Winston’s War. Michael Dobbs

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СКАЧАТЬ war and he’d get it, in the end, if not over Czechoslovakia then over some other god-forsaken patch of Europe. At some point someone would draw a line in the sand and soon it would run red and be so drenched in tears that eventually the line would be swept aside. Vanish. That’s what happened with lines in the sand. The soldier’s boot, the storm, the downpour of tears. Then the line would disappear, leaving everyone except old women struggling to remember where – and why – it had ever been.

      Duff Cooper, of course, would stand in his place that afternoon and insist he was defending the cause of the common man, but Mac was about as common as they came and he’d burn before he saw any sense in it. If Cooper was defending freedom, as he claimed, why hadn’t he done so in Spain, and why not in Austria where Jews were already being rounded up and sent on their railway journeys to nowhere? What was so special about fucking Czechoslovakia?

      No, for the politician this was nothing more than a glory hunt, a game of ambitions and advancement, a game pursued from the day he had been shoved out of his nursery and sent to learn the rules of the sport on the playing fields of some English public school.

      The shave and trim were finished, the moustache back in its proper place. The politician was ready to face the enemy. ‘Have a good day, sir,’ Mac said at the door, holding out his client’s freshly brushed hat.

      The soon-to-be former great person barely heard. In his mind he was already on his feet making one of the most memorable resignation speeches of the age, a speech which might yet rock the Government, even bring its house down. He tried to ignore the worm that had been wriggling deep inside all morning and telling him that he should come to his senses, be realistic, understand that the most he could hope to achieve was to sway the House enough for the door to swing open and allow him back in.

      ‘I’ll be back,’ Cooper barked.

      Mac declined to offer an opinion.

      

      Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess woke badly. It was not a good place in which to wake badly. His apartment, in Chester Square near Victoria Station, was decorated with a deliberate taste for the grotesque – the carpet was red, the walls a murky white, the curtains and sheets beneath his heavy Italianate bed-head an uncertain blue, and everything covered with a film of nicotine. As he opened his eyes the colours and stale tobacco mounted a co-ordinated assault on him, and he groaned. His mouth felt like the bottom of a bird cage, and very soon he would be late. Again.

      He slipped out of bed and stumbled to the window. On his way he knocked over a pile of books on which was balanced a glass of red wine. Fortunately the wine, like Burgess, had been almost completely consumed and the stain would be invisible amongst the rest. He threw open the window and lit a cigarette, coughing as a trickle of fresh air tried to penetrate the room. It was miserably squalid, but as he insisted on telling his friends, if this was squalor it was nothing compared to what you’d find in Guernica or some of the side streets of Moscow. So, you’ve been to Moscow, have you? they would invariably ask. How was it? Tough, uncompromising, intellectual, unsentimental, he would tell them. He would relate his encounter with a militiaman who had threatened to beat him up for walking on the grass, but that was only half the story. He’d been throwing up over a statue of Stalin at the time.

      He flung the cigarette stub out of the window and hauled up a piece of dried fish that he kept dangling on a string from his windowsill, tearing off a piece before throwing the rest back out again. Breakfast on the run. But his mouth was so dry he couldn’t chew, not until he’d poured himself two fingers of Jameson’s and swilled it round the back of his gums.

      ‘To mastication,’ he murmured, raising his glass to the straw-stuffed Regency buck that stood by the wardrobe. It stared back at him in reproach, the glass eyes seeming to follow him around the room. Sometimes it seemed as if the whole world was after him, even the stuffed animals. The apartment was crammed with artefacts, from a frigate in a bottle to an old American harmonium that he occasionally played, nothing of any great value, all garbage really. One day he’d get rid of it, along with the rest of his ludicrous life. He rubbed whiskey with his finger round his teeth to get rid of the sour taste in his mouth. He always seemed to be drinking whiskey, more than he’d intended to, and more still to get rid of the hangover. He would chew garlic to get rid of the smell of whiskey, then drive ludicrously fast to see if he could get rid of all the things that bothered him. His friends said he’d kill himself eventually, and maybe they were right. It was amazing how many friends he had, all things considered.

      It would be another one of those days. He would arrive late at Broadcasting House and they would shout at him, so he would shout back and yet again try to get them to use Churchill. He knew they would refuse, because they were under instructions from above. But in all the shouting about Churchill they would forget he looked like a tramp and had been late yet again. So he would have just one more drink to fortify himself and be on his way.

      It was at that point that the eiderdown moved. It was piled high on one side of the bed, a tangle of old silk and cigarette burns, and out from beneath it protruded a calf, then a thigh, followed by the most gorgeous arse he’d seen since …? Since last night. Victoria Station, one of his habitual hunting grounds, where if ever he was stopped and questioned he could always argue that he was on his way home, just round the corner, officer. The arse moved. It belonged to a young bellboy from Claridge’s. He couldn’t remember his name. Which in the scramble last night hadn’t mattered a damn, but in the damp light of day seemed – well, unnecessarily rude. So Burgess decided he’d spend a little more time with his guest that morning, give himself the opportunity to find out the lad’s name. And if it made him still later at the BBC, what did it matter? The war would wait. That was official.

      

      Brendan Bracken was one of those figures who could be described as many things, but mostly he was outrageous. He would also, soon, become one of the most powerful men in the country.

      Bracken was a fantasist. He was also the Member of Parliament for North Paddington. He was Irish by birth but claimed to be an orphan from Australia where his parents had been killed in a bush fire. In fact, his father had been a stonemason and also a member of the Republican Brotherhood, an illegal Irish nationalist organization on whose behalf he would go round blowing up Anglo-Irish walls and buildings. The following day he would appear cheerfully on the doorstep and offer to repair them. Perhaps he passed on to his son the capacity for vivid imagination.

      Bracken went through life lying about his origins, about his education – at times he would suggest he had gone to Oxford University – and even about his parentage. When he attached himself to Winston Churchill and worked his way up to become the elder man’s indispensable right arm, rumours began to circulate that he was Churchill’s illegitimate son. He did nothing to discourage these rumours, and perhaps even started them.

      Bracken did more than invent the world around him, he invented many worlds and seemed to be able to move guilelessly from one to another. People knew it was largely nonsense, but the brashness and energy he devoted to his fantasies persuaded others to go along with them. It was so much easier than calling his bluff. By October 1938 he was thirty-seven years of age with a safe parliamentary seat and was being driven around in his own custom-built Bentley. Still he had trouble being taken seriously.

      Yet he wanted so desperately to be taken seriously. Which was why, when he entered the Members’ Lobby beside the great oak doors leading to the chamber of the House of Commons and was greeted by Duff Cooper, he was deeply confused. For Duffie had been part of the team. Cooper had been Churchill’s drinking partner, dining companion and intimate colleague in the battle against Chamberlain and appeasement. It had been an awesome team, one of them inside the Cabinet, the other rampaging freely outside, but now it was all unravelling. Cooper, Churchill’s last great ally inside the corridors of power, was gone. Churchill was despondent. Whichever СКАЧАТЬ