Sean Gabb: The Churchill Memorandum

But I had my eyes shut again, and was savouring a lungful of fresh smoke. I thought of the Atlantic, cold and silver a thousand feet below. On one side of that vast expanse, the Americans might grow ever more beastly to each other. On the other, the comic foreigners could jabber and gesticulate themselves black in the face. But England, safe behind the wave-swept grey of the Home Fleet, was the same England as always. The Queen was on her throne. The pound was worth a pound. All was right with the world—or with that quarter of it lucky enough to repose under an English heaven. I breathed slowly out and wondered what might be on the dinner menu.

“Funny things, dates,” I heard Stanhope say. I opened my eyes and sat up. Large gin and tonic in his good hand, he was seating himself on the other side of the little table. “Without Lord Chesterfield’s Act, we’d still be on the old calendar. That would make today the 17 February—the 17 February 1958 , you know. But it would still be Friday. That cycle never changes. It’s followed in unbroken sequence at least since the time of King Solomon. It really makes you think, don’t you agree?” I nodded and took another sip of my brandy. No doubt, I was to be held fast by the voyage bore. But I now owed the man. If he wanted to give the whole crossing to lectures on the French Revolutionary Calendar, or whatever else took his fancy, it was nothing less than his right. I perched the remainder of my cigarette on the ashtray and pushed up another one from its package.

“Thanks for the offer, dear boy. But I’ve already availed myself of the young waitress’s hospitality.” He took a pipe out of his blazer pocket. Clamping it between the jaws of his artificial hand, he broke the seal on a small tin box and pinched out a plug of something black and greasy. I reached over with my lighter and helped get it going. Stanhope sucked hard. Pipe smokers aren’t supposed to breathe in. He did. A moment later, he blew out a cloud of acrid smoke that had a hint of cannabis about it.

Now that the American music laws no longer applied, the piano quartet struck up with an arrangement of Non Piu Andrai . As with tobacco and alcohol, real music was another sign that we were passing back within the realms of civilisation. Anslinger’s present taste ran to mournful folk songs and a few hymns, and, like all his other tastes, he’d imposed these on his subjects with grim enthusiasm. The Republican Guard was always breaking up private gatherings where “anti-American” music might be played. Almost every day in Chicago, I’d seen trucks going back and forth in the street over heaps of confiscated gramophone records, and seen those caught with them paraded up and down with placards about their necks. The only public dissidence I’d heard was from a decrepit Jew, who would get up in Lindbergh Square and sing pieces from Irving Berlin. For some reason, the authorities never touched him. It didn’t do, however, to stand about and listen to him.

“I’d like to thank you for your help back in the airport,” I said, once the band had moved on to selections from Gilbert and Sullivan. “I would have had the boxes stowed. But I didn’t want their contents to risk a soaking in the hold.” Stanhope smiled and puffed out another cloud of black smoke. At the table next to us, a man dressed in American business clothes looked round and scowled. He waved ineffectually at the smoke with what looked like a list of stock prices.

“Oh, think nothing of it—nothing at all,” Stanhope said with a smile that now showed two lines of cracked, brownish teeth. “For my own part, I feel honoured to have been of assistance to one of our most distinguished younger historians. I read the first volume of your Winston biography when I was still in Calcutta. He’s not popular out there, you may be aware. The natives don’t like him for the trouble he made over the India Bill. Our own people don’t like him—it’s all to do with that Birmingham speech he made back in ’43. But I read your first volume, and I think you did as much for him as could be done. No doubt of it—after all, he was a fine writer.”

Stanhope might have said more, but the cannabis in his pipe tobacco was now kicking in. He stretched his legs forward and leaned back in his chair. As his head rolled sideways and his mouth fell open, I thought he’d suddenly nodded off. Another thirty seconds, though, and he’d pulled himself up and reached again for his pipe. It had gone out. I leaned forward again to help get things going properly. He acknowledged the help with an expulsion of air that set his moustaches an inch from his face. He sucked hard and blew out a cloud of now astonishingly dense smoke. The American he’d earlier annoyed started an impatient cough and, this time, put a handkerchief over his mouth. We ignored him.

“I suppose it’s Churchill stuff in your boxes,” he said. I nodded. Trust the old fool to have left virtually all his later papers to the Americans. Then again in that sad, final decade of his life, his affection for the land of his mother had grown regardless of its troubles. So, his executors had begged and scraped to endow the Churchill Collection, and had deposited the last papers there just before the student uprising began that had reduced Harvard and most other university towns to an imitation of Ypres circa 1915.

“The family asked me for a second volume,” I explained. “It won’t have the drama of his main career. But there was much of interest in his last quarter century.” Or so I hoped. I thought of the mound of paper I was bringing back—unsorted originals, mostly, but also photographic copies of copies held under lock and key in Chicago. To justify the bribes and all the attendant risks, I’d have to work these into a bloody interesting narrative. Indeed, if, since about half way through the first volume, I’d changed my mind about the man and his times, I really couldn’t afford to let that show in the second.

“You didn’t have any problems in America?” Stanhope asked with an effort at delicacy. I could see he was looking at my hands. Instinctively, I put them together, covering the fingernails. “They can have some rather hurtful rules in their hotels and restaurants,” he added. I was thinking to change the subject. But there was nothing accusing in Stanhope’s voice. Besides, he already seemed to know enough about me. And he’d served in India. No point trying to evade the point.

“My father was a headmaster in Karachi,” I said quietly. “He retired to England with my mother in ’26. It was a late marriage—she was one of the teaching assistants. You heard from the American that I was born in Reigate.”

“I thought as much,” Stanhope said, dropping his own voice. “I’d have said your mother was from the north—that, or you took most of your father’s colouring. Well, we’re all subjects of the Queen-Empress, even if some of us”—he tapped the immigration control card he’d been issued—“take a little longer than others to get into the Imperial Motherland.” He laughed and raised his glass. “Yes, England isn’t America—and praise be for that!” He looked down for an inspection of the dinner menu one of the waitresses had just laid out. In the resulting silence, I transferred the Woodbines to my cigarette case. The American at the next table was still making his quiet fuss. Now I took the trouble to give him a proper—and what I hoped an insolent—inspection, I could see his face and clothes had the most decided look of a man who’d done well out of the Great Pacification. Certainly, he was drinking only mineral water. If he wanted to bring his country’s laws with him, that was his affair. They didn’t apply to me. I lit another cigarette and breathed easily in. For all I’d have no one waiting for me at Croydon, I was looking forward to England. For the moment, my bottom had stopped itching.