The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (169 page)

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

S
hould 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: