John ‘Gil’ Winant had been sent to replace the excruciating Joe Kennedy as Ambassador to the Court of St James’s. Kennedy had been as crooked as a fish hook, but the new man was of altogether finer construction, the sort you could invite to dinner without having to count the spoons. He was a tall, brooding figure, painted with an expression of profound earnestness. Some thought he looked a lot like Abraham Lincoln, but whereas Lincoln was a wordsmith as glorious as any his country had produced, London had just discovered that Winant was a lamentable public speaker. He had delivered his first address in Britain, to a luncheon of the Pilgrims’ Club, an Anglo-American friendship society. The members of the audience assumed the sentiments in the speech were excellent, but no one could tell, for it had been impossible to make out a word he had said. They had hoped for someone of a different cut to the mean-mouthed outpourings of Kennedy, but this was going to the other extreme. Was America’s new voice to be no more than a whimper?
Churchill had attended the lunch. As they were leaving the Savoy Hotel, he decided to take matters into his own hands and grabbed Winant’s arm.
‘Your Excellency, a fine speech.’
‘Did you truly think so?’
‘Worthy of many plaudits—and a little celebration. Do you have time for several whiskies?’ And before the ambassador could muster an audible answer, he was being led towards the Prime Minister’s car.
‘That is on two conditions, of course,’ Churchill continued. ‘The first is that we become the greatest of friends. As you know, I am half American, on my mother’s side. A Jerome from New York. I even lay claim to a little Iroquois Indian blood, at least an armful, I’d say.’
‘Half American. But I suspect entirely English,’ Winant returned, smiling. He had a most attractive smile, his dark, deep-set eyes glowing with sincerity. His hair was unkempt, a little like a distracted schoolboy, while his suit was crumpled and sat awkwardly on his gaunt frame—as did his marriage, so rumour had it. Clearly he lacked a woman’s touch.
‘The second condition I insist upon is that you call me Winston, and I be permitted to call you Gil. No formality between us, no barriers. We are brothers. I want to like you very much indeed.’
That, as Churchill knew, might be no easy undertaking. Winant had a long career as a liberal activist and labour organizer that seemed to pit him against so many of the interests Churchill’s life had embraced. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Churchill had growled, ‘so long as he hates Hitler.’
They drove to the rear entrance of Downing Street, which nestled against the parade ground of Horse Guards. There were many signs of recent bomb damage—hurriedly filled holes, empty windows, scarred buildings, blasted trees in the park. A long section of the garden wall at the back of Downing Street had been toppled, leaving bricks lying in forlorn piles. A gang of workmen was carrying out repairs. As soon as his car had stopped, Churchill sprang from his seat and began clambering over broken bricks and through piles of sand until he was in the midst of the workers. He seemed not to notice that he was standing in a puddle of cement.
‘My dear Gil, let me introduce you to the men who are the backbone of the British Empire. The bricklayers!’ He thrust his stick at one of the men in exchange for a trowel, and then began loading cement and bricks upon the new wall, eyeing their line, tapping them to a level, and all the while puffing great clouds of smoke from his cigar as he chatted in great animation to the workers. They gathered closely around him, laughing at his jests, shouting their encouragement, and taking care to keep him supplied with fresh bricks.
‘You see, Gil, I, too, am a bricklayer, a member of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers. And proud as punch of it. Lady Astor, one of your American compatriots, a woman with a notoriously sharp tongue, once told me that I was as common as muck. I was able to tell her that she was entirely wrong, that I was not as common as muck—but as common as brick. And I had a trade union membership card to prove it.’
He was playing them like an audience at a music hall.
‘Ah, I am forgetting my manners,’ he said when at last he stepped back. ‘I must introduce you men to my very great friend, Mr Gil Winant. He is the new American Ambassador, which makes him your great friend, too.’
‘Last one wasn’t, was he?’ a voice sounded from the back of the huddle.
‘On the contrary, I was very much attached to him,’ Churchill said, smiling. ‘Like my appendix.’
‘But you ’ad that cut out years ago,’ the voice came back, to general laughter.
‘And you, sir, will get me into a great deal of hot water making baseless accusations like that,’ Churchill replied, grinning broadly.
They cheered him as he stepped into his garden through the hole in the wall. He turned to wave his stick at them. ‘Londoners—are we downhearted?’
‘No!’ they cried as one.
It was a piece of theatre, typical Churchill, the sort of thing he’d made sure his other visitors like Hopkins and Willkie had witnessed. Reality wasn’t as simple as that, of course. For every Londoner who could still summon up the spirit of defiance, there were those who were gradually weakening, being ground down by yet another winter of war. In his heart, Churchill knew they would not go on—couldn’t go on—through another winter unless somehow he could find new hope to sustain them. But he couldn’t even feed them properly. The shipping losses in the Atlantic were enormous and the prospect of starvation still hovered over every meal. He had to give them hope, some taste of victory, not an endless diet of setback and evacuation.
Every week brought a new nightmare and another battlefield. So far the Balkans had remained undisturbed, but it was about to be turned into a slaughterhouse. Hundreds of thousands of German troops were massing to swallow up Yugoslavia and Greece, taking advantage of feuding local leaders who, rather than taking on the Wehrmacht, seemed more intent on fighting each other—‘Cvetkovic, Markovic, Simovic, Subotic and every other damned sonofabitch,’ as Churchill had complained in frustration. Meanwhile a new commander had arrived to breathe fresh life into the German campaign in the North African deserts. Someone called Rommel.
And the Japanese, that unfathomable, unknowable race on the far side of the world—what in damnation were they planning?
His concerns pursued him everywhere, through his days, through his dreams, no matter what he pretended to the bricklayers. By the time he had crossed the garden and reached the back door of Downing Street, they were weighing heavily on his heart once more. He threw open the door and kicked off his shoes.
‘Sawyers! Where are you, man?’ he shouted. ‘Stop hiding and help. Some idiot has poured cement all over my shoes.’
They sat in a small sitting room that was cold and bleak. The curtains were dusty, the windows taped over, some of them cracked, but Churchill still preferred to spend his daylight hours here in 10 Downing Street than entombed in the underground bunker at the nearby Annexe. It was a small reminder of how things used to be.
The American was beginning to warm up and Sawyers hovered attentively, ready to refill his glass. Shy and uncertain as Winant sometimes looked, he was no fool. He had a long and distinguished public career behind him, much of it in New Hampshire, where he had been elected governor three times. They called it the Granite State; evidently they liked the quiet touch.
‘I welcome you to London, Gil, with all my heart. It’s a pity that the medical condition of the President makes it so difficult for him to travel, but that makes your position here of even greater significance. I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that a whole world might depend upon it. It’s one of my great sorrows that I have not yet met Mr Roosevelt, but, in you, I know I have a friend who will bring us together in thought as well as deed. You must be my mirror into his mind.’
The words struck Winant as strange because, of course, Churchill had met Roosevelt, many years before. The old man seemed to have forgotten, but Roosevelt hadn’t. It had been 1918, at an official dinner in London. The occasion hadn’t been an unqualified