Churchill’s Hour. Michael Dobbs

       THREE

      The blue waters of the Mediterranean had been turned into a shooting range, one in which the enemy had many more guns than the British, so the troopship conveying Randolph’s unit was required to take the long and laborious route to Egypt—round the tip of Africa and up through the Red Sea. The Glenroy was desperately overcrowded, and matters were made worse by the constant bickering that took place between the naval and army elements on board. In the view of No. 8 Commando, the captain was incompetent and soon was being referred to as ‘the bugger on the bridge’. The ship’s crew, in turn, regarded Randolph’s unit as ‘long-haired nancies’. It was partly a clash of class. The seamen were rough-handed workers—social underdogs, often from the slums—while many of those who formed No. 8 Commando had joined up straight from the bar of White’s Club in St James’s. Amongst these ill-mixed men who were crowded onto the ship, Randolph stood out most prominently of all, for no one could forget that he was somehow different, and if the point managed to slip anyone’s attention Randolph was always on hand to remind them. He and his closest friends were impossible, articulate, extravagant, impertinent, and took great pleasure in being gratuitously bloody rude. Long before the voyage was over, one of the crew had daubed a slogan on the lower deck: ‘Never in the history of humankind have so many been buggered about by so few.’

      Randolph loved his father, and perhaps too much, almost to the point of destruction. He had been brought up at his father’s table and encouraged to be his own man, yet by insisting so stridently on his uniqueness Randolph turned himself into no more than a pale shadow. He would bicker and abuse, ignoring all criticism, just as he had learnt from Winston, but he had failed to capture the essential counterbalance, that elusive quality of grace. In any event, what can be intriguing from an old man is inexcusable from the young; what was seen as drive and determination in the father appeared as little more than bloody-mindedness in the son. And Randolph, like Winston, would never, never, never give in.

      He’d promised he would stop gambling but it was a long voyage—three weeks—cooped up on the Glenroy in the growing heat and with little else for distraction, apart from alcohol. Just like White’s Club. There was poker, roulette, chemin-de-fer every night—and for very high stakes—hell, they were probably going to die, so what did it matter? They would gamble on anything: the number of empty bottles in a barrel or the number of peas on a plate, double or nothing.

      In spite of being his father’s son, Randolph was a rotten gambler and a worse drunk. And when he was drunk he never knew when the time had come to walk away.

      In three weeks at sea, Randolph lost three thousand pounds. Enough to pay the rent on the family home until the baby was well into old age. A small fortune, even for someone who wasn’t already broke.

      Up until the baby had been born, Pamela had spent much of her time at Downing Street with Randolph’s parents. During air raids she had slept in the wine cellar, in a bunk below Winston—‘one Churchill inside me, and one Churchill above,’ as she told it. It was a relationship that drew her close to her father-in-law and at times even made Randolph’s sisters envious, for while their lives seemed always to be touched by chaos, Pamela grew fat with her child and became almost a good-luck charm for the old man as he fought to keep the bombers at bay and the invasion unlaunched. ‘You are what this war is all about,’ he once told her, placing his hand on her protruding stomach.

      The previous September, at the most crucial hour in the Battle of Britain, Churchill had driven with Pamela and Clemmie from Chequers to the RAF’s headquarters at Uxbridge in order to see for themselves the progress of the extraordinary conflict that was taking place above southern England. They had watched in the operations room as, one after one, squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes had been thrown into the sky against the onrushing enemy. There came a moment during that afternoon when not a single aircraft was left in reserve, when it would have taken just one more wave of bombers to have swept Britain aside. But it hadn’t come.

      Afterwards, as they had driven back towards Chequers, Churchill had seemed buried deep within his own thoughts, exhausted, his chin sunk low upon his chest. After a while he had stirred and turned to Pamela.

      ‘Do you keep a diary?’

      ‘No,’ she had replied, startled.

      ‘You should. These are moments that, if we survive, we should allow no one to forget.’ Then he had fallen back into silence for several minutes, until the chin came up once more. ‘Anyway, if you don’t have a diary, what the hell will you live on when you get tired of Randolph?’

      ‘I shan’t get tired of Randolph.’

      ‘Everyone gets tired of Randolph,’ he had told her.

      But she hadn’t. Randolph was a handful, of course, garrulous, bibulous, fond of reading the histories of Macaulay to her in bed. When she had visited him at his commando training headquarters in Scotland, she’d been alarmed to discover that he had run up a hotel bill of gargantuan size, but he was unabashed. ‘Morituris bibendum,’ he had hollered, which he loosely translated as: ‘Those who are about to die deserve a bloody drink.’

      Anyway, he told her they could afford the occasional drink, and a little light gambling, too. It was only amongst his close friends, he explained, and he won more than he ever lost. After the baby had been born he’d found them an old rectory in Hertfordshire, rented for a pittance with the help of his father’s name. It was their first home; Pamela loved it, and him. When he was there the walls echoed with excitement, and when he was away she felt nothing but draughts and missed him with a power that at times astonished her. During the day she would wander around the house in one of his old uniform jackets, smelling him, touching him, trying to imagine him beside her, and at night she would turn off the gas fire and go to bed early under a pile of blankets and with a copy of Macaulay beneath the pillow.

      She missed him all the more when she discovered she was probably pregnant again. Christmas at Chequers.

      She was young, not yet twenty-one, lacking in experience of things, but she wanted so much to show him that he had found the best wife, mother and housekeeper he ever could.

      Then his letter arrived. It offered an apology, of course, and a renewed vow of eternal self-denial which this time, he told her, he meant. But the self-denial Randolph required was, in truth, all on Pamela’s part. He sent her detailed instructions that she was to pay off his gambling debts by instalments of perhaps ten pounds a month, to a list of names that seemed endless. He didn’t suggest any way in which this sum might be raised. It was to be her problem—and exclusively her problem, for he forbade her to breathe a word of this to his father. He made it sound as though somehow it were all her fault.

      Three days after the letter arrived, the bleeding started, accompanied by excruciating pain that left her bent in two and crying for mercy. It was only with the greatest difficulty that she made it to the bathroom, bleeding profusely.

      She had been pregnant; she was no longer. And would never be again.

      Yet another American had appeared on Churchill’s doorstep. In the last few weeks the Prime Minister seemed to have done little but charge up and down the stairs of Downing