The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (211 page)

Another writer would have cut his schedule to the bone and concentrated on his manuscripts. But it was part of the Churchill syndrome that despite diversions he had absolute concentration during the hours set aside for work, and that other activities were actually necessary to fuel this power. One activity was social intercourse; he needed people as ships need water. The Prof’s arrival for a two-day visit delighted him. So did the unexpected appearance of his eldest daughter at a moment when she was most needed. “I was sitting down last night to eat my New Year’s dinner as I thought in solitude,” he wrote his wife, “and in marched Diana looking absolutely lovely. She had come on her own to keep me company.”
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Working with his hands was equally important. Every day he laid bricks, building a wall which, he promised Clemmie, would be completed when she arrived home. That ought to have been enough, but he also launched two major landscaping projects: turning a peninsula on one Chartwell lake into an island, where the geese could nest safe from the fox, and creating a ha-ha, or sunk fence, beyond the swimming pool to permit one’s eye to plunge “across a valley of unbroken green.” All this was to be accomplished in one week by hiring an enormous mechanical digger for twenty-five pounds. He assured his wife the digger would “do more than forty men do.” Indeed, he added, it was capable of feats beyond the competence of people “as he is a caterpillar and can walk over the most sloppy fields without doing any harm.”
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Note: the contraption was a “he.” Winston, the ultimate anthropomorphist, invested every object, animate or inanimate, with a personality and assigned it a personal pronoun. Mary simply described the contrivance as “the monster.” And she was right. The “digger drama,” as it came to be known at Chartwell, began when the machine clanked into view with all the grace of a heavy tank. Winston regarded the creature with admiration, which was transformed into uneasiness, alarm, pity, and, finally, fury. In his next letter to Clemmie he wrote that the project was proving “a bigger and longer business than I had expected. It will take a fortnight in all.” Nearly a month later he reported in exasperation that the digger had broken down, had fallen into a pit and, despite his heroic efforts to extricate it, had been idle for three weeks. Four hydraulic jacks were rented; with their help “the animal emerged from his hole.” Churchill doubted “if I shall get out of it under £150.” Altogether the mechanical digger was on his property, with its expenses mounting, for ten weeks. As the day for its departure approached, it became the object of a profound Churchillian study, the results of which were reported to Chartwell’s absent mistress: “The animal is very strong with his hands but feeble with his caterpillar legs, and as the fields are sopping, they had the greatest difficulty in taking him away. They will have to lay down sleepers all the way from the lake to the gate over which he will waddle on Monday. I shall be glad to see the last of him.”
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At last, on March 8, he wrote: “The digger has gone, thank God.” His wife knew how to restore his spirits. From Singapore she wrote: “What tremendous works you are doing…. I’m
delighted
about the Ha-ha. Please do
not
throw back
too
much earth on the garden side or the slope might look too sudden…. How lovely it will be when your beautiful wall reaches the end.” Thus far in her trip she had been playing a familiar role as Winston’s eyes and ears; she had inspected the great Singapore dockyard and noted how the government’s cuts in defense spending had reduced its effectiveness, and she had marched into the city’s largest bookshop and asked “if there were a brisk demand for your books.” She was told that a condensed version of
The World Crisis
, his history of World War I, had “gone very well,” and the second Marlborough volume was “going better than the first. They had sold 12 sets of Marlborough & had 5 more on order. I think this is rather good when you realise how expensive it is.”
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At about this time Clementine left civilization, put away the needlework, turned away from her family photographs, and forgot her straightlaced upbringing. The
Rosaura
was headed for the most exotic islands in the world: Borneo, Celebes, the Moluccas, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, New Britain, and the Solomons. “This is the genuine article!” she wrote in a euphoric burst, “unchartered [
sic
] seas, unexplored territory, stark naked savages.” Churchill, vaguely troubled, perhaps goaded by a flicker of intuition, replied that it made him gasp “to look at the map & see what enormous distances you have covered… and it depresses me to feel the
weight
of all that distance pressing down upon us both. How glad I shall be when you turn homewards, & when the mails will be closing up together, instead of lagging & widening apart!” He had reason for anxiety. Clementine was in the presence of danger. That included physical danger; at one point she became separated from the rest of the party, lost in an almost impenetrable patch of dense tropical jungle; she was soaked in a sudden rainstorm, terrified of the lizards and snakes around her, her screams unheard until the yacht’s second officer came crashing through the undergrowth to rescue her. She wrote: “I almost kissed him.”
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She was, in fact, in a kissing mood. And the greater peril lay there. Among the unhappier facts of life is that desire peaks in the two sexes at disparate ages. “The elementary notion of standardization,” Mencken noted, “seems never to have occurred to the celestial Edison.” A male is lustiest at fifteen; the average female reaches the heights of passion in her mid-thirties. Churchill had always been a sublimator. All who were close to him agree that he was weakly sexed, even in youth, and in his sixties his volcano was virtually extinct. In Parliament a fellow MP whispered to him that his trousers were unfastened. “It makes no difference,” Winston replied wryly. “The dead bird doesn’t leave the nest.”
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Clementine, however, was vulnerable. The setting conspired against her. Cruising through tropical seas, past lush, nameless islands heavy with the scent of exotic flowers, she felt transported. Like a Maugham heroine—strong-minded, puritanical, even prim—she met a romantic unattached man and fell in love. The man was Terence Philip, a handsome, wealthy art dealer seven years younger than she. In any affair, La Rochefoucauld observed, one partner is the lover and the other the beloved. Philip was the beloved. Long afterward Clementine conceded that the initiative had been hers, adding, “But he made me love him.” Mary compares the relationship between them to “a fragile tropical flower which cannot survive in grayer, colder climes.” Clementine came to her senses. She was not meant for enchantment; her destiny was inseparable from Churchill’s. Late in life, in a nostalgic letter, she summed up the magic of those three months beneath the Southern Cross, saying, in effect, that she had briefly known the transient rapture of Cinderella at the ball; then the clock struck and she fled. Of course, she missed Philip. They met several times, and that summer she suggested to Churchill that she take another trip. She wrote a friend: “It’s very nice to be back but Oh Dear I want to start out again very badly! Mr. Pug is very sweet but now he says ‘NO.’…” Even before she returned he had written her: “I think a lot about you my darling Pussie… and rejoice that we have lived our lives together; and have still some years of expectation in this pleasant vale…. I feel this has been a gt experience and adventure to you & that it has introduced a new background to yr life, & a larger proportion; and so I have not grudged you your long excursion; but now I do want you back.”
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She brought back one souvenir, an exquisite Bali dove which lived, at Chartwell, in a lovely wicker cage. It could not last there long; perhaps she had known that. After its death she buried it in the walled garden, beneath the sundial. Today one can read the epitaph she had carved round the sundial’s base:

B
y 1937 Churchill’s isolation in the House of Commons was almost complete; as his daughter Mary notes, “his gradual estrangement from the Conservative party’s leadership, due to his… campaign for rearmament and confrontation with the growing power of Germany, made the probability of his being offered office increasingly remote.” The quarantine of him was effective among and in the organs of entrenched power, notably
The Times
and the BBC. But Winston reached millions of readers with his powerful articles—over a hundred in 1937 alone, including fortnightly pieces in Beaverbrook’s
Evening Standard
, which were syndicated in the
Glasgow Evening News
, the
Aberdeen Evening Express
, the
Belfast Telegraph
, the
Adelaide Advertiser
, the
East African Standard
, and the
Madras Mail
; translations in Brussels, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Tallinn, Kaunas, Zurich, Lausanne, Prague, Bucharest, Cracow, Buenos Aires, Trondheim, Lucerne, Budapest, and Belgrade; and a weekly essay in
News of the World. News of the World
was disdained by the mighty for its sensationalism and its pandering to the working class, but with an audience of four million members it could not be scorned by a man struggling to rouse the country, and Churchill was in no position to pick his forum anyhow. On November 3, 1937, he wrote the
News
’s publishers, grandly describing it as “a wonderful platform from which to address the stable, sagacious, good-humoured, kind-hearted mass of the British nation, and I value the opportunity of doing so, quite apart from the handsome payments which you make.”
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Handsome was the right word; on December 18, 1937, after he had agreed to write sixteen
News of the World
articles in 1938, he received a check for £4,500. William L. Shirer knew Randolph as a fellow journalist in the late 1930s and learned something of Winston’s finances from his son. Randolph, he writes, explained that “his father lived mainly from a syndicated weekly [
sic
] newspaper column sold around the world. There were over two hundred subscribers, he said, who paid a total of around $2,000 a week, of which Churchill received some £300, or $1,500, a fairly comfortable income. But not one that was making him really rich.” Yet Winston insisted upon continuing to live as though he were, and most Englishmen, including some who knew him well, would have been astounded to know that all his life he had been just a few steps—sometimes very few—from his creditors.
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Abroad he was taken more seriously than in Parliament. He was, as he described himself, “a private member of Parliament, but of some prominence.” Newspaper publishers who held him in contempt would have preferred to ignore him, but their reporters gave him celebrity status, knowing he always made good copy. At one time or another, photographs of him laying bricks must have been seen by every Briton. When a British tailors’ magazine deplored his wardrobe, it was news, even in the United States. Léon Blum, the French statesman, visited Chartwell to ask his advice. French generals invited him to tour the Maginot Line. He went and, after inspecting it, painted it. His following in France was large; when George VI and his queen made a state visit to Paris, the Churchills were invited to all the royal functions, always
bien placés
—better seated, indeed, than the British ambassador. Among Clementine’s papers, when she died, was a Versailles menu dated July 21, 1938, and signed by her partners on both sides: M. Gabriel Hanotaux, a celebrated author, now forgotten, and Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, whose performance in World War II would be less illustrious.
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Among those who recognized Churchill’s potential should war come was the man who was going to make it all happen. Several months before Eden’s resignation Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop, on Hitler’s instructions, asked Winston to call on him at the German embassy in London. The excuse was one of Churchill’s columns in Beaverbrook’s
Evening Standard
; Winston had written that a recent speech by Ribbentrop had been misrepresented. But there was more to it than that. Envoys of great powers did not deign to discuss articles in newspapers of their host country; lesser men on their staffs did it for them. And when Churchill appeared at the German embassy on May 21, 1937, the column wasn’t even mentioned. The matter discussed was so momentous that they were closeted for over two hours. The Führer, his ambassador said, proposed to guarantee the integrity of the British Empire. Churchill replied that the Royal Navy had been doing that for centuries and needed no help. Nevertheless, Ribbentrop declared that the Third Reich would “stand guard” over it; all he asked in return was a “free hand” in eastern Europe. The Reich, he explained, needed lebensraum for its increasing population. Winston, intrigued, asked how much living space Hitler wanted.
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