Word: sheean
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...there were some guests whom Sheean was able to stomach. There was Winston Churchill, who "first became visible" to Sheean "in a red bathrobe over bathing trunks; he wore a large, flopping straw hat, and slippers and a cherubic grin." His first words were: "My dear Maxine, you have no idea how easy it is to travel without a servant. I came here all the way from London alone and it was quite simple." Said Maxine: "Winston, how brave of you!" Churchill spent much of his time painting. "In such a society [he] was slightly out of place...
...this time, says Sheean, Churchill was pro-Franco and greatly concerned about Russian intervention in Spain. Later "he was willing ... to work with the extreme Left if necessary to defeat the paramount enemy." Sheean was able to watch Churchill's mind at close quarters during "the precise years in which he was traversing this immense ideological area." Sheean once heard Churchill shock the Duke of Windsor by urging a British alliance with Russia. The "self-willed, pleasure-loving little Prince" said: "You of all people, Winston!" Winston replied: "Sir, I would make a friend of the devil himself...
...Astronomical Remoteness. The unbridgeable distances dividing class from class were emphasized for Sheean by a conversation between the Duke of Windsor, Lloyd George and Winston Church ill. Subject: compulsory baths for British miners. The Nazis had just shown the Duke such baths in German mines. Churchill observed that he had proposed compulsory baths in 1911, but the miners refused. Quite rightly, said Lloyd George, because the miners wanted the mine own ers to bear the full cost for installing the baths. "I've always heard," said the Duke seriously, "that the miners' wives didn't want baths...
...Says Sheean: "I sat there musing. . . . The seriousness of their interest in the question could not be doubted, and yet it was confounded with an incurable frivoli ty owing to their astronomical remoteness from the conditions of life of which they spoke. . . . In the exquisite little room, gleaming with glass and silver, over the flowers and champagne, all so enclosed and private and secure, one who had been King, one who had been dictator, and one who was to be: what did they have to speak of but the dirt on a miner's neck? In the realm...
Look Out, Jock. Sheean got to Paris just before the Nazis. He saw the confusion that centered around Helene de Portes, Premier Reynaud's mistress, whom Sheean believes to have been the shrewish organizer of defeat. In Britain, Sheean walked past the workmen stringing barbed vire around the Houses of Parliament. "So it's come to this, has it?" said Lady Diana Cooper, "in that curiously husky voice;" Inside Parliament Sheean heard history made by "a colorless voice." It was Clement Attlee reading the one-sentence law which declared that for the duration all persons and property were...