How I got off on the wrong foot with Churchill
NOTE the comma between the names Winston and Churchill: three people are named in the title of this charming, short memoir.
Winston is Sir Winston Churchill’s grandson (1940-2010), son of Randolph and his first wife Pamela. Churchill is the great cigar-smoking hero himself. And Me is the author, Jonathan Dudley, who, when he was aged eight and nine in 1949 and 1950, was invited to stay at Chartwell to be company for Winston, his school friend of the same age.
Here, nearly 70 years later, he recounts what happened.
The two boys happened to sit next to each other at prep school in London. one day in the summer term of 1949, Winston turned to Jonathan. ‘Would I like to come and stay with him at his grandparents’ home in Kent?’
A few weeks later, the two boys were whisked off to Chartwell in a black car travelling at the fearsome speed of 60mph.
Two young boys roaming in the grounds of a country house in August, one the grandson of the family and the other a nervous guest fascinated by the grandeur and the etiquette; the grown-ups mysterious, glamorous figures in the background: the situation is reminiscent of The Go-Between.
There’s no illicit love or tragedy in this story, but there is, as with The Go-Between, a sense the boys don’t get on well.
Young Winston comes across as rather a prig. He’s always reminding Jonathan, ‘ in a familiar, jokey style that had plenty of edge to it’, how much posher his family is.
They mooch around, Jonathan longing to do normal things such as throwing cricket balls, Winston preferring to do crazy things like climbing up the drainpipe to spy on his grandmother Clementine in the bath.
He is fascinated by the distant figure of Churchill, who wears a blue boiler- suit and slippers when only the family is around.
Eventually, the great moment arrives when Churchill actually speaks to Jonathan. The scene takes place in the dining room.
Churchill says: ‘Jonathan, come and stand by my chair. What are you going to do when you grow up?’ Jonathan suffers from a bad stammer. He manages to get out the first consonant: ‘F’.
Churchill looks interested, perhaps hoping for ‘ foreign secretary’, or ‘film director’. But, after a few more ‘f’ sounds, the word comes out: ‘ Fishmonger. I’d like to be a fishmonger when I grow up.’ ‘ Gone was the sympathy, the kindly and supportive attention which the stuck “f” had elicited,’ Jonathan writes. ‘In its place was deep boredom, an ennui so implacable there was nothing for it but to retreat to my chair and hope that I would never have to speak again.’
He is still wincing from that exchange nearly 70 years later.
But things get better. Churchill’s warmth and kindness come out, especially when Jonathan is invited again (much to his surprise) the next year.
The warm, welcoming presence of Lady Churchill always makes everything all right. She runs the household with gentle calm and kindness. Jonathan notices how ‘Mr Churchill’ draws strength from her.
‘He would look across at Mrs Churchill sitting at the other end of the table, with a beseeching almost plaintive look . . . The look said first how much he loved her, and second how much he needed her guidance on the matter in question that he didn’t feel altogether certain about.’
The boys are invited to watch two films in the basement of the house. This is a thrill. The first is Pride And Prejudice with Greer Garson; Churchill and his wife chat loudly throughout.
The second is a war film, during which one of the characters’ glasses are smashed underfoot.
Jonathan recalls that Churchill’s ‘exclamation of sympathy for the fallen man, now without any means of sight, was accompanied by a sigh which seemed to suggest an overwhelming despair at the suffering and loss of everyone who was ever devastated by war’.
THE crowning Churchill moment comes when Mary Soames says after dinner: ‘Daddy, we would all be delighted if you would tell the boys one of your Boer War stories.’
This is a cue for a classic Churchill set-piece: he uses the salt, white pepper, mustard, black pepper mill, silver pheasant and toothpicks to recreate a dramatic encounter with the Boers.
As he goes on, more and more pieces of silverware are brought on to work as ‘casualties’.
‘Mr Churchill,’ Jonathan writes, ‘delivered the exciting story with all the rhetorical tricks of a 19thcentury actor-manager’ — and by the end, the table is a battlefield of fallen salt- cellars and mustard pots.
A part of Churchill was for ever a young boy lining up his toy soldiers.