One evening in 1963 we sat down as a family for tea, as usual, in the kitchen. We only used the dining room when we had guests. I occupied my usual place at the red-topped Formica table, the kitchen cabinet behind me, cooker and the anthracite stove ahead, the radio on my right, where somebody was droning on about the stock market. We were eating haddock. Dad asked mum where she got her fish from.
“The fishmonger at Broomhill Cross.”
“Mm. You’ll stop buying fish from him.”
“Why?”
Apparently the fishmonger had been heard to cast disparaging remarks about Winston. Something about his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s when, allegedly and in some unspecified way, he had fiddled his budget. Mum listened to this patiently, made no comment, and simply nodded in acquiescence. But I couldn’t help but notice that in the coming days and weeks I was still being sent round to Broomhill Cross to buy haddock or whiting or mackerel or, occasionally, salmon. The subject was not raised at the kitchen table again.
My father had a great word for Winston, who was still a sitting Member of Parliament. Of course that had very much to do with the great man’s wartime leadership. When the war broke out in 1939 Dad had just started as a constable in the City of Glasgow Police. In 1941 came the Clydebank Blitz. Everything was flattened. I think the sight of the devastation had a tremendous effect upon him, because shortly afterwards he volunteered for the RAF. He went to London for a short period of induction, thence off to train in Canada. The Battle of the Atlantic was in full swing, and my dad told me that in Sunday morning service on deck, the troops sang “For those in peril on the seas” with great fervour.
We had on our shelves the six volumes of Churchill’s History of the Second World War in the rather handsome London Reprint Society publication with its yellow hardback covers. I still have them. I didn’t think to attempt to read them at the time, but I was curious enough to leaf through them. They were obviously conceived and composed on a massive scale, each volume commencing with the “Moral of the Work” – In War: Resolution, in Defeat: Defiance, in Victory: Magnanimity, in Peace: Goodwill. It almost sounded like a template for living. I wondered if I should adopt Winston as my hero. Even amid all the stale statistics about troop displacements gathered in appendices, and the humdrum correspondence with his generals, something of the glamour of the man came through. I flicked through Volume 1, The Gathering Storm, whose two parts, From War to War, and The Twilight War, each ended on a personal note which I found totally gripping. Before September 3rd, 1939, Winston was out of office, but sufficiently prominent in his condemnation of Nazi Germany to know he might be a target for assassination. That was why he invited his former Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Thomson, out of retirement.
I told him to come along and bring his pistol with him. I got out my own weapons, which were good. While one slept the other watched. Thus nobody would have had a walk-over.
In my imagination I couldn’t hear Mr Macmillan say anything like that.
And I was quite captivated by Winston’s account of his acceptance, at long last, of the premiership, the crucial meeting with Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, and the subsequent summons to the palace. The light banter with His Majesty.
“I don’t suppose you have any idea why I have sent for you.”
“Sir, I couldn’t possibly imagine.”
So at long last he was asked to form a government. “I felt as if I were walking with destiny…” And when Winston went to bed at 3 am, he slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams.
Facts are better than dreams.
And I wondered about that. Were facts truly better than dreams? Was so-called “quotidian experience” (by which I think was meant everyday life) truly richer than the life of the imagination? I had my doubts.
I was reminded of all this stuff on Saturday night because the movie Darkest Hour was on the telly (BBC 2, 8 pm). Believe it or not, this was actually the first time I have switched my telly on this year. I was slightly surprised the set was still working. I was supposed to be meeting up with friends at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall to hear Nicola Benedetti play Elgar’s violin concerto, but I’m still recovering from Die Grippe, and I didn’t fancy trying to suppress a coughing fit for an hour. So I relieved myself of the burden of negotiating the Glasgow roads’ permanent state of “upness” and stayed at home. What better pastime for the debilitated than to stare passively at the gogglebox? Even if I’d seen the movie before.
There’s much to admire about the film, not least the performances of Gary Oldman, Lily James, Kristin Scott Thomas, et al. On the other hand I found its pervasive gloom – literally rather than figuratively – to be a pain in the neck, much like mumbled diction. I suppose the clue is in the movie’s title. Okay it’s dark, I get that, but I believe this unrelenting use of cinematic gloom is what literary theorists call “the fallacy of imitative form.”
The historic events of May 1940 are faithfully recorded, insofar as we can be sure, with one glaring exception, when Winston goes AWOL and takes a ride in the London Underground to gauge the sentiments of the people. Preposterous. One of his contemporaries once said that Winston had never even ridden on a bus, or if he had, it would have been just for a lark. One strained voluntarily to suspend one’s disbelief.
But a nice conceit of the film was the notion that when Winston tried to articulate the language of political compromise and negotiation that was being thrust upon him by his cabinet, he almost developed a motor dysphasia, a failure both to conceive and to express language, such that his typist Lily James was unable to transcribe the words. So he stuck to his guns, and finally talked everybody round to his vision, in defiance of every rule of common sense.
Darkest Hour is all about political intrigue, and the exercise of the sinews of power. One cannot help but compare Winston’s plight with that of the present incumbent of that self-same political office. Whose coat is on a more shoogly peg – Winston or Keir? Sir Keir might resolve to follow the advice Winston gave to the boys at Harrow. “Never give in, never give in, never never never never…”
But he might ruefully remind himself that even Winston was circumspect enough to add a rider:
“…except to convictions of honour and good sense.”
jamescalumcampbell 