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Churchill could be a difficult patient. He was something of a hypochondriac, Moran says, "and he takes instinctively to a quack." Once, when Sir Winston was planning to join General Alexander's army in southern Italy, Moran demanded that he take along a bottle of mepacrine, an antimalarial drug. Churchill resisted, telephoned Buckingham Palace to see if King George had ever taken the stuff (he hadn't). Wrote Moran: "Winston is just incorrigible. He has only to press a bell to bring into the room the greatest malarial experts in the world; instead, he asks the King."
All of a Tremble. Moran undoubtedly gives too much clinical detail about the pathetic decrepitude of Churchill's last years. The decline became noticeable in 1947, when, wrote Moran, Churchill seemed to be "living in the past and impatient of change. I could see then that he was sliding, almost imperceptibly, into old age." He appeared hearty enough in the 1951 elections, which returned him to office, but, "behind his bluff, he is eaten up with misgivings. He said that he had a 'muzzy feeling' in his head." Three months later, returning on the Queen Elizabeth from a meeting with President Truman, Moran found Churchill asleep in his cabin. " 'I have been dreaming; it was extremely vivid,' he said. 'I could not walk straight or see straight.' He got out of bed, and very deliberately walked across the cabin."
As he watched himself becoming helpless and senile, Churchill began to drink more heavily than ever. "I eats well and sleeps well and drinks well," he admitted jokingly in 1953, "but when I get alongside any business I go all of a tremble. I could do without smoking, but not without my liquor; that would be a sad impoverishment. It is extraordinary between night and morning that I should go like this—a bundle of old rags. I am a hulk—only breathing and excreting."
It was a sad finish for a man of such vigorous habits, and Lord Moran's critics may be excused their squeamishness at seeing it so clearly documented. But except for his very last days, Churchill had the consolation of memory. "He always goes back to the Boer War when he is in a good humor," wrote Moran. "That was before war degenerated. It was fun galloping about."