The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (8 page)

H
is niche in history—it is a big one—is secure. And so is his place in our affections. He will be remembered as freedom’s champion in its darkest hour, but he will be cherished as a man. He was a feast of character, a figure emanating parochial grandeur like King David, and he also belonged to that rare species, the cultivated man of action, the engagé intellectual. Attlee said: “Energy and poetry… sum him up.” But nothing sums him up. He was too many people. If ever there was a Renaissance man, he was it. In the age of the specialist, he was the antithesis, our Leonardo. As a writer he was a reporter, novelist, essayist, critic, historian, and biographer. As a statesman he served, before becoming His Majesty’s first magistrate, as minister for the colonies and for trade, home affairs, finance, and all three of the armed forces. Away from his desk he was at various times an airplane pilot, artist, farmer, fencer, hunter, breeder of racehorses, polo player, collector of tropical fish, and shooter of wild animals in Africa. One felt he could do anything. That was why he seemed inevitable in 1940. Bernard Shaw said: “The moment we got a good fright, and had to find a man who could and would do something, we were on our knees to Winston Churchill.”
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It is pointless to expect balance and consistency in genius. Churchill was not made like other men. Among his many traits was a kind of built-in shock absorber which permitted him to survive his repeated defeats and concomitant depressions. Going through his papers one is struck by his resilience, his pounding energy, his volatility, his dogged determination, and his utter lack of humility. He said: “I am not usually accused, even by my friends, of being of a modest or retiring disposition.”
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In the thousands of photographs of his face you will find every expression but one. He never looked apologetic. He had the temperament of a robber baron. As Walter Bagehot said of Palmerston, “His personality was a power.” In World War I John Maynard Keynes singled out as his most striking virtue his intense concentration on the matter at hand—precisely the quality which, in the opinion of William James, identifies men of genius. In games he was a consistent winner. Like his distant cousin Douglas MacArthur, he was satisfied by nothing short of victory.

He was formidable, but he was also cherubic. That was what made him lovable even to those who recoiled from his benevolent despotism. He said, “All babies look like me.” They did, and he looked like, and sometimes acted like, them. He enjoyed a child’s anthropomorphism—finishing a book, he would put it aside and say: “I don’t want to see his face again.” His chief playthings were his seven-inch cigars, Romeo y Julietas and La Aroma de Cubas. Most of the time they were unlit; he liked to chew and suck them anyway, and when an end grew soggy, he would fashion mouthpieces—“bellybandos,” he called them—from paper and glue. Mornings he worked in bed wearing a scarlet and green-dragon silk bed jacket, with papers strewn around him, and his play in the bath was an important part of his daily ritual; on long flights his luggage included a portable canvas bathtub. Dictating, or just puttering around his study, he wore a bright quilted dressing gown, which had been originally designed for a character playing Pooh-Bah in a production of
The Mikado,
and gold-embroidered slippers bearing his initials, a gift from Lady Diana Cooper. In his Siren Suit, Lady Diana recalls, he looked “exactly like the good little pig building his house with bricks.”
⁵⁰

He was the absolute romantic. His paintings reflect this. There are no monotones—each stroke of his brush added shimmering light and color. And everything he painted or wrote, his very gestures, was invested with emotionalism. “I’ve always been blubbery,” he said. No man wept more easily. His tears flowed at the mention of gallantry in battle, the thought of “invincible knights in olden days,” victims of anti-Semitism, Canadian loyalty to the Empire, the death of George VI, Elizabeth II’s kindnesses toward him, or the name of Franklin Roosevelt—“the best friend Britain ever had.” He never tried to hold back the teardrops because he never knew any inhibitions. In the middle of a 3:00
A.M
. wartime conference at Chequers, the prime minister’s country home, his generals took a smoking break. One started playing “The Blue Danube” on a piano, and to their amazement their host, all alone, started waltzing dreamily around the floor. His feelings about his family were laced with sentimentality. His home was an independent kingdom, with its own laws, its own customs, even its own language. “Wow!” one of them would say in greeting another. When Churchill entered the front door he would cry: “Wow! Wow!” and his wife would call back an answering “Wow!” Then the children would rush into his arms and his eyes would mist over. Except when they lived at Chequers, their closest moments were at Chartwell. He tried never to miss a weekend there. It says much for his belief in privilege, and for his staff’s unquestioning acceptance of it, that No. 10 observed two distinct standards at Christmas, 1940. He was asked if the staff would have any time off. He said, “Yes, an hour for divine services.” Then they all applauded as he flourished his V sign and left to spend a working holiday with his family.
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The Churchill children were never spanked. The worst that could happen to them, according to Sarah, was banishment from his presence. Like many another great captain who has sent thousands of men to their deaths, he shrank from personal violence. This was most striking in his treatment of animals, even of insects. Since he detested fresh air—he had his bedroom windows sealed with putty—it was hard for bugs to get at him. But sometimes a bee, wasp, or moth flew in from another part of the house. “Don’t kill him,” he would tell his valet. “Make sure you put him out the window.” Once, during a division in the House, Anthony Head, the first man out of the chamber, spied a ladybug on the carpet. Realizing that a thunder of MP feet would soon pass this way, he bent down to rescue it. At that moment the prime minister arrived and instantly grasped the situation. Taking charge, he said, “Put her out the window.” But since the introduction of air conditioning the windows had been permanently locked. “Use the Chancellor’s office,” he said, “and report back to me.” Head did, but when he returned Churchill was in conference with the French foreign minister. The secretary told him he could look in for a moment. Head did and told Churchill: “She escaped. I let her out through Macmillan’s window. Nobody touched her.” “Good, good!” the prime minister boomed. To this day Head wonders what must have passed through the foreign minister’s mind.
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“Poor fox,” Churchill said brokenly when an MFH presented him with a mounted fox head. En route to Chartwell one night, his car ran over a badger. He ordered the car stopped, picked up the shattered animal, and carried the dead, bleeding body home in the lap of his striped pants. He would cry over the death of a swan or a cat; would leave the House chamber to telephone Chartwell, asking about the health of his goldfish. But his favorite pet was his little poodle Rufus. More accurately, there were two of them, Rufus I and Rufus II; the first was run down when a maid left him off his leash. (Churchill never spoke to her again.) Sometimes the Rufuses slept with him. After taking dictation—it might be 3:00 or 4:00
A.M
.—his secretary would take the dog for his nightly walk. As Winston was about to drift off he would ask, “Did Rufus do his business?” and, assured that he had, would sleepily congratulate him. The poodle ate in the dining room with the rest of the family. A cloth was laid for him on the Persian carpet beside the head of the household, and no one else ate until the butler had served Rufus’s meal. One evening at Chequers the film was
Oliver Twist.
Rufus, as usual, had the best seat in the house, on his master’s lap. At the point when Bill Sikes was about to drown his dog to put the police off his track, Churchill covered Rufus’s eyes with his hand. He said, “Don’t look now, dear. I’ll tell you all about it afterwards.”
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Predictably, Churchill’s taste in entertainment was unpredictable. In literature it was excellent, though of course he preferred British authors. Music was another matter; aged eleven, he had asked his parents for cello lessons, had been turned down, and had developed instead a fondness for what his daughter Mary calls “somewhat primitive” tunes—such music hall favorites as “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-wow,” “Ta-ra-ra-boom-der-ay,” “Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line,” and a curious ballad about a husband who discovers that his bride has a wooden leg: “I Married Half a Woman and Half a Tree.” He enjoyed any movie about the Royal Navy; otherwise, his preference in films was less discriminating than one might expect. When he learned that Rudolf Hess had parachuted into Scotland, for example, he was watching the Marx Brothers. His favorite star was Deanna Durbin. His favorite motion picture—he must have seen it twenty times—was
That Hamilton Woman
with Laurence Olivier playing Lord Nelson and Vivien Leigh as his mistress. He was always lachrymose at the end of it. But probably the trashiest movie he ever watched was a sentimental pastiche based on a novel by Paul Gallico. Entitled
Never Take No for an Answer,
its chief character was a little Italian orphan whose donkey, named Violetta, helped him run a grocery stand. Violetta sickened. She could be healed, the boy believed, if he could take her to that hub of miracles, the Shrine of Saint Francis. So the orphan embarked on a journey, appealing in vain to a series of clerics: priests, archdeacons, bishops, archbishops, cardinals. Each time the boy was turned down the camera would flash back to Violetta, sprawled in her stable, ready for the last rites. Churchill wept inconsolably. “Oh, the donkey’s dead!” he would sob. The others would reassure him: “No, no, Prime Minister, she’s still alive.” Churchill would recover and declare firmly: “If the donkey dies, I shan’t stay. I shall go out.” Finally the boy, in his finest hour, was granted an audience with the pope. The pontiff reversed the lower rulings and made an appointment at the shrine for Violetta. In the last scene a blazing cone of light, slanting down from heaven, revealed the donkey, bursting with health, beside her loyal, trudging little friend. The prime minister arose slowly from his chair, his eyes luminous and his cheeks streaming.
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J
oyously human, anachronistic and wise, capable of willful misjudgment and blinding vision, dwarfing all those around him, he was the most benevolent of statesmen and the most gifted. Today the ordinary Englishman lives a better life than his fathers did, and for that he is largely indebted to Labour. But the extraordinary man has a harder time of it. He is trapped in regulations, his rise is impeded; his country pays a price. And even the masses seem to sense that while the socialists love ideas, Churchill, the unrepentant Victorian Tory, loved life. Since that love was balanced by a hatred of injustice, the average Briton owes him more than a higher standard of living. He owes him his very liberty.

“History,” wrote Aristotle, “is what Alcibiades did and suffered.” Social scientists impeach that, but Churchill never doubted it. Because the man was matched by his times, he achieved immortality and changed the world, for good or for ill—though not as he had expected or would have wanted, for he was not the only giant in the century. In the long reach of events the impact of the Churchillian era upon his island was decidedly mixed. Hitler lost the war but he didn’t lose it to Britain alone. Churchill, in desperate need of allies, forged a coalition with the United States and the Soviet Union and then had to make concession after concession to them. They emerged in 1945 as superpowers, while Britain, formerly Great Britain, lost its Empire, lost its independent and decisive role in world affairs, and sank to the level of a second-rate power. Of course, that, too, was Aristotelian. Alcibiades routed the Spartans, but in the end he was dismissed and fled to Asia Minor, where he was murdered by Spartan agents. Tragedy is the wasting shadow always cast, sooner or later, by towering heroism. Therein lay the terrible grandeur in Churchill’s funeral, a quarter-century after Dunkirk. The nation was bidding farewell both to a great Englishman and to the greatness of England. When his flag-draped coffin moved slowly across the old capital, drawn by naval ratings, and bareheaded Londoners stood trembling in the cold, they mourned, not only him and all he had meant, but all that they had been, and no longer were, and would never be again.