Here is Chips striking a different note.
“Sunday 23rd June 1940
A dreadful day. The baby leapt on my bed before I was barely awake and I played with that human dynamo for two hours. I adore him, love him beyond belief: he looks like me, acts like me, reacts like me. His energy is overpowering. There was an unfortunate scene as he refused to stay with Honor and insisted on clinging to me: there is a mysterious tenderness between us which unites us. I have never loved anything so much …
We all drove up, Honor, the Nannie, the chauffeur and maid, and I held the young man tightly in my arms all the way. Later here at Belgrave Square I crept up to say ‘goodnight’ and tried gently to break it to him that he was leaving me, perhaps forever … he didn’t understand but looked back at me with my own eyes, my own little face and I wept and suffered … at last I left him. The Nannie, an exceptionally nice woman, saw me, and seized me, and for a second we were great friends. She knows how I love him …. Then Honor went to him. The Lennox-Boyds came to dine and we deplored the present position and the folly of the Polish guarantee and the decay and rottenness of the French and this mad, foolish war. I went to bed, wept …. I care more for Paul than for all France, and mind his departure more than France’s collapse. For the first time in my life I felt a surge of remorse for my appallingly callous treatment of my own parents, who perhaps loved me as I love Paul.”
The next morning the Channons go to Euston to see Paul off. “At the station there was a queue of Rolls-Royces and liveried servants and mountains of trunks. It seemed that everyone one knew was there on the very crowded platform.”
This was not the finest hour of the upper echelons of British society and there was much criticism in the Press of “the horrid little cowards who ran away”. Unfair, as the blame lay at the doors, drawbridges and portcullises of their parents. However, it was a fine hour for the King and Queen who refused to send their daughters overseas.