Churchill turned to Thompson. “You know why I’ve been to Buckingham Palace,” he said.
Thompson did, and congratulated him, but added that he wished the appointment had come sooner, and in better times, because of the immensity of the task that lay ahead.
“God alone knows how great it is,” Churchill said.
The two men shook hands, as solemn as mourners at a funeral. “All I hope is that it is not too late,” Churchill said. “I am very much afraid that it is. But we can only do our best, and give the rest of what we have—whatever there may be left to us.”
These were sober words, although inwardly, Churchill was elated. He had lived his entire life for this moment. That it had come at such a dark time did not matter. If anything, it made his appointment all the more exquisite.
In the fading light, Inspector Thompson saw tears begin to slip down Churchill’s cheeks. Thompson, too, found himself near tears.
* * *
—
LATE THAT NIGHT CHURCHILL lay in bed, alive with a thrilling sense of challenge and opportunity. “In my long political experience,” he wrote, “I had held most of the great offices of State, but I readily admit that the post which had now fallen to me was the one I liked the best.” Coveting power for power’s sake was a “base” pursuit, he wrote, adding, “But power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.”
He felt great relief. “At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial….Although impatient for the morning I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.”
Despite the doubts he had expressed to Inspector Thompson, Churchill brought to No. 10 Downing Street a naked confidence that under his leadership Britain would win the war, even though any objective appraisal would have said he did not have a chance. Churchill knew that his challenge now was to make everyone else believe it, too—his countrymen, his commanders, his cabinet ministers, and, most importantly, the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. From the very start, Churchill understood a fundamental truth about the war: that he could not win it without the eventual participation of the United States. Left to itself, he believed, Britain could endure and hold Germany at bay, but only the industrial might and manpower of America would ensure the final eradication of Hitler and National Socialism.
What made this all the more daunting was that Churchill had to achieve these ends quickly, before Hitler focused his full attention on England and unleashed his air force, the Luftwaffe, which British intelligence believed to be vastly superior to the Royal Air Force.
* * *
—
IN THE MIDST OF THIS, Churchill had to cope with all manner of other challenges. An immense personal debt payment was due at the end of the month, one he did not have the money to pay. His only son, Randolph, likewise was awash in debt, persistently demonstrating a gift not just for spending money but also for losing it gambling, at which his ineptitude was legendary; he also drank too much and had a propensity, once drunk, for making scenes and thereby posing what his mother, Clementine (pronounced Clementeen), saw as a continual risk that one day he would cause irrevocable embarrassment to the family. Churchill also had to deal with blackout rules and strict rationing and the mounting intrusion of officials seeking to keep him safe from assassination—as well as, not least, the everlasting offense of the army of workmen dispatched to buttress 10 Downing Street and the rest of Whitehall against aerial attack, with their endless hammering, which more than any other single irritant had the capacity to drive him to the point of fury.
Except maybe whistling.
His hatred of whistling, he once said, was the only thing he had in common with Hitler. It was more than merely an obsession. “It sets up an almost psychiatric disturbance in him—immense, immediate, and irrational,” wrote Inspector Thompson. Once, while walking together to 10 Downing Street, Thompson and the new prime minister encountered a newsboy, maybe thirteen years old, heading in their direction, “hands in pockets, newspapers under his arms, whistling loudly and cheerfully,” Thompson recalled.
As the boy came closer, Churchill’s anger soared. He hunched his shoulders and stalked over to the boy. “Stop that whistling,” he snarled.
The boy, utterly unruffled, replied, “Why should I?”
“Because I don’t like it and it’s a horrible noise.”
The boy moved on, then turned and shouted, “Well, you can shut your ears, can’t you?”
The boy kept walking.
Churchill was for the moment stunned. Anger flushed his face.
But one of Churchill’s great strengths was perspective, which gave him the ability to place discrete events into boxes, so that bad humor could in a heartbeat turn to mirth. As Churchill and Thompson continued walking, Thompson saw Churchill begin to smile. Under his breath, Churchill repeated the boy’s rejoinder: “You can shut your ears, can’t you?”
And laughed out loud.
* * *
—
CHURCHILL BENT AT ONCE to his new summons, heartening many, but confirming for others their most dire concerns.
CHAPTER 2
A Night at the Savoy
MARY CHURCHILL, SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD, awoke that morning, May 10, to the grim news from Europe. The details were terrifying in themselves, but it was the juxtaposition between how Mary had spent her night and what had happened across the English Channel that made it all the more shocking.
Mary was the youngest of Churchill’s four children; a fifth child, a daughter named Marigold, the family’s beloved “Duckadilly,” had died of septicemia in August 1921, at two years and nine months of age. Both parents were present at her death, a moment that drew from Clementine, as Churchill later told Mary, “a succession of wild shrieks, like an animal in mortal pain.”
Mary’s eldest sister, Diana, thirty, was married to Duncan Sandys (pronounced Sands), who served as Churchill’s “special liaison” to Air Raid Precautions (ARP), the civil defense division of the Home Office. They had three children. The second sister, Sarah, twenty-five, so stubborn that as a child she was nicknamed “Mule,” was an actress who, to Churchill’s displeasure, had married an Austrian entertainer named Vic Oliver, sixteen years her senior and twice married before he met her. They had no children. The fourth child was Randolph, nearly twenty-nine, who a year earlier had married Pamela Digby, now twenty years old and pregnant with their first child.
Mary was pretty, buoyant, and spirited, described by one observer as “very effervescent.” She approached the world with the unabashed enthusiasm of a spring lamb, a guilelessness that a young American visitor, Kathy Harriman, found cloying. “She’s a very intelligent girl,” Harriman wrote, “but so naive that it hurts. She says such frank things; then people laugh at her, make fun of her, and being super-sensitive, she takes it all to heart.” At her birth, Mary’s mother, Clementine, had nicknamed her “Mary the mouse.”