Churchill's Hour by Michael Dobbs Read Free Book Online Page B

had many more guns than the British, so the troopship conveying Randolph’s unit was required to take the long and laborious route to Egypt—round the tip of Africa and up through the Red Sea. The Glenroy was desperately overcrowded, and matters were made worse by the constant bickering that took place between the naval and army elements on board. In the view of No. 8 Commando, the captain was incompetent and soon was being referred to as ‘the bugger on the bridge’. The ship’s crew, in turn, regarded Randolph’s unit as ‘long-haired nancies’. It was partly a clash of class. The seamen were roughhanded workers—social underdogs, often from the slums—while many of those who formed No. 8 Commando had joined up straight from the bar of White’s Club in St James’s. Amongst these ill-mixed men who were crowded onto the ship, Randolph stood out most prominently of all, for no one couldforget that he was somehow different, and if the point managed to slip anyone’s attention Randolph was always on hand to remind them. He and his closest friends were impossible, articulate, extravagant, impertinent, and took great pleasure in being gratuitously bloody rude. Long before the voyage was over, one of the crew had daubed a slogan on the lower deck: ‘Never in the history of humankind have so many been buggered about by so few.’
    Randolph loved his father, and perhaps too much, almost to the point of destruction. He had been brought up at his father’s table and encouraged to be his own man, yet by insisting so stridently on his uniqueness Randolph turned himself into no more than a pale shadow. He would bicker and abuse, ignoring all criticism, just as he had learnt from Winston, but he had failed to capture the essential counterbalance, that elusive quality of grace. In any event, what can be intriguing from an old man is inexcusable from the young; what was seen as drive and determination in the father appeared as little more than bloody-mindedness in the son. And Randolph, like Winston, would never, never, never give in.
    He’d promised he would stop gambling but it was a long voyage—three weeks—cooped up on the Glenroy in the growing heat and with little else for distraction, apart from alcohol. Just like White’s Club. There was poker, roulette, chemin-de-ferevery night—and for very high stakes—hell, they were probably going to die, so what did it matter? They would gamble on anything: the number of empty bottles in a barrel or the number of peas on a plate, double or nothing.
    In spite of being his father’s son, Randolph was a rotten gambler and a worse drunk. And when he was drunk he never knew when the time had come to walk away.
    In three weeks at sea, Randolph lost three thousand pounds. Enough to pay the rent on the family home until the baby was well into old age. A small fortune, even for someone who wasn’t already broke.
    Up until the baby had been born, Pamela had spent much of her time at Downing Street with Randolph’s parents. During air raids she had slept in the wine cellar, in a bunk below Winston—‘one Churchill inside me, and one Churchill above,’ as she told it. It was a relationship that drew her close to her father-in-law and at times even made Randolph’s sisters envious, for while their lives seemed always to be touched by chaos, Pamela grew fat with her child and became almost a good-luck charm for the old man as he fought to keep the bombers at bay and the invasion unlaunched. ‘You are what this war is all about,’ he once told her, placing his hand on her protruding stomach.
    The previous September, at the most crucial hour in the Battle of Britain, Churchill had driven with Pamela and Clemmie from Chequers to the RAF’s headquarters at Uxbridge in order to see for themselves the progress of the extraordinary conflict that was taking place above southern England. They