Summer books
Two souls and minds
Alastair Forbes
Clementine Churchill Mary Soames (Cassell £7.95) Though the inscribed copy which was such a prized schoolboy possession was long ago first pinched and then flogged by a predatory Press Lord employer, there have remained firmly fixed in my memory the final words of My Early Life (A Roving Commission), a book which surely stands on its own as a notable work of art, quite unsurpassed by any other example of its author's very considerable previous and subsequent literary output: ' . . . until 1908' the 56-year-old Winston Churchill wrote in 1930, 'when I married and lived happily ever afterwards.' While this was largely a boast as truthful as it was gallant, the property of truth with which Churchill always admitted greatest concern was precisely its 'many-sidedness'.
His youngest daughter, with the aid of all her mother's papers, has given the best part of six years of her energetic middle age to exploding that ancient alleged truism with which Tolstoy kicked off Anna Karenina, by exploring in great detail how unlike other happy families was the remarkable one into which she was born and how, as she has said elsewhere, its 'great unifying focal point' was Clementine Churchill, whose nobly serene, long-lived outward beauty (staggeringly well caught in oldest age by Lord Snowdon's jacket portrait) concealed a surprisingly complicated, sharp, sensitive, angst-ridden temperament. So eminent an historian as Elizabeth Longford has already opined of the resulting study in depth that it 'is exactly what a filial biography should be'. That is certainly a field Churchills have made their speciality since Winston produced his two volumes on Lord Randolph in 1906. Martin Gilbert now carries on the shelf-long definitive biography of Winston to which Randolph gladly gave up the last and happiest years of his life.
What the publishers call Mary Soames's 'official biography' will be read as much as a portrait of her parents' marriage as of her mother. Readers may be relieved to learn that home life at Chartwell was a very different affair from that down the road at Sissinghurst, for, as the author wrote to her mother in 1945, 'your triumph is that you really have been and are — everything to Papa. Many, many great men have had wives who ran their houses beautifully and lavished care and attention. But they looked for love and amusement and repose elsewhere. And vice versa. You have supplied him with all these things — without surrendering your own soul or mind.' Indeed the only variety in 57 years of conjugal devotion which Clementine (who early in her marriage had laughed to scorn Mrs Keppel's suggestion that it was her duty to help her ambitious husband's career by taking a rich and influential lover, was when pushing 50, to allow herself to fall romantically in love with 'a very personable and agreeable man in his forties', the 'cosmopolitan, worldly' Terence Philip, with whom she took a five-month-long world trip aboard Lord Moyne's very large yacht from which however, as it passed homeward through the Suez canal, she wrote to her husband that she 'longed to be folded in his arms'. (Mary Soames does not consider worth mention her father's rare one-nightstand lapses from fidelity, in which he was doubtless more seduced than seducing, at any rate by Lady Castlerosse, though she does just hint at his pronounced, though platonic, autumnal attachment to Wendy Reyes, the pretty former model married to his literary agent Emery Reyes, who was his frequent postwar hostess on the Riviera — 'God, the Riviera is a ghastly place', said Clementine, adding grudgingly 'I expect it's all right if you keep a flower shop or if you are a waiter'). In conversation with her daughter years later Clementine, acknowledging that Philip had never been in love with her, dismissed the episode, characteristically in her perfect French: 'C'etait une vraie connaissance de ville d'eau', a sort of Chekovian Yalta-type idyll, an unobsessional interlude in a long life of virtuous vocational dedication to an adored but exhaustingly exacting superman.
The perfect French (in such sharp contrast to the fluent false tenses and genders cheerfully echoing through the Soames households in Paris and Brussels) was a legacy of her girlhood, as she was brought up in Dieppe by her far from perfect but clearly enchanting and eccentric mother, born Blanche Ogilvy of a clan that to offset its many sinners can boast a recently canonised saint. Her handsome and accomplished (but in the eyes of his Airlie in-laws bounderish) husband Henry Hozier, already a divorce at the time of their marriage, was evidently not cut out for the institution. He never really wanted children and certainly not the twins by another father that Lady Blanche produced after Clementine and her elder sister Kitty.
The expatriate Lady Blanche managed quite well on modest remittances, though these were much reduced by what Clementine called her 'morbid mania' for gambling at the Dieppe casino, an activity continued to the end of her life and which ate up half her income. This did not stop her sometimes splashing out on a four-star treat, rejecting Clementine's penny-pinching rebuke with a magisterial 'My dear child, to know how to order and enjoy good food is part of a civilised education', a dictum her daughter never forgot: Winston not once had to eat a bad meal in his own home, though during the second war, throughout which 10 Downing Street received 'diplomatic rations', I heard him recalling a traumatic day in the first war when he actually had to go without meat.
Clementine's natural nervousness was increased by some melodramatic attempts by her father to kidnap her and her sense of inadequacy by her mother's 'blatant favouritism', and 'ungovernable partiality' for her eldest girl Kitty, a lovely flirtatious extrovert who, before her death at 17 from Dieppe drains and typhoid, would try to comfort Clemmie with a 'You musn't mind. She can't help it'. Of Clemmie's looks at this time George du Maurier understandably exclaimed, 'She's my Trilby — she's come to life.' Sickert, a Dieppe neighbour, burned her silhouette onto her convent hockey stick but she was not afraid to say, when asked for her opinion of his paintings, 'Well, Mr Sickert, you seem to see everything through dirty eyes'.
Back in England she pursued her education at Berkhamsted High School where the inspiring suffragette headmistress encouraged her to aim for a university, as did her equally zealous Women's Lib great aunt Maude Stanley. That ambition was thwarted by Lady Blanche who, although she allowed her to attend lectures at the Sorbonne, wanted her daughter to make her career a better marriage than her own.
She had either rejected or jilted several more suitable men by 1908 when the young Liberal President of the Board of Trade swept her off her feet by the 'charm and brilliancy', as she put it, of his conversation and a written appeal to 'Be kind to me. I ant a solitary creature in the midst of crowds'. Clementine was even sufficiently flustered to forget the second 'n' when she wrote to Winston, ',le raime passionement. I feel less shy in French.' Blanche Hozier, whom at her death Winston was to call 'the ideal mother-in-law', confessed she did not 'know which of the two is the more in love', and perceptively observed to Lady Airlie 'His brilliant brain the world knows, but he is so charming and affectionate in his own home life', adding with equal truth to Wilfred Scawen Blunt, 'He is gentle and tender and affectionate to those he loves, much hated by those who have not come under his personal charm'. At their wedding, after brief weeks of engagement, at St Margaret's, Westminster (where Lloyd George, invited to sign the register, reported that in the vestry Winston typically talked politics to him across the womenfolk), Winston's old Harrow headmaster presciently predicted in his address that 'There must be in the statesman's life many times when he depends upon the love, the insight, the penetrating sympathy and devotion of his wife. The influence which the wives of our statesmen have exercised for good upon their husbands' lives is an unwritten chapter of English history.' Fortunately Mary Soames has, unlike old Bishop Wel!don, not deemed these matters 'too sacred to be written in full'.
'I am so much centred in my politics, that I often feel I must be a dull companion to anyone who is not in the trade too . . • I often wish I were more various in my topics': so Winston had confessed to her after a year's marriage. But, as her daughter writes, politics in fact thrilled Clementine, especially radical politics, into which she flung herself with passion. 'The noble, puritan element in her nature responded naturally to the great reforming measures in Which Winston, working closely with Lloyd George, was deeply involved . . . Some die-hard Tory acquaintances would even cross the road rather than meet her in the street now that she was Mrs Winston Churchill', a circumstance 'which only seemed to fan. her crusading ardour'. She even won praise from Beatrice Webb. And she wittily Observed of Lord Rosebery's remark that being a peer I do not regard myself as a financier', that 'his delicate and refined nature has been kept aloof since early youth (by a thrifty marriage) from the sordid consideration of how to make both ends meet'. In 1913 she was moved to tears by Lloyd George's great speech on Land Reform, deeming it the greatest she had ever heard, and at his death three decades later she said she 'loved' Winston's Commons tribute because it 'recalled the forgotten blessings which he showered upon the meek and the lowly'. If the reign of Radical Democracy was :very much to her puritanical taste, the Bridge and Women and Champagne' which went with it were not, and this sometimes Showed rather too much. In some of the hitherto unpublished letters (pertinently quoted by Lady Soames) addressed to her Younger, but more worldly cousin, Venetia Stanley, Asquith complained that, 'Clemmie, of whom I am quite fond, is au fond a thundering bore. . . in spite of her excellent manners and many good qualities, I think tshei would rather try one as "yoke-fellow" and perpetual companion. . . not that I am in the least anti-Clemmie.' Like many wives devoured by the terrible egocentricity Which is shyness she could on occasion make social life difficult for her husband. Winston had sometimes to remind his beloved 'Cat', as he called her, 'We have not too many friends . . . Don't come with all Your hackles up and your fur brushed the wrong way — you naughty.' Ashamed after one of her 'scenes' she wrote 'My sweet and dear Pig, when I am a withered old woman how miserable I shall be if I have disturbed Your life and troubled your spirit with my temper. Do not cease to love me. I could not do Without it. If no one loves me, instead of being a Cat . . . I shall become like the Prickly porcupine outside, and inside so raw and unhappy.' The real cri-de-coeur of her life can be heard in those words, the ever present worm of guilty anxiety (anxious guilt?) in the apple of happiness. Winston wrote to her from Germany where he was the Kaiser's guest at the 1909 manoeuvres, 'Much as war attracts me and fascinates my mind, I feel more deeply every year . . . what vile and wicked folly and barbarism it all is.' Five years after, 'as a relief from all the plans and schemes' at the Admiralty in late July, he had characteristically stood, so he wrote to her in Norfolk, 'watching the two black swans on St James's Park lake' and their 'darling cygnet, grey, fluffy and unique'. Four days later on 2 August 1914 he wrote, 'Cat dear, it is all up, Germany has quenched the last hopes of peace by declaring war on Russia'. It is from this point on that Mary Soames succeeds, almost more convincingly than Martin Gilbert and his companion volumes of correspondence, in showing how politically astute Clementine's advice to Winston was throughout the first World war, even if he did not always take it, (`You are a very sapient Cat . . . the sagacity of your judgement is more realised by me every day. I ought to have followed yr counsels in my days of prosperity. Only sometimes they are too negative. I shd have made nothing if I had not made mistakes.') Her counsels of caution were seldom cautiously worded. Kitchener was 'cowardly and base', Arthur Balfour 'smug, purblind, indifferent, ignorant, casual,' Ll.G 'a sneak . . . a direct descendant of Judas Iscariott [sic] . a shabby little tike'. And she said of the 'sensualist' Asquith that his 'sentiments are vy hearty and warm within limits wh cost nothing . . . when association ceases with him he cools and congeals visibly . . . he is like morphia . . lazy, but not a skunk tho' a wily old tortoise.' The fact that her counsels had in no wise lost their confidence or cunning a quarter-century later is demonstrated by the splendid note (especially exemplary for Mrs David Owen) which she sent down to her husband at No. 10 in June 1940: 'My Darling, I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something I feel you ought to know . . . there is danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough, sarcastic and overbearing manner.. . . My Darling Winston, I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner . . . It is for you to give the orders and if they are bungled — except for the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Speaker, you can sack anyone and everyone. Therefore with this terrific power you must combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm. You used to quote — "One ne regne sur les ames que par le calme" — I cannot bear that those who serve the Country and yourself should not love you as well as admire and respect you.' The advice was accepted and very largely adhered to.
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