Winston’s War

‘You see, Burgess, the greatest threats to our island have always arisen in Europe. Our Empire spans the globe, we have helped civilize half the world, yet every time we embark upon an adventure on the continent, instead of grasping glory we end up covered in regret.’ Churchill, who was carving, slapped a thick chunk of ham onto his guest’s plate. ‘At the time, of course, it always seems so different. Europe is like a fine broad stairway of hope, but after a bit the carpet comes to an end. A little further on we discover only flagstones, and a little further on still these break beneath our feet. Now they have crumbled completely and we are supported by nothing more substantial than Mr Chamberlain’s aspirations.’

‘But we have friends in Europe. Friends who still have great armies.’

‘Like the Poles? They have very fine cavalry, Burgess, and as you may know I have a particular love of cavalry. Why, I myself had a part in the last great cavalry charge ever made by the British Army. At Omdurman. Oh, that was a splendid piece. But there we faced an opponent armed with spears, not artillery and machine guns.’

‘I was thinking more of the French.’

‘You forget! The surrender at Munich was signed not only by Chamberlain but also by Daladier.’ He slurped vigorously at his glass of claret. Burgess followed him. It was a fine vintage, better than any Burgess could afford. A little of it dribbled from the glass onto the front of Churchill’s boiler suit, which Burgess noted bore the stains of similar encounters. Churchill was not elegant when he ate. There was too much energy bottled up within him, too much impatience to give much heed to manners. ‘The French have vast armies,’ he continued, ‘but that’s been true since the time of Napoleon, and yet they have gone down to one miserable defeat after another, as if the habit of losing has become an infection.’

‘Do you discount Russia?’

‘Ah, the Bolshevists! How I hate them. They are butchers.’ A forkful of ham waved in Burgess’s direction. ‘But I dare not discount them. They exist and by God they put the fear of damnation into all those around them, Hitler and his Huns, too. Stalin’s capacity for slaughter knows no bounds, but he’s been too busy slaughtering his own to have time or temper for turning against Berlin.’

‘They could never co-exist, Russia and the Fascists.’

‘Perhaps you are right. Maybe Russia is the answer, but if so it only shows us the terrible nature of the questions we are facing.’ Suddenly Churchill’s eyes darted across the table like arrows. ‘You one of those Communistic types, Burgess? I hear there’s a whole nest of ’em inside the BBC.’

‘At Cambridge, like so many others. There seemed no other choice if one wanted to stand up to Fascism. But that was a long time ago. People change. I seem to think you were still a member of the Liberal Party in those days.’

‘No. I had switched back to the Conservative cause by then. But I take your point.’

‘There is nothing worse than a fixed mind and closed eyes. While I was up at Trinity our esteemed Mr Chamberlain came as the guest of honour to our Founder’s Feast. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer then, of course, and we put on the full works – college silver, six courses, including the fatted calf. He was exceedingly reassuring. As the port circulated he told us that we need not worry, there was no hunger about, not even amongst the unemployed. Those were his exact words – not even amongst the unemployed. You’ll remember the times. Two million in the dole queues and hunger marches the length of the nation. Yet Chamberlain couldn’t see them. I almost threw up.’

‘Yet you didn’t. You look like a man with a strong stomach.’ Churchill almost smiled, recognizing a man whose capacity in those quarters might even be a match for his own.

‘No, I didn’t throw up. Instead I stood up. Started shouting. Called him an ignorant provincial ironmonger. The dining hall at Trinity has an amazing echo. Caused one hell of a scene.’

‘Ah, but now the crowd gathers to cheer him.’

‘Should’ve been a lynch mob!’

They had both consumed too much claret for subtle jibes and there was no hiding the vehemence of the younger man’s words. Churchill remained silent for a moment, staring intently, and Burgess thought he might have gone too far.

‘We have much in common, Burgess, you and I.’

When next the younger man spoke, his voice betrayed a tremble, not of sycophancy but of a passion that sprang from deep within. ‘I fear for my country, and I fear for the entire civilized world. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to stop the spread of Fascism. And with all my heart I can tell you, sir, that at a time such as this there is no one in whose company I would rather be.’

Churchill’s voice crumpled with emotion. ‘Then, as you say, I am not alone.’

He was up from the table now, a fresh cigar between his lips, and gazing out through the windows that stretched from floor to ceiling.

‘I had always thought I should retire here, Burgess. Spend my final days gazing out over these fields.’

‘I hope you shall. When the time comes.’

‘Whenever the time comes, I fear it will not be here.’ Churchill sounded as if he were saying goodbye to an old friend. ‘It seems that Clemmie and I shall have to leave.’

‘For safety?’ It didn’t take a military genius to recognize that Chartwell sat directly beneath the bombing path to London.

Churchill shook his head sadly. ‘It is one of the many ironies littering my life that it is the very lack of war that may force me to leave my home, Burgess. It’s no state secret that I have been neglecting my financial affairs in recent times – I have been devoting myself to politics, even though politics have so steadfastly declined to devote themselves to me. The vast majority of my income is generated by my writings, but the books and articles that should have been written have remained locked up in my mind.’

‘But you said the lack of war …’

‘A few months ago I was forced to place Chartwell up for sale. It almost broke my heart. I have created so much of it with my own bare hands, I love it without reservation. But as I despaired, another policy presented itself to me. If war were to break out in Europe, the value of everything in this corner of the world would be crushed, while investments in America would rise to ever greater heights. The New World refreshing the Old. It’s a policy that appeals to me; as you probably know my mother was American.’ Churchill’s mother, Jennie, had been a New Yorker who pursued life with a remarkable vitality that had encompassed three husbands and a multitude of more dubious liaisons. The first of her husbands had been Churchill’s father, who had been a classic example of ducal degeneracy, and they had both neglected their son as sorely as they neglected each other, yet Churchill clung to the wreckage of their reputations like a man adrift. He was at a side table now, pouring substantial cognacs. ‘So I took Chartwell off the market and, in the expectation of war, invested every penny I could raise in short-term stocks on Wall Street. I should by now be sitting on a small fortune.’

‘But Chamberlain comes crawling back from Munich …’

‘An umbrella torn to pieces by the storm. We seem destined to cross each other, Chamberlain and I. He beat me for the leadership of our party, then ignored my claim to office in his Government. He has tried to isolate me, now he may succeed in crushing me.’

‘Because there is to be no war.’

‘Not soon enough for my investments.’

‘What will you do?’

The lower lip jutted forward. ‘Comfort myself in the knowledge that he is wrong, and that in the end I shall be proven right. And hope I may still be alive when that happens. Try to find consolation in the thought that – in war – buildings such as this have a value no greater than the pile of rubble they leave behind.’ There was an unmistakable dampness in the pale blue eyes.

‘We can always rebuild bricks and mortar, Mr Churchill, but we can’t replace your stubbornness and your eloquence.’

‘Words, words, words – when we need armies. Weaponry!’

‘Mr Churchill, at the moment your eloquence may be the only weapons we’ve got. You have to go on.’

‘One man against the world?’ He shook his head. ‘Here I am, an old man, out of office for a decade.’

‘But with a pride in freedom and a belief in the majesty of a man’s right to choose that is the measure of any man I’ve ever met.’ Burgess began to beat his chest. ‘Mr Churchill, my passion is as deep as yours, but I don’t have your powers. No one does. You give up and you’ll leave our sky without its pole star. You must carry on. Your country expects it, demands it. And I know you will listen to them. The Churchills always have.’

The dampness in the old man’s eyes now bordered on tears and he turned to gaze out at his beloved Kent countryside. Burgess was at his side, pointing. ‘These fields, these blessed fields – a distant corner of the bloody German Reich? Never!’

The old man stood staring for a while, then turned slowly towards his companion. ‘It would seem that I cannot give up. You will not let me. And I have come too far to turn back. You are a persuasive man, Burgess – why, you remind me a lot of myself when I was young. Although I think I could afford rather better suits. So …’ – the eyes were alight once more – ‘I shall do as you insist. I shall continue to speak out. After all, I have nothing to lose. And, as you can see, I am too old to learn the goose-step!’ He dispatched the cognac in one draught. ‘But now I must sleep. I have slept very badly in recent days, and not at all last night.’ Churchill held the other man’s hand. ‘You found me at my lowest ebb, Burgess. I had descended into darkness. You have helped restore me. Words will never be able to embrace my gratitude.’ He was propelling Burgess rapidly in the direction of the door. ‘So much to do, so little time to do it. And for that I shall need my strength.’

When they reached the hallway Churchill suddenly stopped as though some important memory had tumbled into his mind. ‘Pray, sign the visitors’ book and wait here for a moment,’ he instructed, before scuttling off. He returned bearing another book. ‘I have been idle, but my son Randolph has not. He is about your age, Burgess, and has recently published a volume of my speeches, Arms and the Covenant. Here.’

He took the pen from Burgess’s hand and began to inscribe on the flyleaf of the book: ‘To Guy Burgess, from Winston S. Churchill, to confirm his admirable sentiments.’ He dated the inscription, September 1938.

‘Read. Enjoy. And if ever you should need me, Burgess, send me this book. I shall remember our conversation, and the debt I owe you.’

They parted, the Great Man and the Arch-Manipulator. It was only later that Churchill read the message left by his guest in the visitors’ book.

‘From a fellow traveller, belligerent, bibulous – and broke.’

It was written on a page that, many years later, would be torn from the book and destroyed.

The weather forecast had been discouraging. It had also proved to be entirely accurate, and the young telephonist scurried to work trying her best to shield her new perm from the elements. She had accepted a date for the following day with a dark-eyed travelling glove salesman from Manchester named Norman, and although she knew their relationship could be measured in little more than moments and plumbed the depths of folly, still she wanted to look her best. She arrived in time before her duty started to repair the storm damage and smoke half a cigarette, carefully replacing the unused portion in its packet.

The exchange room where she worked was gloomy, the overhead lighting meagre and inadequate for its task. She settled onto her high-backed stool and confronted the array of switches that were set out with military precision on the board in front of her. At chin-level were posted the Instructions of the Day, printed on a small card. From all sides came the quiet female chatter of operators handling enquiries and connecting calls. It proved to be a busy night at the exchange with much of the country intent on sharing the hard-won pleasures of peace. She listened in on many of the trunk calls in order to ensure that the connection remained clear, at times feeling tempted to join in, to celebrate with them, even to tell them about her Norman. Thoughts of Norman made the night drag. His hands were elegant and remarkably soft, just like a glove salesman’s should be, and she wanted it to be tomorrow already.

When the call came up on her board, she knew precisely what to do. The Instructions about this number, Westerham 4433, were clear. She turned to attract the attention of her supervisor, who was sitting at her cubicle in the middle of the exchange floor and who responded with a nod. The supervisor, several years older than any other of the girls on the floor, inserted a plug in her own board and re-routed the call through the Observation Room.

The Observation Room was small, almost sepulchral, without the background chatter of the main exchange. In it sat another young female operator with headphones on, recording tape machine at the ready, and pencil in hand. As the call was connected she noted both the time and the number on her Observation Sheet, and as the voices poured out she began her task of taking down in shorthand every word of the conversation.

It wasn’t difficult to tell the difference between the two men’s voices. One was ordinary, just a voice in the babble.

The other was quite unmistakable. Sonorous. Distinctively sibilant.

She began scribbling till her fingers ached.

TWO

Alfred Duff Cooper, PC, DSO, MP and many other bits and bobs, was a man of prodigious appetites. He couldn’t spend a week without women – many of them – including his beautiful and sophisticated wife, Diana. As a species he found them irritating, yet individually they were irresistible. Neither did he seem able to live without the encouragement of alcohol, although in this he was far from unique within the clubs and corridors of the powerful. He was also a man of considerable intellectual capacity, having written an acclaimed biography of Talleyrand and another of Field Marshal Haig even while he was undertaking his duties as a senior member of the Cabinet. But above all else his appetite was for politics, a game that had brought fame, high office and many beautiful women to his doorstep. Yet, for ‘Duffie’, politics were to prove the most faithless mistress of them all.

‘A trim and a shave, if you will, McFadden. And take your time. I have to look my best.’

‘An important engagement, sir?’

‘With the executioner’s axe.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ Mac replied, displaying as much emotion as if he had been asked to put out the empty milk bottles.

The politician had walked the fifteen minutes from his office in the Admiralty to Trumper’s, the finest gentlemen’s barbers in the country, which stood on Mayfair’s Curzon Street. It was a walk made by an extraordinarily large number of the grandest men in the land (although in the case of the Palace and Downing Street it was more usual for the barber to pack his small case of necessities and make a house call). McFadden was one of that handful of select barbers who served them. He had joined the firm years before through a combination of good fortune and his considerable ability. Everyone liked Mac because he was totally undemanding. Nobody needed to bother getting to know him. He arrived, he worked, he cleared up and he left. Now the First Lord of the Admiralty was reclining in his chair within a highly polished wood-panelled cubicle, one of many that stretched into the depths of the shop.

‘I’m sorry to hear you’re going to die, sir. Any particular reason?’ Mac enquired as he prepared the hot towels. The announcement of this great politician’s imminent demise had seemed to require some sort of response, but Mac was always careful not to appear too interested or to become emotional about any of his customers’ concerns. They came here to relax, to put aside the troubles of their day, and they found it much easier to accomplish this with someone like Mac who simply didn’t matter. It was bred into them, the tendency to display in front of a servant the range of thoughts and emotions you’d never dream of sharing with a friend or your wife. It also helped that Mac had a slight accent and a limp and appeared to be a little stupid and slow, not a complete man, conforming to a certain notion of the working man that made him the safe recipient of confidences, if not of the vote.

Duff Cooper closed his eyes and allowed a slow exhalation of breath. ‘I’m not dying literally, for God’s sake. It’s worse than that. This afternoon I have a very important speech to make to the House of Commons. My resignation speech.’

‘A sad day, sir.’ Mac slowed down his preparations for the shave. The client clearly wished to share a confidence with him, which he would find difficult through a swathe of hot towels.

‘God, but I’ve loved my job. I’ve sat in the Admiralty and sent the mightiest navy in the world to every corner of the globe. More power and privilege than most men could ever dream of. Yet by tonight I shall be an outcast, despised by people who yesterday hung on my every word and called me their friend. All because of …’

‘Lift the chin for me, will you, sir? Thank you. Because of what, sir?’

‘Damn it, McFadden! We won the bloody war. Never again, we said. Then Hitler comes along and starts building his squadrons of panzers and fighter planes – purely for defence, he assures everyone, and we believe him. Even when he marches into the Rhineland we believe him. Two years later he’s trampling all over bloody Austria, and now he’s ripping Czechoslovakia to pieces. And still our Prime Minister says he trusts him!’

His client was tense, his moustache a-bristle. Mac reclined the chair even more to help him relax.

‘Tell me, McFadden, what do you think of our beloved Mr Chamberlain?’

Mac didn’t care for such direct questions. All his adult life had been spent in the mentality of the gulag, never openly complaining, always seeming to conform, never risking a row. Perhaps that’s why he had agreed to marry, not so much to avoid disappointing the lady but more because it was the simplest way to fit into the flow of things. Yet there weren’t any simple ways open to him any more. The time had come when even barbers had to take sides.

‘I think Mr Chamberlain wears his hair too long,’ the barber replied softly.

‘God, but what would I do to get near him with a razor,’ the politician spat.

‘Doesn’t go with the image, it doesn’t. That hair – and the winged collar and tail coat. Out of date, if you ask me.’

‘A man out of time.’

‘Will any of your colleagues be joining you, sir?’ Mac made it sound like an invitation to sit down and dine. As he applied the first towel, the politician offered up a soft moan and for a moment Mac thought he had applied it too hot, but it soon became clear that the pain came from an entirely different source.

‘They promised, you know. Walter Elliot, and others. We’ll be there with you, they said, right at your side. Munich was one goose-step too far. But where are they now? Elliot waffles on about how he can be of more use working from inside the Government than being a leper on the back benches. Leper. That’s the term he used. The day before he was talking about honour, now it’s become some sort of disfiguring disease. The bastard. And the others keep drivelling on about there being an election around the corner and how it would be suicide to resign now, how party headquarters would make sure they never got another job again. What sort of job do they think they’ll have when the Wehrmacht comes marching down bloody Whitehall, for Christ’s sake?’

Mac held back on the final towel. It was as though the politician was pouring out all the anguish and pain of betrayal he would never be able to display in the House, needing somehow to get to grips with the wreckage that only hours ago had been a grand life.

‘I despair. What’s become of my party? I thought we were a league of gentlemen, but only Eden telephoned. And Winston, of course. In tears. Sentimental old bugger. By God, if tears could drown Hitler, Winston would’ve finished him off before a single jackboot ever trod on Vienna.’

Mac hobbled around the chair to apply the final towel. Before his face disappeared, Duff Cooper muttered the words that Mac had heard so many times from this chair. ‘Not to be repeated, of course, McFadden. Shouldn’t really be telling you this but … Just between the two of us, eh?’

The politician wanted a sounding board and who better than a slow, stupid Jew-boy barber? Mac dropped the towel and at last the politician was silent.

Mac held a simple view about politicians. He loathed the lot. He’d been governed by Tsars, by Kaisers, by Kings and by Bloody Chaos. He’d seen both imperialism and communism up close – too close – and he had a pretty clear idea about Nazism, too. They were all the same. They were politicians. They sat behind vast desks in their vast palaces and moved vast armies backwards and forwards across the map – until the armies were no longer vast but had been destroyed and the game was over, for a while. Lives of millions of men sliced to pieces by arrows on a map.

This one was scarcely better than the rest. He wanted war and he’d get it, in the end, if not over Czechoslovakia then over some other god-forsaken patch of Europe. At some point someone would draw a line in the sand and soon it would run red and be so drenched in tears that eventually the line would be swept aside. Vanish. That’s what happened with lines in the sand. The soldier’s boot, the storm, the downpour of tears. Then the line would disappear, leaving everyone except old women struggling to remember where – and why – it had ever been.

Duff Cooper, of course, would stand in his place that afternoon and insist he was defending the cause of the common man, but Mac was about as common as they came and he’d burn before he saw any sense in it. If Cooper was defending freedom, as he claimed, why hadn’t he done so in Spain, and why not in Austria where Jews were already being rounded up and sent on their railway journeys to nowhere? What was so special about fucking Czechoslovakia?

No, for the politician this was nothing more than a glory hunt, a game of ambitions and advancement, a game pursued from the day he had been shoved out of his nursery and sent to learn the rules of the sport on the playing fields of some English public school.

The shave and trim were finished, the moustache back in its proper place. The politician was ready to face the enemy. ‘Have a good day, sir,’ Mac said at the door, holding out his client’s freshly brushed hat.

The soon-to-be former great person barely heard. In his mind he was already on his feet making one of the most memorable resignation speeches of the age, a speech which might yet rock the Government, even bring its house down. He tried to ignore the worm that had been wriggling deep inside all morning and telling him that he should come to his senses, be realistic, understand that the most he could hope to achieve was to sway the House enough for the door to swing open and allow him back in.

‘I’ll be back,’ Cooper barked.

Mac declined to offer an opinion.

Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess woke badly. It was not a good place in which to wake badly. His apartment, in Chester Square near Victoria Station, was decorated with a deliberate taste for the grotesque – the carpet was red, the walls a murky white, the curtains and sheets beneath his heavy Italianate bed-head an uncertain blue, and everything covered with a film of nicotine. As he opened his eyes the colours and stale tobacco mounted a co-ordinated assault on him, and he groaned. His mouth felt like the bottom of a bird cage, and very soon he would be late. Again.

He slipped out of bed and stumbled to the window. On his way he knocked over a pile of books on which was balanced a glass of red wine. Fortunately the wine, like Burgess, had been almost completely consumed and the stain would be invisible amongst the rest. He threw open the window and lit a cigarette, coughing as a trickle of fresh air tried to penetrate the room. It was miserably squalid, but as he insisted on telling his friends, if this was squalor it was nothing compared to what you’d find in Guernica or some of the side streets of Moscow. So, you’ve been to Moscow, have you? they would invariably ask. How was it? Tough, uncompromising, intellectual, unsentimental, he would tell them. He would relate his encounter with a militiaman who had threatened to beat him up for walking on the grass, but that was only half the story. He’d been throwing up over a statue of Stalin at the time.

He flung the cigarette stub out of the window and hauled up a piece of dried fish that he kept dangling on a string from his windowsill, tearing off a piece before throwing the rest back out again. Breakfast on the run. But his mouth was so dry he couldn’t chew, not until he’d poured himself two fingers of Jameson’s and swilled it round the back of his gums.

‘To mastication,’ he murmured, raising his glass to the straw-stuffed Regency buck that stood by the wardrobe. It stared back at him in reproach, the glass eyes seeming to follow him around the room. Sometimes it seemed as if the whole world was after him, even the stuffed animals. The apartment was crammed with artefacts, from a frigate in a bottle to an old American harmonium that he occasionally played, nothing of any great value, all garbage really. One day he’d get rid of it, along with the rest of his ludicrous life. He rubbed whiskey with his finger round his teeth to get rid of the sour taste in his mouth. He always seemed to be drinking whiskey, more than he’d intended to, and more still to get rid of the hangover. He would chew garlic to get rid of the smell of whiskey, then drive ludicrously fast to see if he could get rid of all the things that bothered him. His friends said he’d kill himself eventually, and maybe they were right. It was amazing how many friends he had, all things considered.

It would be another one of those days. He would arrive late at Broadcasting House and they would shout at him, so he would shout back and yet again try to get them to use Churchill. He knew they would refuse, because they were under instructions from above. But in all the shouting about Churchill they would forget he looked like a tramp and had been late yet again. So he would have just one more drink to fortify himself and be on his way.

It was at that point that the eiderdown moved. It was piled high on one side of the bed, a tangle of old silk and cigarette burns, and out from beneath it protruded a calf, then a thigh, followed by the most gorgeous arse he’d seen since …? Since last night. Victoria Station, one of his habitual hunting grounds, where if ever he was stopped and questioned he could always argue that he was on his way home, just round the corner, officer. The arse moved. It belonged to a young bellboy from Claridge’s. He couldn’t remember his name. Which in the scramble last night hadn’t mattered a damn, but in the damp light of day seemed – well, unnecessarily rude. So Burgess decided he’d spend a little more time with his guest that morning, give himself the opportunity to find out the lad’s name. And if it made him still later at the BBC, what did it matter? The war would wait. That was official.

Brendan Bracken was one of those figures who could be described as many things, but mostly he was outrageous. He would also, soon, become one of the most powerful men in the country.

Bracken was a fantasist. He was also the Member of Parliament for North Paddington. He was Irish by birth but claimed to be an orphan from Australia where his parents had been killed in a bush fire. In fact, his father had been a stonemason and also a member of the Republican Brotherhood, an illegal Irish nationalist organization on whose behalf he would go round blowing up Anglo-Irish walls and buildings. The following day he would appear cheerfully on the doorstep and offer to repair them. Perhaps he passed on to his son the capacity for vivid imagination.

Bracken went through life lying about his origins, about his education – at times he would suggest he had gone to Oxford University – and even about his parentage. When he attached himself to Winston Churchill and worked his way up to become the elder man’s indispensable right arm, rumours began to circulate that he was Churchill’s illegitimate son. He did nothing to discourage these rumours, and perhaps even started them.

Bracken did more than invent the world around him, he invented many worlds and seemed to be able to move guilelessly from one to another. People knew it was largely nonsense, but the brashness and energy he devoted to his fantasies persuaded others to go along with them. It was so much easier than calling his bluff. By October 1938 he was thirty-seven years of age with a safe parliamentary seat and was being driven around in his own custom-built Bentley. Still he had trouble being taken seriously.

Yet he wanted so desperately to be taken seriously. Which was why, when he entered the Members’ Lobby beside the great oak doors leading to the chamber of the House of Commons and was greeted by Duff Cooper, he was deeply confused. For Duffie had been part of the team. Cooper had been Churchill’s drinking partner, dining companion and intimate colleague in the battle against Chamberlain and appeasement. It had been an awesome team, one of them inside the Cabinet, the other rampaging freely outside, but now it was all unravelling. Cooper, Churchill’s last great ally inside the corridors of power, was gone. Churchill was despondent. Whichever way Bracken looked at it and turned it over in his mind, Chamberlain had won.