Churchill cursed. His concentration was broken and nothing more would be achieved that morning. He had lost the battle of the bathrobe. He heaved himself from his bed, scattering papers in his wake, and, ignoring his servant, stomped off in the direction of the bathroom.
It was known as Chequers Court, an age-mellowed manor house constructed of red brick and surrounded by parklands and beech woods in the Chiltern hills, some forty miles to the north-west of London. It was graced by ambitious chimneys, loose windows and a system of heating that, in deference to the ancient timbers, remained totally inadequate. Chequers had once belonged to Mr and Mrs Arthur Lee, who had no children and therefore no lasting use for the property, so in 1921 they had handed it over to the nation complete with all its furniture and fine paintings as a country retreat for whoever was Prime Minister of the day. A year earlier the occupant had been Neville Chamberlain, a proud but inadequate man who remained mercifully unaware that the dogs of misfortune were already on his trail and would soon tear him apart. Calamity had got him first, then cancer, and only six weeks ago they had buried him. Dust to dust. So the keys had been passed to Winston Churchill, who had summoned three generations of his family to spend Christmas with him in his new retreat. It was to be a special occasion, one that everyone present would remember, although, in hindsight, not for all the most comforting reasons.
Sawyers had risen before six that morning to make sure that everything was in proper festive order. The fire in the Great Hall had been lit, the boilers stoked, the baths run, breakfast served in the bedrooms, the great dinner prepared on a scale that was prodigious. Hitler’s U-boat campaign in the Atlantic was supposed to be starving the country into submission, but the German Fuehrer had apparently failed to take into consideration the legendary Mrs Landemare, who was in charge of the Chequers kitchen. She was short, exceedingly stout, and married to a renowned French chef, but her prime loyalty was directed towards the Prime Minister, whose gastronomic demands were notorious. Breakfast was taken in bed and often consisted of chops as well as bacon and a glass of something red, while what followed throughout the day would have left the regulators at the Ministry of Food reeling in horror. There wasn’t supposed to be much food around, but Churchill had a lot of good friends, and so did Mrs Landemare. As a consequence the huge bleached wooden table that ran down the centre of the kitchen was now piled high like that of a medieval court. The first course—an entire smoked salmon, half a dozen lobsters and several pots of duck terrine—had been provided by parliamentary colleagues, all anxious to display their loyalty and show off the extent of their country estates. The dessert that sat at the end of the table was a thick-crusted pie filled with apples from the orchards at Churt, the home of a previous Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. Churchill’s own family home at Chartwell had been the source of most of the fresh vegetables, sent up by train, while as usual Mrs Landemare had made up any shortfall from the contacts she maintained below the stairs of several other country estates. But the pride of place in this year of famine was occupied by the turkey—an enormous beast, sent on the instructions of the dying Viscount Rothermere as one of his last mortal acts, perhaps in repentance for the appalling things his newspapers had often written about Churchill. It had been plucked, stuffed, basted, and was now roasting under the watchful eye and moist brow of the blessed Mrs Landemare.
‘Unusual large, cook,’ Sawyers had said as he’d watched her thrusting chestnut stuffing deep inside the bird.
Mrs Landemare had given a defiant twirl of her white cap to keep the perspiration from dripping into her eyes. ‘What were you expecting me to give him for his Christmas dinner? Toast? Anyhows, Mr S, we might find there’s even a couple of mouthfuls left over for the likes of us.’
‘Wouldn’t want it to go wasting, cook,’ he’d said. ‘I might even be able to find a bottle of something to go with it, like.’
‘You are a man after my own heart, Mr Sawyers, so you are,’ she had exclaimed, smiling. She didn’t mean it, of course. Sawyers was unmarried and always would be—‘a gentleman’s gentleman, one of those who lisps to port,’ as she would explain it to friends, ‘but there’s nobody else on God’s earth who can deal with Mr Winston the way that he can.’
And so long as Mr Winston was happy, he wouldn’t miss an occasional bottle. Ah, but as for Mr Randolph, the son, he was altogether another matter…
Randolph Churchill, the sole, much-excused and overindulged son of the Prime Minister had been expected to arrive at Chequers the previous evening, Christmas Eve, but a hurried phone call had offered some vague excuse about pressing duties—easy enough to concoct, given his status as an officer in No. 8 Commando and a newly elected Member of Parliament. But Sawyers was sceptical. The younger Churchill hardly ever passed through his constituency and his regiment was notorious for its careless habits; the only landmark Randolph and his fellow officers could be relied upon to hit while on exercise was the officers’ mess. That, in Sawyers’ eye, was not enough to condemn him—it seemed little more than aristocratic excess, the pampering of the privileged class—but there were other reasons why Sawyers reserved for ‘his master’s little echo’ the contempt that only servants can manage to keep out of sight of others. The first was the man’s spitefulness. It wasn’t for Sawyers to moralize if Randolph decided to spend the night his son was born in the arms of another man’s wife, but to make it so blatantly obvious was unnecessarily cruel. Like burning beetles. And there was a more personal reason. Even after all the years Sawyers had served his father, after the many times he’d been forced to help the son to his bed, take off his soiled clothes, clean up after his excesses, he knew that Randolph didn’t even know his first name. Didn’t care. Wasn’t important. For the younger Churchill, Sawyers was as insignificant and expendable as old orange peel.
He arrived that morning, shortly before his father came down and while the rest of the family including his young wife Pamela was gathered round the log fire, singing carols. He appeared, dark-eyed, dishevelled, and told them he had spent the night on some railway station platform waiting for his train. That was possible, as a matter of fact, but doubtful as a matter of habit. Hardship wasn’t Randolph’s style. But Sawyers would find out where he’d been sleeping, given a few days. The network that operated below the stairs of all fashionable homes—the same one that made up for any shortages in Mrs Landemare’s kitchen—would also make up for any shortcomings in Randolph’s explanation. The man simply didn’t realize that the servants knew. Could tell whether a bed had been slept in, by how many and to what purpose. The telltale signs on a freshly laundered sheet were as clear to a chambermaid’s eye as an elephant’s rump, and if the chambermaid knew, the news would get round the scullery faster than a mouse.
Yet, for the moment, there was harmony. Sawyers stood guard as the family sang their carols, led by the old man, who had a voice that sounded as if it had been broken on a capstan. It was as close as Churchill got nowadays to his son-in-law, Vic Oliver, who was playing the piano. Oliver had never truly been part of the Churchill family scene; he was a music-hall comedian who had been born an Austrian and who was now a naturalized American citizen. It was difficult to count the number of reasons why Churchill held reservations about him: he was brash, he was so much older than Churchill’s daughter, Sarah, he had been married twice before. He also preferred to crack jokes for a living when in Churchill’s view he should have been cracking German skulls. Oliver used words like ‘cute’ and ‘Britisher’. In retribution, Churchill had given him a copy of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. But mostly Churchill’s antipathy was because of the effect Oliver had on Sarah. She had always been a perfectionist, desperate for applause and approval—it was one of the reasons why she had become an actress—yet she could never persuade herself that she merited any measure of her success. She had rushed into marriage, but it had only caused her sense of inadequacy to grow worse. She was beautiful but fragile, while Oliver was domineering. It had left her limping like a butterfly with a broken wing.
The eldest daughter was Diana. She had the same blue eyes and auburn hair of Sarah, inherited from their father, yet Diana was as reticent as her father was extrovert, as sensitive as he was bullish. When the Churchill family was at play, to most