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‘They were flying from Holland yesterday when they were intercepted by German fighters. They made it through, but badly damaged. Forced to ditch in the sea off Brighton. And that’s where the most dangerous part of their enterprise began. They managed to swim and stumble ashore and had just fallen exhausted upon the sand, when they were surrounded by a suspicious mob and arrested by the constabulary on suspicion of being enemy spies.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Desperately so. By the time they arrived in my office they were in a terrible state. I told them they had set a splendid example, and were clearly invincible.’
‘What did they want?’
‘Oh, an army.’
‘Pity. Brave souls.’
‘I’ve just seen their ambassador – you know him I think, van Verduynen. Assured me that the Dutch will resist with the same stubbornness and perseverance they have always shown.’
‘Without an army,’ the King added softly.
‘The Belgian ambassador assures me of victory. Says they are ten times stronger than in 1914.’
‘And they have our prayers.’
‘Not forgetting our own Expeditionary Force,’ Halifax added a trifle too quickly, missing the irony.
The conversation was proving difficult, and at first Halifax was relieved when they were diverted by the arrival of the Queen, Elizabeth. Halifax responded to her warm smile by kissing her hand and enquiring after the children, but he was to find no relaxation on this occasion.
‘Edward,’ the Queen began, ‘we are so disappointed.’
The Minister stooped once more. ‘I’m a little mystified myself. It’s not easy to explain but … I thought – I think – that Winston’s temperament, however unreliable and impetuous, may be better suited for this particular moment than perhaps is mine.’
‘You don’t sound terribly certain of it,’ the King commented.
‘I’m not. Certainty is a luxury at times like these. But think of it this way, if I were Prime Minister I would have Winston prowling up and down outside Downing Street. You know how much damage he can cause when things go to his head. So better the tiger inside the cage.’
‘With you holding the key.’
‘Yes, something like that.’
‘Until he has been either tamed or trampled by events,’ the Queen added. ‘Nothing lasts for ever in this chaotic world, Edward. Your turn will come.’
Halifax nodded diffidently in the manner of all Englishmen confronted by their own ambition.
‘Oh, Winston!’ Elizabeth uttered the name in exasperation, and without affection. ‘He will cause problems, you know he will. Always has.’
‘And already is,’ Halifax responded. ‘Wants Beaverbrook back.’
‘What?’ Elizabeth exclaimed. She neither liked nor trusted Max Beaverbrook, a Canadian émigré who had spent a long life charting a career through some exceptionally murky waters. He had been a Cabinet Minister during the last war, was now a peer and the immensely powerful owner of the Daily Express, and would for ever be an incorrigible conspirator. In his time he had schemed against both Churchill and the present Royal Family; it appeared that Churchill was far more ready to forgive him than was the Queen.
‘Wants to put him in charge of aircraft production,’ Halifax added for detail.
‘He must be stopped,’ Elizabeth insisted. ‘Beaverbrook is incapable of responsibility. Remember …’ She waved her hand in exasperation. There was so much to remember from Beaverbrook’s long career, not least his unflagging public support for her despicable brother-in-law, the abdicated Edward.
The King, less voluble, was nevertheless shaking his head. ‘No, no, it won’t do. I must write to Winston immediately.’
‘Yes, hobble his horse,’ the Queen insisted.
Halifax swallowed deep, calculating. Should he mention the other matter? But he was exhausted by the events of the last few days and no longer trusted his own judgement. Instead he allowed base instinct to rule and to stir the Prime Minister’s pot.
‘He also wants Bracken as a Privy Councillor.’
‘No!’ Elizabeth once more led the objections, more vehement than ever. ‘Bracken as part of the King’s own private council? That we cannot have.’ Membership of the Council was an exceptional honour reserved for the most senior in the land, not a jumped-up Irish adventurer. She hooked her arm through her husband’s and clasped him tightly, as if they both required an extra measure of support. ‘Those men around Mr Churchill,’ she exclaimed, ‘are not gentlemen.’
‘I fear the government is being given over to gangsters,’ Halifax muttered miserably. He knew that both the King and Queen believed it to be largely his fault.
They wandered on in silence, skirting the lake, passing beyond rhododendrons that were raising flower-drenched branches in seasonal triumph, until Elizabeth turned to her husband, as always wishing to share his burden when he appeared distressed. ‘A penny for those thoughts of yours, my dear.’
The King seemed startled for a moment, dragged back from distant troubles. ‘I was thinking, well … like you, how very much I had wanted Edward for the job. And then worrying – just a little – how can I put it? About us and the Germans. That our gangsters may not be as good as theirs.’
It was beyond midnight when Churchill’s private detective, Inspector Thompson, ushered the woman into Churchill’s study. Churchill was busy writing a letter and didn’t look up. Without being asked, Thompson refilled his master’s glass, then offered a drink to the woman. With a curt shake of the head, she declined. Thompson left, closing the door behind him quietly.
Only then did Churchill raise his eyes.
‘Didn’t know if you would come.’
‘Didn’t want to. But your private policeman waved his warrant card. You know we Germans are helpless in the face of authority.’
Ruth Mueller was around fifty with a thin, elegant face that had worn well and fading blonde hair trimmed severely at the neck. She had probably cut it herself. There were other signs of self-reliance about her, apart from defiant eyes – her tweed suit was frayed at the cuffs and clearly designed for someone several pounds heavier, her shoes were old, her fingers unadorned by any jewellery. She held an ancient handbag protectively in her lap.
‘You look well,’ he offered clumsily.
‘No thanks to you.’ Her vocabulary was precise, her accent stiff.
He cleared his throat in irritation. He could still remember his surprise at their first encounter. He had received a letter from an R. Mueller explaining that the writer was a refugee from Germany, had an academic background as an historian, and wondering whether Churchill might be in need of any researchers for his forthcoming writings. The letter had added in impassioned terms that the threat of events in Europe were so imminent and the lack of understanding about them so immense in everyone but Churchill that he was the only man in Europe the writer wished to work for.
It had been a timely letter, arriving at Chartwell at the moment when Churchill, under severe pressure from both his publishers and his multiple creditors, had turned once more to his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a book commissioned many years previously and repeatedly pushed aside for the distractions of politics. Yet as interested as Churchill was in politics, for the past decade politics had displayed precious little interest in him. He had been a political outcast, lost in the wilderness, out of office and largely ignored. So he had picked up his pen once more, believing that his History would in all likelihood be his last endeavour on this earth, and in a typically impetuous moment had written offering R. Mueller a position on his team of research assistants.
He was shaken when, on the appointed day, a woman had turned up. Churchill was not good with women, not in a professional sense. For him they were creatures of romance, to be admired when the moment was right, then left in their drawing rooms while the menfolk got on with business. He’d had severe doubts about giving them the vote and was aggravated beyond endurance by most of those who had found their way into Parliament. When, with some awkwardness, he had sat R. Mueller down and suggested there had been some confusion but he might have a vacancy on his staff for an additional typist, she had not taken it well. She was a qualified historian, she told him, one who had spent several years researching an authoritative biography of the Fuehrer. Her abilities had been recognized even by the Gestapo. They had visited her several times and suggested several other professional avenues for her to pursue, ranging from a teaching position in almost any other subject than Hitler studies, which she had declined, to a librarianship in Dachau, which she had avoided only by fleeing. But even the Gestapo hadn’t suggested she be a typist. She had waved Churchill’s letter of appointment and insisted that she be given the proper job on his staff.
The engagement had lasted three weeks. She was brilliant, incisive, immensely hard-working, and impossible. When she had discovered that he was spending most of his time working on a history of the English-speaking world, she had asked why he wasn’t writing about the contemporary threat in Europe. He had offered many reasons: he was under considerable contractual obligation to his publishers, he had told her, and people were fed up with him going on about impending war. Anyway, it was necessary for him to think about his financial survival. She had looked him in the eye and told him that survival was about much more than his silk underwear and champagne. It had been the last time they had spoken. Until tonight.
‘Many circumstances have changed since we last met, Frau Mueller,’ he began, smiling.
If he was expecting congratulation, there was no sign of it.
‘I have a war to fight. Against your Herr Hitler. I was wondering if you would like to help.’
‘Help you?’ she enquired, startled.
‘Help Britain. I know it is a lot to ask.’
‘Help? How?’ She stared at him fiercely, across a desk that was cluttered with piles of papers weighed down by gold medals and surrounded by bottles of pills, potions, a magnifying glass, two spectacle cases and a small pot of toothpicks. There were also two cuffs made of card to prevent his sleeves getting dirty.
He was examining her, weighing her up. ‘I take a risk even in having you here. But it is a time when risk arrives with my breakfast and lingers on to tuck me in at night. We face a formidable opponent in Germany and its formidable armies. We also face Hitler.’ He began jabbing his chest with his finger. ‘I face Hitler. I, Winston Churchill. And yet I don’t know him. One of the few significant men in Europe I have never met.’ The room was dark except for the light of his desk lamp, yet she could see the exhaustion that hovered behind his eyes. ‘He refused to meet me, you know. In 1932 when I was motoring in Europe, inspecting the old battlefields. All the rest, Chamberlain, Halifax, Lloyd George, they met him. But not me. He simply refused. Mistook me for a man with no future, apparently.’
‘He may yet be right.’
‘Indeed he may,’ Churchill muttered, refusing to rise to the bait. ‘My father was a great English statesman, Frau Mueller. It’s partly due to him that you are here.’
‘But he’s … ?’
‘He gave me an excellent piece of advice. My father instructed me, never underestimate your enemy. Know your enemy if you want to beat him. Words of wisdom. So I was wondering … if you would be willing to help me thrash Hitler.’
‘Help? You?’
‘I am sure if an apology is owed for any misunderstandings we may have had in the past, it is freely offered on my part.’ For a man who had such an easy way with words, the apology sounded contrived to the point of insincerity.
‘You also owe me a week’s wages. You never paid.’
‘I … I …’ The old man began to splutter helplessly. This was leading nowhere. ‘Frau Mueller, you know Hitler better than any man in Britain. I need to understand him in order to crush him. I thought you might want to help in that enterprise, but if I am mistaken then I –’
‘You make it sound terribly personal.’
‘In some respects, it is.’
‘Hurt pride? Because he refused to meet you?’
‘It has nothing to do with pride!’
‘Then what are you fighting for? The British are fighting for no better reason than that you are too proud to admit that at almost every step of the way you got it wrong. Versailles. The Rhineland. Austria. Czechoslovakia –’
‘We are fighting for principle, not pride!’ he snapped, with an undertone of anger.
‘Poland? Poland’s not a principle, it’s a miserable afterthought from the last war that’s been pulled to pieces while you sat back and watched.’
He was beginning to breathe heavily, his teeth clamped fiercely around the butt of his cigar. ‘Well, now we are fighting because Hitler insists upon it, whether we like it or not. You said this was personal. It is. Both he and I have been recalled from obscurity to guide our nations through this hour. I am a Churchill, for all the strengths and faults which that has bred in me. Now I need to know what a Hitler is. And you can help me, if you will.’
‘You are a lot like him.’
‘Like That Man?’ He spat the words out, as though his face had been slapped.
‘Unruly, bad-tempered rabble-rousers, propagandists, nationalists, outsiders.’ She began ticking characteristics off on her fingers. ‘Why, you are both even painters – although in my view you show rather more talent than Hitler. And you both love war.’
‘I do not love war, as you put it.’ They both knew he was lying. ‘And perhaps I have made a mistake in thinking you could help –’
‘There is one difference which I think is very important, Mr Churchill.’
‘And what, pray, is that?’
‘I do not know you well, Mr Churchill, but I have my instincts. As a woman. And I believe you are capable of compassion – love, even. I see it in your eyes, in your words. But Hitler knows only one thing. Hatred. From his earliest days he was conditioned to hate – even to hate his father. Perhaps he hated his father most of all. He was an Austrian, a customs official on the Austro-German frontier, you see, and there is part of me which thinks that the Fuehrer’s first great coup, when he marched his army into Austria, was driven as much as anything by a desire to sweep away his father’s entire life work, to smash down his border posts and erase all traces of him. You think that ridiculous, of course, to suggest that the political ambitions of a man like Hitler could be driven by the memory of a long-dead father.’
Churchill paused before replying. ‘No, I do not think it ridiculous.’
‘Hitler has always needed someone to hate. When he was young it was his father, and now it is the Jews. Never forget how much he hates. But also never forget – never dare forget – Hitler’s extraordinary achievements. He took a nation as broken and decayed as Weimar Germany, where old women and babies starved to death in the streets, and he rebuilt it.’ Her mood had changed; it was no longer a lecture, her words carried growing passion. ‘While you English were clinging to your old ways, he built something new – not just the autobahns and barracks but a new people. He ripped out their sadness and restored their hope. He has raised them high and made them feel all but invincible. Germany is a land where no one starves any more. And what does it matter if a few Jews or Social Democrats don’t join in the general joy? What do a few cracked heads matter when an entire people who had been denied any sort of future have been lifted up and made proud once more? For the happiness of the whole, aren’t a few whispered sacrifices acceptable?’
He suspected she was goading him, but that was what he required, for his mind to be bent into focus.
‘So why did you not accept his bold new world?’
‘To my shame I did. For several years. I was one of those young mothers of Weimar who had starved like all the rest. Do you know how we survived in those years after the war, Mr Churchill, do you have any conception of what it was like? Once a month, every pay day, we hired a taxi to take us to the market – a taxi, not because we were rich but because every moment that passed could be measured in gold. With every breath we took, the money in our pockets grew more worthless, like butter on a hot stove. If we were lucky what had been worth a king’s ransom the previous week would now buy a few essentials, and if we weren’t lucky, if we were delayed, if the taxi was late, perhaps not even that. We stood in line, and prayed that by the time we reached the head of the queue there would still be something left, and that the price wouldn’t have shot out of sight even while we looked on. So in the end you stopped queuing and started pushing, and those that couldn’t push got trampled. We would spend everything we had, everything! Every last pfennig in our pockets. Then we would climb back into the taxi with whatever we had been able to buy and go home. Sometimes we might have meat, sometimes it would be off a cheese stall, other times just vegetables. But whatever it was would have to last us an entire month, until the next pay day, because we had nothing left. Nothing. All my jewellery gone, all our best clothes pawned. Can you understand that? I’m not talking about money for champagne but money for a little sugar and milk and bread.’ Her voice suddenly softened and began to break. ‘Nothing left for school. For medical bills. For heating in winter. And eventually, Mr Churchill, it wasn’t enough even for bread. One day I woke up and discovered I had no more milk for my baby. A week later she was dead.’
‘My heart breaks for you,’ he whispered.
‘No one starves under Hitler. And as long as we ate we gave thanks. We gave money when the Brown Shirts came round with their begging buckets, we gave salutes as their parades passed in the streets and we closed our ears to those noises in the night. When we woke up we might hear whispers that one neighbour or another had disappeared. It seemed a small price to pay for the food on our plates.’
‘So why did you eventually … ?’
She looked into her lap, her fingers running distractedly along the frayed edges of her cuffs.
‘If only I had a simple answer. There was a madness about our lives that infected us all. How mad can you get, driving into starvation in the back of a taxi? You know, Mr Churchill, in the whole of the last war when I was a young woman, I never heard a single shot fired. But under Weimar, shots were being fired all the time – at each other. Our leaders, our opponents, eventually even at the bread queues. Our streets became a battleground, our schools the headquarters. Children grew more used to the sound of gunfire than they were to their teachers’ voices. Instead of carrying around schoolbooks they began carrying around knives and hammers; their sports teams became nothing more than gangs of thugs. Can you imagine how much I and every other mother in the land begged for it to end? Then Hitler came along and made it all seem so simple. It was the fault of the Jews and the democrats. And we asked ourselves, what good was democracy if the water didn’t run and the lamps went dark? Better that we see by the light of burning torches. Our political leaders had been so weak, so false, but Hitler seemed above all that. Different. Exciting. Almost – what is the word? – spiritual.’
‘And we had Stanley Baldwin,’ Churchill muttered in contempt. ‘So tell me, pray, why you put it all behind you. Why did you choose to resist when so many went along with it?’
‘It crept up on you so slowly, what was really happening. Made it so easy to accept. Of course, there were those that had to be punished, the guilty men. The Marxists, the Social Democrats, the Jews. They almost seemed to prove their guilt when so many of them were shot trying to escape. But slowly it crept closer to us all. Everyone became a suspect. We had to give up our friends, our lovers, our beliefs – even renounce Belief itself. You could trust no one. And suddenly there was no private life at all, no space even to think.’ Her head fell to hide the pain. ‘After my baby died I went back to work – as a teacher in the Grundschule, the primary school, where my other child, my son, was a pupil. One day I was supervising in the library when the Brown Shirts came in. Very polite, apologized for the disturbance. But they had come for the Jews, they announced, and started leading the Jewish children out, one by one. I asked what the children had done, and the Brown Shirt leader just looked at me curiously. “Done? They are Jews.” But they were my pupils, my son’s classmates, my Jews, and I demanded to know why they were being taken. The Brown Shirt’s attitude changed; a rage came over his face. “Are you a Jew?” he asked. And I almost fell over in my rush to deny the charge – of course I wasn’t a Jew. I was furious with him, how dare he accuse … ?’
She was silent for a moment, needing to recover herself. When her head came up once more the eyes were filled with tears. ‘After he had gone I realized what had already become of me. I watched as they dragged them all away. I looked at the empty spaces in the library, the schoolbooks still open on the tables, the satchels on the backs of the chairs, and wondered when the Brown Shirts would be coming back for more.’ She leant forward, bent with feeling. ‘No, I can’t pretend I saw it all at that moment, that I became an opponent. I am not a hero, Mr Churchill, and I had no idea where they were taking them. But I knew the Brown Shirts would be back, and eventually they would come for my son, and either he would join them, or be taken by them. This was the new Germany, my son’s Germany, and I wanted to find out more about the man who had made it. That is when I started reading about Hitler, talking about him, studying him. In the end I decided to write about him. A biography.’
‘You were seeking to know your enemy …’
‘My enemy?’ She shook her head. ‘No, he wasn’t my enemy, not at first. The book wasn’t intended to be an attack upon him, I was doing no more than trying to understand. So I started asking questions about him, but that meant that very soon they began asking questions about me. I had become their enemy without my realizing it.’
‘I am so sorry.’
But she had no desire for his pity. Already she had shared with him far more than she had intended. Once again her life was being invaded. It was time to push him back. ‘Did your father know his enemies?’
‘No, I think not,’ Churchill replied, startled at the sudden change of subject. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because I’ve noticed that when you talk about him you seem … stiff. Formal. Almost anxious.’
‘I loved my father.’
‘No. You were afraid of him, I think.’
Churchill bridled. ‘My whole life has been dedicated to his memory.’
‘Dominated by his memory, perhaps. A bit like Hitler.’
His hand slapped down on the desktop to demand her silence. It landed with such force that the toothpicks jumped in their pot. ‘I asked you here to talk about the Fuehrer, not to offer crass remarks about my father, a man whom you never met.’
‘I’ve never met Hitler.’
And they were back where they had always been.
