One can imagine the surprise of William Reed, a carpenter who lived near the airbase, when the king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland knocked on his door and asked for a bed for the night.
Reed told me after the war, “The king wouldn’t let me waken my daughter, Hannah, to give him her bed, so he slept on the davenport in the sitting room. I found an extra blanket for him.”
Asked about his decision to leave the airplane, the king mischievously explained after the war, “I decided I outranked a prime minister, even a Mr. Churchill.”
Evelyn Blaine determined that her small part of British heritage would not fall into German hands and that to allow Wehrmacht troops to bivouac in her cottage near Shepherd’s Close would be tantamount to trampling on the Union Jack. When the artillery barrages came within earshot, she began distributing to refugees the priceless foodstuffs General Clay had given her several days before.
She told me, “There was an endless stream of people passing my door, some leading heavily burdened horses, some carrying a grip in each hand, some with nothing but an extra coat over an arm. Tommy and I started giving out boxes and bags of food. We must have made a hundred trips between the cottage and the road carrying it all. We’d receive a smile or a nod or a brief word of thanks. Some were too dazed to reply, and I’d just tuck a bag of food under an arm, and they would walk on. Soon General Clay’s gracious gift was gone. I saved one tin of ham and a small bag of apples for Tommy and me.”
Mrs. Blaine returned to her sitting room for the last time. She took a piece of paper and a pen and wrote a note to her husband, Lieutenant Jeffrey Blaine.
“The letter had only three sentences. I told him we were traveling north, that his son and I would be at the Marble Arch in London each and every Sunday at noon until he found us, and that I loved him.”
She put the letter into an envelope and wrapped it in waxed paper, then placed it in her mailbox near the road. Then she told Tom to remain near the mailbox while she finished up in the house. It took her little more than five minutes to push her furniture into the center of the sitting room. From her sewing box she removed the cloth strips and patches she had hoarded over the months to mend their clothing. She made a small pile of them under her husband’s favorite item in the house, a well-worn wicker rocking chair. She lit a sulphur match and fanned the flame until it caught on the fabric.
She remembered, “I stood in the doorway until the furniture was well ablaze. By the time I reached the mailbox, smoke was pouring out the windows. I could not see through my tears, so my son took my hand and led me away, and we joined the others fleeing north in front of the invaders.”
Mrs. Blaine was one of many Kent and Sussex citizens who put the torch to their homes and belongings. The pall of smoke that hung over England from the channel to London during those days was not so much from battle as from the acts of thousands of civilians who destroyed their homes.
Some have said English citizens individually adopted a scorched earth policy, burning in front of the invaders so as not to provide them with shelter or sustenance. But I think they resolved that if they could not take with them their mementos and photographs and Bibles and family histories, all their treasured belongings, all the items that singled them out as English and marked their passage through this life as British subjects, they would destroy those possessions rather than allow the invaders’ hands to soil them.
Here, too, in ways perhaps less grand but no less profound than the king’s heroic gesture of remaining in England or the refugees’ gathering up the crown jewels, the English proved that their heritage would not be frightened away from them, that they would hold onto it fiercely, if only in their memories.
21
The prime minister deserved to be shaken. Instead, he stood near his chair in the war cabinet room, imperturbably chewing on his cigar, one hand casually in a jacket pocket.
“A deliberate assassination attempt by the Nazis, I think,” Churchill said. He could draw out the word “Nazi” until it sounded odious. “Had I been sitting here, it would have crushed my head.”
A plaster slab the size of a truck tire had dropped onto his chair, snapping off the backrest. The wall clock had fallen to the concrete. Other chunks of plaster lay about the room. One of the bell-shaped glass lamps that had been suspended from the ceiling had shattered. AACCS members swatted at the glass and plaster on the green cloth before placing their folders on the table. Dust was thick in the air.
“Your head is your least vulnerable spot, Prime Minister,” Clement Attlee said, lowering himself into the chair near Churchill.
Thirty minutes before the meeting was to have begun, a five-hundred pound bomb had gutted the government offices above the cabinet rooms, leaving only a twisted steel frame and a mountain of rubble. Debris filled King Charles and Great George streets. Several trees in St. James Park had been blown down. Royal Engineers had quickly cleared the stairs leading to the basement war rooms and had assured the Defense Committee that the hole in the ground was still sound. Telephone lines had been quickly reconnected.
The Flying Buttresses found their places. I once again sat behind Clay. Generals Barclay, Alexander, and Douglas, Lords Lindley and Erskin, and the other committee members took their seats. Many coughed against the dust. Churchill tilted his chair until the plaster fell off. He had been drinking tea in his quarters down the hall when the bomb hit. His coat was still wet from the spill. He carefully lowered himself to the seat, leaning forward so as to not lose his balance.
The prime minister’s face was a dispassionate mask. Only the dark stains under his eyes hinted at his sleeplessness and anxiety. He uselessly tapped his damp cigar on an ashtray and said, “It is the last day of May. The Germans have been on our island now for three days. I want to know the state of our preparations to throw them off. We’ll begin with your situation report, General Clay.”
Clay rose quickly and walked to the map of Sussex and Kent. I could tell he was moving with a rigor he did not feel, that his back, as straight as a dagger, was aching, and that only with concentrated effort could he remove the limp from his gait.
He said, “Discussions of throwing the Wehrmacht out of Great Britain are a bit premature, Prime Minister.”
Churchill pointed his cigar. “Don’t trouble me with trivialities, General. The Germans’ returning to the sea whence they came is as inevitable as tomorrow’s sunrise.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me where they are this morning, then.”
Clay brought up a hand. “The Wehrmacht front is fluid due to the eruptive nature of its attacks. But generally the line as of 0700 today runs from Guildford southwest almost to Chichester in a great bow. We still hold Bognor Regis, Littlehampton, and Worthing, since they have been bypassed inland, and the German is behind them.”
“And your northern defensive positions?” Churchill asked.
“The line runs east from Guildford to Royal Tunbridge Wells, then across Kent to Faversham. My 5th Infantry still holds the area from Canterbury to the North Foreland, largely because units facing it are being diverted for the push to London.”
“In other words, the invading host has captured three-quarters of English soil between London and the channel.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Perhaps seventeen hundred square miles of this treasured isle.”
“Yes, sir.”
Churchill pinched his nose. “And more by the moment.”
General Alexander said stiffly, “In fact, the Wehrmacht is within twenty miles of this meeting.”