Feeling relaxed and happy halfway down her second martini, she looked around at the disparate group gathered in her home. They had paid her the compliment of coming to her door without an invitation, knowing they would be welcomed. They belonged to her, and she to them. They were, she realized, her family.
She felt very blessed.
Woody Dewar sat outside Leo Shapiro’s office, looking through a sheaf of photographs. They were the pictures he had taken at Pearl Harbor, in the hour before Joanne died. The film had stayed in his camera for months, but eventually he had developed it and printed the pictures. Looking at them had made him so sad that he had put them in a drawer in his bedroom at the Washington apartment and left them there.
But this was a time for change.
He would never forget Joanne, but he was in love again, at last. He adored Bella and she felt the same. When they parted, at the Oakland train station outside San Francisco, he had told her that he loved her, and she had said: ‘I love you, too.’ He was going to ask her to marry him. He would have done so already but it seemed too soon – less than three months – and he did not want to give her hostile parents a pretext for objecting.
Also, he needed to make a decision about his future.
He did not want to go into politics.
This was going to shock his parents, he knew. They had always assumed he would follow in his father’s footsteps and end up as the third Senator Dewar. He had gone along with this assumption unthinkingly. But in the war, and especially while in hospital, he had asked himself what he
This was a good time to leave. His father had achieved his life’s ambition. The Senate had debated the United Nations. It was at a similar point in history that the old League of Nations had foundered, a painful memory for Gus Dewar. But Senator Vandenberg had spoken passionately in favour, speaking of ‘the dearest dream of mankind’, and the UN Charter had been ratified by eighty-nine votes to two. The job was done. Woody would not be letting his father down by quitting now.
He hoped Gus would see it that way too.
Shapiro opened his office door and beckoned. Woody stood up and went in.
Shapiro was younger than Woody had expected, somewhere in his thirties. He was Washington bureau chief for the National Press Agency. He sat behind his desk and said: ‘What can I do for Senator Dewar’s son?’
‘I’d like to show you some photographs, if I may.’
‘All right.’
Woody spread his pictures on Shapiro’s desk.
‘Is this Pearl Harbor?’ Shapiro said.
‘Yes. December seventh, 1941.’
‘My God.’
Woody was looking at them upside-down, but still they brought tears to his eyes. There was Joanne, looking so beautiful; and Chuck, grinning happily to be with his family and Eddie. Then the planes coming over, the bombs and torpedoes dropping from their bellies, the black-smoke explosions on the ships, and the sailors scrambling over the sides, dropping into the sea, swimming for their lives.
‘This is your father,’ Shapiro said. ‘And your mother. I recognize them.’
‘And my fiancee, who died a few minutes later. My brother, who was killed at Bougainville. And my brother’s best friend.’
‘These are fantastic photographs! How much do you want for them?’
‘I don’t want money,’ Woody said.
Shapiro looked up in surprise.
Woody said: ‘I want a job.’
Fifteen days after VE Day, Winston Churchill called a General Election.
The Leckwith family were taken by surprise. Like most people, Ethel and Bernie had thought Churchill would wait until the Japanese surrendered. The Labour leader, Clement Attlee, had suggested an election in October. Churchill wrong-footed them all.
Major Lloyd Williams was released from the army to stand as Labour candidate for Hoxton, in the East End of London. He was full of eager enthusiasm for the future envisioned by his party. Fascism had been vanquished, and now British people could create a society that combined freedom with welfare. Labour had a well-thought-out plan for avoiding the catastrophes of the last twenty years: universal comprehensive unemployment insurance to help families through hard times, economic planning to prevent another Depression, and a United Nations Organization to keep the peace.
‘You don’t stand a chance,’ said his stepfather, Bernie, in the kitchen of the house in Aldgate on Monday 4 June. Bernie’s pessimism was the more convincing for being so uncharacteristic. ‘They’ll vote Tory because Churchill won the war,’ he went on gloomily. ‘It was the same with Lloyd George in 1918.’
Lloyd was about to reply, but Daisy got in first. ‘The war wasn’t won by the free market and capitalist
