Clementine was by instinct as well as by the force
majeure of Winston's nature a wife first, a mother when it fitted. Though she delighted in her children when they were small and cuddly, they had to take second place. The eldest, Diana and Randolph, suffered an unsettling succession of nannies and this may have contributed to their extreme naughtiness, which was nevertheless an important basic ingredient of their considerable if sometimes disputed adult charm. (Mary Soames herself was raised by her very good Scotch egg of an Ogilvy cousin, the Norland-trained nurse, Moppet Whyte, which is what has made her all her life the happiest and best integrated not only of Churchills but of almost all other creatures.) One cannot, though, read with a dry eye the account of the death of the fourth Churchill child, the sweet-voiced threeyear-old Marigold, with both her parents heart-broken at her bed-side. Winston was to tell Mary years later of the succession of wild shrieks like an animal in mortal pain' uttered by her mother. He himself had touchingly and aptly written of that separation, a year after the child's death, 'It is a gaping wound whenever one touches it and removes the bandages and plasters of daily life'. It is worth quoting such documentations of feeling today when Winston is the bloodthirsty villain of any Stratford Churchill Play, when he has been turned into a sort of all-purpose scarecrow to youth, as old Boney long before him to children, when there are generations unaware that once he had 'hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions' too.
In the Twenties, when the decline and fall of the Liberal Party became incontrovertible, Clemmie begged Winston not to 'Let the Tories get you too cheap — they have treated you so badly in the past and they ought to be made to feel it'. Soon after this, at a Conservative Rally with his wife on the platform. Winston told his hosts, 'She's a Liberal, and always has been.' Although she told her daughter that she never thereafter voted Liberal (and her great friend Horatia Seymour was said to have been 'moved on' from her Chartwell cottage after admitting to voting thus in 1945), I can recall at least one wartime meal at Chequers, with both Mrs Churchill and Mrs Attlee present, when the former sounded like a woman who had never voted Tory in her life and the latter like one who had never voted anything else. As Lady Soames writes, 'Clementine's basic and undying radicalism made high Tories and most very rich people potential targets for her scorn.'
I can likewise well recall the vehemence with which she argued against Winston accepting the Leadership of the Tory Party when Neville Chamberlain had had to relinquish it shortly before his death in the autumn of 1940. As lately as May of the same year Winston had in a seldom quoted letter, reminded Lloyd George that 'The Government I have formed is founded upon the leaders of the three parties, and like you I have no Party of my own'. Of course, it was rational enough for Winston to want a proper parliamentary power base, controllable by patronage and Whips. But the opposite view was passionately held by Clementine and found much sympathY amongst those of us who saw the Tories as responsible for the failure to halt Hitler long before Munich and who believed that Winston could best hold the nation firm behind his National Government by eschewing Party label or affiliation.
Lady Soames says that her mother 'never altered her opinion that this step was a mistake, and that it alienated much of the support which Winston derived from the working classes through the vindication of his pre-war prophecies and his record as a war leader'. However, 'she had never made any secret of the fact that, in her view, Winston should, at the victorious conclusion of the war, resign from office and not seek re-election at all . . . she felt very strongly that he should retire rather than become the leader of one half of the nation against the other.' (When, after his death, she took her seat in the Lords she did so on the Crossbenches.) But, as her daughter writes, 'Earnest, even passionate in the advocacy of her point of view, once Winston had taken a decision she would swallow her objections, and loyally support him through thick and thin, only revealing to her most intimate friends or closest relations that her instincts and advice had all been to the contrary.' She had, for instance, 'begged Winston to delete the odious and invidious reference to the Gestapo in his notorious 1945 election broadcast but he would not heed her'.
'My life is probably in its closing decade'. he had thought in 1937 and had added, shortly before he was recalled to government and the destiny of the premiership. 'One must always hope for a sudden end before faculties decay'. The hope was not granted and was perhaps too soon forgotten. In 1945 the electoral horse had thrown him heavily and he jolly well meant to remount, if strength remained, to resume the 'endless adventure' of power, that selfjustifying possession. His youngest son-inlaw Christopher Soames — his closest friend in later years, to whom he was to speak his last words: 'I'm so bored with it all' — Pot him on to racing, with the shrewd buy of brave French grey re-christened Colonist If which pleased him by winning a lot of races and prize-money. His older son-in-laW Duncan Sandys put him on to the European Movement and by 1946 he had learned to parrot in French as well as English, 'We must be good Europeans. Europe must take first place in our thoughts.'
Yet when at that time he was asked to go into more planning detail along more praetical Jean Monnetary lines, he told me, Tot going to die soon. It's bound to happen but its not for me to have to take responsibilltY for it. But it will be nice for people to saY that once again I was far-sighted and on to 0 good thing at the end of my life'. The trouble was that he was not going to die, not for nearly a score more years, of which three and a half were to be actually spent at Downing Street, again, this time with ever more palsied hand on spinning helm, only dimly aware that to preside over the liquidation of the Empire he had served under six monarchs was indeed to be one of the inevitable historic chores of his office.
As Clementine had tartly observed of FDR in 1944, four hours a day was not enough time for a leader to give to pinpointing his mind on the great issues. Lord Moran, shortly to abandon general for Sharper . practice, and who by his own account had made Winston in wartime an addict of blue 'uppers' and red 'downers', could offer no professional prognosis of his patient's longevity to assist those who thought British policies should be something more than day-to-day, hand-to-mouth affairs. No wonder Clementine's nerves and general health more and more frequently began to break under the strain. Accidentproneness, illness of varying severity, sometimes but not always psychosomatic, and even complete hysterical collapses, succeeded each other in the body and mind's textbook protests at having been pushed too long and too far along the path of duty in Conditions perhaps best describable as high mettle fatigue. She had simple been too long in the front line and was overdue for leave — the unspoken thought being that the best leave would have meant the restful leisure of widowhood. 'I never think of after the war. You see, I think Winston will die When its over' she had said to Diana Cooper in Marrakech in 1944.
General de Gaulle, of whom in 1940 she had made a life-long friend by ticking him off for bullying bad manners, once called Old age a shipwreck; it was sometimes worse than that for two such closely interwoven Persons who had always been 'solitary in the midst of crowds' and now became increasingly unravelled and separated by senility's cruel game of grandmother's steps. Moran's self-centred autopsy (in a book appearing almost before funeral bak'd meats had had time to cool) of his greatest patient, by its exposure of the various circulatory and cardiac weaknesses which, together with mild manic-depressive symptoms, had troubled Winston, managed to give a totally unbalanced picture of its subject. It would be a pity if Mary Soames's courageous and compassionate tackling of the many periods of her mother's despair and misery were to Obscure all the countless sunnier hours her Parents succeeded in spending together. Clementine's almost pitiful perfectionism and , qualms of conscience would always have made happiness less easily accessible to her than to other people. Though there could be no circumstances in which she would not have emerged as a person of c°nsequence in her own right, it was surely the extraordinary warmth of Winston's love and of her own response to it that was the godsend blessing that melted her reserve. As for the rest, the truth is that Browning's 'Grow old along with me, The best is yet to be' is a very doubtful starter.
Mary. Soames's splendid book, like her parents' lives and this review, may be too long for its own good, despite the massive cuts it is reported to have undergone before publication. Like most good sauces its flavour could probably be improved by further reduction. Nevertheless it is a remarkable achievement, an enterprise of Churchillian scale and execution by a first time author who, if she save at intervals lacks that vein of poetry present in all her sister Sarah's briefer writings, has marvellously marshalled her mass of material and has seldom allowed it to swamp the reader with repetition. Her long drawn account of her father's long-drawn-out death and funeral is given treatment on the scale once accorded to those of Queen Victoria, but perhaps not without reason since both marked the end of epochs and, as de Gaulle remarked to a friend of mine on the evening of the State Funeral at St Paul's: 'They were fitting obsequies — burying a great nation along with its last great leader.'
I was surprised at an ommission concerning Edward Heath 'whose fortunes and misfortunes', Mary Soames writes, 'Clementine followed with an affectionate, almost maternal eye'. As a young Chief Whip, he frequently 'dined and slept' at Chartwell on his way to or from Broadstairs or Bexley. One such evening out of the blue Winston put his hand out to pat Heath affectionately and murmured that he would one day be Prime Minister, a prophetic accolade that was treated by its recipient as having a strangely sacramental force. There is no mention of this incident first related to ,rne by Lady Churchill and later confirmed by her cousin Sylvia Henley, who was present, as well as Heath himself, which was surely worth including.
-Historians will certainly find this book a necessary coda to all previous Churchilliana. The author's notes of sources would have won the approval of her biographer brother Randolph, though her use of such expressions as 'wealthy' for 'rich' and 'centred around' for 'centred upon', together with sundry arch euphemisms or circumlocutions for cancer, would not. Though he would not have disapproved of her account of his 'brilliant, tempestuous mind' or of the 'insatiable appetite for controversy' that made him 'not a "comfortable" person to have around' and could sometimes for long periods turn the lovehate relationship between himself and his mother into a hate-hate one on both sides, he might, I think, have thought it something less than fair of Mary Soames, so frank about some of the misadventures of her sisters Diana and Sarah, not to have mentioned the reason for the 'emotional and angry scenes which had so often marked his brief times at home in the war' and 'which had left lasting scars on his relationship with both his parents'.
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