III Sans Soucis et Sans Regrets Lake Como, September 1945
During the five-and-a-half-hour flight to Milan in a Dakota aircraft provided for his personal use by the Supreme Allied Commander for the Mediterranean, Field Marshal Alexander, Churchill pored over five years’ worth of his wartime minutes. This was the torrent of dictated notes, consisting of comments, questions, and requests to individual ministers, to the Chiefs of Staff, and to others, by which he had brought his powerful personal impact to bear on every aspect of the conduct of the war.
Churchill had used his minutes the way an octopus uses its tentacles – to reach everywhere, to be in many places at once. Throughout his life, he had been constitutionally incapable of sitting back and letting others do what he usually believed he could better accomplish himself. Where problems existed, he was driven to grapple with them directly, so much so that at times even his admirers had been known to question his sense of proportion. He craved responsibility, which he once tellingly described to his mother as ‘an exhilarating drink’. His minutes allowed him to be involved in anything that concerned the fight against Hitler, to shine a searchlight into the most obscure corners of the war effort, and not only to learn about, but also to manage details which other, less controlling personalities might have been inclined to leave to the judgement of subordinates. Now, all that power had fallen away from him.
Still, he had not brought printed copies of his minutes just to brood over what had been lost. Faced with the likelihood that his political career was at an end, Churchill insisted he could not simply be idle for the rest of his life. More and more, it seemed as if he was weighing the possibility of a memoir along the lines of The World Crisis, his highly personal multi-volume chronicle of the First World War. Fellow Conservatives – most, apparently, with the ulterior motive of edging him aside as party leader – had suggested that he undertake to tell the story of the Second World War as only he could. At a time when Churchill was deeply upset that the election had called his record into question, a memoir held the distinct attraction of allowing him to defend his actions, both during the war and in the immediate aftermath, in the courtroom of history.
Could such an undertaking fill the vacuum in his life that had been created when he lost the premiership? Would a memoir be enough to absorb the energies of a man of Churchill’s temperament? In part, that was what he was on his way to Italy to find out.
As Parliament was in recess until 9 October, Alexander had offered him the exclusive use of the Villa La Rosa, the commandeered property above Lake Como which had served as the Field Marshal’s headquarters in the war’s final days. In anticipation of his stay there, Churchill had had bound copies of his minutes and telegrams specially prepared; these would form the spine of any autobiographical work. The Churchills’ middle daughter, red-headed Sarah, was with her father on the flight on 1 September, along with his physician, his secretary, his valet, and a detective. He had wanted Clementine to come as well but she refused, explaining that she would be able to accomplish more in his absence. She too was exhausted and dejected, and felt that she would be unable to enjoy a holiday in the sun.
On the plane Churchill barely said a word to the others, but in the car afterwards it became apparent that in the course of reading he had already seized on the narrative possibilities of one part of the Second World War saga. He spoke excitedly of the Dunkirk evacuation, testing the story, feeling for the drama. At the Villa La Rosa, after he learned that one of the aides-de-camp assigned to him for the occasion had been at Dunkirk, animated talk of the episode continued over dinner. Seated at a huge green glass table in the ornately-mirrored and marbled pale green oval dining room, Churchill interrogated the nervous twenty-four-year-old. How long had he waited on the beaches? What kind of vessel had rescued him? Churchill, in his enthusiasm, wanted to hear every detail.
Previously, he had been in such low spirits that Sarah had feared time would pass slowly and dully. Already, that was far from the case. But any hope that a change of scenery was all that it would take to cure her father was soon dashed. After dinner, Churchill put on a dark hat and coat over his white suit and padded out onto the balcony in bedroom slippers to sit. As he puffed on a cigar, his interest in a memoir seemed to evaporate with the swirls of smoke. He insisted to his doctor that he was in no mood to write, especially not when the Government was poised to take so much of his earnings. Suddenly, he was back to rehashing the election, brooding aloud about what had gone wrong and what might have been.
Early the next morning, the sun was warm and bright and a soft breeze rippled the lake as a tiny caravan assembled in front of the Villa La Rosa, which gave long views of villages and mountains on the opposite shore. An aide-de-camp loaded one of the cars with Churchill’s painting apparatus. An elaborate lunch was packed in an accompanying station wagon. Through the years, Churchill had often sought relief, repose, and renewal through painting. He first picked up a paintbrush in 1915 after the loss of his position as First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of the calamitous Dardanelles campaign affected him so strongly that Clementine worried he would ‘die of grief’.
Then, as now, he had been cut off in the midst of a great and urgent undertaking. Then, as now, it galled him to be deprived of control while the fate of the enterprise was still in suspense. Then, as now, he felt as if he ‘knew everything and could do nothing’. Then, as now, at a moment when every fibre of his being was ‘inflamed to action’, he was forced to remain ‘a spectator of the tragedy, placed cruelly in a front seat’.
In a period when dark broodings about his predicament had allowed him no rest, 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