Late in the night of February 20 a telephone message reached me as I sat in my old room at Chartwell (as I often sit now) that Eden had resigned....In a long life I have had many ups and downs. During all the war soon to come and in its darkest times I never had any trouble in sleeping. In the crisis of 1940, when so much responsibility lay upon me, and also at many very anxious, awkward moments in the following five years, I could always flop into bed and go to sleep after the day's work was done--subject of course to any emergency call. I slept sound and awoke refreshed, and had no feelings except appetite to grapple with whatever the morning's boxes might bring. But now on this night of February 20, 1938, and on this occasion only, sleep deserted me. From midnight till dawn I lay in my bed consumed by emotions of sorrow and fear. There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender, of wrong measurements and feeble impulses. My conduct of affairs would have been different from his in various ways but he seemed to me at this moment to embody the life-hope of the British nation, the grand old British race that had done so much for men, and had yet some more to give. Now he was gone. I watched the daylight slowly creep in through the windows, and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of Death.
Churchill ibid (202)
I see vividly in my mind's eye Churchill lying awake in bed seeing in his mind's eye at Death at dawn, just as I saw vividly in the words of Churchill's countryman Dickens the scene in A Tale of Two Cities of a blood red dawn washing over the monseigneur's castle, coloring the stone gargoyles crimson, bloodying the water of the fountain, creeping through the open windows of the bedroom, illuminating the monseigneur lying in his bed, eyes eternally asleep, a knife in his chest, stone cold Dead.
What a powerful writer Winston Churchill was. What powerful scenes he saw to write.
Churchill ibid (202)
I see vividly in my mind's eye Churchill lying awake in bed seeing in his mind's eye at Death at dawn, just as I saw vividly in the words of Churchill's countryman Dickens the scene in A Tale of Two Cities of a blood red dawn washing over the monseigneur's castle, coloring the stone gargoyles crimson, bloodying the water of the fountain, creeping through the open windows of the bedroom, illuminating the monseigneur lying in his bed, eyes eternally asleep, a knife in his chest, stone cold Dead.
What a powerful writer Winston Churchill was. What powerful scenes he saw to write.
