please as a boy scout.
But what really put Troy off him were the jokes. Troy thought of himself as a man with a sense of humour, but Khrushchev’s jokes struck him as tasteless and adolescent, as though he were
striving too hard to outrage.
The first evening they did a mind-boggling, whistle-stop tour of the sights of London, faster than an American senator running for reelection in the boondocks, pressing the flesh while
double-parked. The Royal Festival Hall, that stirring example of the British Soviet School of Architecture; dark, brooding, ancient Westminster Abbey; sublime St Paul’s, a surviving Wren
masterpiece in the midst of a sea of wartime ruins; and the floodlit white walls of the Tower of London at dusk, with its red and black romance of beefeaters and ravens. All in less than two
hours.
At the RFH Khrushchev appeared singularly unimpressed. He looked at the prices on the bar tariff and said he’d come back on pay day when he could afford it. Not bad, thought Troy, some
sense of the wage packet if nothing else. At the Tower, informed that, according to legend, the empire would cease when the ravens left, Khrushchev quipped that he couldn’t see any ravens in
the first place. Nelson putting the telescope to his blind eye. A few smiles were forced but no one laughed. Hardly offensive, but Troy began to wonder if the man had any tact.
At St Paul’s—a building known to still even the arid souls of atheists like Troy—the old Dean showed them the vast dome, in an eerie silence of muted voices and leather
footsteps, and remarked with some pride that this was the spot on which a German incendiary had landed in 1940, how the cathedral had been saved, the damage repaired, and how London had lost
seventeen of its precious Wren churches. Khrushchev blithely remarked that the Dean wouldn’t have to worry about repairs when the Russians dropped ‘the bomb’.
He did not need to qualify the term. ‘The Bomb’ was ‘T HE B OMB ’. Not HE or incendiary, not 500lb or a ton, but mega tons—a word still virtually
incomprehensible to most people, often paraphrased in multiples of Hiroshima: twenty Hiroshimas; fifty Hiroshimas. The same town atomised time after time in the power of metaphorical fission. In
his mind’s eye Troy saw tiny atolls in the South Pacific going whumpf and disappearing from sight beneath the icon of the times, a colossal mushroom cloud.
The Dean looked blankly at Khrushchev. The presence of an interpreter, the passage of words through a second language and a second voice, seemed somehow to deflect the sense of just who had
spoken, to deflate the sense of menace and the contrivance at outrage. Bought the time for tact that Khrushchev himself could not muster. The Dean led off, taking them in search of John
Donne’s memorial. Just behind his right shoulder Troy heard a muttered ‘Jesus Christ’ from Mulligan.
Troy rapidly lost count of the number of trips they had made. He seemed to be in and out of Claridge’s and Number 10 three or four times a day; and each evening he would dutifully report
to Cobb, usually telling him that Khrushchev had said nothing of any significance within earshot. Or did MI5 and MI6 really want to know that he had thrown a tantrum when he couldn’t find a
diamond cufflink, or that he complained constantly about the tea? And that on one occasion Troy had found him crawling around the bedroom of his suite on all fours, and had been unable to tell
whether this was another search for the missing cufflink or capitulation to the effects of his favoured drink, red pepper vodka?
On the evening of the second day, Downing Street had given a formal dinner for their guests. B & K met C & A, former Prime Ministers Churchill and Attlee, and the Leader of the
Opposition, Prime Minister-Apparent Hugh Gaitskell. The Night of the Nobs, as Clark put it.
It was an easy shift ‘doing’ Downing Street. One simply escorted the Russians there, handed over to the
But what really put Troy off him were the jokes. Troy thought of himself as a man with a sense of humour, but Khrushchev’s jokes struck him as tasteless and adolescent, as though he were
striving too hard to outrage.
The first evening they did a mind-boggling, whistle-stop tour of the sights of London, faster than an American senator running for reelection in the boondocks, pressing the flesh while
double-parked. The Royal Festival Hall, that stirring example of the British Soviet School of Architecture; dark, brooding, ancient Westminster Abbey; sublime St Paul’s, a surviving Wren
masterpiece in the midst of a sea of wartime ruins; and the floodlit white walls of the Tower of London at dusk, with its red and black romance of beefeaters and ravens. All in less than two
hours.
At the RFH Khrushchev appeared singularly unimpressed. He looked at the prices on the bar tariff and said he’d come back on pay day when he could afford it. Not bad, thought Troy, some
sense of the wage packet if nothing else. At the Tower, informed that, according to legend, the empire would cease when the ravens left, Khrushchev quipped that he couldn’t see any ravens in
the first place. Nelson putting the telescope to his blind eye. A few smiles were forced but no one laughed. Hardly offensive, but Troy began to wonder if the man had any tact.
At St Paul’s—a building known to still even the arid souls of atheists like Troy—the old Dean showed them the vast dome, in an eerie silence of muted voices and leather
footsteps, and remarked with some pride that this was the spot on which a German incendiary had landed in 1940, how the cathedral had been saved, the damage repaired, and how London had lost
seventeen of its precious Wren churches. Khrushchev blithely remarked that the Dean wouldn’t have to worry about repairs when the Russians dropped ‘the bomb’.
He did not need to qualify the term. ‘The Bomb’ was ‘T HE B OMB ’. Not HE or incendiary, not 500lb or a ton, but mega tons—a word still virtually
incomprehensible to most people, often paraphrased in multiples of Hiroshima: twenty Hiroshimas; fifty Hiroshimas. The same town atomised time after time in the power of metaphorical fission. In
his mind’s eye Troy saw tiny atolls in the South Pacific going whumpf and disappearing from sight beneath the icon of the times, a colossal mushroom cloud.
The Dean looked blankly at Khrushchev. The presence of an interpreter, the passage of words through a second language and a second voice, seemed somehow to deflect the sense of just who had
spoken, to deflate the sense of menace and the contrivance at outrage. Bought the time for tact that Khrushchev himself could not muster. The Dean led off, taking them in search of John
Donne’s memorial. Just behind his right shoulder Troy heard a muttered ‘Jesus Christ’ from Mulligan.
Troy rapidly lost count of the number of trips they had made. He seemed to be in and out of Claridge’s and Number 10 three or four times a day; and each evening he would dutifully report
to Cobb, usually telling him that Khrushchev had said nothing of any significance within earshot. Or did MI5 and MI6 really want to know that he had thrown a tantrum when he couldn’t find a
diamond cufflink, or that he complained constantly about the tea? And that on one occasion Troy had found him crawling around the bedroom of his suite on all fours, and had been unable to tell
whether this was another search for the missing cufflink or capitulation to the effects of his favoured drink, red pepper vodka?
On the evening of the second day, Downing Street had given a formal dinner for their guests. B & K met C & A, former Prime Ministers Churchill and Attlee, and the Leader of the
Opposition, Prime Minister-Apparent Hugh Gaitskell. The Night of the Nobs, as Clark put it.
It was an easy shift ‘doing’ Downing Street. One simply escorted the Russians there, handed over to the
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