Alone, 1932-1940 Read online

  A minute passes; two minutes. No valet. Winston fumes; the Churchillian lower lip juts out. His bizarre daily schedule deceives visitors who think it disorderly. Those who live at Chartwell know better. Though very odd, it is a schedule—is, in fact, a rigid one. Young F. W. D. (“Bill”) Deakin will soon leave his don’s rooms at Christ Church, Oxford, and become chief researcher (at a mere £300 a year) for Winston’s multivolume biography of his great ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. Long afterward Deakin will recall: “He was totally organized, almost like a clock. His routine was absolutely dictatorial. He set himself a ruthless timetable every day and would get very agitated, even cross, if it was broken.” He is very cross now. His valet is often dilatory, though today the blame is not his. Lately the bell has not been working properly. And though Churchill is now bellowing, his shouts are unheard. That is partly his fault. The walls in this part of the mansion are thick. By puttying all the crevices he has effectively soundproofed the room.7

  Raging, he flings aside the counterpane, leaps out, stamps his bare foot like a spoiled child, and then stalks dramatically across the room, crossing the threshold and reaching the landing in pursuit of his man. This happens from time to time, and the effect is sometimes spectacular, for Churchill sleeps naked and remains so on such sorties. He will don a robe when visiting other homes, “in deference,” as he puts it, to his hosts’ “views of propriety,” but at Chartwell he feels free to roam around nude; as one of his servants will later explain, it seems “completely natural to him.” It did not seem natural to a young housemaid who has just left his employ. Looking up the stairwell one morning she beheld, on the top step, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill in the buff—all 210 pounds of him, a massive pink man with a bald, smooth dome and broad if slightly stooped shoulders, glaring down at her, as one of Winston’s secretaries remembers, “like a laser beam.” The girl fled the house shrieking. She has sent for her belongings and her pay.8

  At long last Inches arrives, sweating and offering profuse apologies. The Churchill children delight in mimicking him, but their father values his man; despite his tippling and other flaws, the valet knows the daily Churchillian drill. He opens the day properly, carrying in a tray bearing his master’s first meal of the day: orange juice from a bottle (Winston detests freshly squeezed juice), and a cooked English breakfast, with, as the pièce de résistance, a small steak, a chicken leg, or a cutlet Churchill ordered set aside at last evening’s dinner for this very purpose. There is also a small dish of jam, usually black cherry. If the jam has been forgotten Winston will lie there propped up on pillows, pouting and refusing to touch anything on the tray until it appears.9

  Rising, he moves toward the bathroom with an alacrity surprising for his age and weight and quickly shaves himself with a safety razor while his valet draws the first of his two daily baths. Like preparing the breakfast, this requires precision. Churchill will not enter the tub until it is two-thirds full and the bath thermometer registers 98 degrees. Once in, he demands that the temperature be raised to 104 degrees. Inches, obedient, again opens the hot spigot. The water has now reached the brim. Winston likes it that way; on his instructions the bath’s overflow drain has been sealed off. This is splendid hydrotherapy, but like his immodest excursions beyond his bedroom door, it invites disaster. He likes to play in his bath, and when on impulse he turned a somersault, “exactly like a porpoise,” a spectator recalls, the tub overflowed, damaging the ceiling below and, worse, drenching the frock coat of an eminent Frenchman there who called to pay his respects. Now a special drain has been installed. Churchill lolls in his bath, reciting Kipling, rehearsing speeches or lectures he will soon deliver, or singing, not in the virile baritone familiar in Parliament, but in a soft, high tone.10 Elsewhere in the great building Sarah (“Mule,” he fondly calls her) has risen and is playing the most popular hit of the season on her phonograph:

  Night and day

  You are the one…

  Sarah’s father prefers to recall melodies which evoke the England of his youth, long before 1914 and Armageddon, when, as he wrote afterward in his history of the Great War, “the world on the verge of catastrophe was very brilliant,” when “nations and empires crowned with princes and potentates rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace”11—when young patricians like Lieutenant Winston S. Churchill, subaltern of horse in Her Britannic Majesty’s Fourth Hussars, lived like gods here and throughout the vast British Empire. Talleyrand once observed that those who did not live under l’ancien régime did not know what true douceur de vivre meant. Being an aristocrat in the Victorian and Edwardian eras had been fun, and Winston never tires of singing the great hit of the Boer War, when his escape from an enemy prisoner-of-war camp made him a national hero:

  Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave you,

  Though it breaks my heart to go;

  Something tells me I am needed

  At the front to meet the foe!

  Nor of booming out Victorian England’s anthem of imperial conquest:

  It’s the soldiers of the Queen, my lads,

  Who’ve been the lads, who’ve seen the lads,

  In the fight for England’s glory, lads,

  Of her world-wide glory let us sing!

  In the England of 1932, glory has become a discredited word. After “the glorious dead” of 1914–1918, the word “glory” now soils the air. Therefore, when he warns of a Germany obsessed with a yearning for vengeance, crowds heckle him or drift away. He is no tribune of the people now. Although he believes in radical social solutions, he remains a traditionalist in all else. And tradition, he holds, begins at home. The ritualistic unfolding of a Chartwell day, from dawn to Kent’s long blue twilight, is for him a kind of private pageant. He enjoys it; he considers it as efficient as it is delightful, and he never doubts—nor does anyone else sleeping beneath this roof—that he alone is qualified to be the playwright, producer, director, stage manager, and, of course, hero of the performance.

  It is time for the star to don his first costume. Emerging from his bath pink and clean, he waits impatiently until Inches has toweled him dry and then slips into one of two worn-out cherished dressing gowns. The more subdued is dark blue velvet; the other, a riot of green and gold displaying a scarlet dragon coiled sinuously around his plump torso. His valet has been busy during his bath. Churchill will remain in bed all morning, and for a man with his tender skin this invites bedsores. Therefore Inches has brought a basket of large sponges, which he now deftly thrusts between the sheet and the most vulnerable parts of the Churchillian anatomy as his master yaws this way and that.12

  The tray has gone. Remaining within reach are the jam and a weak (three-ounce) scotch and soda—always Johnny Walker Red—which the prostrate Winston will sip occasionally over the next four hours in the tradition of Palmerston, Pitt, and Baldwin. However, the legend that he is a heavy drinker is quite untrue. Churchill is a sensible, if unorthodox, drinker. There is always some alcohol in his bloodstream, and it reaches its peak late in the evening after he has had two or three scotches, several glasses of champagne, at least two brandies, and a highball, but his family never sees him the worse for drink. He remarks: “We all despise a man who gets drunk.” And, after an exchange of views on drinking: “All I can say is that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” He encourages absurd myths about his alcoholic capacity, however, partly to furbish his macho image, which needs it because he cries so often in public (“I’m a blubberer,” he cheerfully tells friends), and partly because Europeans still like to think that their leaders are men who can hold their liquor. Winston tipples off and on all day but never gets drunk.13

  Having tasted this first scotch, he is ready for one of the children’s pug dogs, who leaps upon the bed, trembling with joy, tail wagging furiously. Churchill then lights his first cigar of the day. His valet is custodian of Chartwell’s cigar hoard, which will eventually grow to over
three thousand, all from Havana, mostly Romeo y Julietas and La Aroma de Cubas, kept in a tiny room between this chamber and his study on shelves labeled “wrapped,” “naked,” and “large.” Friends and admirers have sent Winston countless cigar cutters, and he carries one on his watch chain. He never uses them, however. Instead, he moistens one end of a fresh cigar, pierces it with a long match, blows through it from the other end to clear a passage, and lights it from the candle that always stands by his bed. During the course of a day he may consume ten or more cigars, but he seldom smokes one through. Indeed, most of the time they will be unlit. He simply chews them and never inhales. If one becomes hopelessly frayed, he may wrap it in gummed brown paper, calling this improvisation a “bellyband.”14

  The morning papers are neatly stacked by the bed, with The Times and the Daily Telegraph on top and the Daily Worker on the bottom. Editorials are read first, frequently with such intense concentration that the newsprint may become hopelessly smeared with jam. That is a servant’s problem, not his; when Winston has finished a page, he simply lets it slide to the floor. All in all, he devotes two hours to the press, occasionally stepping into his slippers and striding toward his wife’s bedroom to call her attention to this or that item. It may be a mere statistic representing an increase in Germany’s mineral ore imports, but he sees significance in it. Or she may arrive at his bedside on a similar errand. Although they never breakfast together, each starts the day with the same rite.15

  As he glares at the last pages of the Worker, Mrs. P. or Grace Hamblin—later to be joined by Kathleen Hill—enters the room. It is important that she do so boldly, even noisily; her employer is not deaf, but he dislikes surprises. If someone glides in, he will rise wrathfully and roar: “Goddammit!” As she prepares to take dictation, he riffles through the morning mail, which she has sorted into three piles: affairs of state, private correspondence, and letters from the general public. As a young author he had written his mother, “My hand gets so cramped. I am writing every word twice & some parts three times.” Now he seldom puts a word on paper himself—except when affixing his signature, correcting galley proofs, or writing close friends and his immediate family—and he normally uses fountain pens, blue ink for correspondence, red for proofs. The humblest correspondent receives a reply, but the secretary writes it. Winston merely outlines in the most general way what he wants said and she, familiar with his style and his love of anachronistic phrases (“sorely tried,” “most grieved,” “keenly elated,” “pray give me the facts,” “highly diverted”), fills it out. Important letters require more thought and longer searches for the right word. Once the mail has been cleared away, memoranda dictated, and visitors greeted—he will receive anyone except the King in his bedchamber—he may summon a researcher after glancing through proofs, and say: “Look this up,” or “Find out about this.” The researcher may be asked to read certain documents aloud. Or Churchill may turn to speeches. By noon the cadences of his prose have begun to trot; by 1:00 P.M. they are galloping. In the words of Mrs. Hill, he would often be “dashing around in shorts and undershirt and a bright red cummerbund while I trotted behind him from room to room with a pad and pencil struggling to keep pace with the torrential flow of words.” One has the impression of a man in a desperate hurry, not even dressed yet, already behind the day’s schedule—which is, in fact, the case.16

  He is approaching his daily lunch crisis. The meal is to be served at 1:15 P.M.; often, eminent guests are arriving. And he is never there to greet them. He deplores this tardiness in himself yet cannot break it, though everyone at Chartwell knows the explanation: he systematically underestimates, usually by about five minutes, the length of time he needs to do everything, from shaving to wriggling about while his valet dresses him. Its most hair-raising consequences come while he is traveling. Once at Coventry station a close friend was pacing the platform beside an infuriated Clementine. The conductor was signaling all aboard when Winston finally came in sight. Clemmie told the friend: “Winston’s a sporting man; he always gives the train a chance to get away.” Even at Chartwell his dilatoriness is a source of distress for both his family and the manor’s staff. Once a manservant conspired against him by setting his bedroom clock ahead. It worked for a while, because he scorned that offspring of trench warfare the wristwatch, remaining loyal to his large gold pocket watch, known to the family as “the turnip,” which lay beyond his grasp. After his suspicions had been aroused, however, the game was up; he exposed it by simply asking morning visitors the time of day.17

  Eventually a communal effort by all available servants propels their master, roughly dressed, down into the drawing room, which he enters with a beaming Here-I-am-at-last expression. If the assembled guests include newcomers under the impression that it is a normal upper-class British home, they are swiftly disillusioned by the greetings exchanged between the Churchills. Instead of “Hullo,” they utter elementary animal sounds: “Wow-wow!” or “Miaow!” In the family, Christian names are replaced by exotic petits noms. Clementine addresses her husband as “Pug,” he calls her “Cat.” The children are “Puppy Kitten” (Diana), “the Chumbolly” (Randolph), “Mule” (Sarah), and “Mouse” (Mary).

  At the round oaken dining room table on the floor below, Churchill chooses to sit facing eastward (making that the head of the round table), looking out across his terrace toward the largest of his artificial lakes. The servants place a candle in a silver Georgian holder by his setting. He will need it when, after one of his long monologues, he finds that his cigar has gone out. As he approaches his chair it is evident that he anticipates the meal with relish. Although he scorns exercise, his appetite is always keen. He cannot, however, be considered a gourmet. Intricate dishes are unappreciated by him; for lunch he prefers Irish stew, Yorkshire pudding with “good red beef,” as he calls it, or an unsauced whiting with its tail in its mouth. Furthermore, he is a confirmed anthropormorphist; he has adopted many of Chartwell’s chickens as pets, has even given them names and speaks of them as his “friends.” So there is no fowl. He would be troubled by the thought that he was devouring one of them.18

  To Churchill a meal without wine would not be a meal at all. In his ten years as squire of Chartwell he has yet to pass a day without confronting a shining bottle of champagne, always at dinner and often at lunch also. As a youth he declared: “A single glass of champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration. The nerves are braced; the imagination is stirred; the wits become more nimble.” A bottle produces the contrary effect: “A comatose insensibility.” He confines himself to a single glass now. Apart from his contempt for the fiction that red meat and white wine do not mix, his drinking habits are characteristic of upper-class Englishmen. He regards the American martini as barbaric, and when Jan Christiaan Smuts arrives and presents him with a bottle of South African brandy he takes a sip, rolls it around on his tongue, then rolls his eyes, and, beaming at his old friend, says: “My dear Smuts, it is excellent.” He pauses. “But it is not brandy.” At the end of lunch, after a glass of port with a plain ice and a ripe Stilton, he greets the appearance of Hine, real brandy, with a blissful smile and the reaming of a fresh cigar. Brandy, he believes, is essential to a stable diet, and the older the bottle the better. Although uninebriated, he becomes more genial, more affable, more expansive, radiating reassurance.19

  Sir John Colville, who will later serve as private secretary to three prime ministers, including Churchill, may well have been right in arguing that Churchill’s friends are—except for the absence of boors and the garrulous—notable for their variety. They include the witty, the ambitious, the lazy, the dull, the exhibitionists, the talented, the intellectual, and above all the honorable. But the most gifted will appear at dinner. And his guests are all friends. In London, even in his pied-à-terre at No. 11 Morpeth Mansions, where he stays while attending Parliament, he is embattled. He needs no snipers here.

  But neither are guests confined to lickspittles and sycophants. Himself a celebrity be
fore the turn of the century, before the word had entered common usage, Churchill relishes the company of others in the public eye. His favorite American, the financier Bernard Baruch, visits here whenever in England. T. E. Lawrence, now serving in RAF ranks under an assumed name, roars up on his motorcycle and, knowing that the spectacle will enchant Mary, appears at dinner in his robes as a prince of Arabia. Charlie Chaplin entertains them all with his pantomime and mimicry. Winston asks whether he has chosen his next role. “Yes,” Chaplin replies: “Jesus Christ.” Churchill pauses, then asks, “Have you cleared the rights?”

  Among the regulars at the table are two MPs who remain loyal to Winston in these years of his political eclipse: the handsome young Robert J. G. (“Bob”) Boothby and Brendan Bracken, a brash adventurer and self-made millionaire notable for his pug nose, granny glasses, disheveled mop of flaming red hair, and the extraordinary rumors, which he encourages, that he is his host’s illegitimate son. Winston finds this gossip highly amusing. Clementine does not. (She once confronted her husband and demanded to know whether the stories were true. He replied: “I’ve looked the matter up, but the dates don’t coincide.”) Clemmie is the only participant who is never intimidated by her husband’s deep frowns and hissing wrath, and her dislike of Bracken, revealed by gesture, glance, and edged voice, is stark. Churchill admires her spirit—“God,” he later confides in a friend, “she dropped down on poor Brendan like a jaguar out of a tree”—but remains silent. Others at the table wonder why. Undeniably Bracken is gifted and able. But his behavior, even in this most tolerant of homes, is atrocious. Recently he went through Clementine’s scrapbook with shears, scissoring out articles of Winston’s career.20