Titan in Closeup

CHURCHILL'S LAST YEARS by Roy HowelIs. 214 pages. McKay. $4.50.

On April 27, 1958, a neat young man stepped off a train at the Kentish village of Westerham. A limousine whisked him to a spacious country home, where he was shown into a high-ceilinged study. There, from the depths of an enormous armchair, a portly old party glared at him like a ruffled eagle. The young man shook in his shoes--and with reason. The old party was Sir Winston Churchill, and the young man had just been engaged as his male nurse. Roy Howells, then 28, held his job until Churchill's death in 1965. In this appealing memoir, he has produced a remarkably intimate view of the great man, and supplies plenty of evidence to refute the popular notion that Churchill in old age sank into senility. Howells describes him as "the most impossible, arrogant, yet lovable and wonderful patient imaginable," and demonstrates that he lived with the persistent vigor of a man determined to climb into his coffin and pull down the lid for himself.

Howells, whom Churchill invariably addressed as "Howes," was hired as a nurse, but he was promptly promoted to factotum. The admirable Howells dressed Churchill, supplied him with cigars, tended his pets, shuffled his cards at bezique, and acted as all-purpose shock absorber.

Zippered Shoes. There were shocks aplenty. Churchill, a titan in the face of global catastrophe, was a temperamental tot in domestic matters. Infuriated by delays, he had his shoes fitted out with time-saving zippers and insisted on driving at racecourse speed. When he wanted more speed, he spurred his chauffeur by rapping on the glass and bellowing "GO ON!" At home, when Howells seemed to dally in executing a command, Churchill hurled his hairbrushes at him, shouting, "Move, Howes! Goddammit, move!"

Churchill himself was of course im movable. He was chronically late for meals. Even a housewide conspiracy to set all his clocks ahead failed to get him to table on time; the old boy merely asked the correct time of visitors who were not in on the plot. He bore pain with graceful fortitude, and he recovered from a fractured spine (at 85) and a broken leg (at 87) with startling speed. He blandly spurned injections and pills ("I won't take those today, thank you") in favor of brandy and cigars, refused to wear pajamas. One morning, ambling out of his bedroom, he encountered a newly hired housemaid and sent her screaming through the halls--he was clad only in his walking stick.

The stick had other uses. Once he flicked it out and "jokingly prodded" a pretty young nurse who was standing in his way. "Oh!" squealed the victim. "You're getting saucier!"

Sticky Newsprint. Churchill's style was imperial, even at breakfast in bed. His pet parakeet Toby pecked at his grapefruit or perched on a hovering servant as Churchill ate his toast and jam, attentively scanning the newspapers. When the papers got stuck with jam, Churchill tossed them to the floor, which was hidden by morning's end in a froth of sticky newsprint.

Churchill himself was forever shrouded in cigar smoke. From his supply of 3,000 or 4,000 cigars, he smoked seven or eight a day. The ashes fell everywhere. His suits had to be sent out repeatedly for reweaving. The holes in his bed linens finally exhausted even Lady Churchill's longanimity, and she gave him a smart dressing down. Churchill remained calm. The next time his sheets started smoldering he called for a pair of scissors and imperturbably snipped out the telltale burn.

Battlements & Moats. Churchill's passion for films, which were regularly shown at Chartwell, endured almost until his death. "We saw," recalls Howells, "John Wayne westerns, Kirk Douglas westerns, Gary Cooper westerns, James Stewart westerns, any western just as long as there was lots of horse riding and gunfighting in it. He also liked period films with lots of dueling and people falling off battlements into moats." He especially admired Steve Reeves as Hercules and Victor Mature as Samson.

It must have been his sense of history. In the last weeks of Churchill's life, his mind seemed to settle in the past. He gave up reading books, and through the long afternoons sat staring into the fire. He seemed more somber, more withdrawn, as if, having passed his 90th birthday, he had concluded that there would not be a 91st. On the evening of Jan. 8, 1965, when he was offered his usual brandy and cigar after dinner, he said: "No, I don't want it." Next day he took to his bed. Not long afterward, he suffered a stroke; on Jan. 24, he was dead.

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