by Erik Larson
“O God, be with the homeless and anxious
“I have seen so many worried & sad & lost expressions—& a great deal of courage & optimism & good sense.”
Two days later, on Monday, September 23, Mary read the news about the sinking of the City of Benares, and the deaths of so many of the children aboard. “May God rest their souls,” she wrote in her diary that night, “and help us to wipe the curse of Hitler & the vilest burden mankind has ever born[e] from the world.” Her father ordered that in view of the sinking, “the further evacuation overseas of children must cease.”
In the distance, guns fired and shells burst, but in the Prison Room at Chequers, there was peace and history and the benign presence of Lady Mary’s ghost. No matter how harsh the stories Mary heard each day, she was able to retreat each night to her lovely home, to be looked after by Monty—Grace Lamont, the Chequers housekeeper—and kept company by Pamela, as the latter awaited the arrival of her baby. Unexpectedly, Pamela’s doctor, Carnac Rivett, also now made himself a more or less full-time inhabitant, much to Clementine’s displeasure. She found his presence both oppressive and embarrassing, especially since Chequers was not the Churchills’ private property but belonged to the government. She told Pamela, “My darling, you must realize this is an official house and it is rather awkward having the doctor every night at the dinner table.”
Rivett often stayed the night, arguing that his presence was required because the baby could come at any time.
Pamela suspected that Rivett was driven by a different motive: fear. He was, she believed, terrified of the bombing in London and came to Chequers to be safe.
Her baby was due in three weeks.
* * *
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JOHN COLVILLE LEFT CHEQUERS Sunday afternoon, after tea, and traveled to London to have dinner at his family’s home in Eccleston Square, near Victoria Station. Just before they sat down to eat, the sirens rang out, and soon came the sound of German bombers overhead. Colville went up to a bedroom. With the lights off behind him, he knelt by a window to watch the raid unfold. It was all very surreal—bombs falling into the heart of one’s capital city, one’s home—but it also had a certain beauty, which he attempted to describe in his diary before going to bed.
“The night,” he wrote, “was cloudless and starry, with the moon rising over Westminster. Nothing could have been more beautiful and the searchlights interlaced at certain points on the horizon, the star-like flashes in the sky where shells were bursting, the light of distant fires, all added to the scene. It was magnificent and terrible: the spasmodic drone of enemy aircraft overhead; the thunder of gunfire, sometimes close sometimes in the distance; the illumination, like that of electric trains in peace-time, as the guns fired; and the myriad stars, real and artificial, in the firmament. Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness.”
CHAPTER 50
Hess
THE LETTER WAS A CURIOUS one. England’s network of censors kept close watch on all mail entering and leaving the country, and this letter, mailed from Germany on September 23, immediately drew their attention. The outer envelope was addressed to an elderly British woman, a “Mrs. V. Roberts,” but it contained a second envelope and instructions to send that one to a prominent Scotsman, the Duke of Hamilton.
Inside this second envelope, the censors found a letter that seemed disconcertingly cryptic, proposing a meeting in a neutral city, perhaps Lisbon. The letter was signed only with the initial “A.”
The censors gave the letters to Britain’s domestic counterintelligence agency, MI5, and there they remained. The duke would not learn of their existence until the following spring, six months after they were posted.
CHAPTER 51
Sanctuary
GERMANY’S ASSAULT ON LONDON GREW in intensity, as Göring sought to dispel the taint of failure that had gathered around him like a fog, dulling the gleam of his white uniforms and glinting medals. Every night scores of bombers advanced on London in waves, bombing with abandon, though officially Germany still clung to its claim that the Luftwaffe was only going after targets of military significance.
In practice, however, it waged war more openly against the city’s civilian population than ever before. For one thing, the Luftwaffe was deploying increasing numbers of bombs known as “parachute mines,” which drifted wherever the wind carried them. Loaded with fifteen hundred pounds of high explosives, they could destroy everything and everyone within a five-hundred-yard radius. Originally designed to destroy ships, they were first used over land on September 16, when twenty-five were dropped on London, descending on the city in eerie silence. The terror they raised was amplified when seventeen of them failed to explode, forcing evacuations of whole neighborhoods until the weapons could be disarmed by specially trained technicians from the Royal Navy.
The mines soon began falling in increasing numbers. In a note to Pug Ismay on September 19, a day when the Luftwaffe set loose thirty-six such weapons, Churchill wrote that dropping mines by parachute “proclaims the enemy’s entire abandonment of all pretense of aiming at military objectives.” He proposed to retaliate by dropping similar weapons on German cities, matching one for one. With ruthless glee, he also suggested publishing in advance a list of the German cities to be targeted, to build foreboding. “I do not think they would like it,” he wrote, “and there is no reason why they should not have a period of suspense.”
With the German shift to night raids, life in London became compressed into the hours of daylight, which, as autumn advanced, began to shrink with a dreadful ineluctability, all the faster because of the city’s northern latitude. The raids generated a paradox: The odds that any one person would die on any one night were slim, but the odds that someone, somewhere in London would die were 100 percent. Safety was a product of luck alone. One young boy, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, a fireman or pilot or such, answered:
“Alive.”
Scores of residents did die, and the onset of night became a source of dread, but by day, life took on a strange normalcy. The shops of Piccadilly and Oxford Street still teemed with customers, and Hyde Park still filled with sunbathers, more or less confident that German bombers would not pass overhead until after dusk. A pianist, Myra Hess, held daily concerts in the National Gallery, on Trafalgar Square, during lunch hour to avoid the nightly raids. The hall filled to capacity, many attendees sitting on the floor, gas masks at hand just in case. Audiences edged toward tears, the applause “tremendous and moving,” observed Mollie Panter-Downes, the New Yorker writer. From time to time the pianist showed off her dexterity by playing music with an orange under each hand. Afterward, everyone hurried away, Panter-Downes wrote, “shouldering their gas masks and looking all the better for having been lifted for an hour to a plane where boredom and fear seem irrelevant.”
Even night came to seem less intimidating, despite the escalating violence and spreading destruction. At one point, Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett and a friend, Peg, went for a stroll during an air raid. “Walked out into the light of the full moon,” Cockett wrote. “Were so thrilled with its beauty we walked to Brixton, through gunfire and all, admiring the effects of shadow and light and liking the empty quiet of the streets. As Peg said, the war and the guns did seem trivial, essentially frivolous, against that solemn splendor.” Another diarist, also a young woman, described her own surprise at how she felt while lying in bed after a near miss by a bomb. “I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant,” she wrote. “ ‘I’ve been bombed!’ I kept saying to myself, over and over again—trying the phrase on, like a new dress, to see how it fitted. ‘I’ve been bombed!…I’ve been bombed—me!’ ” Many people had probably been killed or wounded during the raid, she acknowledged, “but never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness.”
Diarist Phyllis Warner found that she and
fellow Londoners were surprised by their own resilience. “Finding we can take it is a great relief to most of us,” she wrote on September 22. “I think that each one of us was secretly afraid that he wouldn’t be able to, that he would rush shrieking to shelter, that his nerve would give, that he would in some way collapse, so that this has been a pleasant surprise.”
But the persistence of the raids and the increasing destruction also had a darker effect. Wrote novelist Rose Macaulay, on Monday, September 23: “I am getting a burying-phobia, result of having seen so many houses and blocks of flats reduced to piles of ruins from which people can’t be extracted in time to live, and feel I would rather sleep in the street, but know I mustn’t do this.” Harold Nicolson had a similar fear, which he confided to his diary the next day. “What I dread,” he wrote, “is being buried under huge piles of masonry and hearing the water drip slowly, smelling the gas creeping towards me and hearing the faint cries of colleagues condemned to a slow and ungainly death.”
Many Londoners began complaining of gastrointestinal distress, a condition called “Siren Stomach.”
* * *
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RATIONING REMAINED AN IRRITANT, especially the total absence of eggs in stores, but here too one could adapt. Families raised hens in their yards, a tactic adopted by the Prof, who kept chickens at his laboratory and in the Christ Church Meadow at Oxford. A Gallup Poll found that 33 percent of the public had begun growing their own food or raising livestock.
The Churchills were subject to rationing rules but managed to live well all the same, thanks, in part, to the generosity of others. (Churchill seemed to attract charitable offerings by friends. In 1932, upon returning to London after a lecture tour during which he was struck by a car in New York and hospitalized, he was given a new Daimler automobile, paid for by donations from 140 contributors, including Lord Beaverbrook.) The Prof, being a vegetarian, did not consume his allotted rations of meat and bacon, and ceded these to the Churchills for their use. At Chequers, food was always a welcome hostess gift. The king sent venison, pheasants, partridges, and hares from the royal hunting grounds at Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, and Sandringham, in Norfolk. The provincial government of Quebec sent chocolate; the Duke of Westminster sent salmon, via fast train, marked “DELIVER IMMEDIATELY.”
Churchill was, of course, the prime minister, and with this came a degree of privilege denied the common man—as in the case of that most precious of commodities, gasoline. The Ford automobile kept at Chequers, license plate DXN 609, consumed gasoline at a rate higher than Churchill’s allocation of eighty gallons, which was supposed to have lasted from June 1 through July. By late June, it became apparent that a good deal more fuel was necessary. An ordinary Londoner would have been out of luck; all Churchill had to do was ask for more. “If you would also be careful to star your letter it will receive my immediate personal attention,” wrote Harry B. Hermon Hodge, a divisional petroleum officer for the Mines Department, which oversaw gasoline rationing. The necessary coupons were issued to caretaker Grace Lamont—Monty—for another fifty-eight gallons.
When Churchill realized, early on, that his allotted food rations could not possibly feed the many official guests he now entertained, he simply requested extra coupons. On June 30, private secretary John Martin wrote to the Ministry of Food, “Both at Chequers and at No. 10 Downing Street the rationing restrictions make it very difficult to entertain officially to the extent which the Prime Minister finds necessary.” The ministry agreed to help. “We think that the simplest way to meet the position would be to follow the procedure adopted in the case of Foreign Ambassadors to whom we have issued special ration books covering meat, butter, sugar, bacon and ham, the coupons being used for official guests entertained by the Ambassadors. A set of books is enclosed.” Churchill also wanted extra diplomatic coupons for tea and “cooking fats.” These, too, were supplied. To make sure the foods were available for the coming weekend at Chequers, the ministry instructed its local “food executive officer” to notify nearby stores that these unfamiliar coupons might be coming their way. “I hope that the arrangements now made will be satisfactory,” wrote the Food Ministry’s R.J.P. Harvey, “but if there is any further difficulty, perhaps you will let us know.”
Happily for Churchill, rationing rules did not apply to certain critical commodities. He found no shortage of Hine brandy, Pol Roger champagne, or Romeo y Julieta cigars, though the money to pay for these was, as usual, never quite sufficient, especially when it came to covering the costs of hosting the many visitors who came to Chequers each weekend. The Chequers Trust, which paid the wages of Chequers’ staff and the routine costs of maintaining the estate, donated £15, or just under $1,000 in today’s dollars, for each weekend, about half of what Churchill actually spent—or, as he once put it, just about enough to cover the cost of feeding the chauffeurs of his guests. For the period from June through December 1940, his costs at Chequers exceeded the trust’s overall contributions by the equivalent of $20,288.
Wine was a significant expense, just as it had been when he was first lord of the Admiralty; at Chequers, now, he spent twice as much. The Government Hospitality Fund agreed to chip in wines and spirits, with the caveat that these were to be served only when entertaining foreign visitors. Churchill took enthusiastic advantage of the program. One Chequers order consisted of:
36 bottles of Amontillado—Duff Gordon’s V.O.;
36 bottles, white wine—Valmur, 1934 [Chablis];
36 bottles, port—Fonseca, 1912;
36 bottles, claret—Château Léoville Poyferré, 1929;
24 bottles, whisky—Fine Highland Malt;
12 bottles, brandy—Grande Fine Champagne, 1874 [66 years old, same as Churchill];
36 bottles of champagne—Pommery et Greno, 1926 [Pol Roger, however, remained his favorite].
The wines were promptly stocked at Chequers by the fund’s own “Government Hospitality Butler,” a Mr. Watson, who noted their exact positions in the cellar’s bins. He also complained that the bins were haphazardly marked; special cards to correct this deficiency were sent forthwith. The fund’s administrator, Sir Eric Crankshaw, laid out the precise rules for using the bottles in a letter to Grace Lamont. The wines were to be served only when “Foreign, Dominion, Indian or Colonial guests” were being entertained. Before each event, the Churchills were to consult with Crankshaw, “and I will let you know whether or not Government Hospitality wines are to be used during the visit.” Crankshaw instructed Miss Lamont to keep precise records in a “cellar book” provided by the fund, including the names of visitors and the wines consumed; the book would be audited every six months. The record keeping did not stop there, however. “After the Luncheons or Dinners held,” Crankshaw wrote, “would you please complete a form, specimen of which is attached, to show the nature of the entertainment, the number of guests and the amount of the various wines consumed, and return the form to me for record and accounting purposes.”
Many other products, while not rationed, were nonetheless in short supply. A visiting American found that he could buy chocolate cake and a lemon meringue pie at Selfridges, but cocoa was impossible to find. Shortages made some realms of hygiene more problematic. Women found tampons increasingly difficult to acquire. At least one brand of toilet paper was also in perilously short supply, as the king himself discovered. He managed to sidestep this particular scarcity by arranging shipments direct from the British embassy in Washington, D.C. With kingly discretion, he wrote to his ambassador, “We are getting short of a certain type of paper which is made in America and is unprocurable here. A packet or two of 500 sheets at intervals would be most acceptable. You will understand this and its name begins with B!!!” The paper in question was identified by historian Andrew Roberts as Bromo soft lavatory paper.
* * *
—
WITH RAIDS SO LIKELY and so predictable, Londoners inclined to use
public shelters found themselves following a new and novel routine, leaving their chosen shelter for work in the morning, returning at dusk. Some shelters began publishing their own journals and bulletins, with names like Subway Companion, Station Searchlight, and the Swiss Cottager, this last named for a newly built, deep-level tube station, Swiss Cottage, which now served as a shelter. The station, in turn, had been named for a nearby pub, whose exterior evoked a Swiss chalet. “Greetings to our nightly companions,” the Cottager’s inaugural bulletin began, “our temporary cave dwellers, our sleeping companions, somnambulists, snorers, chatterers, and all who inhabit the Swiss Cottage Station of the Bakerloo, nightly from dusk to dawn.” The editor, shelter resident Dore Silverman, promised to publish only intermittently—at a rate “as spasmodic as Hitler’s hallucinations”—and hoped the publication would have a very short life.
Full of cautions and advice, the Cottager warned shelterers not to bring camp beds or deck chairs, as these took up too much room; begged all inhabitants to be less “generous” with their litter; and pledged that soon the shelter would provide hot tea, though how soon could not be determined—and anyway, “while you sit, read or sleep in quietness and comfort, other things than tea may be brewing up in the streets.” In an item entitled “ARE YOU NERVOUS?” the Cottager’s second issue sought to address anxiety caused by the deployment of heavier anti-aircraft guns in the neighborhood above, noting that subway tunnels tended to amplify noise. Here the bulletin offered a bit of what it called expert advice: “Vibration due to heavy gunfire or other causes will be felt much less if you do not lie with your head against the wall.”
In shelters, the danger posed by poison gas was a particular concern. People were encouraged to wear their gas masks for thirty minutes a day, so that they would grow accustomed to their use. Children took part in gas-attack drills. “All the little children of five have Mickey Mouse gas-masks,” wrote Diana Cooper in her diary. “They love putting them on for drill and at once start trying to kiss each other, then they march into their shelter singing: ‘There’ll always be an England.’ ”
