She wasn’t a ship of much note in anybody’s logbook, a twenty-year-old ocean workhorse with a tall funnel, a single screw and a crew of English officers helped out by mostly Chinese deckhands. By mid-November the Automedon was some two hundred and fifty miles off the coast of Sumatra when, late one night, her radio operator picked up a distress call from a Norwegian merchant vessel. The signal said that she was being followed by an unknown ship; a little later the Norwegian reported that she had been stopped, after which—nothing. Total silence. It was a strange incident, but these were strange times and the affair caused more curiosity than concern to the Automedon’s Captain Ewan. However, it was enough to ensure that when an unidentified ship appeared at first light some distance off the port bow, Ewan spent a considerable time peering through his binoculars at the vessel. The stranger was flying a Dutch flag, innocent enough, and Ewan could see what looked like women hanging out washing on lines stretched across the foredeck. She was drawing slowly closer. McEwan concluded that the vessel was a friendly merchantman, much like dozens of others the Automedon had passed since leaving Liverpool.
They were on parallel courses and only a couple of thousand yards apart when the new vessel suddenly increased speed and identified herself as the German raider Atlantis. At the same moment, she fired a warning shot across Ewan’s bow. He had been duped. He immediately ordered his radio operator to send a distress signal, so the Atlantis began to pour round after round into the Automedon in a desperate attempt to prevent the signal being completed and her location discovered. The German assault was totally successful. After being hit twenty-eight times in less than three minutes, the Automedon lay listing and defenceless, her radio silenced, her captain killed on his bridge and her fate entirely unknown to the wider world. The Kriegsmarine had claimed one more victim.
The Automedon was a small ship, little more than seven thousand tons, yet in time her loss was to change the course of the war. Indeed, in time, it would change the world.
None of this was known to the Churchills when, around midnight, they gathered in the Long Gallery, a room filled with the smell of smoke and old books that stretched along the north front of Chequers to form its library. That night, behind its blackout curtains, it had been transformed into a makeshift cinema.
‘You shall sit beside me, Pamela,’ Churchill said to his daughter-in-law, patting the seat next to him on the sofa while the others searched around to find themselves comfortable perches, all except for Clemmie, a most reluctant participant in any of her husband’s late-night frolics, who had long since bidden them farewell and departed for her bed.
‘A special treat for Christmas,’ Churchill told Pamela, as Sawyers erected the screen and fussed over the projector. ‘There is a friend of mine, Mr Alexander Korda, a Hungarian who makes very fine films. He and I are much alike. He loves cigars. He is often broke. And he is always impeccably dressed.’
Pamela wanted to giggle. She doubted if Mr Korda had gravy stains running down the lapels of his jacket.
‘He has sent me his most recent work,’ her fatherin-law continued. ‘It’s not yet been released to the public. It’s about Horatio Nelson. I’ve even given Mr Korda some advice on the matter—oh, just a few words here and there to place in the admiral’s mouth.’ He waved his brandy glass in a simulation of modesty, and began to address her as though she were a public audience. ‘You know, at the opening of the last century when Napoleon’s armies dominated the continent, the people in these islands of ours fought on alone for many years. At times it seemed impossible that they should prevail, until Nelson rallied them to the cause. Now it seems that history wishes to repeat its great cycle, and once more we search for our Nelson.’
‘Some of us think we’ve already found him,’ she replied, smiling and taking his soft hand.
His eyes began to mist. ‘You know, my dear, you are a most unusual pearl. I shall never know how Randolph found you, let alone persuaded you to marry him.’
Perhaps it was better that the old man never knew. The truth was that Randolph had picked Pamela up on a blind date and proposed to her the following night. Married six weeks later, just as war had broken out. It was only afterwards that she discovered she was the eighth woman he’d pursued with the prospect of marriage in less than a month. Oh, it was one of those things that happened in wartime. For young soldiers such as Randolph, war had a brutal simplicity. They expected to die, so every long night, every available woman, was taken as their last. They didn’t so much embrace the moment as grab it in both hands, and in the rush the common standards and decencies were often thrown to one side. But the British were ridiculously inept at the soldierly traditions of rape and pillage, so instead they hurried to churches and register offices, hoping to find in their marriage beds something that was worth fighting and dying for.
But Randolph hadn’t died. He was there in an armchair, picking his nose and demanding another drink from the ubiquitous Sawyers. Yet for all his shortcomings he had introduced her to a new world that took her breath away. Eighteen months ago Pamela had been an unsophisticated teenager from rural Dorset with nothing more on her mind than flower arranging and the occasional midnight fumble with a taxi tiger; now she found herself at the epicentre of a war. When she had first met Randolph, his father had been an outsider, distrusted by his colleagues and despised by many, yet now he was the Prime Minister, and that made everyone in the family a target. He’d warned them all. If the Germans invaded, he had told them, they should fight to the very end. ‘With bullets, with bayonets,’ he had declared.
‘But, Papa,’ she had said, ‘I don’t know how to use a gun.’
‘Then go to the kitchen and find a carving knife! You know how to use a carving knife, don’t you, woman?’
He could be such a little boy at times. Perhaps that was why they got on so well. They could both still enjoy the enthusiasms of being children, she because she hadn’t yet grown up, and he because in some ways he never would.
‘Enough time-wasting, Sawyers,’ he now told the valet. ‘Out with the bottle and on with the show!’
‘It’s on table beside yer.’
‘What is?’
‘Yer brandy.’
‘Ah, what a charming coincidence. Then what are you waiting for?’
Lights were switched off until there was nothing but the glow of the wood-stoked fire and the flickering of the film. Soon they were immersed in the tale of Nelson and his mistress, Emma Hamilton, a dancer and woman of questionable virtue who came to captivate the warrior’s heart. The actress was Vivien Leigh.
‘She is extraordinarily beautiful,’ Churchill whispered in Pamela’s ear. ‘So very much like you.’
Beside her on the sofa, Pamela felt the old man melt as England was shown friendless, alone, its armed forces denied supplies, with nothing to eat, a country fighting for its survival and little other than one man’s determination to keep it from succumbing. Yet, as Emma pointed out, England seemed so insignificant, ‘just a tiny little bit’ on the globe compared with the might of the enemy that had spread so far across the map of Europe. Her eyes lit up with wonder as she was told in reply: ‘…there are always men who, for the sake of their insane ambition, want to destroy what other people have built. And therefore this “tiny little bit” has to send out its ships again and again to fight those who want to dictate their will to others.’
Pamela felt her hand being squeezed with almost painful force as the words showered from the screen upon Churchill. She knew they were the words that he had written.
So the images flickered and the ships went out once more to confront the European tyrant, willing to be blown to bits in the hope that the enemy would be pulverized to even smaller pieces. England expected it of them. Then Nelson, mortally wounded at the moment of his supreme triumph, paid the price that freedom so often demands.
‘Thank