The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (30 page)

T
HE
P
ROF, MEANWHILE, PEPPERED
Churchill with notes and minutes on far-flung topics and novel weapons. His penchant for viewing all things through the icy lens of science caused some of his proposals to veer toward the ruthless.
In one memorandum, he recommended poisoning water wells used by Italian troops in the Middle East. He suggested using calcium chloride, “extremely convenient since only 1 lb of material should be required for every 5,000 gallons.” He was not unaware of the importance of public perception, however, and thus shied from recommending poisons of a more lethal nature, like arsenic, since they raised “undesirable associations in the public mind.”

He expressed no such restraint, however, with regard to simply incinerating columns of enemy soldiers. “
In my view burning oil has great possibilities in warfare provided it is used on a large scale,” he told Churchill a week later. Flaming oil could be deployed for stopping an advancing force or “better still burning up a whole column of troops or vehicles,” he wrote. “All that need be done is to run a couple of pipes along [the] side of the road concealed in a hedge with holes bored in them pointing towards the road. A pipe is carried away some hundreds of yards to a supply of oil. At the crucial moment when a column of armored vehicles is on the road the oil is turned on and ignited producing a flaming furnace over the whole prepared length of road.”

M
ARY
C
HURCHILL STILL RESENTED
being tucked away for safekeeping in the countryside by “excessively protective” parents and not being able to share in the experience of war. On the night of Wednesday, September 25, she got an opportunity. One of the Luftwaffe’s giant parachute mines drifted into Aylesbury and exploded so near the offices of the Women’s Voluntary Service as to render them unusable. Nineteen staff members were injured.

The excitement was eclipsed by heartbreak, as a tidal surge of criticism broke over her father and his government. Bowing to confident assurances from his top military advisers, Churchill had reinstated Operation Menace, the seizure of Dakar, in West Africa, by a mixed force of British and Free French soldiers led by General de Gaulle. The attack, which began earlier in the week, at first seemed certain to yield an easy victory, but a combination of factors, including an unexpectedly strong defense by Vichy forces in control of the port, produced only spectacular failure—an operation so confused and inept that it became a parody of the stirring offensive coup Churchill had hoped for. Once again British forces were compelled to withdraw, prompting critics to portray the incident as only the most recent of a chain of failures that included Norway, Dunkirk, and—for those who cared to look back further—Gallipoli during Churchill’s initial tenure as first lord of the Admiralty, when his attempt to land an army on the Turkish peninsula had also ended in evacuation. That debacle, far bloodier than Dakar, had cost him his post. A Home Intelligence report summed up popular reaction to the Dakar failure: “
Another victory for evacuation.”

Mary knew how desperately her father wanted to launch offensive operations against Germany, beyond merely bombing the country. Churchill’s initial instinct to cancel the operation, after his visit to the RAF operations center at Uxbridge a week earlier, had been a good one, but he had allowed himself to be overruled by the confident dissent of senior commanders. In her diary, Mary rose to her father’s defense: “
I don’t see how in the course of having to make endless decisions one can avoid some mistakes.”

Within the Churchill household, the failure of Operation Menace was perceived to be sufficiently grave as to pose a threat to Churchill’s government.

“O god—somehow this minor reversal has cast a shadow over everything,” Mary wrote. “I do hope the government will pull through—All my feelings are so mixed. Of course I want Papa to pull it off but not
only
for personal reasons—but
also
if he went WHO IS TO COME??”

The next day, Friday, September 27, was no better. “
All today seemed overcast with the gloom of the Dakar affair,” Mary observed. “It certainly does seem that there was misjudgment somewhere. Oh I am so anxious for Papa. He loves the French so much, & I know longs for them to do something grand & spectacular—but I fear
he
will take rather a bump over this.” She was shocked by the vitriol from the press. The
Daily Mirror,
in particular, seemed to have gone mad over the episode. “ ‘The Gallipoli touch?’ ” Mary wrote, quoting the paper. “Oh—how unkind.”

On top of it all, compounding the suspense that already pervaded the house, her pregnant sister-in-law, Pamela, was feeling ill, sick on Thursday, sicker on Friday. And the ministrations of Pamela’s doctor, Carnac Rivett, including his apparent obsession with keeping her on her feet and walking, were becoming suffocating, prompting Mary to exclaim in her diary, “Why can’t Mr. Rivett let the poor girl alone.”

D
ESPITE THE FACT THAT
the baby was due any day, on Tuesday, October 8, Pamela and Clementine set out from Chequers for London, to attend the swearing-in of Pamela’s husband, Randolph, as a new member of the House of Commons, a post he would hold while also retaining his commission in the 4th Hussars and continuing as a correspondent for Beaverbrook’s
Evening Standard
.

They drove to London knowing full well that the Luftwaffe would likely pound the city again that night, as it had done every night since September 7, and despite the fact that invasion fears remained high. As Churchill told Roosevelt on Friday, October 4: “
I cannot feel that the invasion danger is past.” Referring to Hitler, he wrote, “The gent has taken off his clothes and put on his bathing suit, but the water is getting colder and there is an autumn nip in the air.” If Hitler planned to make his move, Churchill knew, he would have to do it soon, before the weather worsened. He told Roosevelt, “We are maintaining the utmost vigilance.”

Pamela and Clementine carried a tank of laughing gas in the car, to administer to Pamela if she happened to go into labor. But it was to Mary, who remained behind at Chequers, that the day would yield the greatest drama.

A
T
C
HEQUERS THAT NIGHT,
Mary found herself the guest of the officers of the Coldstream Guards unit assigned to defend the house. She loved the party and the attention—until the Luftwaffe intervened.

The dinner was in full sway when she and the others heard the unmistakable whistle of a falling bomb. They all ducked, by instinct, and waited what seemed an inordinate amount of time for the detonation. When the explosion came, it was oddly muted; it left the guests “rather breathless but intact & morale on all sides good,” Mary wrote.

Her hosts rushed her outside into a deep air-raid trench, whose base was full of mud, which destroyed her beloved suede shoes. Once the raid was judged to have ended, the men escorted her home. “They were all sweet to me,” she wrote in her diary, “—and I was feeling
terribly
excited & rather breathless—but thank god—not all white & trembly as I so often feared & imagined I would be.”

She added: “Damn those Bloody Huns for breaking up an enjoyable party.”

The next day, Wednesday, October 9, Mary discovered that the bomb had left a huge crater only one hundred yards from the guards’ mess, in a muddy field. The mud, she reasoned, probably explained why the explosion had sounded so muted.

In her diary she wrote, “I am not feeling so ignored by the war.”

E
ARLY ON
T
HURSDAY MORNING,
at Chequers, Pamela, attended by the fearful and ever-present Dr. Rivett, gave birth to a son. A young nurse was present as well. Pamela was just coming out of an anesthetic haze when she heard the nurse say, “
I’ve told you five times that it’s a boy. Will you please believe me?”

Pamela, dazed, needed reassurance. “It can’t change now,” she said. “No. It can’t change now.”

She was assured that indeed the baby’s sex would not change.

Clementine entered the news in the Chequers visitors’ book. “October 10th 4.40
A.M.—
Winston.” This was the first birth in the house in over a century.

“
Winston Churchill Junior arrived,” Mary wrote in her diary. “
Hooray
.”

She added:

“Pam weak but happy

“Baby not at all weak & only partially happy!”

Pamela’s husband, Randolph, newly minted member of Parliament, missed the birth. He was in London, in bed with the wife of an Austrian tenor, whose monocled image appeared on cigarette trading cards.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
in London, Churchill, working from his bed at 10 Downing Street, learned that two bombs had fallen on the Horse Guards Parade adjacent to the house but had failed to detonate. He asked Colville, “
Will they do us any damage when they explode?”

“I shouldn’t think so, Sir,” Colville said.

“Is that just your opinion, because if so it’s worth nothing,” Churchill said. “You have never seen an unexploded bomb go off. Go and ask for an official report.”

Which reinforced for Colville the folly of offering opinions in Churchill’s presence, “if one has nothing with which to back them.”

C
HURCHILL MET HIS NEW
grandson that weekend when he again traveled to Chequers, bringing with him, as always, numerous guests, including Pug Ismay and General Brooke. Churchill was “utterly delighted, and he used to come and watch the baby, feed him, and was just thrilled to death with him,” Pamela said.

While baby Winston was the main attraction, Churchill’s attention also was drawn to the crater left by the bomb that had interrupted Mary’s dinner party. After lunch, he and Ismay, along with Colville and other guests, gave it a close inspection, and debated whether the bomb’s proximity to the house was mere accident. Colville judged it a chance event; Churchill and Pug disagreed, and posited that it might have been a deliberate attempt to strike the house.

“
Certainly there is a danger,” Colville mused in his diary that night. “In Norway, Poland and Holland the Germans showed it was their policy to go all out for the Government, and Winston is worth more to them than the whole Cabinets of those three countries rolled into one.” His colleague Eric Seal, principal secretary, reiterated his own concerns in a private letter to the new chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal, who replaced Cyril Newall. “We have established a Military guard there which should be adequate for all emergencies likely to arise by land,” he wrote. “But I am not at all sure whether he is really safe from bombing attack.” Emphasizing that he had said nothing about this as yet to Churchill, Seal added, “I should myself be much happier if it were possible for him to have several other retreats which could be used irregularly so that the enemy would never know where he was.”

Chequers was too valuable an asset for Churchill to abandon entirely, but he agreed that spending every weekend at the house might pose too great a security risk, at least when the sky was clear and the moon was in its fullest phases. He himself had expressed concern about the safety of Chequers. “
Probably, they don’t think I am so foolish as to come here,” he said. “But I stand to lose a lot, three generations at a swoop.”

Simply staying in the city, however, was not a consideration. Churchill needed his weekends in the country, and believed he knew of a house that was ideally suited to the role of moonlight surrogate.

He invited its owner, Ronald Tree, to his office. Tree was a friend of long standing who had shared Churchill’s prewar concerns about the rise of Hitler. Now he was a Conservative member of Parliament and parliamentary secretary to Minister of Information Duff Cooper. From a financial standpoint, Tree needed neither post: He had inherited great wealth as a scion of the Marshall Field’s empire in Chicago. His wife, Nancy, was American, a niece of Lady Astor. They owned Ditchley, an eighteenth-century house in Oxfordshire, about seventy-five miles from 10 Downing Street.

Churchill was direct. He told Tree that he wished to spend the upcoming weekend at Ditchley, and that he would be arriving with a number of guests and a full complement of staff and protective guard.

Tree was delighted; his wife, thrilled. Whether they quite knew what they were in for is open to question. Churchill’s descent upon the house had more in common with one of Hitler’s blitzkriegs than a tranquil arrival for a weekend in the country.

“
It is quite a business,” wrote Harold Nicolson in his diary, after taking part in one such Ditchley invasion. “First come two detectives who scour the house from garret to cellar; then arrive valet and maid with much luggage; then thirty-five soldiers plus officers turn up to guard the great man through the night; then two stenographers with masses of papers.” Next, the guests arrive: “The great mass of the house is dark and windowless, and then a chink in the door opens and we enter suddenly into the warmth of central heating, the blaze of lights and the amazing beauty of the hall.”

The decor of the house was by now legendary, and was fast becoming the model for a style of country home decor that emphasized color, comfort, and lack of formality. Its popularity prompted Mrs. Tree to create a home-design firm around the concept. Her future business partner would later describe her aesthetic as one of “pleasing decay.”

The Trees did not mind the sudden siege of their home. Far from it. “
I have always been one of your greatest if most humble admirers,” Mrs. Tree wrote to Churchill after his initial visit, “—and I meant to tell you how delighted and honored we all were to have you come to Ditchley. If it is convenient for you at any time to use no matter how short the notice—it is at your disposal.”

It was indeed convenient. Churchill came the following weekend as well, and over the next year or so, he would occupy the house on more than a dozen additional weekends, including one of the most momentous of the war.