In Europe

the estate where Churchill's heart lay and where he spent a large part of his life from 1924–64. This is where he planned his military campaigns, lunched and met with his political allies, where he wrote his memoirs and his works of history, where he withdrew to his painter's studio whentension got the better of him, and where he spent whole summers laying bricks and roofing tiles when the political winds had abated. It is a complex of brick houses on a crest of hills, with a glorious view of the wooded landscape of Kent. The Chart Well, the estate's spring, had formed a lake there, and later Churchill would build a great many things beside, often with his own hand: a swimming pool, dams, marshy gardens and even a second lake.
    He had plenty of time for that in the 1930s, when his political fate was very much up in the air. For a long time, his tirades against the abandonment of the gold standard, the politics of appeasement and against the Indian resistance leader Gandhi – ‘a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir … striding half naked up the steps of the vice-regal palace’ – made him a political outsider. ‘You probably don't realise … that he knows nothing of the life of the ordinary people,’ his wife Clementine once blurted out. ‘He has never been on a bus, and only once on the Underground.’
    When Churchill turned sixty in 1934, he was, in the eyes of his contemporaries, a curiosity, a romantic reactionary who had lost his grip on reality. More than one historian has noted that, had Hitler and Churchill both died before the war broke out, Hitler would probably have gone down in history as the man who, despite his peculiar anti-Semitism, had put a collapsed Germany back on the map. Churchill, on the other hand, would have been dismissed as a footnote, as just one more promising failure in British politics.
    Chartwell is still the reflection of Churchill himself: the playground of an aristocrat with too much energy, the library of a gifted historian, the studio of an amateur painter not devoid of talent, the family home of a man of feeling.
    The building has been restored to as it was in the 1930s, and for the sake of the museum a few rooms have been joined and objects moved. Yet Churchill is still present everywhere: in the much-used library, in a jar of brushes on the windowsill of his studio, in the brick playhouse he built for his daughter Mary, in the flowered wallpaper on the top floor, in the bizarre collection of canes in the hall, in a painting of the family at breakfast with the red cat on the table. Churchill's bedroom, behind the study, is one of the smallest in the house. Beside his bedsteadhangs his reading board, a handy, pivoting table. In the morning he usually governed the country from this bed, reading, dictating, making telephone calls, dressed in an oversized ‘siren’ suit with big buttons, always with his watery whisky and cigar within reach. When his biographer Martin Gilbert first stepped into this room in 1970, it still smelled of Churchill's tobacco.
    Domestic life at Chartwell had two centres: the low-ceilinged, intimate dining room where the festive and expansive family lunches were usually taken, and the big study on the top floor. Here was Churchill's ‘factory’, as he called this cozy space with its heavy beams, wooden ceiling, bright windows, bookcases and a fireplace, all dominated by a lavish painting of his birthplace, Blenheim Palace. In Churchill's day this same space was occupied as well by the secretaries and assistants who handled his correspondence, did research and converted Churchill's incessant flow of words – he even dictated letters from his bricklayer's scaffold – into more correspondence, memoranda and books. He would proudly receive visitors with the words ‘Do come in and see my factory.’
    Between 1929–39, the decade during which Churchill was only a Conservative MP for Epping, the factory formed the epicentre of his activities. As Martin Gilbert writes, it was there that he carried out a kind of ‘unofficial opposition’, including a ‘cabinet’ of former colleagues, friends, dissatisfied officials and political allies. During those years he was part politician, part journalist, and produced among other things the widely praised, four-volume biography
Marlborough: His Life and Times
. He did not live in isolation. His knowledge of military matters and foreign affairs was formidable, everyone wanted to hear his