Doctor Who: Players: 50th Anniversary Edition by Dicks Terrance

Author:Dicks, Terrance [Dicks, Terrance]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781448140275
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

INVITATION

WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL was building a wall.

He was in the garden of his country house, Chartwell Manor in Kent. What he liked to do most of the time was to eat and drink, to smoke his cigars, and talk – about politics, history, art, literature, any of the hundred-and-one subjects that interested him. He liked to write. He already had a formidable number of books to his credit. When he felt tired and drained, he liked to paint, here at Chartwell or in the south of France.

But when things were going badly, when he felt tired and angry and despairing, he built walls. Something about the mixing of the mortar, the careful and laborious placing of the bricks, the steady rising of the wall itself, brought him a kind of solace.

As he worked, Churchill’s mind drifted back over his life. Sometimes it seemed a very long life indeed.

He was sixty-one.

He thought of his escape from prison in the Boer War, of his flight from that mysterious chateau in the Great War.

He had served for a year on the Western Front, fighting in the trenches with the Scots Fusiliers and ending up as a Lieutenant-Colonel.

A year later he had returned to Parliament, feeling that by risking his own life in battle he had, at least to some extent, purged the shame of the failed Dardanelles attack. Moreover, his friends told him, and he knew in his heart that it was true, that he could make a far greater contribution to the war effort in the Government than in the trenches.

He had helped to pioneer the development of the tank, the war-winning weapon that eventually freed the troops from the hell of the trenches, and ended the war as Minister of Munitions.

After the war, for many years, his political career had prospered. He had held most of the important Cabinet posts, including that of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Now, however, in the mid-1930s, Winston Churchill’s career was in decline. He had quarrelled with his party leaders, and had been out of the Cabinet for many years. His unpopularity with the Conservative party, and in particular with its leaders, was made worse by the fact that Winston Churchill had found a cause.

Ever since Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Churchill, and Churchill alone, had raised his voice in repeated warnings about the Nazi menace, about the dangers of German rearmament. But nobody wanted to know. The only result had been the virtual end of his political career.

Perhaps it was time he accepted the inevitable and retired. He could write and paint – and build walls.

He sighed, and put another brick in place.

A slim, beautiful woman in her early fifties came down the long path from the house towards him. She was Clementine Churchill, Winston Churchill’s beloved Clemmie. They had married in 1908 and, as Churchill said, lived happily ever after. Clemmie was strong-minded enough to manage him, and intelligent enough not to let it show.

She was also the only one who dared to disturb him when he was in this kind of mood.

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