The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (170 page)

while Churchill is exuberantly tapping his feet in rhythm to:

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.

A
s 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.”