Читать книгу Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945–1955 - Barbara Leaming - Страница 6

During the five-and-a-half-hour flight to Milan in a Dakota aircraft provided for his personal use by the Supreme Allied Commander for the Mediterranean, Field Marshal Alexander, Churchill pored over five years’ worth of his wartime minutes. This was the torrent of dictated notes, consisting of comments, questions, and requests to individual ministers, to the Chiefs of Staff, and to others, by which he had brought his powerful personal impact to bear on every aspect of the conduct of the war.

Churchill had used his minutes the way an octopus uses its tentacles – to reach everywhere, to be in many places at once. Throughout his life, he had been constitutionally incapable of sitting back and letting others do what he usually believed he could better accomplish himself. Where problems existed, he was driven to grapple with them directly, so much so that at times even his admirers had been known to question his sense of proportion. He craved responsibility, which he once tellingly described to his mother as ‘an exhilarating drink’. His minutes allowed him to be involved in anything that concerned the fight against Hitler, to shine a searchlight into the most obscure corners of the war effort, and not only to learn about, but also to manage details which other, less controlling personalities might have been inclined to leave to the judgement of subordinates. Now, all that power had fallen away from him.

Still, he had not brought printed copies of his minutes just to brood over what had been lost. Faced with the likelihood that his political career was at an end, Churchill insisted he could not simply be idle for the rest of his life. More and more, it seemed as if he was weighing the possibility of a memoir along the lines of The World Crisis, his highly personal multi-volume chronicle of the First World War. Fellow Conservatives – most, apparently, with the ulterior motive of edging him aside as party leader – had suggested that he undertake to tell the story of the Second World War as only he could. At a time when Churchill was deeply upset that the election had called his record into question, a memoir held the distinct attraction of allowing him to defend his actions, both during the war and in the immediate aftermath, in the courtroom of history.

Could such an undertaking fill the vacuum in his life that had been created when he lost the premiership? Would a memoir be enough to absorb the energies of a man of Churchill’s temperament? In part, that was what he was on his way to Italy to find out.

As Parliament was in recess until 9 October, Alexander had offered him the exclusive use of the Villa La Rosa, the commandeered property above Lake Como which had served as the Field Marshal’s headquarters in the war’s final days. In anticipation of his stay there, Churchill had had bound copies of his minutes and telegrams specially prepared; these would form the spine of any autobiographical work. The Churchills’ middle daughter, red-headed Sarah, was with her father on the flight on 1 September, along with his physician, his secretary, his valet, and a detective. He had wanted Clementine to come as well but she refused, explaining that she would be able to accomplish more in his absence. She too was exhausted and dejected, and felt that she would be unable to enjoy a holiday in the sun.

On the plane Churchill barely said a word to the others, but in the car afterwards it became apparent that in the course of reading he had already seized on the narrative possibilities of one part of the Second World War saga. He spoke excitedly of the Dunkirk evacuation, testing the story, feeling for the drama. At the Villa La Rosa, after he learned that one of the aides-de-camp assigned to him for the occasion had been at Dunkirk, animated talk of the episode continued over dinner. Seated at a huge green glass table in the ornately-mirrored and marbled pale green oval dining room, Churchill interrogated the nervous twenty-four-year-old. How long had he waited on the beaches? What kind of vessel had rescued him? Churchill, in his enthusiasm, wanted to hear every detail.

Previously, he had been in such low spirits that Sarah had feared time would pass slowly and dully. Already, that was far from the case. But any hope that a change of scenery was all that it would take to cure her father was soon dashed. After dinner, Churchill put on a dark hat and coat over his white suit and padded out onto the balcony in bedroom slippers to sit. As he puffed on a cigar, his interest in a memoir seemed to evaporate with the swirls of smoke. He insisted to his doctor that he was in no mood to write, especially not when the Government was poised to take so much of his earnings. Suddenly, he was back to rehashing the election, brooding aloud about what had gone wrong and what might have been.

Early the next morning, the sun was warm and bright and a soft breeze rippled the lake as a tiny caravan assembled in front of the Villa La Rosa, which gave long views of villages and mountains on the opposite shore. An aide-de-camp loaded one of the cars with Churchill’s painting apparatus. An elaborate lunch was packed in an accompanying station wagon. Through the years, Churchill had often sought relief, repose, and renewal through painting. He first picked up a paintbrush in 1915 after the loss of his position as First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of the calamitous Dardanelles campaign affected him so strongly that Clementine worried he would ‘die of grief’.

Then, as now, he had been cut off in the midst of a great and urgent undertaking. Then, as now, it galled him to be deprived of control while the fate of the enterprise was still in suspense. Then, as now, he felt as if he ‘knew everything and could do nothing’. Then, as now, at a moment when every fibre of his being was ‘inflamed to action’, he was forced to remain ‘a spectator of the tragedy, placed cruelly in a front seat’.

In a period when dark broodings about his predicament had allowed him no rest, painting had come to his rescue. Thirty years later, his daughter and others in the group, not to mention Churchill himself, were hoping it might do so again. The vehicles were packed and ready to go by 10 a.m., but Churchill did not enter the open yellow car until almost noon.

They drove along the lakefront while Churchill scouted for what he liked to call a ‘paintaceous’ scene. Before long, he announced that he was hungry, so the procession halted and a table was set up. About twenty Italian peasants formed a circle around the English travellers and watched them eat and drink. At length, the Churchill party drove over the mountains to Lake Lugano. It was late afternoon before he found a view that pleased him. His easel, canvas, paints, and brushes were laid out, along with the tiny table he liked to have nearby for whisky and cigars. The paints were arrayed on a tray fitted to stand slightly above his knees. The brushes went in a ten-inch-high container. Finally, wearing a white smock and a straw sombrero, Churchill settled into his cane painting chair and began to work.

When his sister-in-law Gwendeline Churchill, known as Goonie, introduced the middle-aged Churchill to painting in 1915, he found that he needed only to concentrate on the challenge of transferring a scene to his canvas in order to put politics and world problems out of his thoughts. For a man who worked and worried as much as he did, the discovery was a revelation. His private secretary later said that it was as if a new planet had swum into his ken.

Then and on many subsequent occasions, though not during the Second World War when the magnitude of his burdens allowed no interruption, the balm of painting healed Churchill both mentally and physically. He painted in rapt silence. As he focused on a composition, all of his cares and frustrations appeared to vanish. He revelled in the physical and tactile aspects of the process, from the ‘voluptuous kick’ of squeezing the fragrant colours out of their tubes, to the capacity for building the pigment ‘layer after layer’, to the wondrous ability to scrape away one’s mistakes with a palette knife at the end of the day. When he inspected a finished painting, he was known not just to look but also to touch the surface of the canvas, caressing the whorls of dry paint with his fingertips.

Churchill theorized that when he painted, the use of those parts of the mind which direct the eye and hand allowed the exhausted part of his brain to rest and revive. A change of scenery alone would not have sufficed, for he would still be condemned to think the same thoughts as before. Nor would activities like reading or writing, for they were too similar to the sort of work that had worn him out in the first place. Nor would it help simply to lie down and do nothing, for the mind would keep churning. Painting offered a complete change of interest. It was not that his thoughts stopped; he was thinking, to be sure, but about matters other than those that had been preoccupying him.

At Lake Lugano in 1945, painting again seemed to work its magic. Eyeglasses partway down his nose, Churchill paused at intervals to push back his straw hat and wipe his forehead, but otherwise he laboured continuously, utterly engrossed. Another group of Italians, mostly children no more than twelve or thirteen years old, sat on the ground and observed. By the time he put down his brush at last and the spell was broken, five hours had passed and it was early evening. Later, Sarah was pleased to hear her father exclaim, ‘I’ve had a happy day.’ As she reported to Clementine, she had not heard him say that ‘for I don’t know how long!’

Churchill continued to paint in the days that followed. The only drawback was that at his age too much sitting threatened to stir up the hot lava of his indigestion. In the evenings, he would prop up his canvases in the dining room and appraise them during dinner. He transformed his huge bathroom, which had mirrors on every wall, into a studio with makeshift easels, and he would stare at works in progress while he soaked in a marble tub. He rejoiced that in Italy he felt, as he had not in many years, as if he were entirely out of the world. At home he was an obsessive reader of newspapers, which he marked up with slashes of red ink before dropping them on the floor for someone else to collect. Here he saw no newspapers for days at a time. When they were delivered, he claimed to be so busy with his painting that he hardly had time to read them.

In this spirit Churchill was soon insisting he was glad to have been relieved of responsibility for how things turned out after the war. He claimed as much in separate conversations with Moran and with another physician, who came to the villa to fit him with a truss. He wrote to Clementine of his own steadily growing sense of relief that others would have to deal with the problems of postwar Europe. And he told Sarah one evening, ‘Every day I stay here without news, without worry I realize more and more that it may very well be what your mother said, a blessing in disguise. The war is over, it is won and they have lifted the hideous aftermath from my shoulders. I am what I never thought I would be until I reached my grave “sans soucis et sans regrets”.’ In a good deal of this, Churchill was probably trying to convince himself as much as anyone else of his change of heart. Certainly he had gone through this very process at the time of the Dardanelles disaster, pretending to be content with the loss of high office when in fact he was waiting and hoping for an opportunity to regain power and influence.

Unlike his air of calm acceptance, the healing effects of his artist’s holiday were no pose. Churchill had long been blessed with remarkable powers of recuperation. At Lake Como, his absorption in something other than personal and professional issues allowed those powers to kick in. At the end of eighteen days he seemed so much better physically and mentally that he decided to extend his trip, sending his doctor back to England along with Sarah and nine finished canvases. Accompanied by his remaining entourage, he drove along the Italian and French Riviera in search of new scenes to paint.

On his first day out he motored for four hours through ravishing countryside to Genoa. He arrived after nightfall to find the British officer who was in charge of the area ensconced at the Villa Pirelli, an ‘incongruous’ mix of marble palace and Swiss chalet perched on a rocky bluff above the sea. Churchill’s host marvelled at how healthy and vigorous he looked after so many years of war. But admiration turned to alarm when Churchill proved rather too active for his host’s comfort. In the morning, Churchill insisted he wished to swim despite the fact that the clear, pale green water below was said to be somewhat rough and the bathing place rocky. Refusing to be talked out of his plan, he climbed down nearly a hundred steps, followed by his valet carrying a massive towel. Soon, Churchill had doffed his silk dressing gown and bedroom slippers and was splashing about, porpoise-like, enjoying himself immensely. At the end of the session, an awkward logistical problem required the poor beleaguered host to push Churchill’s boyishly pink-and-white, five-foot-six, 210-pound figure up from the water, while an aide-de-camp tugged from the shore.

After two days in Genoa, Churchill and company proceeded to the half-empty Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, where he dined lavishly on a veranda overlooking the casino and confronted a stack of newspapers from London. He had seen some press at Lake Como, but in that setting the information had struck him as oddly remote. Now, revived in body, mind, and spirit, he took in the first British reports of discord and deadlock at the Council of Foreign Ministers which had been meeting in London in his absence. Molotov had thrown every obstacle he could think of in the path to progress (even so, as was later discovered, Stalin had berated him in secret messages for being too soft and conciliatory). For many observers in Britain and elsewhere, the talks’ failure amounted to a first disconcerting glimpse of the sharp divisions that had already emerged between the Western democracies and their wartime ally the Soviet Union. The fiasco came as no surprise to Churchill. He had predicted as much in the House of Commons on 16 August, when he publicly lamented the handing off of the most serious questions at Potsdam, questions the heads of state themselves ought to have settled. Once again, his warnings about events in Europe were starting to come true.

When he moved on to Cap d’Antibes, where he stayed at a fully staffed villa on loan from General Eisenhower, he wrote to Clementine in a voice markedly different at times from that of his letters from Italy. Previously, he had claimed to be interested solely in painting and to have little appetite for news of the outside world. Now, he spoke of how certain he had been that the foreign ministers’ talks would fail, of his understanding that the Soviets had no need of an agreement as they actually welcomed the chance to consolidate themselves in nations already in their grasp, of his concern that so little was known about what was happening to the Poles, the Czechs, and others trapped behind the iron curtain, of his sense that the future in Europe was full of ‘darkness and menace’, and of his feeling that there would be no lack of subjects to discuss when Parliament reconvened. Clearly, this was the letter of a man ready to re-engage.

Churchill had gone to Italy in the hope of coming to peace with the people’s decision. He had tried very hard to concur with his wife that the loss of the premiership was indeed a blessing in disguise. At last, he found he could do neither. The threat of another war was too great. His confidence that he was the man to prevent it was too strong. For better or worse, it simply was not in his character to remain detached for long.

When Churchill returned to Britain on 5 October 1945, his family understood that he had made an important decision while he was abroad. Once again, in defeat he would be defiant. Whatever the obstacles, he intended to fight on. He refused to retire.