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 need of an agreement as they actually welcomed the chance to consolidate themselves in nations already in their grasp, of his concern that so little was known about what was happening to the Poles, the Czechs, and others trapped behind the iron curtain, of his sense that the future in Europe was full of ‘darkness and menace’, and of his feeling that there would be no lack of subjects to discuss when Parliament reconvened. Clearly, this was the letter of a man ready to re-engage.
Churchill had gone to Italy in the hope of coming to peace with the people’s decision. He had tried very hard to concur with his wife that the loss of the premiership was indeed a blessing in disguise. At last, he found he could do neither. The threat of another war was too great. His confidence that he was the man to prevent it was too strong. For better or worse, it simply was not in his character to remain detached for long.
When Churchill returned to Britain on 5 October 1945, his family understood that he had made an important decision while he was abroad. Once again, in defeat he would be defiant. Whatever the obstacles, he intended to fight on. He refused to retire.
IV Old Man in a Hurry London, October 1945
It was one thing to decide to fight on, quite another to stage a political comeback in his seventies.
During his first week in London, Churchill was a whirling dervish of activity, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that he meant, and retained the capacity, to lead. He set policy with his Shadow Cabinet. He cut a lively figure on the Opposition front bench. He offered the first Opposition motion and he directed all Conservatives to be present the following week when he assailed a bill to prolong government controls on labour, rations, prices, and transport for five additional years. Parliamentary commentators noted his bronzed, robust appearance, and King George remarked privately that Churchill had returned from Italy and France ‘a new man’. As if he had energy to spare, Churchill capped off a busy week by attending a Friday evening performance of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan.
By the next morning, however, his efforts began to unravel. While her husband was at Lake Como, Clementine Churchill had worried that in his passion to transfer a scene to the canvas he might labour on oblivious to the chill of the evening air. Given his medical record, there was always anxiety that were he to catch cold it could escalate into pneumonia. As feared, he returned from the South of France with a cold. Despite promises to be careful, he largely ignored it. By Saturday, he had lost his voice. By Sunday, a statement went out that he was confined to his house on doctor’s orders due to an inflamed throat.
Churchill had rallied the troops, but in the end he