Dreamers of the Day

Tongue lolling, Rosie plumped abruptly down on her haunches. Taking pity on her, I opened my purse and motioned to a tiny child who staggered beneath a vestlike contraption that held a jug of tea and a few small crockery cups.

“Don’t buy anything, miss,” I heard Sergeant Thompson call. “We have lemonade and clean glasses.”

His tone of voice made his meaning clear, for the child shot him a look of purest hatred, then aimed liquid eyes full of pleading at me.

Thompson trotted back to the car, glancing repeatedly over his shoulder at Churchill, who stood immobile, apparently absorbed in artistic rapture. The sergeant gave Davis orders to “haul out those damned boxes—pardon my French, miss.” This Davis did, muttering in the same Gallic dialect. “I’ll find something for the dog. Just give me a moment, miss,” Thompson pleaded, gathering the rest of the equipment. With that, he and Davis scuffed profanely through sand and scrubby weeds toward Mr. Churchill, who awaited delivery without moving a muscle.

Rosie looked close to prostration. After tapping my lips for silence, I motioned to the tea boy and held up a coin. In an instant, I was surrounded by a half-pint mob of children waving their pitiable wares and crying, “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!”

Dropping the easel and a box of paints, Thompson sprinted back to run the children off. “Buggy little beggars,” he snarled. “I told you, miss! Don’t buy from them! If you give them anything at all, they’re all over you.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but Rosie’s thirsty! Look at her! And I hardly think lemonade is something dogs should—”

“There’s milk for the tea,” Thompson said, rummaging through a picnic basket in the trunk of the car. With a tense courtesy that said, Please, don’t make my job any harder than it is, he handed over a thermos. I opened it and poured a drink into the cap for Rosie, refusing to feel guilty.

Ten yards away, Davis was setting up a large umbrella. With his easel erected, Mr. Churchill had begun to work, and this was inevitably a matter of professional concern to his bodyguard, for any public painter will naturally attract a crowd. There is something magical about the process of turning blank canvas and blobs of color into something recognizable and pleasing. Presently, a group of blue-jacketed British airmen came along, off duty and nonchalant. When they stopped to watch, Sergeant Thompson relaxed slightly and returned to my side. “That lot can handle trouble if it’s offered. Mind if I smoke, miss?”

“No, but I mind if I’m lied to,” I said. “See the pyramids, indeed.”

“There they are,” Thompson replied, all i

Sitting with his back to the gawking airmen, Mr. Churchill dabbed at the canvas with a paintbrush in one hand and a stogie in the other. Smoke curled upward and began to pool beneath the green sunshade that rendered his own color bilious.

“Looks like an upholstered toad,” Thompson observed with deadpan venom, “slowly incinerating itself.”

The assembled airmen were no more respectful, delivering artistic appraisals in stage whispers that we could hear from where we stood. It wasn’t until one of them suggested that the gentleman might be better employed painting the outside of a blimp hangar that Mr. Churchill turned to look at him.

“Gawd! It’s Winston,” the young man cried.

Appalled by the discovery that they’d been “razzing” such an important personage, the airmen backed away. Churchill gri

For all the artistic paraphernalia Mr. Churchill had for himself, there was nowhere for us to sit, apart from the car, which would have roasted Rosie alive. Years of teaching had made me tolerant of standing, but for heat and flies, summer in Ohio couldn’t compete with a spring day in Egypt.

“How long do these painting sessions last?” I asked Thompson. He just rolled his eyes.

Churchill shouted another stream of peremptory orders, this time for Thompson and Davis to unpack the picnic hamper and share its delicacies out among the airmen. While the boys ate sandwiches and slurped tea, the great man painted and chatted about his plans to put additional air force installations in Egypt. If the Sudan and Mesopotamia could be policed from the air by flyboys like themselves, it would represent a great savings to the empire. “Trenchard agrees,” Churchill told them. “What do you think?”

The airmen were voluble on that topic and a variety of others. Mr. Churchill seemed particularly interested in their canteen and barracks. When a sergeant mentioned that the married quarters assigned to noncommissioned officers were abominable, Churchill promised to look into the problem personally.

“They don’t realize it, but they’re giving him a report on their morale and readiness for combat,” Thompson remarked, waving flies away from his face. “You’re watching His Majesty’s secretary of state for air at his best. Do anything for those boys, he would, but with his own staff ?” Thompson shook his head. “Thoughtless, selfish, rude. That’s his class: casual tyra

“Including professionals who deserve better,” I surmised, scratching as discreetly as I could at an insect bite on my ankle.

“We’ve had a few short, sharp discussions,” Thompson admitted. “End of the day, I’ll be walking out the door to go home to my sup-per—he’ll a

“I imagine you build up a conversational head of steam, listening to him all day.” I pressed the hankie against my neck and thought of murder. “Why don’t you ask for a transfer?”

“I tried, miss. This assignment was supposed to last two weeks. Marched into my chief ’s office at the end of it and said, ‘Sir, I’d like very much to be relieved of this protection duty.’ Chief just laughed. ‘Well, it’s yours whether you want it or not,’ said he. ‘Winston’s asked for you to be with him permanently.’ It’s this or quit the Yard.”

“And you have a family to feed.”

“I help my brothers and sisters out, as well. I’m one of thirteen.”

“Gracious! Is your family Catholic, Sergeant Thompson?”

“Methodist.” He shrugged as if to say, No excuses.

“Your mother must have had … great stamina.”

“I worked it out once. She was preggers for one hundred and seventeen months.” The sheer scale of the feat lingered while he tossed the cigarette butt into the sand and lit another. “I’ve seen my Kate go through it four times.” He blew smoke high into the air and vowed, “No more for us!”

His own story was a familiar one. Like many of my students, he’d had no difficulty learning whatever he was taught, but he’d worked from the age of nine, helping to provide a bare living for his family. Mornings, he told me, he’d run three miles from home to a draper’s, where he took down two dozen big wooden shutters and carried them to a storage cellar. He’d clean the windows, polish the brass, and then run to school. He’d return at lunchtime to deliver parcels for an hour, and return again late in the evening to haul the shutters out and replace them for the night.