated when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914.

Because of the general revulsion against another European war, and because Churchill’s judgment has been discredited since the failure of the Dardanelles campaign, men will shrug and turn away when he predicts, accurately, that Hitler will come to power in Germany, and that once Hitler has moved into the Kanzlei—the German chancellery in Berlin—their only hope of avoiding another general war will lie in following his advice: shoring up England’s defenses, or, that failing, in turning to a leader who possesses not only vision and intellect, but also a capacity for brutality, faith in the superiority of his race, and a positive relish at the prospect of grappling with a nation of warriors led by a demagogue who represents everything he loathes—in short, to Winston Churchill.

The great difference between the two is that Hitler wants war and will actually be annoyed by Britons and Frenchmen who propose to give him what he wants without a fight, while Churchill, though a born warlord, is prepared to sacrifice all save honor and the safety of England to keep the peace. Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a difficult book, but no one who has struggled through it can doubt that the author is a killer obsessed with Blutdurst, bloodthirstiness. Churchill, on the other hand, after telling his guests that he has already begun research on a major project which will follow Marlborough, a four-volume History of the English-speaking Peoples, gloomily adds: “I doubt if I shall finish it before the war comes.” If he does and an English victory is “decisive,” he says, “I shall have to add several more volumes. And if it is not decisive no more histories will be written for years.”

It is eleven o’clock. Churchill sees his overnight guests to their rooms and, as they retire, begins his working day. Only after entering his employ will Bill Deakin discover, to his astonishment, that Churchill lacks a large private income, that he lives like a pasha yet must support his extravagant life with his pen. The Churchill children are also unaware that, as Mary will later put it, the family “literally lived from book to book, and from one article to the next.” Her mother, who knows, prays that each manuscript will sell. Luckily, they all do, with the exception of one screenplay for Alexander Korda, and editors and publishers, both in Britain and America, pay him the highest rates. His output is prodigious. During backbencher years, from early 1931 to late 1939, he will publish eleven volumes and over four hundred articles, many of them hack work (“Sport Is a Stimulant in Our Workaday World,” “The Childless Marriage Threatens Our Race,” “What Other Secrets Does the Inventor Hold?”) in Strand Magazine, Sunday Pictorial, Daily Mail, The Times, Saturday Review, Answers, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Chronicle, Collier’s, Sunday Dispatch, Pictorial Magazine, Sunday Times, Pictorial Weekly, The Listener, Pearson’s Magazine, Daily Sketch, Evening Standard, Sunday Express, News of the World, Jewish Chronicle, and Daily Telegraph. His annual earnings will average £20,000, or $96,000. During the same period he will deliver 368 speeches for which he is, of course, paid nothing. He will reject some commissions: a history of Parliament because the sum is inadequate, nearly $30,000 for a speaking tour in the United States because the mounting crises on the Continent keep him in England, and $50 from William S. Paley, president of the Columbia Broadcasting System, for an appraisal of Nazi activity in Austria. Paley asks CBS correspondent William L. Shirer to make the approach. Shirer, appalled by the paltry sum, phones Winston at the House of Commons. Called out of the chamber, Churchill says he will do it for $500. Paley decides he isn’t worth it, and a fragment of history is lost.⁴⁷

Winston’s Chartwell study is a writer’s dream. Entering through the Tudor doorway with its molded architrave, one looks up and up—the ceiling has been removed, revealing vaulting rafters and beams which were in place long before the Renaissance. One’s second impression—and it is strong—is a reminder of the greatest enigma in Churchill’s life. Despite his parents’ disgraceful neglect of him in his early years, a bronze cast of Jennie’s hand lies on one windowsill. The desk and the bureau-bookcase with Gothic glazing were Lord Randolph’s. The most prominent painting on the walls depicts his father writing. On the level of awareness, Winston reveres the memory of both his parents, but the resentment has to be there. His suppression of it is doubtless a heavy contributor to his periodic spells of depression, and his combativeness arises from the need to find another outlet for his anger. Significantly, he works not at his father’s magnificent mahogany desk with gleaming claw feet, but at a high Disraeli desk of unvarnished deal with a slanting top, designed by Winston and fashioned by a local carpenter—a reminder that Victorians liked to write standing up.

His appearance heralded by the harff, harff of his slippers, he enters the room in his scarlet, green, and gold dressing gown, the cords trailing behind him. Before greeting his researcher and the two secretaries on duty tonight, he must read the manuscript he dictated the previous evening and then revise the latest galleys, which arrived a few hours earlier from London. Since Churchill’s squiggled red changes exceed the copy set—the proofs look as though several spiders stained in crimson ink wandered across the pages—his printers’ bills are shocking. But the expense is offset by his extraordinary fluency. Before the night is out, he will have dictated between four thousand and five thousand words. On weekends he may exceed ten thousand words. Once his family presented him with a Dictaphone. He was delighted. It seemed miraculous. He could dictate alone; one of the secretaries could transcribe the Dictabelt later. After a productive session, he went to bed triumphant, only to be told upon wakening that it was all wasted. He had forgotten to turn the device on. Everything was lost. “No more gadgets!” he roared, and stuck to the old system till his death.

Churchill has developed what biographer Philip Guedalla calls a faculty for “organizing large works.” If he is researching a speech, a magazine essay, or a newspaper article, he needs little help. But for a major effort—his four-volume Marlborough or his History of the English-speaking Peoples—he requires a staff, most of them young Oxford graduates to whom he assigns readings and investigations; they then submit précis or memoranda which he studies between bursts of dictation. Among those thus engaged (at very small wages—£300 to £500 a year) are Deakin, John Wheldon, Keith Feiling, Maurice Ashley, Charles Hordern, and Ridley Pakenham-Walsh, both the last two former military officers. For a man approaching sixty, Winston does a great deal of his own field work, touring Marlborough’s European battlefields—he is amazed at their enormity—but he hasn’t time to rummage through the archives at Blenheim, translate old Flemish documents, or pore over the dispatches of William of Orange. So his staff does it for him.

This in no way diminishes his achievements. Deakin will remember that he, Winston, and the “shorthand-typists,” as Churchill calls his secretaries, would sometimes “work on Marlborough until three or four in the morning. One felt exhilarated. Part of the secret was his phenomenal, fantastic power to concentrate on what he was doing. And he communicated it. You were absolutely a part of it—swept into it. I might have given him some memorandum before dinner, four or five hours before. Now he would walk up and down dictating. My facts were there, but he had seen it in deeper perspective. My memorandum was only a frame; it ignited his imagination.” Winston asks him to write a summary of the election of 1710, and, Deakin will recall, “He read this without any comment at all and then dictated what he wanted to write in his book…. He translated it into integral power and things he understood in contemporary terms, but it was a transformation that was very special. His penetrating insight revealed insights I had completely missed.”⁴⁸

Because tonight’s major project is a parliamentary speech, the researcher’s tasks are complete before midnight. Those of the shorthand-typists are about to begin. Two will be on hand, to work shifts, and they will have assembled the necessary tools: scrap paper, shorthand notebooks, pens, pencils, rulers, erasers, scissors, paste, rubber bands, copy paper, carbon paper, an assortment of green tags, a copy of Vacher’s Parliamentary Companion Guide, and Winston’s “klop” or “klopper”—a powerful paper punch. Winston despises staplers. Instead the klop perforates a batch of paper; he then threads a piece of string through the hole and attaches it to a tag. In a public address the pages must be in order, and he has an irrational fear that someone will sabotage him, reversing pages. Right up to the moment of delivery he will be nervously checking to reassure himself that they are in sequence.

Sometimes, as Cecily (“Chips”) Gemmell will recall, the opening hour is “ghastly.” There is no diverting him. A stenographer peers through a window and observes blithely: “It’s dark outside.” Churchill, giving her a bleak look, replies pitilessly: “It generally is at night.” His creative flow is blocked; he will prowl around, fling himself into a chair, bury his head in his hands and mutter, “Christ, I’ve got to do this speech, and I can’t do it, I can’t.” On such occasions, Inspector Thompson notes, Winston is “a kicker of wastebaskets, with an unbelievably ungovernable bundle of bad temper. It is better to stay away from him at such times, and this his family seeks to do.”⁴⁹

But the help has no choice. In time a word will come; then another word; then a prolonged search for the right phrase, ending, after a prolonged mumbling to himself, with a chortle of delight as he finds it. But his pace is still halting; Sir John Martin, one of his principal private secretaries, will later recall it as a long process, “while he carefully savored and chose his words, often testing alternative words or phrases in a low mutter before coming out loudly with the final choice.” He is trying to establish rhythm, and once he has it, his pace quickens. Beginning where he will begin in the House, he opens with what MP and diarist Harold Nicolson calls “a dull, stuffy manner, reciting dates and chronology,” but as he progresses he takes a livelier tone, introducing his familiar quips and gestures. Most writers regard the act of creativity as the most private of moments, but for Churchill it is semipublic; not only is the staff on hand, but any guest willing to sacrifice an hour’s sleep is also welcome.

In Parliament he stands when speaking. Here he paces. In the House of Commons pacing is impossible, so he has adopted a different mode of delivery there. Nicolson notes: “His most characteristic gesture is strange indeed. You know the movement that a man makes when he taps his trouser pockets to see whether he has got his latch-key? Well, Winston pats both trouser pockets and then passes his hands up and down from groin to tummy. It is very strange.”⁵⁰

In Parliament his wit will flash and sting, but members who know him well are aware that he has honed these barbs in advance, and only visitors in the Strangers’ Gallery are under the impression that his great perorations are extemporaneous. F.E. once referred to “Churchill’s carefully prepared impromptus.” Peter E. Wright, who had been among Churchill’s colleagues during the Gallipoli crisis of 1915, notes: “Mr. Churchill cannot, as is well known, improvise very easily; telling as his speeches are, they are wrought, rehearsed, and often half read. To produce it all, Mr. Churchill, in his books and in his speeches, heaves like a mountain.” But so, Wright adds, do other MPs, with disappointing results, whereas, “if Mr. Churchill’s throes are volcanic, so is the result—a burning flood of lava, often uneven and tumultuous, but sweeping and splendid in its general effect.”⁵¹

It is the product of toil, sweat, and frequent tears. On the average he spends between six and eight hours preparing a forty-minute speech. Frequently, as he dictates passages which will stir his listeners, he weeps; his voice becomes thick with emotion, tears run down his cheeks (and his secretary’s). Like any other professional writer, he takes his text through several drafts before it meets his standards; but even in its roughest stages it is free of cant and bureaucratic jargon. Where Stanley Baldwin has said “a bilateral agreement has been reached,” Churchill makes it “joined hands together.” The “Local Defence Volunteers” become the “Home Guard.” One sure way of rousing his temper is to call a lorry a “commercial vehicle” or alter “the poor” to “the lower-income group.” He wages a long, and, in the end, successful campaign to ban the civil service’s standard comment “The answer is in the affirmative” to a simple “Yes.” A Churchillian text includes such inimitable phrases as “the jaws of winter,” “hard and heavy tidings,” and—neither Pitman nor Gregg is equal to this—“a cacophonous chorus.” In both conversation and dictation he uses words with great precision and insists that others do the same. On a trip his physician comments: “I hope you did not catch cold sitting on the balcony in the chill night air.” His patient, smiling mischievously, corrects him: “Portico, not balcony, Charles.”⁵²

Most of the action takes place in his study, but it can be unsettling even there. Once at 3:00 A.M. Winston uncharacteristically opened a window. Immediately a bat entered. The young woman on duty, more frightened of her employer than of this new uninvited immigrant of the Chartwell pet colony, closed her eyes and kept taking down words while Churchill pursued the bat with a poker, drove it back out, and slammed the window shut—meantime not missing a phrase. Another time a fire broke out in the study. Churchill’s voice continued until, enveloped in smoke, his croaks and gasps became incomprehensible. By then a half-dozen servants had arrived. The flames had been smothered and all windows opened. The secretary, who had also been on duty the Night of the Bat, as the staff now called it, vanished. (“I headed for the loo,” she recalls.) Churchill convened a court of inquiry on the spot, demanding the name of the arsonist. Kathleen Hill looked at him and said evenly, “You.” She pointed at the remains of the cigar butt in the charred seat of an overstuffed chair. He scowled darkly, turned, and shouted, “Where’s Miss?”⁵³

His secretaries are required to take down every audible word from him; he often changes his mind in midpassage, but he may change it back. If he says “I was going” and adds after a pause “I decided to go,” they type: “I was going. I decided to go.” They spell one another from time to time, not because they are exhausted; he wants to see what he had said in cold type. He will revise it in his red ink, redictate it, and scrutinize it again. Occasionally he will add a paragraph. When at last he has a final version, it will be typed, on a machine with outsized type, on small pieces of paper, eight by four inches, the whole lot klopped and strung to a tag. The speech will be set in broken lines to aid his delivery, “speech form,” or “psalm form,” as Lord Halifax calls it. After Hitler becomes absolute master of the Third Reich, Churchill tells the House of Commons:

I have on more than one occasion

Made my appeal that the Führer of Germany

Should become the Hitler of peace.

When a man is fighting in a desperate conflict

He may have to grind his teeth and flash his eyes;

Anger and hatred nerve the arm of strife.

But success should bring a mellow, genial air

And, by altering the mood to suit the new circumstances,

Preserve and consolidate in tolerance and goodwill

What has been gained by conflict.

Thus, when Churchill rises to speak in the House, he holds in his hand not notes on the issues he means to address, but the entire text of what he intends to say. To be sure, he may say a few words suitable to the occasion, commenting on the remarks of previous speakers, but the rest is a set piece, though few know it. Because his delivery gives an illusion of spontaneity and the notes include stage directions (“pause; grope for word” and “stammer; correct self”), each of his speeches is a dramatic, vibrant occasion.

It would be pleasant to report that his relationship with his staff is genial, that he treats them as he would his daughters, and that he is particularly patient with new secretaries. In fact, he is nothing of the sort. He treats them like servants. A. J. P. Taylor calls him an “atrocious” taskmaster, and his attitude toward his employees is difficult to understand or, at times, even to excuse. He can summon each of his pets by name, recite poetry by the hour, and remember the exact circumstances under which he learned of a certain event fifty years earlier, but he knows the names of only three or four of his eighteen servants and stenographers. They are “the tall Miss with blue eyes” or “the man with ginger hair.” Newcomers find his lisp an obstacle—they simply do not understand what he is saying—but he makes no allowance for that. Chips Gemmell will remember that during her first session she “sat there terrified; I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and I couldn’t keep up with him. I thought, this is a nightmare. This isn’t happening. So I went plop, plop, quite convinced it wasn’t real.” Winston didn’t read her typescript until the team assembled in the study the following evening. He glanced through the first two pages, his face passing through deeper and deeper shades of red and his frown growing more savage, until he rose, flung the sheets on the floor, stamped his feet, and screamed: “You haven’t got one word in fifty right! Not one word in fifty! NOT ONE WORD IN FIFTY!”⁵⁴

She froze. So did Elizabeth Nel, when, on the evening of her secretarial baptism, she found her machine had been set at single, not double, spacing. With Churchill rattling along, uncharacteristically fluent at this early hour, she had no time to switch. After she had passed him the first page, she will recall, “he went off like a rocket. I was a fool, a mug, and idiot: I was to leave his presence and one of the others was to appear.” Later she was given a second chance, and, still later, a third. She was understandably nervous, and “my apprehensions were seldom ill-founded. More often than not it would come skimming back to me with a few red alterations on it, sometimes to the accompaniment of remarks disparaging to my education and sense of hearing.”⁵⁵ Yet their misunderstandings are completely understandable. Who can blame a stenographer who types “lemons” when he means the Greek island of Lemnos, mistakes “fretful” for “dreadful,” or “perfervid” for “perverted”? Winston can and does; he rages and stamps his feet. (Foot-stamping is his outlet with women, a substitute for obscenities; if only men were present he would cut loose with a string of short Anglo-Saxon oaths “mostly beginning,” as he once put it, “with the earlier letters of the alphabet.”) One young woman wrote home:

Not in a very good temper this morning. He suddenly said “Gimme t—gr—spts—pk.” Interpreting this as “Give me a toothpick,” I leapt up, looked round and then started rummaging in the bag where such necessities should be kept. After less than 20 seconds he said, very bored and superior “now Miss Layton just stop playing the bloody ass and”…. Presently, after dictating something, he found I’d put “Somehow I think it right” (which was what I thought he’d said). So fairly patient, he said “no, no, I said now the time is right” (with accents like that). So I did it again. Gave it back. There was a roar of rage. “God’s teeth, girl, can’t you do it right the second time? I said ripe ripe ripe—P P P.” I should, perhaps, have realized, but he hadn’t mentioned that “right” was “wrong.” However he forgave me for the rest of the day.

Occasionally the secretaries guess at a word, trusting to chance rather than provoke certain wrath by asking: “What did you say, sir?” Any break in his creative flow is intolerable to him. When a girl reaches the bottom of a page she must remove paper, carbon, and second sheet, then insert a new set and roll it into place. Winston makes no allowance for this. He barks: “Come on! Come on! What are you waiting for?” The crackling of carbon and the flimsy second sheets is almost as intolerable to him as whistling. He splutters: “Don’t fidget so with that paper! Stop it!” His tantrums would be more bearable if he apologized afterward or complimented them on work well done. He never does either. When one of the secretaries carries on the night after one of his outbursts, he may mutter, “There. I knew you could do it.” Or, if one bursts into tears: “Good heavens, you mustn’t mind me. We’re all toads beneath the harrow, you know.” Once a manservant stood up to him. The result was a blazing row. At the end of it Churchill, his lower lip jutting, said: “You were very rude to me, you know.” The servant, still seething, replied: “Yes, but you were rude, too.” Churchill grumbled: “Yes, but I am a great man.”⁵⁶

At Chartwell this is the last word. Later the servant will say: “There was no answer to that. He knew, as I and the rest of the world knew, that he was right.” Elizabeth Nel, after reciting her very legitimate grievances, adds: “Neither I nor anyone else considered this treatment unfair…. I used to wonder how long his patience would last, if he would not one day say, ‘Go, and never let me see you again.’ ” Phyllis Moir, another member of the secretarial pool, will recall Winston on the phone, telling her to fetch him certain papers: “Mr. Churchill was standing by the telephone, his face very red and very angry, stamping his feet and sputtering with rage. He literally tore the papers out of my hand and savagely stammered an incoherent answer into the mouthpiece.” She adds loyally: “Mr. Churchill is not the sort of man to apologize to anyone, but he would go out of his way to say something appreciative and his whole manner made you feel he was ashamed of his bad behavior.” In this instance, she explains, he expressed his shame by failing to turn on her wrathfully after he had hung up. Instead he asked her if she was enjoying the countryside.⁵⁷

It seems hardly adequate. Neither does his forgiveness “for the rest of the day” seem appropriate redress for browbeating a girl who mistook his lisped “ripe” for “right.” The blunt truth is that Winston has never considered himself a toad beneath the harrow, and for the best of reasons: he isn’t one. No humble man would outflank a traffic jam by driving on pavement. He believes he is a superior being, entitled to exceptional forbearance as well as special privilege and not subject to judgment by the rules of polite society. This is, of course, arguable. What is striking is that those who work for him, toiling long hours, underpaid, and subject to savage, undeserved reprimands, agree with him. They feel the sting of his whip. Yet he continues to command their respect, even their love. Those who are shocked by Churchill’s treatment of his employees all have this in common: they never worked for him.

Sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 A.M. he quits, leaving the others to sort out ribbon copies and carbons, clean up the study, and, if the night’s dictation has included manuscript, prepare a packet for the London courier. In his bedroom he divests himself of his trousers and velvet slippers; then, in one great overhead swoop, yanks the rest of his clothing up, away, and across the chamber. In a gesture that is more narcissistic than remedial, he faces the mirror in his bedroom and brushes his strands of hair straight down over his ears, saying to his valet, with dubious authority, “That’s the way to keep your hair, Inches.” He asks him for “my eye blinkers,” slips the sleep mask in place, and is soon breathing the deep, slow breaths of the slumberer. His dreams, he tells his family, are often of his father, who died prophesying Winston would be a failure. In 1932 it would be hard to find more than a dozen men of Parliament or Fleet Street who would think that prediction laughable.

PREAMBLE

THE LION CAGED