Read Online The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 by William Manchester, Paul Reid - Free Book Online Page B

house, on his master’s lap. At the point when Bill Sikes was about to drown his dog to put the police off his track, Churchill covered Rufus’s eyes with his hand. He said, “Don’t look now, dear. I’ll tell you all about it afterwards.” 53
    Predictably, Churchill’s taste in entertainment was unpredictable. In literature it was excellent, though of course he preferred British authors. Music was another matter; aged eleven, he had asked his parents for cello lessons, had been turned down, and had developed instead a fondness for what his daughter Mary calls “somewhat primitive” tunes—such music hall favorites as “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-wow,” “Ta-ra-ra-boom-der-ay,” “Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line,” and a curious ballad about a husband who discovers that his bride has a wooden leg: “I Married Half a Woman and Half a Tree.” He enjoyed any movie about the Royal Navy; otherwise, his preference in films was less discriminating than one might expect. When he learned that Rudolf Hess had parachuted into Scotland, for example, he was watching the Marx Brothers. His favorite star was Deanna Durbin. His favorite motion picture—he must have seen it twenty times—was
That Hamilton Woman
with Laurence Olivier playing Lord Nelson and Vivien Leigh as his mistress. He was always lachrymose at the end of it. But probably the trashiest movie he ever watched was a sentimental pastiche based on a novel by Paul Gallico. Entitled
Never Take No for an Answer,
its chief character was a little Italian orphan whose donkey, named Violetta, helped him run a grocery stand. Violetta sickened. She could be healed, the boy believed, if he could take her to that hub of miracles, the Shrine of Saint Francis. So the orphan embarked on a journey, appealing in vain to a series of clerics: priests, archdeacons, bishops, archbishops, cardinals. Each time the boy was turned down the camera would flash back to Violetta, sprawled in her stable, ready for the last rites. Churchill wept inconsolably. “Oh, the donkey’s dead!” he would sob. The others would reassure him: “No, no, Prime Minister, she’s still alive.” Churchill would recover and declare firmly: “If the donkey dies, I shan’t stay. I shall go out.” Finally the boy, in his finest hour, was granted an audience with the pope. The pontiff reversed the lower rulings and made an appointment at the shrine for Violetta. In the last scene a blazing cone of light, slanting down from heaven, revealed the donkey, bursting with health, beside her loyal, trudging little friend. The prime minister arose slowly from his chair, his eyes luminous and his cheeks streaming. 54

    J oyously human, anachronistic and wise, capable of willful misjudgment and blinding vision, dwarfing all those around him, he was the most benevolent of statesmen and the most gifted. Today the ordinary Englishman lives a better life than his fathers did, and for that he is largely indebted to Labour. But the extraordinary man has a harder time of it. He is trapped in regulations, his rise is impeded; his country pays a price. And even the masses seem to sense that while the socialists love ideas, Churchill, the unrepentant Victorian Tory, loved life. Since that love was balanced by a hatred of injustice, the average Briton owes him more than a higher standard of living. He owes him his very liberty.
    “History,” wrote Aristotle, “is what Alcibiades did and suffered.” Social scientists impeach that, but Churchill never doubted it. Because the man was matched by his times, he achieved immortality and changed the world, for good or for ill—though not as he had expected or would have wanted, for he was not the only giant in the century. In the long reach of events the impact of the Churchillian era upon his island was decidedly mixed. Hitler lost the war but he didn’t lose it to Britain alone. Churchill, in desperate need of allies, forged a coalition with the United States