Read The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz for Free Online Page B

small group of other officials went along.
    Upon landing, they realized immediately that things were much worse than they had expected. Officers assigned to meet them told Ismay that they expected the Germans to arrive in Paris within the next few days. Wrote Ismay, “None of us could believe it.”
    Reynaud and his generals again pleaded for more aircraft. After much agonizing, and with an eye, as always, on history, Churchill promised the ten squadrons. He telegraphed his War Cabinet that night: “It would not be good historically if their requests were denied and their ruin resulted.”
    He and his party returned to London the next morning.
    The prospect of sending so many fighters to France worried private secretary Colville. In his diary he wrote, “This means denuding this country of a quarter of its first-line fighter defense.”
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    A S THE SITUATION IN France degraded, so rose the fear that Hitler would now turn his full attention to Britain. Invasion seemed a certainty. The deep current of appeasement that had persistently flowed within Whitehall and English society began to surface anew, with fresh calls for a peace arrangement with Hitler, the old instinct burbling up like groundwater through a lawn.
    In the Churchill household, such defeatist talk inspired only rage. One afternoon, Churchill invited David Margesson, his chief whip in Parliament, for lunch, along with Clementine and daughter Mary. Margesson was one of the so-called Men of Munich, who had previously endorsed appeasement and had supported Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Agreement.
    As lunch progressed, Clementine found herself growing more and more unsettled.
    Ever since Churchill’s appointment as prime minister, she had become his ever-present ally, hosting luncheons and dinners and answering innumerable letters from the public. She often wore a head scarf, wrapped turban-style, that was printed with tiny copies of war posters and slogans exhorting, “Lend to Defend,” “Go to It,” and the like. She was now fifty-five years old and had been married to Churchill for thirty-two of them.Upon their engagement, Churchill’s good friend Violet Bonham Carter had expressed grave doubts about Clementine’s worthiness, forecasting that she “could never be more to him than an ornamental sideboard as I have often said and she is unexacting enough not to mind not being more.”
    Clementine, however, proved to be anything but a “sideboard.” Tall, lean, and displaying a “finished, flawless beauty,” as Bonham Carter conceded, she was strong-willed and independent, to the point where she often took vacations alone, absent from the family for long periods. In 1935, she traveled solo on an excursion to the Far East that lasted more than four months.She and Churchill kept separate bedrooms; sex happened only upon her explicit invitation.It was to Bonham Carter that Clementine, soon after being wed, revealed Churchill’s peculiar taste in underclothes: pale pink and made of silk. Clementine was undaunted by argument, no matter how lofty her opponent, and was said to be the only person who could effectively stand up to Churchill.
    Now, over lunch, her anger rose. Margesson espoused a pacifism that she found repulsive. She quickly reached a point where she could stand it no longer, and lit into him for his past role as an appeaser, implicitly blaming him for helping bring Britain to its current dire position. As daughter Mary put it, she “flayed him verbally before sweeping out.” This was not uncommon. Family members talked of “Mama’s sweeps.” Churchill, describing one incident in which the victim received a particularly vivid rebuke, quipped, “Clemmie dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree.”
    In this case, she did not sweep out alone. She dragged Mary with her. They had lunch at the Grill in the nearby Carlton Hotel, famous for its gleaming interior rendered in gold and white.
    Mary was mortified by her mother’s behavior.