Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945–1955. Barbara Leaming

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ