WC02 - Never Surrender

by Michael Dobbs

  "Do you think he understands all this?"

  "Not unless he understands you."

  He took her hand it seemed so frail, so vulnerable -raised it to his lips and kissed it with great tenderness. "Then it is my good fortune that you are at my side and not at his. I owe you a debt more profound than I can express."

  "You owe me nothing other than his destruction."

  She picked up her handbag, preparing to leave.

  "What will you do?" Churchill asked.

  "I shall wait for you to win this war. Then I shall try to find my son and give him a decent burial. He's one of them, you see, a Nazi. Betrayed his father, then he betrayed me."

  "I am so sorry, I never .. ." His voice trailed away in embarrassment. He never knew, because he had never asked.

  "Your war will probably be the end of him, Mr. Churchill. That is as it must be. But in spite of it all, he is my son. Family. I think you understand."

  She was at the door. "Something has been bothering me. How did you do it, persuade Herr Halifax to give you his support?"

  Churchill's shoulders stiffened in unease. "He doesn't realize it, but I lied to him," he growled defiantly. "Then I threatened him."

  "Just as I thought. Very much like that other bloody man, then."

  A few feet away on the other side of the door, Colville jumped in alarm. He heard something he had never heard before. Winston Churchill was roaring with laughter.

  It had taken Don several days to recover from his ordeal. The water had been so overwhelming, his lungs so weak, his pain so profound.

  Their fingertips had brushed, then he was gone. After a journey of many troubles their lives had been brought together, only to fly past each other once more and disappear into the darkness. Don had fought against it with every remaining crumb of resistance he could gather, had swum and searched and dived beneath the black waters of the Channel until his strength was exhausted, and even then he had carried on, until he no longer knew where the margins of sea and night were joined.

  The crew of one of the search ships had discovered Don when they had almost given up hope. He was smothered with the oil through which he had swum, slumped across a hatch cover that had been ripped from one of the wrecks. Fortune had at last thrown in with him; he could so easily have been missed in the profound gloom as many others had been during previous nights. For several days he lay recovering in a bed at the military hospital in Crookham. It was where he had completed his nursing training, but he didn't recognize it; he could no longer connect with this neat world of calm and order. As the pollution was drained from his body it was replaced with a kaleidoscope of memories that chased each other around his mind, never settling, tormenting him. Every time he turned in his bed, every time he woke, every time he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, he saw his father, but he could not touch him. His body healed, but the pain didn't.

  A nurse with dark, understanding eyes telephoned the vicarage, but there was no reply. Neighbours told her the place was empty, had been silent for days. So he asked the military authorities if there had been any sign of a Henry Chichester, but the clerk shook his head; things were so fouled up that even Don wasn't on their evacuation records. It would take weeks to sort out the confusion. There was no sign of his father. Time had run out on their miracle of deliverance from Dunkirk.

  When at last he was able to leave the hospital, he had told the nurse, Kathy, that he was going to Dover.

  "Why Dover?"

  "I have nowhere else to go."

  She had asked to come with him.

  "As a nurse?"

  "As a friend. I think you will need a friend in Dover."

  They walked from the railway station, up the hill towards St-Ignatius-without-the-Walls. Strangers raised their caps as they saw his uniform and knew from the darkness around his eyes where he had come from.

  It was the gentlest time of the year in Dover. The branches hung low with fresh life and a warm breeze carried with it the scent of honeysuckle and salt. But for Don it was a walk through his wasted childhood, and he found his footsteps growing heavier as he dragged behind him the regrets he knew would be with him whenever he thought of his father.

  He felt very old, as though much of his life was already past, and what was left to him would be spent looking back. He was glad that Kathy's arm was linked through his in support.

  "You had that time with him, on the beach," she reminded him.

  But it wasn't enough, a few moments snatched from a lifetime of neglect.

  "Your father would have understood," she said. That's why he was there on the beach. For you."

  "I know," he replied. "I as good as killed him."

  "No, that's not true. Your father knew what he was doing. Do you think for one moment that if he had to make that same choice again, he would have decided differently?"

  Don didn't reply. He knew she was right, yet it didn't make the regrets disappear or the guilt go away.

  "If only I could have told him .. ."

  "What? That you were sorry? That you loved him? I think he knew that."

  "But what would I give for the chance to have told him so."

  She squeezed his arm more tightly, not as a nurse, as a friend. They were walking through the churchyard. Someone had been trimming the grass and the air was rich with its sweetness. They passed the old timbered porch his father's handwritten notices were still hanging there, with their marriage banns and brass-cleaning rosters, just as they had always been, ever since he could remember. The light was beginning to fade, the sea washing gently upon the shore, lying to him, whispering that nothing had changed since last he was here.

  They walked around the laurel bush that guarded the gravel path leading to the front door of the vicarage. There was a light on in the kitchen and through the open window came the sound of singing. It was a voice Don thought he recognized, from long ago.

  EPILOGUE

  The day after the last troops were evacuated from Dunkirk, the weather changed. Great rollers came crashing up the beaches that would have rendered any further evacuation impossible, but by that time the soldiers of the BEF, along with 123,000 Frenchmen, had already been brought to safety. Winston Churchill had escaped, too.

  Four years later almost to the day, Churchill's army was back, clambering up new French beaches alongside their American and Canadian Allies in the extraordinary re invasion of Europe known as D-Day.

  Just as he had done at Dunkirk, Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay was to play a crucial role in those events on D-Day as Commander-in-Chief of the Allied naval forces. Sadly, he did not live to see the fulfilment of his work. He was killed in an air crash in France shortly before the war's end. He is buried in France, the country he did so much to liberate.

  Jock Colville stayed with Churchill, with short absences for service in his beloved R.A.F. He began as a critic and turned ardent acolyte, but he always kept a sharp eye about him and provided us with a magnificent diary of the events he witnessed at Churchill's side. Chips Channon, too, left a wonderful diary, so rich with beautifully crafted observations on the manners and morals of his time that they more than made up for the total inconsequence of his parliamentary career.

  Yet there was a price to be paid for all the mistrust and disagreements that had taken place. Halifax was a man of immense experience but also of many sides Channon wrote of 'his high principles, his engaging charm and grand manner his eel-like qualities and, above all, his sublime treachery which is never deliberate'. And he was not a Churchillian. Five months later, and much against his will, he was shipped off to become Britain's ambassador to the United States. He served in that role throughout the war, and most effectively.

  In the same month the American ambassador, Joe Kennedy, was also shipped back home, but there were no new glories awaiting him. Roosevelt knew of his treachery, and as soon as the presidential elections were completed, Kennedy was thrown overboard like scraps from a ship's kitchen.

  Rab Butler also remained a
controversial figure. Rumours of disloyalty continued to swirl around him, yet Churchill kept him in his Government. Perhaps it wasn't simply a matter of knowing your enemy, but also knowing where he could be found. Many years later, when Butler repeatedly put himself forward as a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Churchill threw his irresistible weight against him. Revenge was eaten with a long spoon.

  Others paid a far heavier price. Andre Gershell, the brave but forlorn Mayor of Calais, died in a concentration camp, and Brigadier Nicholson, the gallant defender of that town, died in a prisoner-of-war camp, some said of a broken heart.

  No one knew precisely how many of the 3800 Allied soldiers involved in the defence of Calais were killed. Many bodies were buried in the rubble and never recovered. There were no casualty returns, no figures for the number of wounded. Those who survived went into captivity for five hopeless years, and came back to find their sacrifice largely forgotten alongside the miracle of Dunkirk.

  Blame for the wretched fate of the BEF should have been shared almost universally, yet one man was selected to shoulder the responsibility almost alone its commander, Viscount Gort. His decision to abandon the thrust south and his insistence that the BEF should fall back on Dunkirk saved not only the British army, it also saved Churchill. But neither the army nor Churchill displayed much gratitude. Gort was never again given a fighting command.

  Churchill was not always fair. He was also frequently and abominably rude. A few days after the evacuation of Dunkirk had been completed, his beloved wife Clementine wrote him an extraordinary letter. "My Darling, I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something I feel you ought to know," it began. "There is a danger of you being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & over-bearing manner .. . My Darling Winston I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not as kind as you used to be." It was ferocious criticism from one who loved him so much.

  Bad manners and appalling memory. In his history of the war, Churchill gave his own version of the events of this period. "Future generations may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we should fight on alone never found a place upon the War Cabinet agenda," he wrote. "It was taken for granted and as a matter of course by these men of all parties in the State, and we were much too busy to waste time upon such unreal, academic issues."

  Churchill, like so many other statesmen, preferred to be remembered in noble words; their actions were rarely as straightforward or so pure.

  And Ruth Mueller? She disappeared once more, and this time her whereabouts were not discovered. Pimlico library, where she loved to spend her time, was bombed in the Blitz that began a few weeks later, and there were reports that an unidentified body was found beneath the rubble. It seems probable that it was Ruth.

  But the portrait of Lord Randolph Churchill did survive. You can see it for yourself, still with its ripped canvas, in Churchill's studio at his home in Chartwell.