Читать книгу Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock - Страница 15

SOFIE MAGDALENE WAS AN incurable optimist. All through the summer of 1939, despite constant pressure to move from Bexley to the remote seaside resort of Tenby, where the family had spent so many holidays together, she remained determined to sit out the war in her big, rambling home with her two younger daughters and their menagerie of animals, believing that somehow she would manage to evade the German bombers there. For a while, it looked as if her stubbornness would pay off, as the “Phoney War”, which had begun in September that year, continued on into winter and then into spring. Spring even moved into early summer with none of the predicted German attacks. Food rationing and blackout restrictions aside, for the average British civilian there was little tangible sense of being involved in military conflict. Moreover, as long as Neville Chamberlain remained prime minister, there was still an outside chance that some sort of peace might eventually be concluded with the Nazis.

Ironically for the Dahls, the series of events that precipitated the end of this twilight war began when the Nazis invaded Norway on April 10, 1940. In response, the British despatched an Expeditionary Force there to support their new Norwegian allies, but the short-lived campaign was so badly planned and mismanaged that, a month later, it forced Chamberlain’s resignation. After a short struggle for the premiership with Viscount Halifax, Chamberlain’s aloof and patrician foreign secretary, Winston Churchill, the maverick leader of the anti-Nazi Conservative faction in Parliament, emerged as the new prime minister. The same day that he entered Downing Street as the leader of a new all-party wartime government, Hitler invaded Luxemburg, Holland and Belgium. Within forty-eight hours, German Panzer divisions were pushing into France. As French defences collapsed, almost a quarter of a million British troops had to be evacuated back to the United Kingdom from Dunkirk. By mid-June, Paris was occupied, and France on the brink of surrender that became reality a few days later. Suddenly Britain was alone. On June 18, Churchill announced to the nation grimly that the Battle of France was over and that the Battle of Britain was surely about to begin. Nevertheless, as British forces retreated from mainland Europe, he brushed aside any suggestion of making peace with the Nazis. “We shall fight on,” he declared. Hitler felt he had no option but to launch his attack on Britain.