record. His service in the wartime administration had been marked
by some major failures, but he had redeemed himself by resigning
and serving on the front lines with the Royal Scots Fusiliers. After
the war, he was called back to serve as secretary of state for war and
air and then secretary of state for the colonies.
The mid-1920s saw Churchill serving as chancellor of the
exchequer (a position in which he was in way over his head), while
having also signed a contract to produce a six-volume, three-
thousand-page account of the war, titled The World Crisis. Left to his
own devices, he might have tried to white-knuckle this incredible
workload. But those around him saw the toll that his responsibilities
were taking and, worried about burnout, urged him to find a hobby
that might offer him a modicum of pleasure and enjoyment and rest.
“Do remember what I said about resting from current problems,”
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin wrote to him. “A big year will soon
begin and much depends on your keeping fit.”
In typical Churchillian fashion, he chose an unexpected form of
leisure: bricklaying. Taught the craft by two employees at Chartwell,
he immediately fell in love with the slow, methodical process of
mixing mortar, troweling, and stacking bricks. Unlike his other
professions, writing and politics, bricklaying didn’t wear down his
body, it invigorated him. Churchill could lay as many as ninety bricks
an hour. As he wrote to the prime minister in 1927, “I have had a
delightful month building a cottage and dictating a book: 200 bricks
and 2000 words a day.” (He also spent several hours a day on his
ministerial duties.) A friend observed how good it was for Churchill
to get down on the ground and interact with the earth. This was also
precious time he spent with his youngest daughter, Sarah, who
dutifully carried the bricks for her father as his cute and well-loved
apprentice.
A dark moment in World War I had inspired another hobby—oil
painting. He was introduced to it by his sister-in-law, who, sensing
that Churchill was a steaming kettle of stress, handed him a small kit
of paints and brushes her young children liked to play with. In a little
book titled Painting as a Pastime, Churchill spoke eloquently of a
reliance on new activities that use other parts of our minds and
bodies to relieve the areas where we are overworked. “The cultivation
barry
(Barry)
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