Churchill’s Hour. Michael DobbsЧитать онлайн книгу.

       ONE

       Christmas Day, 1940.

      Winston Churchill sat propped up against the pillows of his bed. The room was cold, a sullen December sky rattling at the mullioned window, but the old man didn’t complain. The foul weather had kept the bombers at bay last night. Peace on earth, at least until tomorrow.

      A servant entered the room carrying a pair of freshly ironed trousers on one arm and a silver tray on the other. Frank Sawyers was short, hairless, with piercing blue eyes and two missing teeth. He was no more than forty years in age yet his attitude was timeless.

      ‘Did you knock?’ Churchill’s brow was split by a crease of irritation.

      ‘As always, zur,’ Sawyers said, a trifle wearily and with a pronounced lisp and Cumbrian burr.

      ‘And what’s that disgusting green stuff?’ The Prime Minister took off his reading glasses and used them to indicate the jar on the silver tray. ‘No medicine, do you hear me? I’ll have none of your quackery. I’m not ill.’

      ‘Chutney. Home-made. By way of me Christmas present to yer, like. With season’s greetings.’

      Churchill stared at the jar, his blue eyes alert as though suspecting some plot. Sawyers had a knack of producing exotic and unexpected gifts, even through the constraints of wartime, and Churchill knew that no matter how alarming the sour green pickle might appear, it would taste delicious. He didn’t have the knack himself; he’d given only books for presents, and mostly his own books at that.

      As he approached the bed, the servant glared at Nelson, the patch-eyed cat who lay sprawled across the eiderdown at Churchill’s feet. Nelson possessed a foul temper that had grown ever more unreliable from spending too many nights in Downing Street during the air raids, and Sawyers’ loathing for the cat had grown with the number of scratch marks left on the back of his hands. He gave the beast a wide berth as he placed the tray on the bedside table and dealt with the refreshed trousers. Then he took down a vivid red silk bathrobe that was hanging on the back of the door.

      ‘Not yet,’ Churchill said, ‘I’ve not finished my papers.’

      ‘You’ll be late,’ the other man insisted. ‘Family’s already gathered round fire, and if you’re not down there soon, Mr Oliver will be on serenading us all with his piano music.’

      ‘Bloody racket.’

      ‘Exactly,’ Sawyers agreed, holding up the bathrobe in the manner of a matador tempting a bull.

      ‘Not now, not now,’ Churchill said, shaking the paper in his hand. ‘D’you know there’s a Nazi battleship on the loose in the southern Atlantic?’

      ‘I dare say it’ll still be there after luncheon.’ The servant stood resolute. ‘You can sink it then.’

      Churchill was contemplating the next phase of this battle for domestic supremacy when, in some distant part of the old house, notes began to cascade from a piano and a baby