The last book I loved–the book I wanted to take to a sandbox and introduce to Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory where I could watch one send a Matchbox car through the sand and another a green soldier, one saying to the other, “You can’t make a car noise for a green soldier!“–was Inspector Walter H. Thompson’s account of his time serving as Churchill’s bodyguard.
He called it, Assignment: Churchill, but I always, always catch myself calling it, “Operation: Churchill;” not because of the board game resemblance, but because I can’t shake the dialogue out of my head of the Old Lion going–“Operation Me? You’re not going to drop me out of a plane on anything, are you?”
Which he would love; he would adore that. And it’s a reason I cherish the book and conscientiously pair it with Guthrie’s memoir–that spiraling upward column of adventure that produces a string of birds floating and aloft and serene is endemic to both. Borges may be more formally daring–and as worthy of obsessive re-reads as Bolano suggests–but you can’t go wrong with Guthrie or Thompson’s books for exterior movement. Moving out and about and onwards. If Robert Louis Stevenson is too far buried under Wells, Eco, Calivno, and Patrick O’Brian, this kind of thing is the next best option.
Here are some of the things I’ve underlined in the book:
“In the afternoon of the 10th of May, with the world exploding and the oceans geysering, I drove behind the Old Man with indescribable pride.”
“The zeal to kill Germans had also begun to infect England’s women, and I’ve seen many a British grandmother flat on her tummy, shooting live ammunition at practice targets set up against a barnside or a stump.”
“He stopped our train in the middle of the Sudanese desert on one occasion and ordered hot water to be brought from the engine’s boiler! And there, beside the tracks in a huge tub he’d seen in a goods car we were hauling, he’d bathed with half of Africa agape. ‘You would think they never saw nudity before.'”
“He did not inhale the smoke, but blew it about in meditative balloons, often peering into them as if they were fish pools, or as if he might have dropped something of value in their center and were seeking to locate it.”
“And we had a system that was devised to convert, without warning, great areas of the [English] Channel waters to fire by floating huge stores of gasoline to the surface and igniting these areas by remote electric contact if the Germans, in large numbers, penetrated this far in an invasion attempt. Much of this is still secret.”
I could drop as much theory on you as Harpo has kitchenware in his sleeve regarding why this book is great, but the best writing–the writing we love–should feel ineffable and self-evident, like Louis Suarez cutting through Manchester United’s defense or Jacoby Ellsbury stealing home from third. So I’ll end here and say, simply, Isn’t this a wonder?
