Winter of the World (50 page)

‘No!’ said Lloyd indignantly. ‘We can’t have an earl for Prime Minister at a time like this. Anyway, he’s an appeaser, just as bad as Chamberlain!’

‘I agree,’ said Bernie. ‘But who else is there?’

‘What about Churchill?’

‘You know what Stanley Baldwin said about Churchill?’ Baldwin, a Conservative, had been Prime Minister before Chamberlain. ‘When Winston was born, lots of fairies swooped down
on his cradle with gifts – imagination, eloquence, industry, ability – and then came a fairy who said: ‘No person has a right to so many gifts,’ picked him up, and gave him
such a shake and a twist that he was denied judgement and wisdom.’

Lloyd smiled. ‘Very witty, but is it true?’

‘There’s something in it. In the last war he was responsible for the Dardanelles campaign, which was a terrible defeat for us. Now he’s pushed us into the Norwegian adventure,
another failure. He’s a fine orator, but the evidence suggests he has a tendency to wishful thinking.’

Lloyd said: ‘He was right about the need to rearm in the thirties – when everyone else was against it, including the Labour Party.’

‘Churchill will be calling for rearmament in Paradise, when the lion lies down with the lamb.’

‘I think we need someone with an aggressive streak. We want a prime minister who will bark, not whimper.’

‘Well, you may get your wish. The tellers are coming back.’

The votes were announced. The Ayes had 280, the Noes 200. Chamberlain had won. There was uproar in the chamber. The Prime Minister’s supporters cheered, but others yelled at him to
resign.

Lloyd was bitterly disappointed. ‘How can they want to keep him, after all that?’

‘Don’t jump to conclusions,’ said Bernie as the Prime Minister left and the noise subsided. Bernie was making calculations with a pencil in the margin of the
Evening
News
. ‘The government usually has a majority of about two hundred and forty. That’s dropped to eighty.’ He scribbled numbers, adding and subtracting. ‘Taking a rough
guess at the number of MPs absent, I reckon about forty of the government’s supporters voted against Chamberlain, and another sixty abstained. That’s a terrible blow to a prime minister
– a hundred of his colleagues don’t have confidence in him.’

‘But is it enough to force him to resign?’ Lloyd said impatiently.

Bernie spread his arms in a gesture of surrender. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

(vi)

Next day Lloyd, Ethel, Bernie and Billy went to Bournemouth by train.

The carriage was full of delegates from all over Britain. They all spent the entire journey discussing last night’s debate and the future of the Prime Minister, in accents ranging from the
harsh chop of Glasgow to the swerve and swoop of Cockney. Once again Lloyd had no chance to raise with his mother the subject that was haunting him.

Like most delegates, they could not afford the swanky hotels on the clifftops, so they stayed in a boarding house on the outskirts. That evening the four of them went to a pub and sat in a quiet
corner, and Lloyd saw his chance.

Bernie bought a round of drinks. Ethel wondered aloud what was happening to her friend Maud in Berlin: she no longer got news, for the war had ended the postal service between Germany and
Britain.

Lloyd sipped his pint of beer then said firmly: ‘I’d like to know more about my real father.’

Ethel said sharply: ‘Bernie is your father.’

Evasion again! Lloyd suppressed the anger that immediately rose in him. ‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ he said. ‘And I don’t need to tell Bernie that I love him
like a father, because he already knows.’

Bernie patted him on the shoulder, an awkward but genuine gesture of affection.

Lloyd made his voice insistent. ‘But I’m curious about Teddy Williams.’

Billy said: ‘We need to talk about the future, not the past – we’re at war.’

‘Exactly,’ said Lloyd. ‘So I want answers to my questions
now
. I’m not willing to wait, because I will be going into battle soon, and I don’t want to die in
ignorance.’ He did not see how they could deny that argument.

Ethel said: ‘You know all there is to know,’ but she was not meeting his eye.

‘No, I don’t,’ he said, forcing himself to be patient. ‘Where are my other grandparents? Do I have uncles and aunts and cousins?’

‘Teddy Williams was an orphan,’ Ethel said.

‘Raised in what orphanage?’

She said irritably: ‘Why are you so stubborn?’

Lloyd allowed his voice to rise in reciprocal annoyance. ‘Because I’m like you!’

Bernie could not repress a grin. ‘That’s true, anyway.’

Lloyd was not amused. ‘What orphanage?’

‘He might have told me, but I don’t remember. In Cardiff, I think.’

Billy intervened. ‘You’re touching a sore place, now, Lloyd, boy. Drink your beer and drop the subject.’

Lloyd said angrily: ‘I’ve got a bloody sore place, too, Uncle Billy, thank you very much, and I’m fed up with lies.’

‘Now, now,’ said Bernie. ‘Let’s not have talk of lies.’

‘I’m sorry, Dad, but it’s got to be said.’ Lloyd held up a hand to stave off interruption. ‘Last time I asked, Mam told me Teddy Williams’s family came from
Swansea but they moved around a lot because of his father’s job. Now she says he was raised in an orphanage in Cardiff. One of those stories is a lie – if not both.’

At last Ethel looked him in the eye. ‘Me and Bernie fed you and clothed you and sent you to school and university,’ she said indignantly. ‘You’ve got nothing to complain
about.’

‘And I’ll always be grateful to you, and I’ll always love you,’ Lloyd said.

Billy said: ‘Why have this come up now, anyhow?’

‘Because of something somebody said to me in Aberowen.’

His mother did not respond, but there was a flash of fear in her eyes. Someone in Wales knows the truth, Lloyd thought.

He went on relentlessly: ‘I was told that perhaps Maud Fitzherbert fell pregnant in 1914, and her baby was passed off as yours, for which you were rewarded with the house in Nutley
Street.’

Ethel made a scornful noise.

Lloyd held up a hand. ‘That would explain two things,’ he said. ‘One, the unlikely friendship between you and Lady Maud.’ He reached into his jacket pocket. ‘Two,
this picture of me in side-whiskers.’ He showed them the photograph.

Ethel stared at the picture without speaking.

Lloyd said: ‘It could be me, couldn’t it?’

Billy said testily: ‘Yes, Lloyd, it could. But obviously it’s not, so stop mucking about and tell us who it is.’

‘It’s Earl Fitzherbert’s father. Now
you
stop mucking about, Uncle Billy, and you, Mam. Am I Maud’s son?’

Ethel said: ‘The friendship between me and Maud was a political alliance, foremost. It was broken off when we disagreed about strategy for suffragettes, then resumed later. I like her a
lot, and she gave me important chances in life, but there is no secret bond. She doesn’t know who your father is.’

‘All right, Mam,’ said Lloyd. ‘I could believe that. But this photo . . .’

‘The explanation of that resemblance . . .’ She choked up.

Lloyd was not going to let her escape. ‘Come on,’ he said remorselessly. ‘Tell me the truth.’

Billy intervened again. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree, boyo,’ he said.

‘Am I? Well, then, set me straight, why don’t you?’

‘It’s not for me to do that.’

That was as good as an admission. ‘So you
were
lying before.’

Bernie looked gobsmacked. He said to Billy: ‘Are you saying the Teddy Williams story isn’t true?’ Clearly he had believed it all these years, just as Lloyd had.

Billy did not reply.

They all looked at Ethel.

‘Oh, bugger it,’ she said. ‘My father would say: “Be sure your sins will find you out.” Well, you’ve asked for the truth, so you shall have it, though you
won’t like it.’

‘Try me,’ Lloyd said recklessly.

‘You’re not Maud’s child,’ she said. ‘You’re Fitz’s.’

(vii)

Next day, Friday 10 May, Germany invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Lloyd heard the news on the radio as he sat down to breakfast with his parents and Uncle Billy in the boarding house. He was not surprised: everyone in the army had believed the invasion was
imminent.

He was much more stunned by the revelations of the previous evening. Last night he had lain awake for hours, angry that he had been misled so long, dismayed that he was the son of a right-wing
aristocratic appeaser who was also, weirdly, the father-in-law of the enchanting Daisy.

‘How could you fall for him?’ he had said to his mother in the pub.

Her reply had been sharp. ‘Don’t be a hypocrite. You used to be crazy about your rich American girl, and she was so right-wing she married a Fascist.’

Lloyd had wanted to argue that that was different, but quickly realized it was the same. Whatever his relationship with Daisy now, there was no doubt that he had once felt in love with her. Love
was not logical. If he could succumb to an irrational passion, so could his mother; indeed, they had been the same age, twenty-one, when it had happened.

He had said she should have told him the truth from the start, but she had an argument for that, too. ‘How would you have reacted, as a little boy, if I had told you that you were the son
of a rich man, an earl? How long would it have been before you boasted to the other boys at school? Think how they would have mocked your childish fantasy. Think how they would have hated you for
being superior to them.’

‘But later . . .’

‘I don’t know,’ she had said wearily. ‘There never seemed to be a good time.’

Bernie had at first gone white with shock, but soon recovered and became his usual phlegmatic self. He said he understood why Ethel had not told him the truth. ‘A secret shared is a secret
no more.’

Lloyd wondered about his mother’s relationship with the earl now. ‘I suppose you must see him all the time, in Westminster.’

‘Just occasionally. Peers have a separate section of the Palace, with their own restaurants and bars, and when we see them it’s usually by arrangement.’

That night Lloyd was too shocked and bewildered to know how he felt. His father was Fitz – the aristocrat, the Tory, the father of Boy, the father-in-law of Daisy. Should he be sad about
it, angry, suicidal? The revelation was so devastating that he felt numbed. It was like an injury so grave that at first there was no pain.

The morning news gave him something else to think about.

In the early hours the German army had made a lightning westward strike. Although it was anticipated, Lloyd knew that the best efforts of Allied intelligence had been unable to discover the date
in advance, and the armies of those small states had been taken by surprise. Nevertheless, they were fighting back bravely.

‘That’s probably true,’ said Uncle Billy, ‘but the BBC would say it anyway.’

Prime Minister Chamberlain had called a Cabinet meeting that was going on at that very moment. However, the French army, reinforced by ten British divisions already in France, had long ago
agreed a plan for dealing with such an invasion, and that plan had automatically gone into operation. Allied troops had crossed the French border into Holland and Belgium from the west and were
rushing to meet the Germans.

With the momentous news heavy on their hearts, the Williams family caught the bus into the town centre and made their way to Bournemouth Pavilion, where the party conference was being held.

There they heard the news from Westminster. Chamberlain was clinging to power. Billy learned that the Prime Minister had asked Labour Party leader Clement Attlee to become a Cabinet Minister,
making the government a coalition of the three main parties.

All three of them were aghast at this prospect. Chamberlain the appeaser would remain Prime Minister, and the Labour Party would be obliged to support him in a coalition government. It did not
bear thinking about.

‘What did Attlee say?’ asked Lloyd.

‘That he would have to consult his National Executive Committee,’ Billy replied.

‘That’s us.’ Both Lloyd and Billy were members of the committee, which had a meeting scheduled for four o’clock that afternoon.

‘Right,’ said Ethel. ‘Let’s start canvassing, and find out how much support Chamberlain’s plan might have on our executive.’

‘None, I should think,’ said Lloyd.

‘Don’t be so sure,’ said his mother. ‘There will be some who want to keep Churchill out at any price.’

Lloyd spent the next few hours in constant political activity, talking to members of the committee and their friends and assistants, in cafés and bars in the pavilion and along the
seafront. He ate no lunch, but drank so much tea that he felt he might have floated.

He was disappointed to find that not everyone shared his view of Chamberlain and Churchill. There were a few pacifists left over from the last war, who wanted peace at any price, and approved of
Chamberlain’s appeasement. On the other side, Welsh MPs still thought of Churchill as the Home Secretary who sent the troops in to break a strike in Tonypandy. That had been thirty years ago,
but Lloyd was learning that memories could be long in politics.

At half past three Lloyd and Billy walked along the seafront in a fresh breeze and entered the Highcliff Hotel, where the meeting was to be held. They thought that a majority of the committee
were against accepting Chamberlain’s offer, but they could not be completely sure, and Lloyd was still worried about the result.

They went into the room and sat at the long table with the other committee members. Promptly at four the party leader came in.

Clem Attlee was a slim, quiet, unassuming man, neatly dressed, with a bald head and a moustache. He looked like a solicitor – which his father was – and people tended to
underestimate him. In his dry, unemotional way he summarized, for the committee, the events of the last twenty-four hours, including Chamberlain’s offer of a coalition with Labour.

Then he said: ‘I have two questions to ask you. The first is: Would you serve in a coalition government with Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister?’