Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (43 page)

Churchill had not spent the night alone after all. Several years
earlier, Howard had introduced into the mine a species of white rat that was, in Churchill’s words, “an excellent scavenger.” The rats had thrived in the dark recesses of the mine and had quickly added to their numbers until there were now swarms of them, clever, quick and able to make a living off anything they could find, including Churchill’s candle.

Fortunately, Howard had brought with him half a dozen more candles along with a cooked chicken. The chicken, Howard told Churchill, sitting down to keep him company as he ate, had not been easy to get. The largely eaten leg of mutton had, as Howard had feared it would, aroused suspicion in his Dutch servant girls. To avoid further questioning, he had gone all the way to the house of an English doctor, twenty miles away, to get the chicken Churchill was now eating. If he had difficulty getting another chicken the next day, he would have to resort to taking double helpings, and stuffing them into a bag when the servants were out of eyesight.

Howard was not being overly cautious. Not only had the Boers not given up their search for Churchill, but knowing that Middelburg and Witbank were among the few places in the country where Britons were still living, they had narrowed in on the very region where Churchill was hiding. As in Pretoria, everyone of English origin was under suspicion. “
He said inquiries were being made for me all over the district by the Boers,” Churchill wrote. “The Pretoria Government was making a tremendous fuss about my escape.”
In fact, three thousand copies of Churchill’s picture had been printed for distribution so that any Boer could recognize the fugitive instantly.

Although Howard assured Churchill that as long as he was in the mine, he was “
absolutely safe,” even this was not completely true. Howard knew that it was quite possible, even likely, that the Boers would search the mine, although if that happened, he had a plan. “Mac,” he told Churchill, referring to one of the Scottish miners, Churchill did not know which one, “knows all the disused workings and places that no one else would dream of. There is one place here where the water actually touches the roof for a foot or two. If they searched the mine, Mac would dive under that with you into
the workings cut off beyond the water. No one would ever think of looking there.”

Even if the Boers didn’t come rattling down the mine elevator, workers would be in and out all the time, their movements very difficult to anticipate or control. For this problem, Howard planned to rely less on the mine’s hidden corners than his workers’ own fears.
He would tell them that the mine was haunted, perhaps even inhabited by a
Tokoloshe
. One of the most feared creatures in Zulu mythology, a
Tokoloshe
is a small, malevolent spirit believed to cause not only mischief wherever it goes but also physical harm, perhaps even death. A
Tokoloshe
, Howard hoped, would discourage his workers from wandering too deep into the mine, and keep their curiosity in check.

The next morning, after a restless night spent fending off the rats as they tried to snatch his candles from beneath his pillow, Churchill was glad to see another lantern approaching, this time accompanied by the two Scottish miners, McKenna and McHenry. Would he “
like to take a turn around the old workings and have a glimmer?” they asked Churchill. Eager to tour the mine, or do anything that would allow him to leave his, by now, filthy mattress for a few hours, Churchill quickly agreed, and they set off down the tunnel.

Mostly what they saw were rats. Fortunately, Churchill had “no horror of rats” and thought that the ones scurrying around the mine were “rather nice little beasts.” He admired their sleek white fur and their dark eyes. His guides, however, assured him that if he could see the rats in natural light, he would find that their eyes were in fact bright pink. They were albinos, and so had even worse eyesight than most rats as well as a unique sensitivity to light, all of which made them, unlike Churchill, perfectly suited to life in the mine.

After more than an hour of touring what Churchill referred to as the “
subterranean galleries,” the three men ended up at the bottom of the shaft, two hundred feet below the surface. One of the Macs had told Churchill that, in some parts of the mine, there were disused
shafts through which daylight was visible. As promised, when they reached the bottom, Churchill was able to stand beneath a shaft and peer up at the outside world. He stayed there for a quarter of an hour, surrounded by darkness as he gazed longingly at the “grey and faint…light of the sun and of the upper world,” the world he had been forced to leave behind and to which he was so desperate to return.

CHAPTER 25

THE PLAN

F
or the next two days, the rats were Churchill’s constant companions. Although they neither frightened nor disgusted him, he quickly tired of fending them off. “
The patter of little feet and a perceptible sense of stir and scurry were continuous,” he wrote. As long as he had a lit candle, they kept to the shadows, but as soon as he extinguished the flame and lay down to sleep, they rushed at him, trying to take anything he had. At one point, Churchill wrote, he was wrenched from his sleep when he felt a rat “actually galloping across me.”

One of the few pleasures Churchill would allow himself were the cigars Howard had brought him. Even these proved to be potentially dangerous. This particular type of cigar was extremely fragrant, and one day a young mine worker smelled the smoke and followed it to where Churchill was hidden. It did not take him long to find the fugitive, the glowing end of his cigar lighting his pale face. The stories that Howard and the Scottish miners had planted among their crew, however, must have made an impression because as soon as he saw Churchill, the worker fled in terror. Word of the ghost in the mine quickly spread, and Churchill was left to himself. In fact, Howard later wrote, “
for a long time afterwards we could not get any of the boys to move in that vicinity at all.”

Although he did not yet know how he was going to smuggle Churchill out of the country, Howard had begun to worry about the young man’s mental health. “
I noticed that he was becoming nervy,” Howard would later write, “this being probably due to his solitary confinement.” As lonely as the days were, the nights were far worse. Churchill could hardly sleep because of the rats, which surrounded him, he told one of Howard’s friends, playing “
leap-frog [and] hide-and-seek,” leaping and pouncing. They had to get him out of the mine, Howard finally decided, even if it was just for a few hours.

That night, Churchill was allowed to come to the surface for the first time since he had gone underground. Walking next to Howard along the veld, he had a full, unimpeded view of the stars, their light supernaturally bright in comparison to the pale, filtered sunlight he had seen from the bottom of the mine shaft. Churchill had “
a fine stroll in the glorious fresh air and moonlight,” but it was not enough. He couldn’t bear the thought of going back down into the dark.

Taking pity on his young friend, Howard told Churchill that, although he would still need to remain carefully hidden, they would move him to a secure location aboveground. The Boers were still spread out across the region, searching for Churchill, but most of them believed that he had never left Pretoria. He was still hiding in the capital, they thought, doubtless in the house of an Englishman or, an object of even greater loathing, a British sympathizer.

Soon after, Howard made a small hideout for Churchill in a spare room at the back of his office, behind a barrier of packing cases. He gave him a key, and they agreed upon a secret knock. Unless he heard that knock, Churchill was to remain hidden, with the door always locked.

Even though he was now out of the mine, the days passed slowly for Churchill, filled with fear that he would be found and frustration that he had so little control over his own fate. Although he had repeatedly tried to persuade Howard to give him a pony and a guide
and let him set off on his own, Howard refused to listen, determined to help Churchill no matter what the risk. While Howard and his friends discarded plan after plan as too difficult or too dangerous, Churchill tried to tamp down his growing restlessness. Every night, he slipped outside to walk on the veld with Howard or one of his friends. Every day, he waited behind the packing cases, trying to forget even for a moment the desperation of his situation by losing himself in the pages of a book—a borrowed copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Kidnapped
.

For most of his life, Churchill had taken refuge in books. He had never liked school, finding it a grim, joyless struggle, and himself more often than not at the bottom of his class. He wasn’t well liked by the other boys, and his parents had all but abandoned him, so he was left with few places to turn for solace and friendship. “
The greatest pleasure I had in those days was reading,” he later wrote. In particular, he loved poring over the pages of
Treasure Island
, which had been a rare gift from his father when he was only nine years old. “My teachers saw me at once backward and precocious,” he wrote, “reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the Form.”

Churchill had again turned to books when he was a young officer in India, hoping that they might fill in what he perceived to be the gaps in his education. Every month, he asked his mother to send him more books, books on history, philosophy, economics and evolution. He read for four or five hours every day, everything from Plato’s
Republic
to Aristotle’s
Politics
to Schopenhauer, Malthus and Darwin. In history, he began with Edward Gibbon. “
Someone had told me that my father had read Gibbon with delight; that he knew whole pages of it by heart, and that it had greatly affected his style of speech and writing,” Churchill later recalled. “So without much more ado I set out upon the eight volumes of Dean Milman’s edition of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
.”

Now, in Stevenson’s
Kidnapped
, Churchill found something more than refuge or even knowledge. He found shared understanding. Although David Balfour, the hero of
Kidnapped
, was a fictional character, through him Stevenson expressed the same feelings of foreboding,
powerlessness, even shame, with which Churchill was struggling as he sat alone in Howard’s office. “
Those thrilling pages…awakened sensations with which I was only too familiar,” he wrote. “To be a fugitive, to be a hunted man, to be ‘wanted,’ is a mental experience by itself. The risks of the battlefield, the hazards of the bullet or the shell are one thing. Having the police after you is another. The need for concealment and deception breeds an actual sense of guilt very undermining to morale….Feeling that at any moment the officers of the law may present themselves…gnawed the structure of self-confidence.”

There were enough moments in his new hiding place alone to keep Churchill’s nerves constantly on edge.
One day, he heard what he thought was the secret knock that he and Howard had agreed upon. Slipping out from behind the packing cases, he put the key in the lock and opened the door. Instead of Howard standing before him, however, Churchill found the young man Howard had hired to do odd jobs. As he had stood outside the office, sweeping the floors, the man had either placed his broom against the door or let it fall, making a noise that, to Churchill’s ears, had sounded like Howard’s signal. When he saw Churchill standing at the open door, the man, as shocked as the mine worker had been, immediately fled, rushing to tell his bosses that a stranger was hiding in the office. As soon as Howard learned what had happened, he pulled the young man aside, promising him a new set of clothes if he would keep their secret. He agreed and, Howard later said, received his clothes in due course.