I didn’t even know what to think of this, much less what to say—since all I wanted to say was I don’t need white tie and tails and I don’t need your damned charity, either—so I nodded at Churchill, who’d lighted a fresh cigar and was already perusing some papers even before I was out of the room.
“Wait,” I said, stopping and turning. “One thing.”
The round face with its cherubic little smile looked across the width of the room at me and waited.
“What and where is Chartwell?” I heard myself ask.
29.
Chartwell was Churchill’s country place near Westerham in Kent, some twenty-five miles from London. I dropped by to pick up my new clothes at the tailor’s at noon, tried them on, let the tailor pronounce them proper, stayed in one of the white shirts they’d chosen for me and in the tan linen suit they’d just made for me—the tailor chose a modest green and burgundy tie for it—and caught the 1:15 train with the help of a waiting car sent by the Ministry. (Which “Ministry” I had no idea.) Another such chauffeur-driven limousine picked me up at the Westerham station and drove me the few miles to Chartwell proper.
I’d expected another huge estate such as Lady Bromley’s or the one I’d heard described that Richard Davis Deacon had given up after the War, but Chartwell looked more like a comfortable house in the country somewhere in Massachusetts. I was to learn much later that rather than its having been in the Churchill family for a dozen generations, Chartwell—a rather plain brick house made ugly by additions and bad landscaping in the 1800s—had been fairly recently purchased and more or less rebuilt by Churchill’s workmen.
And by Churchill himself.
After I’d been shown to a room by a servant and had time to “freshen up” a bit, an older male servant came to the room and told me that Mr. Churchill would like to see me and asked if the time was convenient for me. I told him it was.
I expected to be led into a huge library, but instead the tall gray-haired servant who’d answered my query about his name only with “Mason, sir” led me around to the side of the house where Winston Churchill, wearing a white fedora and a dark mortar-spattered coverall, was laying bricks.
“Ho, welcome, Mr. Perry,” he cried, using a trowel to level off some mortar before laying another brick in place.
It was a long wall.
“I spend ten hours a day in my office in London, but this is my real work,” continued Churchill. I’d already come to realize that the monologue was his favorite form of conversation. “This and writing histories. I took care to contact the bricklayers’ union before I did my first wall. They made me an honorary member, but I still pay my dues. My real work this week has been two thousand words written and two hundred bricks laid.”
He set the trowel down and, taking me suddenly by the elbow, led me around to the back of the house.
“The ‘Cosy Pig,’ I call it,” said Churchill.
“Call what, sir?” I said.
“Why, the house, of course. Chartwell. And if you’re Mr. Perry, then I am Mr. Churchill; no more ‘sirs.’”
“All right,” I said, just avoiding uttering the “sir.”
We stopped on a patio amidst a low formal garden, but it wasn’t the garden that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had brought me around the house to see. “This is why I bought the place three years ago,” he said.
I knew he meant the view from this hilltop. It was then—and remains today—the single most beautiful and verdant view of a peacetime countryside I’d ever seen. There were distant forests of beech, chestnut, and oak, countless wide green meadows, and the longest, grassiest slopes I’d ever encountered.
“The Cosy Pig sits in its eighty acres of all this,” said Churchill, “but it’s this view of the combe and the larger Kentish Weald that convinced me to buy the place, although Clementine said it was—and would be in its rebuilding—too dear for me. For us. And I suppose it has been.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, realizing how inadequate the words were.
“Not as beautiful as Mount Everest, I would imagine,” said the heavyset little man. His bright eyes were watching me carefully.
“That’s a different beauty, si—…Mr. Churchill,” I said. “All rock, ice, harsh light, air. Almost everything, including the air, is so cold it cuts. There’s no green there, usually, above Base Camp, not even a lichen. Nothing alive but the climbers and the rare raven. No trees, no leaves, no grass…almost nothing soft, Mr. Churchill. Just rock and ice and snow and sky. This is infinitely more…gentle. More…human.”
Churchill had been listening carefully, and now he nodded. “I’d best be getting back to work. When I finish that wall for what will be the final terrace extension to Clementine’s bedroom, I need to build another dam.” He waved his short arm and chubby hand to the left. “I built those ponds as well. Have always enjoyed looking at water and things that like to live in water.”
The ponds were beautiful and natural-looking. But this time I said nothing.
“Make yourself at home, as you Yanks like to say,” said Churchill. “If you’re hungry at all, tell Mason or Matthews; they’ll have cook make up a sandwich for you. The liquor’s in the drawing room, and there is some good whisky—Scotch, I believe you fellows call it on your side of the pond—in your suite. There are books in your room, but feel free to borrow from the library. If you can’t reach the book, it’s because you weren’t meant to be able to. Anything else is fair game. We’ll have sherry or whisky at six, dinner’s at seven thirty—early tonight because one of our guests had his people bring a projector with a motion picture for us to see later. Or for the children to see, I should say. I think you’ll find all our dinner guests amusing tonight, but three of them especially so. See you in a while, Mr. Perry.”
The first guest I met was T. E. Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia,” the American reporter Lowell Thomas had called him during and after the War—who was descending the stairs for drinks just when I was. Lawrence was wearing the full robes of a prince of Arabia, complete with a jewel-handled curved dagger tucked in his sash.
“Silly, I know,” he said after we’d introduced ourselves and shaken hands, “but the children love it.”
We were soon joined by an older man whom Churchill called “Prof.” This was Professor F. A. Lindemann, and Lawrence later whispered to me that in 1916, when countless RAF pilots were dying because they were unable to get their flimsy paper and wood aircraft out of a flat spin, “Prof” Lindemann had worked out, using advanced mathematics, a maneuver which he announced would bring any aircraft out of even the worst tailspin. When the RAF establishment and the pilots said the maneuver wouldn’t work—according to Lawrence, who was still wearing his rather effeminate white cotton headdress and headband as he told me all this—the professor had taught himself how to fly, taken up a SPAD while wearing no parachute, deliberately put the craft into the worst flat spin imaginable, and deftly pulled it out—using his mathematically concocted maneuver—with hundreds of feet to spare. Evidently the secret was in getting one’s hands and feet off the controls; the aircraft, said Professor Lindemann, wanted to fly straight and level and would do so if the pilot left it alone. It was, he announced, all the correcting and overcorrecting inputs to the controls that turned spins into death spins. And then, according to Lawrence, the “Prof” had taken up another, older biplane, set it into a terrible spin, and allowed it to recover yet again.
After that, T. E. Lawrence assured me, all RAF pilots were required to learn the Prof’s maneuver.