Winston Churchill - Between Victory and Defeat: A Private Life

1955, Hyde Park Gate, London

I write this in Hyde Park Gate in London, after the war and after my second leaving of Downing Street, in those years when people still rise when I enter a room and still lower their voices when they speak my name, but no longer send for me before the important paper is signed. The house is full before breakfast. A secretary comes in with the post tied in blue ribbon. Another places cuttings from the morning newspapers beside the marmalade. The telephone rings in a room beyond my own and I hear the maid answer, then pause, then say, very carefully, that I am resting, or shaving, or still at Chartwell, according to what answer will best protect the hour. I know all the tricks because I once relied upon them.

The black hat box by the stand in the hall contains old speeches copied afresh. On the library table lies a red dispatch box that no longer comes from the Prime Minister's room but arrives all the same, filled with requests for forewords, appeals for attendance, invitations to lend my name, my memory, my face, my blessing. In one tray there are proofs from the memoirs. In another are notes from young Members of Parliament who wish to be told how to sound older than they are. Every item has been brought with civility. Every item presumes an answer.

Age makes the body a disputatious colleague. In the morning my hand is thick and slow. I can button a cuff and then find myself short of breath from the exertion. The old stroke taught the right side of me a lesson it has not forgotten. Lord Moran watches the colour in my face with the air of a man reading an unwelcome cable. Clementine studies the set of my shoulders and knows, before I admit it, whether the day will hold. I can still work, but the work now comes surrounded by cushions, naps, warnings, and glances exchanged over my head by people who love me enough to organise me.

That is one reason I have taken to writing in this fashion, with the door shut if I can manage it and the papers pushed into my own order. Dictation is too easily made tidy. A spoken page invites a helpful hand. A helpful hand arranges the sentence, clips the temper, straightens the chronology, and turns a live recollection into something fit to be indexed. I do not want to be indexed before I am dead.

Another reason is simpler. I can feel how readily a public man is turned into furniture while he is still warm. A speech is quoted after the room in which it was spoken has been demolished. A warning is repeated by men who did not hear the voice that carried it. A decision taken after midnight with three ashtrays overflowing on the table returns twenty years later as one polished line beneath a portrait. If I leave nothing but polished lines behind me, I shall deserve the fate of every schoolbook bust in England.