The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz Read Free Page B

guilelessness that a young American visitor, Kathy Harriman, found cloying. “She’s a very intelligent girl,” Harriman wrote, “but so naive that it hurts. She says such frank things; then people laugh at her, make fun of her, and being super-sensitive, she takes it all to heart.” At her birth, Mary’s mother, Clementine, had nicknamed her “Mary the mouse.”
    While Hitler had been inflicting death and trauma on untold millions in the Low Countries, Mary had been out with friends having the time of her life. The evening began with a dinner party for her close friend Judy—Judith Venetia Montagu—a cousin, also seventeen, daughter of the late Edwin Samuel Montagu, former secretary of state for India, and his wife, Venetia Stanley. Theirs had been a marriage steeped in drama and speculation: Venetia married Montagu after carrying on a three-year affair with former prime minister H. H. Asquith, thirty-five years her senior. Whether Venetia and Asquith had ever had a physical relationship remained for all but them an unresolved question, although if word volume alone were a measure of romantic intensity, Asquith was a man lost irreclaimably to love. Over the three years of their affair he wrote at least 560 letters to Venetia, composing some during cabinet meetings, a penchant Churchill called “England’s greatest security risk.” Her surprise engagement to Montagu crushed Asquith. “No hell could be so bad,” he wrote.
    A number of other young men and women also attended Judy Montagu’s dinner, all members of London’s bright set, the offspring of Britain’s gentry, who dined and danced and drank champagne at the city’s popular nightclubs. The war did not put an end to their revelry, though it injected a somber note. Many of the men had joined some branch of the military services, the RAF being perhaps the most romantic, or were ensconced in military schools like Sandhurst and Pirbright. Some had fought in Norway, and others were now abroad with the British Expeditionary Force. Many of the girls in Mary’s group joined the Women’s Voluntary Service, which helped resettle evacuees, operated rest centers, and provided emergency food, but also did such varied tasks as spinning dogs’ hair into yarn for use in making clothing. Other young women were training to be nurses; some took shadowy posts within the Foreign Office, where, as Mary put it, they pursued “activities not to be defined.” But fun was fun, and despite the gathering darkness, Mary and her friends danced, Mary armed with the £ 5 ($20) allowance Churchill gave to her on the first of each month. “London social life was lively,” Mary wrote in a memoir. “Despite the blackout, theaters were full, there were plenty of nightclubs for late dancing after restaurants closed, and many people still gave dinner parties, often organized round a son on leave.”
    A favorite locale for Mary and her group of friends was the Players’ Theatre, near Covent Garden, where they sat at tables and watched an ensemble of actors, including Peter Ustinov, perform old music-hall songs. They stayed until the theater closed, at two A.M. , then walked home through blacked-out streets. She adored the beauty and mystery conjured on nights when the moon was full: “Emerging from streets deep in shadow like dark valleys into the great expanse of Trafalgar Square flooded with moonlight, the classical symmetry of St Martin-in-the-Fields etched in the background and Nelson’s Column soaring away up into the night above his guardian lions so formidable and black—it was a sight I shall never forget.”
    Among the men at Judy Montagu’s dinner was a young army major named Mark Howard, whom Mary judged to be handsome and debonair, and whom she “rather fancied.” Fated to die in action in four years’ time, Howard was a major with the Coldstream Guards, the oldest continuously serving regiment in Britain’s regular army. Though an active combat unit, its duties