Winston’s War (31 page)

“Not boning her. Well, ain't that a thing,” Kennedy muttered into his glass, shaking his head. “You not boning her. Could've sworn somebody was…”

The approach of Easter 1939. Bucketfuls of daffodils. And optimism. Chamberlain's reputation significantly restored by his guarantee to Poland—if for no other reason than that, for the moment, it kept his critics quiet. Having raised Cain about a lack of action on Czechoslovakia, they could scarcely complain when he moved to protect Poland, not with an election in the wind. Life, for some, seemed to have returned almost to normal.

Although what passed for normal in Burgess's life was another matter.

He had his new friend—Tom Driberg—who had a house, a crumbling rectory on a promontory which jutted into the Blackwater estuary in Essex. Driberg had bought the house in an excess of enthusiasm some months before, when he had neither the money for the purchase price nor the means to underpin its crumbling foundations. Yet his was a lucky soul. The deposit arrived in the form of a personal injury claim following a car accident in which he broke both nose and kneecap, and the rest was provided by his reputation as the
Daily Express
's William Hickey, which secured the overdraft he needed until the legacy he was expecting from his mother, who was dying of leukemia, came through. In the meantime, he instructed builders to thrust steel girders into the cellar to prevent it sinking still further and to install a central heating system to guard against the chill winds that blew off the
estuary. The builders did as they were asked, and within days had rendered the house completely uninhabitable.

So, in the week before Easter, Driberg was to be found motoring towards the far reaches of Essex in order to inspect the progress of the building works, and also to have a little fun. To assist with this latter purpose he had invited Burgess. While both were notorious and indiscriminate sexual highwaymen, they had no particular attraction for each other. Theirs was an entirely disinterested, almost sisterly friendship, but they shared many other passions—politics, journalism, public lavatories, danger, and fast cars. They had clambered into Driberg's Studebaker and set out on the journey from London through Essex. They stopped for lunch at a pub just before the village of Steeple and, when they set off again, Burgess, who was driving, had a bottle of John Jameson's on his lap. They were driving too fast and had drunk too long. Disaster was, if not inevitable, then at least likely, but that was the point. They shared a thirst for danger which amounted to a compulsion.

It arrived while they were driving at nearly sixty and approaching the crossroads on the other side of Steeple just as a cyclist wobbled into their path. Burgess swore, then swerved, then skidded, finally coming to a halt nearly a hundred yards further on after having completely demolished a signpost. Driberg wound down the window in order to bellow insults at the hapless pedaler—which proved to be their second slice of misfortune, for the cyclist turned out to be the local policeman.

As he rode up he was greeted with the overwhelming aroma of whiskey. Burgess had dropped the bottle in an attempt to regain control of the car and his clothes were now covered in the stuff. “You've been drinking,” the constable accused.

“No, officer,” he lied, “not drinking. But I have been spilling. The waste of a fine and nearly full bottle. I assure you we were doing nothing more than toasting the parents of my friend here. He's
Czech
, you know, and he hasn't heard from
them for weeks. I think in the circumstances you might be a
little understanding—”

“You dirty bastards!” the policeman shouted across him. He had now inspected Driberg, who was in the back seat of the car. He was not alone. He was seated beside a young man, a bellboy Burgess had brought along as a housewarming gift. Both Driberg and the boy were in a state of disorder, for they had been struggling to replace the clothes they had only just discarded in order to experiment with sex at seventy over the bumps leading out of the village. Driberg hadn't bothered taking his shoes off and as a result had found it impossible to replace his trousers in a hurry. His underwear was still twisted around his knees.

“You're all going to go down for this,” the constable announced without a trace of irony, allowing his cycle to fall to the grass verge and reaching for his notebook and pencil. “You—name,” he demanded, pointing at Driberg.

“Ah, my name? William Hickey.”

“How do you spell that?”

“Like in the
Daily Express
.”

“Don't you mess with me, you bleedin' degenerate.”

“No, officer, seriously—I am William Hickey. Of the
Daily Express
. Look.” He thrust that day's copy of the newspaper at the policeman.

“Don't prove nothing,” the policeman said, leafing through. “Call the office. I can give you the number. And I've got my press card somewhere,” he added, scrambling back into
his trousers.

“You're kidding. My mum reads William Hickey all the time.”

“I can tell you everything that's in that column today. I'll even tell you what's going to be in tomorrow, if you like.” Driberg was now out of the car, standing by the constable, at last respectably clad, dealing with him man to man.

“You really William Hickey?”

“Word of honor. And all this, officer”—he flapped his hands
at his trousers—“not what it seems. I'd simply dropped a lighted cigarette and it was burning me terribly.”

“But he said you were from Czechoslovakia.”

“On my mother's side. A countess. But I'm as British and as proud of it as you. And I'm terribly worried about the situation. Aren't you?”

“Looks like war. That's what my mum says.”

“Too right. We'll all be driving tanks soon. Silly to fall out amongst ourselves at a time like this, isn't it?”

The policeman was shaking his head, gripped in disbelief. “My mum'd die if she thought I'd met William Hickey.”

“I'll happily sign the newspaper for her, if you like. Here, lend me your pencil a minute.”

And suddenly the constable was no longer taking notes.

“The least I can do is pay for the sign we've broken,” Driberg insisted, pulling out a wad of notes with which he had planned to pay his builders.

“So if you're William Hickey, what's going to be in tomorrow, then?” the policeman demanded, still not entirely in command of events.

“Well, you—if you want. I'm moving down to these parts—love it, everyone so kind—and I'd be happy to put in a reference to the friendly local police.”

“What, in William Hickey?”

“I guarantee it.”

“Tell you what, Mr. Hickey, no need to pay for a new sign. You give me a couple of quid drinking money and I'll get some of the lads down at the Rose and Crown to fix it. No fuss. Mended by tomorrow.”

“And a signature for your mother? Happy Easter? Something like that?”

“Be really fine, sir. Could you do one in my book?” He ripped out the sheet on which he had been scribbling and offered Driberg a clean page. “Me mum's going to ruddy well die…”

Chamberlain himself constantly attempted to mislead political correspondents in the most calculated fashion, by telling us what later proved to be the most grotesque version of the truth. He persisted in giving optimistic forecasts of international prospects which were lies. In all situations and all crises, however menacing, he always claimed that the outlook was most encouraging, with not a cloud in the sky; he claimed his contacts with Hitler and Mussolini were very good and that the dictators were responding with understanding and promise, and if only the Leftwing newspapers would stop writing critical and insulting things about them, he was confident that Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini (he was always punctilious in using the Herr and Signor as a mark of respect, and frowned on any offhand reference to Hitler) would cooperate with him in his peace initiative.

So forget your worries, he would tell us; the world situation has never been more promising; all these warmongering stories are got up by the Communists, Jewish propagandists, and their sympathizers… It was on the eve of the Easter recess that Chamberlain met a group of us (press men) for yet another of his sunshine tours. Reassure public opinion, he urged us; the worst was over and there would be no more shocks or surprise coups by the dictators—he was convinced of their good intentions. Have a good holiday, he advised us, free from worry and care.

He was, he added for good measure, acting on his own advice and was leaving that night on the Aberdeen express for a salmon-fishing holiday on the Dee.

James Margach, Abuse of Power

W.H. Allen, 1978

The next day was Good Friday.

Even before Chamberlain had cast his first fly, before his words of comfort had a chance to grow cool, before the ink on that morning's newsprint had dried, the dictators had struck again. Mussolini's troops marched into Albania.

Yesterday, Albania had been on the far side of the globe; now it seemed as though the whole world had shifted and she could almost hear the firing of the guns. For Sue Graham, Easter was not to be what she had planned. Those plans had included Jerry—indeed, had been entirely focused around him—but now the world talked of nothing but war and, with all the sensitivity that those oxymorons at military planning could muster, they'd sent him away for a week's basic to learn how to fire blanks. It had been pretty basic at Ypres, wasn't that enough?

So, with no post office duties to distract her, she was left on her own, which mattered more than she had realized. She missed him very greatly. The night before she had taken her family bible down from its perch on top of her wardrobe and sat on her single bed—the bed he had told her from the start she must change for something more accommodating, which she had known then and felt with a surprising inner force now meant accommodating him—simply to inspect the rose he had given her. She even found herself wandering around in the sloppy jacket he had left hanging on the back of the kitchen door, just so she could touch and smell him. And she had traced their favorite walk, along the cliff tops of Bournemouth past the Highcliffe Hotel, the breeze riffling through her hair, her face covered in his scarf.

She put her head down into the wind and walked briskly towards the highest point on the cliffs, struggling to convince herself that the tears in the corner of her eyes had been caused by nothing more than the fresh sea air tugging at her cheeks. As she gained the top, she came to a full stop and raised her head, suddenly alert. For carried on the breeze was not only the smell of salt but also the sharp reek of cold, oiled steel…

Her tear-filled eyes swept out to sea. It was thick with warships, their guns blazing, landing craft filled with men, disgorging a gray-clad army onto the beach, and bombers with bent wings were falling out of the sky, howling, casting a rain
of death all around—at points the sea was churning red. She could see chaos and confusion—and death—on the beaches, and almost all of it was British…

Sue shook her head. It was only her imagination, of course. And foresight. She gazed along the beaches with cleared eyes and saw nothing but gently sloping sand and shingle, and a man out walking his dog. And that was about it, wasn't it? A man and his dog, for otherwise there was nothing here, not a minefield, not a pill-box, not a single strand of barbed wire, not a gun nor even an embrasure for a gun. Nothing. Nothing to stop those warships and landing craft and bombers and all the paraphernalia of war that was surely to come. Defenses based on nothing more than the optimism of ostriches. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead. Starting with Jerry.

They had much to answer for, those men of Westminster, who had sat by irresolutely and thrown away the sacrifices of those who had bled, and suffered, and died in the last war. Like her dad. And now they wanted Jerry, too.

What had it all been about if it hadn't been the war to end the carnage, to stop Jerry and those like him marching to the slaughter, leaving the women behind to weep and the children with nothing more than faded sepia images of men? Well, she'd be no weeping widow, vainly wringing her hands. Her dad had died a proud man who had been buried in his Sunday suit with his medals by his side, and she would be damned before she'd let bloody Huns trample all over his memory as they had trampled over his life. She was the postmistress. She knew things. Above all she knew people—all the people—the sort of things it sometimes took a woman to know. She knew those who were made of steel, and those who would bend. She knew the gossips, the fighters, the compromisers, and the outright cowards. Those who might resist and turn bomb-maker or saboteur, and those who
would raise their hands and their petticoats at the sight of the first German invader.

It might come to that. And if it were to come to that, there was damn-all point in following the example of Chamberlain and starting tomorrow, the day after it was too late. So she came to a decision. She would start that afternoon. Making her plans, planting more vegetables and sowing a few seeds amongst those who would be forced to stay behind, after all the young men had gone. Seeds of resistance. She owed that to Jerry and her dad.

They sat on the terrace overlooking the river, glad of the chance to take the air. It was musty inside, with all the gas-proofing that had been carried out. Workmen had been busy installing air-tight windows, and there were new double doors and screens in addition to the dark blackout blinds and blast-proof curtains, all of which rendered the atmosphere inside listless, at times almost lifeless.

“Can't cope with all this, Dickie.”

“The ice-creamers in Albania, you mean?”

“All this Grand Old Duke of York stuff. We go off for Easter expecting peace, then get rushed back for war. It's all very well, but there's an election coming up at some point. How the deuce am I to explain all this to the voters when I can't even explain it to myself?”

“Does rather take the plum out of the pudding.”

“It's all very well Neville promising us a green and pleasant land, but he's got to stop covering the whole farmyard in
horse droppings.”