A Daughter's Tale: The Memoir of Winston Churchill's Youngest Child

by Mary Soames

  I also had friends in Westerham, and Nana—who drove the runabout “nursery” car—used to take me to call on them. Mrs. Cosgrove kept the sweet shop on the Green and lived behind the shop in a very old cottage with extremely low ceilings: both Mr. Cosgrove and their daughter Mollie were large and tall, and I remember thinking they must have felt rather “squashed.” There was great excitement and interest when, in the course of some redecorating, Mr. Cosgrove uncovered part of a very old plaster frieze; I was taken in behind the shop (a great privilege) to see it. Mrs. Cosgrove always let me have a sweet after we had made our purchases, taken from one of the long row of glass jars (no prepackaging then): pear drops were my favourites, and even now their smell evokes nostalgia.

  Another visit would be to the baker’s shop kept by the Boreham family on the corner of the Green with Vicarage Hill. In cold weather especially a most delicious smell wafted forth every time the shop door opened; inside, the aroma was even more concentrated—and if the door from the shop to the back was open, one could glimpse the great oven and trays full of buns or loaves being loaded in by white-clad bakers. I was allowed to choose something to take back for tea: doughnuts were my favourite, and I always wished the globule of red jam in the middle might have been a little bigger. Mrs. Boreham looked rather like a cottage loaf herself, being rather short, with her apron tied tightly round her middle and her fine brown hair arranged in a bun on top of her head. Some thirty years later the Boreham family (the business being carried on by the sons) would make my wedding cake.

  At the end of each of these busily and happily occupied days came an evening ritual—reading aloud. This was a treasured highlight of my routine, and my greatest punishment was to be deprived of this great treat. Starting after teatime, Nana would read to me; when bedtime arrived, we adjourned upstairs, and the reading continued while I undressed, folding my clothes carefully (Nana keeping one eye on the page, and one supervising this process); we then removed to the adjacent bathroom, where I took as long as possible to wash—tiresome interruptions to the narrative being occasioned by very necessary knee scrubbings. Swathed in a towel, I would try to spin more time out: “Oh, we must finish the chapter—please.…”

  Nana seemed an inexhaustible reader, and throughout my nursery years I listened enthralled to her renderings of many books—some of them favourites with my grandchildren’s generation still: all of Beatrix Potter, and the Christopher Robins; then Black Beauty (I remember sobbing into my face flannel over poor Ginger’s story); The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room by Mrs. Molesworth; Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass; Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies—and, of course, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

  There were also some very Victorian religious stories, which most certainly have not stood the test of time: one I recall in particular was about an armour-clad soldier called Agathos (a fearful bore and prig) who was (of course) ever ready while slacker comrades slept; another was a real tearjerker called Jessica’s First Prayer, in which the prototype of a Barnado orphan, who did not know about God, is rescued from her heathen background, and utters her first prayer (on her deathbed, of course).

  But Nana knew when and how to move on: to Little Women and the What Katy Did series; and to tales of history and action—quite my most favourite being The Little Duke by Charlotte M. Yonge. Then there were Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Stevenson’s Treasure Island (Blind Pew terrified me).

  Much better (and of more enduring influence) than Agathos was Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; and I see from faded inscriptions in my handsome green Centenary Edition of the works of Charles Dickens that Nana and Sarah gave me volumes as birthday and Christmas presents when I was nine or ten. My social conscience was further educated by Harriet Martineau’s The Peasant and the Prince, and her namesake Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And still my first reaction on hearing Oscar Wilde’s name is to remember and read again (to myself if no grandchild is at hand) his wonderfully beautiful collection of stories in The Selfish Giant.

  My most favourite “magic” books were George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and its sequel The Princess and Curdie, with the thrilling and beautiful “old” Princess, who conferred on Curdie the miner’s son the gift of being able to divine by a mere handshake whether a person or one of the terrifying creatures by which he found himself surrounded was a human (and therefore capable of redemption) or irredeemably vile. I suppose these books could be regarded as the precursors of the Narnia books of C. S. Lewis.

  My introduction to poetry was Robert Louis Stevenson’s enchanting A Child’s Garden of Verses—and, of course, A. A. Milne’s rhymes; but these horizons were rapidly broadened when, from the age of seven or so, I started lunching in the dining room. Here, along with the general company of family and guests, I would be spellbound by my father when he was in “reciting” vein. Eagerly I listened to his renderings of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome and thrilled to the tale of how splendid Horatius held that bridge “in the brave days of old.” Soon I knew all the verses of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—when we all joined in the “Glory, Glory Hallelujah”s like anything. At mealtimes, too, Rudyard Kipling, Rupert Brooke, and Byron dawned on me, and I received my first apprehensions of Shakespeare—all dredged up from my father’s prodigious memory, stretching way back to his Harrow schooldays. And all these “classics” were interspersed with the music-hall songs enjoyed by Papa and his friends when they were gentlemen cadets at Sandhurst in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign. For my tenth birthday, Sarah gave me a lovely green leather-bound copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse: much faded now, it is still a treasured possession.

  Another grown-up of importance to me in this child’s world largely peopled by adults was Nana’s mother, Lady Maude Whyte—my great-aunt Maude, known to me as Aunt Maudie. She lived at No. 56 Lansdowne Road, WII, in elegant but rather shabby gentility, looked after by a devoted old family retainer, Maggie, who lived in the basement and “did everything.” This area of Notting Hill is now rather smart, much inhabited by actors (stage and screen) and members of the more intellectual professions, and used as the location for award-winning films; but then it was considered “very far out,” a borderline area where impecunious gentlefolk, such as Aunt Maudie and her equally strapped-for-cash sister, my grandmother Lady Blanche Hozier (who lived not far away in W8), could just afford to live. My grandmother, indeed, was in the habit of cheerfully inviting her guests to visit her in “The Wild West.”

  When I see how delightful the grandmother-grandchild relationship can be, I have always been sorry that I never knew any of my grandparents: Lord and Lady Randolph died before I was born, as did my maternal grandfather, Sir Henry Hozier; and Granny Blanche lived the last years of her life in Dieppe, where she died in 1925. But Aunt Maudie, I now see, was a “grandmother” figure in my life. I sometimes went to stay with her, which was a great treat: I was rather in awe of her, but Maggie was very sweet to me in the kitchen, and gave me all sorts of goodies forbidden in the drawing room. I remember that throughout the house all the floorboards creaked, and that the streets outside were still illuminated by gas lamps, lit by hand each evening.

  Although a badly off widow, Aunt Maudie also owned two seaside cottages at Buck’s Mills in North Devon: her husband, Theodore Whyte, was a Devonshire man, and they had lived in nearby Bideford. I can only imagine the cottages must have been advantageously let at various times, but naturally these mundane economic considerations did not at this time concern me. Nana used to take Sarah and me to stay with Aunt Maudie at the smaller of the two houses, Buck’s Cottage, which clung precariously to the cliff’s edge just above a crashing waterfall. After days of rain I used to cower in my bed and listen to the ocean, and to the rumble of the boulders being swept down in the swollen torrent to the beach below, and wonder if I and my bed would be swept away too. The cottage had a wonderful old flag
ged floor (beneath which there was said to be a smugglers’ cave), and although there was electricity we bathed in turn in a tin bathtub placed before the kitchen coal range—an arrangement both fairly primitive and totally delightful.

  Buck’s Cottage was at the top of the steep path which led down to the beach—which was a paradigm for all beaches: boulders and pebbles (smoothly rounded by endless poundings) gave way to coarse golden sand (perfect material for sand castles), punctuated by quite fierce black rocks with wonderful coral-lined pools full of anemones, mussels, darting tiny fish, and small “nippy” crabs, filled and emptied (except at very low tide) three times in every twenty-four hours. The beach sloped fairly gradually, but quite definitely—a great incentive to becoming a proficient swimmer. There were thrilling, crashing waves, but no treacherous currents that I can remember, until quite far out—which was forbidden water to us smaller ones. Sitting in our bathing towels, a bit shivery after swimming, munching our elevenses or picnic tea (somehow even Nana could not prevent the sandwiches being gritty with sand!)—we would gaze straight out to Lundy Island, eighteen miles away, with its steep cliffs and rocky Shutter Point, fatal to so many men-o’-war, Spanish and English alike—a tale familiar to us from Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, for Nana had a special Buck’s reading “menu,” which recounted the Armada legends that have gathered round that coastline. She also read me the romantic story of Lorna Doone (I blenched at the appalling death even of the terrible Carver Doone—the story’s villain—being sucked relentlessly down into the black depths of one of the quagmires on Exmoor). And although “The Smugglers’ Leap” from The Ingoldsby Legends actually refers to the Kent coast, it was during these blissful Devonshire holidays I squirmed with excitement at the account of that ghostly pursuit of the fleeing Smuggler Bill by the desperate and determined Exciseman Gill. My father often recited from this treasure trove of poetic, narrative legends, the cynical yet infinitely moving “The Execution” and “The Jackdaw of Rheims” being among his favourites. I incidentally received my earliest lesson in English grammar from his quoting from the latter poem: “heedless of grammar, they all cried, ‘THAT’S HIM!’ ”

  When the weather was wild and wet, we donned our macs and gum boots and sallied forth, clambering up slippery paths to the “Berries” (the rough common land stretching back inland from the perilously unguarded cliffs’ edge) for long walks. Sometimes the force of the gale threw one, screaming excitedly, to the bilberry- and heather-covered ground; below us the sea foamed and raged and the waves lashed our beach. Returned home, dripping and soaking, we stripped and dried in front of the kitchen stove, and never did cocoa taste better.

  Sometimes my mother would visit us, and, there being no room in our cottage for another guest, she would stay at a local hotel up at Buck’s Cross on the main road. It must have been quite simple really, but I equated it with the Ritz. Nana, Sarah, and I would collect her in the morning, and we would spend the days together. Sometimes she would take us to Hartland Abbey to lunch with friends of hers, the Stucleys. We always visited the nearby village of Clovelly, which is built up and down a steep cliff, with a precipitous cobbled high street leading to the little fishing harbour: no cars are allowed, and donkeys carry all and sundry up and down. It was then, and is still, always thronged with people in the holiday season. I loved the donkey rides, and the ice creams, and the “tourist trap” shops. Buck’s Mills boasted no such amenities, which were indeed considered very common by our grown-ups (although the post office—a long walk up to the top of the village—sold ice creams as well as newspapers). One expedition I enjoyed less was luncheon at the Abbey, for this meant putting on socks and generally tidying up. Our hosts were very kind, but I languished under the longueurs of the conversation, which very properly was not devised for my amusement and seemed to be all about obscure relations of whom I had never heard. But worse was to come: in the afternoon my mother and any other grown-up guests headed for a famous local woodland walk near Clovelly, with wonderful vistas of the sea, known as “The Hobby Drive.” I thought it was endless (it is in fact three miles long, which is quite a hike for a child); I used to become excruciatingly bored and always behaved badly—so much so that one year even a genuine blister was attributed to general bolshiness. How pleased I was to get back to dear Buck’s, and my beach friends, and endless happy occupations!

  FROM THE EARLY DAYS of his marriage to my mother Winston had always been most attentive to their nursery world, regularly reporting its news to Clementine when she was away; now, many years on, he seemed delighted to find nursery life revived and, despite ministerial and parliamentary affairs, seemed always to find time for the “Benjamin” as well as for the older ones. “Mary is flourishing,” he wrote to my mother from Downing Street in March 1925, while she was away in Dieppe with her own, dying mother. “She comes and sits with me in the mornings & is sometimes most gracious [I was two and a half at this time]. Diana is just back from school & we are all planning to go and see Randolph [at Eton] this afternoon.”

  My father and I evidently enjoyed each other’s company: “Mary is very gracious to me & spends ½ an hour each morning in my bed while I breakfast,” he wrote in February 1926. “Some of her comments are made in the tone & style of a woman of thirty. She is a sweet.” The following month he told Clementine, who was travelling in Italy, that I had breakfasted with him, while Diana and Sarah (sixteen and eleven respectively) and he had all dined together. Later in March, when the whole family were sending our birthday greetings to her for 1 April, Winston was evidently much amused that I had observed to his brother, Jack: “Mummie is bored with me so she has gone to Rome.”

  In October 1927 I was evidently beginning my “London season,” and my father wrote to my mother: “Moppet and Maria [pronounced as in “fire”] have shifted their headquarters to London. I looked in on them on my way through and was very graciously received. In fact as I took my leave Maria said to Moppet, who was calling her, ‘I must take my visitor downstairs,’ which she accordingly did with a great air of ceremony.” Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin were obviously most kindly disposed towards me; one day the Prime Minister came down to Chartwell and I was deputed to welcome him. Winston reported the event to Clementine: “Baldwin came to lunch & was greeted with much ceremony by Mary. How women admire power!” And a few weeks later my father had an amusing incident in our London life to report: “Yesterday she encountered Mrs B in the garden and was taken by her into the Cabinet room and introduced together with the pug to a number of people. I said to Moppet ‘Was she dressed all right?’ meaning, was she tidy? to which Mary replied ‘Oh, yes, she (Mrs B) was wearing a nice grey frock’!”

  During this same absence Winston wrote to Clementine, who was travelling in Italy with Diana, from Chartwell: “What a delightful postcard correspondence you carried on with Mary! She showed them all to me with gt pride. I am sorry she has shifted her Headquarters to London. I shall be alone here next week without the interruptions of her charming prattle & ceremonious entrances.”

  All these accounts seem to show me as a somewhat “quaint” little person and—except for trying to pour water on a policeman from my first-floor nursery—as, on the whole, a good child. However, I have to record an incident which reveals me as having been perfectly capable of behaving atrociously. In the summer of 1927 my mother commissioned the artist Neville Lewis to paint my portrait at Chartwell. In the book Studio Encounters he gave this account of our sittings:

  Mary was an attractive child of about six or seven years old [in mitigation I must point out I was in fact not quite five]. She was to sit the next morning, but when I was ready to start she decided that she was not going to sit and did not want a painting done. She was the most obstinate child I have ever met. Nothing her parents could say made any difference. She would not be painted. She had a very patient governess, who let Mary sit on her knee and read to her to keep her quiet. I pretended to be busy painting her doll, which was on a table next to her, but if she s
aw me looking at her she would say ‘Don’t look at me, you are only to paint the doll’. I did a reasonably good job, in spite of the trouble she gave me, and Mr. and Mrs. Churchill were pleased.

  The portrait, which I have now, is a delightful picture of a proper crosspatch, with a red face, shiny nose, very blue eyes, and untidy blonde hair.

  Jack Churchill’s wife, Lady Gwendeline (always called Goonie) was also staying at Chartwell at the time, and she asked Mr. Lewis to paint their only daughter, Clarissa, who was two years older than I. I (justly) fared badly by comparison, Neville Lewis writing: “She [Clarissa] really was a lovely child. She was a bit older than her cousin and was well behaved, and there was no trouble in getting her to sit still.” I don’t remember this shaming episode at all, but I well recall my mother telling me in later years how dreadfully naughty I was, and how mortified she and Nana had been by my behaviour.

  IN MAY 1929 Parliament was dissolved, and there was a general election. My parents took a house in the constituency (the West Essex Epping Division, later renamed the Wanstead and Woodford Division of Essex) where my father had in 1924 won the seat which he would represent as a Conservative for the remaining forty years of his parliamentary life. Our house for the campaign was The Wood House in the grounds of Copt Hall, a large mansion that had been destroyed by fire: the overgrown ruins seemed very spooky to me. Nana and I were included in the electioneering party, and I remember we girls wore our father’s election colours round our hats and drove round with our parents on their vote-raising drives. While Winston was safe at Epping, the Conservatives overall were roundly defeated, and Ramsay MacDonald formed his second Labour government. We therefore said goodbye to No. 11 Downing Street, which would hold many vivid memories for me in later years.