His tone now became notably sterner. He replied acerbically that she seemed to want him to stay in the trenches until the ‘Day of Judgment’. (He had, in fact, been there for less than five months.) She should, he commanded, ‘be careful not to use arguments or take up an attitude in conflict with my general intention, & do nothing to discourage friends who wish for my return. On the contrary labour as opportunity serves to create favourable circumstances.’53
In a letter dated 6 April, she made one last attempt to persuade him to stay, an effort that confirms the acuity of her political sense. ‘To be great one’s actions must be able to be understood by simple people. Your motive for going to the Front was easy to understand – Your motive for coming back requires explanation.’ The reason why his Fisher speech had failed was that ‘people could not understand it’. Now beginning to take stock of her own worth, she added: ‘I have no originality or brilliancy but I feel within me the power to help you now if you will let me. Just becos’ I am ordinary & love you I know what is right for you . . . & some day . . . perhaps not for five years, you will have a great & commanding position.’54 Her extraordinary conviction was right, of course. It took, however, a lot longer than five years.
Sadly Winston’s self-absorption was now such that it threatened to break their marriage. She had given him her love and wisdom but he was a man possessed, and unwilling to listen. He certainly gave her very little back; his letters were full of instructions – even orders – and soured by his sense of grievance. ‘These grave public anxieties are very wearing,’ she had written on 25 March, making her point with a new and chilly distance. ‘When I next see you I hope there will be a little time for us both alone. We are still young, but Time flies, stealing love away, and leaving only friendship which is . . . not very stimulating or warming.’55
Evidently this frightened him. Moreover, it was probably unexpected, incapable as he often was of real empathy, sometimes even with her. ‘Oh my darling, do not write of friendship to me,’ he pleaded. ‘I love you more each month that passes & feel the need of you & all your beauty.’ He even admitted that he was ‘devoured’ by ‘egotism’. ‘I reproach myself so much with having got so involved in politics when I was home that all the comfort & joy of our meeting was spoiled.’ He promised that next time would be different ‘with no wild & anxious hurry . . . I am going to live calmly.’ Sometimes, he claimed, he thought he would ‘not mind stopping living vy much’ but wished to meet her ‘in another setting, & pay you all the love & honour of the gt romances’.
This last letter arrived in time for Clementine’s thirty-first birthday. A few weeks later he was back in London for good. But, despite his promise, Winston never would learn how to ‘live calmly’.
Chapter Five
Married Love
1916–18
It was a typical Randolph prank. With a faint suggestion of menace, he had dared his younger cousin Johnny to pour the contents of a chamber pot out of a bedroom window. A harmless downpour on the hydrangeas it was not, however. Randolph had omitted to share with Johnny the fact that the target was no lesser a figure than the new Prime Minister.
It was summer 1917, and Lloyd George was admiring the views over the Surrey hills from the terrace of the Churchills’ new ‘country basket’, a rundown Tudor manor called Lullenden, near the town of Lingfield. The ever-dapper Welshman appears not to have commented on being drenched in this way, although he can scarcely have failed to notice. Perhaps his pride was at stake. Or perhaps Winston’s was. A regular visitor, Lloyd George must surely have known that Randolph’s cherubic looks belied his character and that he was doubtless to blame. Unrestrained by either his adoring father or his concerned but distant mother – and cared for by untrained local girls when both parents were busy in London during the week – the six-year-old was becoming distinctly unruly.
Randolph took pleasure in terrorising the other Lullenden children – his sisters Diana and Sarah, and cousins Johnny and Peregrine. On one occasion he pushed three-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Peregrine inside a model caravan and sent it careering down a steep hill. Fortunately, although the caravan, a present from newspaper proprietor Lord Riddell, was smashed to pieces, the pair emerged almost unscathed. Johnny would try to laugh off Randolph’s tyrannical behaviour, but eight-year-old Diana found her younger brother difficult to bear. Doll-like in looks and timid in character, she was becoming more and more withdrawn. Her eyes were forever cast downwards under astonishingly white eyelashes – indeed, her family nickname was the ‘gold-cream kitten’.
The children had been sent down to Surrey that summer to escape the increasingly ferocious air raids on London; thereafter they had been left largely to their own devices. Jack was away at war, Goonie was socialising in the capital, and Winston and Clementine were preoccupied. Even when the adults came down at weekends, they spent little time with their offspring, sticking to the rambling main house with its seventeenth-century galleried hall while the youngsters camped out in a converted barn, leading, some have suggested, an almost Lord of the Flies existence. Allowed to roam across the farmlands all but unchecked, they drank water from the pond and untreated milk straight from the cows.
It was probably here that Sarah picked up the glandular tuberculosis that would dog her childhood and eventually necessitate, around the age of six, a traumatic operation. Clementine never forgot her daughter panicking as the doctors put the chloroform mask over her face. When she managed to fight her way off the operating table and run for it, her mother could only watch with horror as her little girl was caught and held down with force. Young Sarah was left with a scar on her neck and an equally permanent terror of physical restraint.
The elder children at least went by pony and trap to the village school at Dormansland. Here Randolph was taunted about the Dardanelles, but he appears to have shrugged it off; the teasing confirmed that his father was a boss and he exulted in the reflected superiority. At home flustered nursery maids tried a variety of punishments to chasten him – a hard slap seems to have been the favourite. Yet Randolph neither respected nor feared such underlings. He even claimed to be guilty of additional misdemeanours for the satisfaction of proving he could withstand any sanctions they devised. One maid, maddened by his impudence, filled his mouth with mustard. He screamed but swallowed it. So much for Clementine’s delightful Chumbolly, now known by the equally unsuitable nickname of ‘the Rabbit’. And so much for her bucolic idyll too.
From the outside, though, Clementine’s life had long ago been transformed. Winston had come back to her uninjured from the trenches in May 1916, whereupon he immediately set about his rehabilitation as a palatable public figure. It had proven painfully slow. As she had predicted, in returning home through his own petition rather than by popular demand he had provoked a fresh torrent of abuse in the press. The Daily Mail, invoking the toxic legacy of the Dardanelles, had accused him of being a ‘megalomaniac politician’ who had ‘sacrificed thousands of lives to no purpose’; in November 1916 the popular weekly journal, the World, ranked the expedition as ‘one of the greatest military disasters of all time’.
Both Lloyd George and Asquith continued to take great pains to distance themselves from Winston. For well over a year, he had been given neither a government job nor much hope of one. Coming up to his forty-second birthday, he could only look back at the promise of his youth and wonder where it had all gone wrong. So despairing had he become at his ongoing isolation, at a time when the war was taking yet another turn for the worse, that he wrote to his brother Jack: ‘I am learning to hate.’ Even Violet had deserted Winston, effectively choosing her father over her one-time hero. His criticism of the Asquith administration’s direction of the fighting had made him ‘an enemy of the Government from which he was an exile’, she explained. ‘My father was the leader of that Government and my loyalty to him must range me in the enemy camp.’1 Here was yet another casualty of Winston’s egotistical insistence that his allies must be fully �
��on his side’ or be considered wholly against him.
Lloyd George had finally manoeuvred the flailing Asquith out of power in December 1916, following the disastrous Somme offensive (in which 20,000 British soldiers had died on the first day alone) and the consequent collapse of Tory support for his coalition government. But, even after the fall of his nemesis, Winston remained untouchable. Validating Clementine’s long-nursed suspicions, Winston’s one-time political twin fought shy of bringing him into the new government in even the most junior role, let alone the War Cabinet. As Lloyd George had observed, some of his partners in the new coalition disliked Winston more violently than they did the Kaiser, and the son of a teacher’s desire to rise to Prime Minister easily outweighed any feelings of loyalty to his erstwhile comrade-in-chief.
Winston, of course, had found this prolonged exclusion impossible to comprehend. In his view, he had done his penance on the Front and knew a great deal about the higher direction of the war, as well as what the men actually fighting it most needed. He also clung to the conceits that he enjoyed a huge following in the country, that his enemies were without reason, and that his rightful place was in Downing Street itself. As Violet later put it, while Winston certainly had ‘vision’ he lacked ‘antennae’.2
Throughout this time only one person had been in a position to disillusion him; only Clementine could repeatedly define the reasons he was deemed untrustworthy, and why he had made so many enemies. But while she saw beyond the brusqueness, the scorn for lesser beings, the refusal to listen to rival points of view, others could – or would – not. Genuinely fretting about his despondent state of mind, she had devoted every minute of her time and every drop of energy left over from her canteen work to his welfare. Sometimes, in her devotion to the cause of returning Winston to office, she had gone for weeks without seeing the children. No wonder they were playing up.
Deliverance had arrived soon after the publication in March 1917 of the preliminary findings of the Dardanelles Commission – which partly exonerated Winston. Three weeks after the Commission’s report appeared, the US entered the war; Lloyd George now badly needed a minister of munitions of energy, efficiency and imagination, capable both of working with the Americans on supplies and, crucially, of avoiding another catastrophic shell scandal now that the conflict was entering a new phase. When in July he decided to hand the appointment to Winston – allowing him, in his own words, to become the ‘escaped scapegoat’ – it was just as Clementine had hoped. She had long surmised that if only the facts about the Dardanelles were made public at the right time, her husband would no longer have to shoulder the entire blame for the tragedy and could work his way back into favour on merit. Even so, she never forgave Lloyd George for taking seven long months after becoming Prime Minister to grant Winston the chance. More than 340,000 British soldiers had been killed in action in the twenty months since Winston had left office, and it seemed as if virtually every family in the country (although not the Churchills) had in the interim been bereaved.
Ensuring adequate supplies of bombs, grenades, ammunition, guns, planes, lorries and ambulances to the military was a more important job than ever with the Americans on board and was a gigantic operation. Winston presided over twelve thousand civil servants in the ministry and two and a half million munitions workers in the factories, some of whom, of course, benefited from Clementine’s canteens. The return of a ministerial salary allowed them to move back into Eccleston Square when their tenant, Sir Edward Grey, moved out (although not before destroying the Art Nouveau experiment in Clementine’s bedroom). But, according to custom, the appointment also triggered a by-election in his Dundee constituency. While he ecstatically plunged into his war work, Clementine took over much of the campaigning. The Churchill name inevitably attracted a lot of barracking, but Clementine gamely dealt with the hecklers while lending a compassionate ear to their complaints. In large part thanks to her, Winston was returned with a sizeable majority of over five thousand, although the attacks on his name continued.
He remained surprised and hurt by the hostility wherever he encountered it. His aunt Cornelia – one of the more sensible of his relations – counselled him to be cautious: ‘You are just the man for the job [but] my advice is stick to munitions & don’t try & run the Govt!’3 Yet Winston was perhaps even more restless than when he had been at the Admiralty, and still wrapped up in inflated ideas of his own importance. At a banquet in July 1918, held to welcome the thirty-six-year-old assistant secretary of the US Navy Department, one Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston was so self-absorbed that he virtually blanked the guest of honour. Roosevelt had been a little overawed in the venerable setting of the great hall of Gray’s Inn, and he came away thinking forty-three-year-old Winston was a ‘stinker’. While Winston could not even remember having met him, Roosevelt was never to forget the slight.
Clementine’s home in Eccleston Square quickly became an alternative nerve centre for the war, with ministers and messengers coming and going and secretaries pounding away on typewriters. Winston delighted in conducting life at breakneck speed, not excluding his frequent journeys between London and their country home. A reckless and impatient driver, known to mount pavements in order to bypass traffic, he drove far too fast, sometimes losing control and colliding with other vehicles. On one occasion, his car overturned just outside Dormansland with Clementine at his side – they were fortunate to escape with mere bruises.
These jaunts to Lullenden, although increasingly brief and rare, were a highlight for the children. Clementine could only look on as Winston, happy to be at the centre of world events once more, played with the youngsters as if one of them himself. He was glamorous – arriving with guards, secretaries, important guests and a great deal of fanfare. And he was fun – playing ‘gorilla’, when he would drop out of a tree on unsuspecting children, or ‘bear’, in which he would chase them through the woods growling gloriously. As soon as he had had his fill, however, he would instantly retreat into an unreachable adult world, leaving the overwrought youngsters for someone else to deal with. Randolph, in particular, could not contain his pride at having such an exalted and exotic creature as his father. In turn, Winston sucked up his son’s adoration and returned it without qualification. The unfortunate consequence was that Randolph felt immune from Clementine’s reproving glances, let alone from any real sanction.
Now he was back in the saddle, Winston’s state of mind was positively joyful compared to the misery of the two long years since his departure from the Admiralty. But a buoyant Winston was also a selfish and dictatorial one. He expected to live exactly as he pleased. ‘Churchill on top of the wave,’ Beaverbrook later commented, ‘has in him the stuff of which tyrants are made.’4 Clementine had shared his humiliation, and helped him to absolution, but now her wishes were largely ignored. Once again, particularly after she became pregnant for the fifth time in early 1918, she was distressed by his frequent trips to the Front. She thought more of his work could be conducted safely from his desk in Whitehall, and that when he did have to go to France he should cross the Channel by sea. Instead, though he knew of her desperate fear of planes, he flew whenever he could, sometimes twice or more a day. A field near the house at Lullenden was specially redesignated a ‘flying station’ so that Winston could land and take off whenever he pleased at the weekend as well. She should not worry, he told her in his egocentric way, as flying gave him a ‘feeling of tremendous conquest over space & I know you’d love it yourself’.5
His courting of death in this fashion caused her to writhe in her bed haunted by nightmares of crashes and flames. She was so consumed by dread and foreboding that she could not stop herself pouring out her fears in front of her bewildered children. Whenever Winston was in the air, Lullenden was suffused with gloom and tension – and with some justification, for he was involved in a number of potentially fatal accidents. One of his planes caught fire over the Channel, another somersaulted after take-off, and yet another crash-landed. These tin
y, fragile aircraft were also, as Clementine knew, at the mercy of storms or passing squalls. Winston remained obstinately undaunted. Despite numerous warnings, he refused to give up his reckless habit of boarding planes with a lit cigar.
He was not, however, entirely inconsiderate. Indeed, he fretted as to whether he and Clementine were more or less happy than ‘the average married couple’. When away in France on their tenth wedding anniversary in September 1918, he wrote to her: ‘I reproach myself vy much for not having been more to you. But at any rate in these ten years the sun has never yet gone down on our wrath . . . My dearest sweet I hope & pray that future years may bring you serene & smiling days . . . your ever devoted if only partially satisfactory, W.’6
His fine words did not mean he was prepared to change his ways, of course, and he seemed genuinely surprised when she took umbrage. Although normally an exemplary correspondent, on one occasion, after he had been away a whole month, she stopped writing to him completely to demonstrate her distress. He was outraged. ‘When I reflect on the many and various forms which yr naughtiness takes, I am astonished at its completeness & its versatility. So there!’ Winston told her on 15 September 1918, signing himself as her ‘vilely neglected Pig’.7
He also continued to ignore her fears about money, stubbornly refusing to bow to reality and live within their means. Lullenden, now bought for £4000 in Clementine’s name with a hefty mortgage, was proving highly costly to run. It satisfied Winston’s craving for a substantial country residence, with seven bedrooms in the main house alone, and the date 1694 carved into the stone fireplace in the hall (although its history was actually even older), but it failed to meet several of Clementine’s romantic dreams. The soil was too poor to establish the rose garden she longed for and there was no money for a tennis court. The house did not even have electricity at first, and remained bitterly cold and damp in winter, while the sixty-seven acres of farmland were hugely expensive to manage, especially with wartime labour shortages.
First Lady Page 14
