Churchill's Hour by Michael Dobbs

had watched in the operations room as, one after one, squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes had been thrown into the sky against the onrushing enemy. There came a moment during that afternoon when not a single aircraft was left in reserve, when it would have taken just one more wave of bombers to have swept Britain aside. But it hadn’t come.
    Afterwards, as they had driven back towards Chequers, Churchill had seemed buried deep within his own thoughts, exhausted, his chin sunk low upon his chest. After a while he had stirred and turned to Pamela.
    â€˜Do you keep a diary?’
    â€˜No,’ she had replied, startled.
    â€˜You should. These are moments that, if we survive, we should allow no one to forget.’ Then he had fallen back into silence for several minutes, until the chin came up once more. ‘Anyway, if you don’t have a diary, what the hell will you live on when you get tired of Randolph?’
    â€˜I shan’t get tired of Randolph.’
    â€˜Everyone gets tired of Randolph,’ he had told her.
    But she hadn’t. Randolph was a handful, ofcourse, garrulous, bibulous, fond of reading the histories of Macaulay to her in bed. When she had visited him at his commando training headquarters in Scotland, she’d been alarmed to discover that he had run up a hotel bill of gargantuan size, but he was unabashed. ‘ Morituris bibendum,’ he had hollered, which he loosely translated as: ‘Those who are about to die deserve a bloody drink.’
    Anyway, he told her they could afford the occasional drink, and a little light gambling, too. It was only amongst his close friends, he explained, and he won more than he ever lost. After the baby had been born he’d found them an old rectory in Hertfordshire, rented for a pittance with the help of his father’s name. It was their first home; Pamela loved it, and him. When he was there the walls echoed with excitement, and when he was away she felt nothing but draughts and missed him with a power that at times astonished her. During the day she would wander around the house in one of his old uniform jackets, smelling him, touching him, trying to imagine him beside her, and at night she would turn off the gas fire and go to bed early under a pile of blankets and with a copy of Macaulay beneath the pillow.
    She missed him all the more when she discovered she was probably pregnant again. Christmas at Chequers.
    She was young, not yet twenty-one, lacking inexperience of things, but she wanted so much to show him that he had found the best wife, mother and housekeeper he ever could.
    Then his letter arrived. It offered an apology, of course, and a renewed vow of eternal self-denial which this time, he told her, he meant. But the self-denial Randolph required was, in truth, all on Pamela’s part. He sent her detailed instructions that she was to pay off his gambling debts by instalments of perhaps ten pounds a month, to a list of names that seemed endless. He didn’t suggest any way in which this sum might be raised. It was to be her problem—and exclusively her problem, for he forbade her to breathe a word of this to his father. He made it sound as though somehow it were all her fault.
    Three days after the letter arrived, the bleeding started, accompanied by excruciating pain that left her bent in two and crying for mercy. It was only with the greatest difficulty that she made it to the bathroom, bleeding profusely.
    She had been pregnant; she was no longer. And would never be again.
    Yet another American had appeared on Churchill’s doorstep. In the last few weeks the Prime Minister seemed to have done little but charge up and down the stairs of Downing Street to the tune of ‘YankeeDoodle’, but he didn’t complain. It was far better than being marched up and down Whitehall to the sound of a glockenspiel.
    John ‘Gil’ Winant had been sent to replace the excruciating Joe Kennedy as Ambassador to