by Mary Soames
My diary is full of my last term at school. For the half-term holiday my mother took me to Paris—my first visit; Iris Forbes (who was at the Ozannes’ finishing school, where Sarah had been) joined us. My mother had planned an absolute feast of delight and interest. We stayed at the Hôtel Prince de Galles, from where we made visits to Versailles, the Louvre, Notre Dame—my diary could not contain the ecstasy. We also saw several plays: Cyrano de Bergerac, with the décor by Christian Bérard; Ondine by Jean Giraudoux. At some point during this otherwise idyllic weekend I received a monumental reprimand from my mother on the subjects of ingratitude and bad manners—which, according to my diary, I felt I deserved.
During the summer, Chartwell life was full of guests coming and going; there was swimming, tennis, and croquet. My menagerie had been joined by a pair of enchanting fox cubs—Charles James and Victoria: they were never really “tame,” but they were much admired and cosseted, and romped happily with our dogs in the garden. At Blenheim there was a great ball for Sarah Spencer-Churchill’s “coming out.” I, of course, was too young to attend, but I revelled in the accounts I heard from my family. In July my parents gave a dinner party before a ball given by the Astors at Hever Castle. My cousin Clarissa came to stay, and I remember how exquisitely beautiful she looked with her corn-coloured hair and willowy figure. I was awestruck too by the difference two years’ seniority made; she seemed very unapproachable, and I could scarcely believe I had ever once played “Bears” or hide-and-seek with her. I rather wistfully wrote in my diary on 18 July: “I long to be able to go to these balls and parties—I only hope I shall enjoy them as much as I expect to.”
The last weeks of my last term at Manor House spun by in a rush of swimming, sports, and tennis tournaments (I reached the finals of the singles before being severely walloped); and I took the leading part in the end-of-term play. I had various heart-to-heart talks about “life” from various members of the teaching staff, and Miss Gribble as she kissed me said she had been “glad of my presence in the school.” I said tearful farewells to my dearest friends, Rose and Jean.
Fiona (my closest friend, and nearest in age to me of the Forbes family) came to stay for a fortnight, and Nana and I were to go to Les Essarts later on. In the interval my great and “grown-up” treat was to go with my parents to stay with Consuelo and Jacques Balsan at their beautiful house near Dreux, Château St. Georges Motel. My father had gone on ahead of us to visit the Maginot Line at the invitation of the French government; we left on 16 August, travelling by train ferry, and staying in Paris as before at the Prince de Galles. The next day the morning was devoted to shopping, and my mother bought me the most enchanting evening dress at the Trois Quartiers—spotted organdie with red cherry bows. My father arrived back from his tour and told us, as I recorded in my diary on 17 August, that “the spirit among the French soldiers is wonderful.” While my mother rested, he took me off to see the tomb of Napoleon at Les Invalides: we stood looking down in silence on the final resting place of his great hero. Late that afternoon we drove down to St. Georges Motel.
Consuelo Balsan, born Vanderbilt, had been married to Winston’s cousin, contemporary, and great friend Sunny, ninth Duke of Marlborough. After eleven years, and having provided him with two sons, she left him and Blenheim for good in 1906: they were divorced in 1920, and the following year she married Jacques Balsan, a lieutenant colonel in the French air force. Despite the bitterness between the Marlboroughs, Winston and Clementine kept up their friendship with Consuelo, and after her marriage to Jacques Balsan, with whom she was lastingly happy, were often their guests at St. Georges Motel in Normandy and at Eze on the Riviera.
St. Georges Motel—where we would spend the last days of holiday in peacetime—is a most beautiful seventeenth-century château, built in rose-pink brick: it greatly appealed to my father that King Henri IV (of Navarre) had slept the night there before the Battle of Ivry in 1590. Consuelo’s exquisite taste and lovely possessions had made it as remarkable inside as out; here she and her husband led a cultivated and highly civilized way of life, offering warm hospitality to their many friends. Consuelo was also most public-spirited, and between them the Balsans were bywords for good works and generosity wherever they lived.
This August of 1939 the large house party gathered at the château was a mixture of French and other continental guests with some English friends. The weather was glorious, the scene pleasant and peaceful: Winston was happily absorbed painting the house and its beautiful pièce d’eau, and nearly every day his friend and painting companion Paul Maze came over from his family home nearby on the estate at the Moulin de Montreuil to keep him company. For the rest of us there were tennis and swimming, expeditions to nearby places of interest—and fraises des bois, whose delights I discovered for the first time. But over all our enjoyment hung a menacing cloud of uncertainty. My mother and I visited Chartres Cathedral: as we stood—drenched in the cool blueness of those glorious windows—I thought of the words of “Fare Well” by Walter de la Mare: “Look thy last on all things lovely, / Every hour.”
These days passed most pleasantly; but, agreeable and civilized though the company was, all was not harmony, for one or two of the guests were hostile to my father’s political views, and to Britain. Paul Maze remembered how, while he was talking to my father, one of the English guests shouted down from the stairs: “Don’t listen to him. He is a warmonger.”3
The news was becoming increasingly grave, and Winston decided he must return to England: so, less than a week after his arrival, on 23 August, he left St. Georges Motel and flew home. That same day Germany and Russia had signed a pact of mutual nonaggression: now Hitler, his eastern front thus made safe, could turn on Poland. Chamberlain had warned that in this eventuality Britain would stand by its guarantee given to Poland a few months earlier.
The next day, full of forebodings, my mother and I also packed up and bade our farewells. The holidays were over. As we passed through Paris on that glorious summer’s evening to take the night ferry home, the Gare du Nord was teeming with soldiers: the French army was mobilizing.
ON ARRIVING IN LONDON on 25 August we found Diana waiting at the station barrier for us, with the news that her children, Julian (aged three) and Edwina (a baby of eighteen months), with their nanny, had been sent down to Chartwell, and that Duncan, a Territorial Army officer, had been called up. We too went straight to Chartwell, driving down through the night. War preparations were now going ahead in earnest, locally and nationally, though many people were still clinging to the hope that some miraculous last-minute happening might stave off—yet again—the awesome reckoning. I was enchanted to be reunited with my dogs and goats, the fox cubs, and the beautiful Patsy, and for the moment kept out of the way of the general flap and commotion.
The signatures in the Chartwell visitors’ book (and the final ones until 1946) for what would be the last weekend of peace (26–28 August) were those of the Prof (an habitué indeed: it was the 112th time he had signed the book since 1925!) and General Sir Edmund Ironside, the Chief of the Imperial Staff, invited by Winston, with whom he had been in touch a good deal in recent times, to learn about Winston’s latest contacts with the French generals and his tour of the Maginot Line. I was immensely impressed with Sir Edmund, exclaiming to my diary: “What a giant!” (It was his huge stature that earned him his army nickname of “Tiny Ironside.”) Other visitors that weekend (but not “stayers”) were Bob Boothby, Diana and Duncan, local neighbours Desmond Morton and Horatia Seymour—and Randolph, who had brought Noël Coward for dinner on the Sunday evening. I recorded in my diary for 27 August: “N.C. was charming, and sang and played many of his songs, ‘Stately Homes of England’; ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ and the ‘Bitter Sweet Waltz.’ ” This must have been a charming interlude as we tottered on the brink.
During the next few days the official plans for the evacuation of mothers and children from London began to take effect, and householders in “safe” areas were being in
formed of the numbers of evacuees they would be expected to accommodate. Friday, 1 September, was a busy and fateful day, as my diary makes plain:
Up early moving furniture, making beds and generally turning things upside down in order to be ready for the evacuated children. Rumour, confirmed by the Polish embassy came through at about 9 a.m. that Germany had marched on Poland and that bombing is proceeding. May God bless and strengthen the Poles & prosper their cause against tyranny. Went down on bicycle to Crockham Hill schools [which were being used as the evacuation centre] to act as a messenger … Blackout begins from tonight. Papa left for London before lunch, having been summoned by the P.M. & this evening he told us he has been asked to join a War Cabinet of 7 … God guide him in this great work.
Saturday the second was spent in helping to sew blackout curtains while awaiting the arrival of the expected evacuees: they eventually pitched up, and by the evening the Chartwell “ration” of two mothers with seven children between the ages of three months and seven years old had been installed in my old day nursery and kitchen and in bedrooms on the top floor. I had to grapple with all this as “Nana was out buying macintosh sheeting (!) & Mummie was in London.…” I’m not surprised that my last diary entry for that day was: “I retired to bed somewhat flattened!!” Like so many of that first wave of evacuees, our mothers and their children drifted back to London and their own homes after about three weeks, preferring the risk of bombing to the intolerable boredom of country life.
On Sunday, 3 September, my parents were both in London in the flat at Morpeth Mansions: in the country we learned that Britain’s ultimatum to Germany would expire at eleven that morning. I had made plans to ride at Scamperdale with friends, and we were in the stable yard there when Sam Marsh came out, told us the Prime Minister would be broadcasting shortly, and invited us to come into his sitting room to hear him. At 11:15 came the brief statement by Mr. Chamberlain that, since no reply had been received to Britain’s ultimatum, “consequently, this country is at war with Germany.”
“Standing in the sitting room at Scamperdale and looking out at the blue summer sky, just as blue and gay as ever with white clouds floating slowly by, I found it impossible to believe that war has come,” I wrote in my diary later that day. There must have been about five or six of us there—the “regulars”—all, of course, subdued and moved by the announcement. Sam Marsh abruptly sent us all to get saddled up—and he then led us in a gallop all round the farm, jumping the (normally sacrosanct) hunter trials fences. It was such a lovely, bright, breezy day, and this gesture of sheer theatre was the perfect touch—releasing tension and emotions. But I believe for us all it marked quite dramatically the end of our world as we had known it.
* * *
* The Fox family were very nice neighbours who lived near Westerham.
† Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947), Lord President of the Council 1931–35 and Prime Minister (for the third time) 1935–37. In 1937 he was created first Earl Baldwin of Bewdley.
‡ Sir James Hawkey was for many years Winston’s constituency chairman.
§ Hitler’s annexation on 15 March of the territory still remaining to Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement of September 1938.
‖ The towers were taken down in 1941 as they were thought to be guiding landmarks for German bombers.
a Roger Keyes (1872–1945), later Lord Keyes of Zeebrugge; MP for Portsmouth 1934–43; Director of Combined Operations 1940–41; First World War naval hero and friend of WSC.
CHAPTER 7
Clearing the Decks
I RECALL THE NEXT FEW WEEKS AS ONES OF FEVERED ACTIVITY and commotion as we geared up our home front for whatever might befall. On that very first night of the war, 3 September, a German U-boat torpedoed the liner Athenia en route from Glasgow to Montreal, with heavy loss of life: the news shocked us and came as a grim harbinger of what we might expect. We witnessed helplessly from afar the agony of Poland as the Germans moved in, occupying Warsaw on 28 September. Meanwhile the British Expeditionary Force was dispatched across the Channel; petrol rationing began; the civilian population was issued with gas masks; and we were experiencing our first weeks of what would be over five years of blackout.
On 1 September, with war a virtual certainty, Mr. Chamberlain had asked Winston to join the small War Cabinet he was forming. Two days later, after the Prime Minister’s broadcast, the House of Commons met briefly; afterwards he invited Winston to become First Lord of the Admiralty. It was the appointment he most desired, and he did not delay, reporting to the Admiralty that very evening. My mother must have telephoned me the news, and I wrote at once to my father:
CHARTWELL,
WESTERHAM, KENT.
3RD SEPTEMBER 1939
My Darling Papa,
I felt I must just write to tell you how proud and glad I am that you are in the Cabinet.
Don’t get too tired, and remember that you always have your very loving daughter,
Mary
During these early days of the war I divided my energies between helping with the major task of sewing blackout curtains and doing four-hour shifts as a telephonist at the Ambulance Headquarters in Westerham, to-ing and fro-ing on my bicycle. I also had my own programme of wartime preparations. It was planned, to my delight, that I should live in London with my parents and continue my education at Queen’s College, Harley Street; this meant that I had to dispose of my menagerie—a not inconsiderable task! The dogs and the cat could stay with Nana and the children in the cottage, but homes had to be found speedily for my goats and budgerigars, and the fox cubs had to be prepared to take up their life in the wild. I remember they scampered away happily when I released them in woodland quite far from the house, but I was anxious as they had had no training from a vixen mother in the ways of fending for themselves: for some little while I put out food for them. But it was pleasing for me in those last weeks at Chartwell, when I walked our dogs at night, sometimes to see two shadowy forms appearing as if from nowhere, to gambol again with their friends and erstwhile companions.
A painful parting was from my beloved Patsy. It would have been too expensive keeping her at livery just for weekends—which I completely accepted; but I sobbed to my diary, while acknowledging that I must keep a sense of proportion as the civilized world crashed round our ears. Happily for me, her new owner kept her stabled at Scamperdale, and most kindly allowed me to go on riding her. I even had some lovely last mornings of cub hunting. Goodbyes also had to be said to my local friends of all ages: husbands, sons, brothers, and fiancés were rejoining Territorial units or volunteering, while those left behind, the womenfolk, the old, and the very young, were throwing themselves into war work on the home front.
Meanwhile in London, Winston and Clementine prepared to move once more into Admiralty House, nearly a quarter of a century after they had left it. Long since converted into offices, or apartments for government ministers, in 1939 this grand and beautiful house, between Whitehall and Horse Guards Parade, was still available for the use of the First Lord. When the Churchills had lived there in 1913–15, for reasons of personal economy they had used only the upper floors of the house, shutting up the splendid reception rooms on the ground floor: now the exigencies of another war again made it sensible that they should inhabit only part of it, and Clementine, in consultation with the Office of Works, set about planning and furnishing living quarters for us on the top two floors. They worked together so speedily that we were able to move in towards the end of September. My mother, with a combination of “government issue” and our own furniture, and with many of our own pictures, had in a few weeks contrived to make the nursery and staff floors into a charming family apartment. We had lovely views over Horse Guards Parade and St. James’s Park—and, importantly, there was a communicating door with the Admiralty itself, enabling Winston to be instantly accessible to his staff and reached with any urgent news. I was enchanted with my large bed-sitter on the attic floor—it had, I remember, an old-fashioned gas f
ire which “popped” in rather an alarming way.
I started as soon as possible at Queen’s College, Harley Street, joining a part-time course in my favourite subjects—English literature, history, and French. I also enrolled with the Red Cross in one of their workrooms making dressings and bandages: this was a severe test of my patriotism, as all the other volunteers were years older than I, my natural aptitude with needle and thread is zero, and I found mastering herringbone stitch for the many-tailed bandages a task as difficult as it was tedious. I much preferred my shifts at a forces’ canteen at Victoria Station (except when one of my superiors took the unsporting view that I talked too much to the customers, and planted me firmly behind the steaming tea and coffee urns, from where I emerged rather crossly, and with my hairdo predictably ruined).
Diana joined the WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) at the end of September, and as her husband, Duncan, a Territorial officer, was serving in the London area, she was posted as an officer to do welfare work at the WRNS headquarters: she looked ravishing in her tricorn hat and black stockings!
Sarah and Vic were living in Westminster in a glamorous (to my admiring eyes) flat, and were energetically pursuing their acting careers. However, they were not too busy to arrange a lovely family luncheon to celebrate my seventeenth birthday on 15 September.
Randolph, who had joined his father’s old regiment, the 4th Hussars, provided the chief family excitement of the season when he became engaged to Lord and Lady Digby’s red-haired daughter Pamela after a rushed and hectic courtship. Since his regiment might be sent overseas at any moment, their engagement was likewise a short one. I was naturally much excited by all this, and curious about my future sister-in-law, who was only a little older than I, but whom I would watch develop rapidly from a fairly dowdy country girl with freckles into a glamorous figure. For the moment, however, I was deeply preoccupied with my wedding outfit—a cast-off, cut-down fur coat of my mother’s, with a really pretty hat made from the leftovers. Randolph and Pamela were married at St. John’s Smith Square on 4 October; since the Digbys did not have a London house, Winston and Clementine gave the wedding reception at Admiralty House, where the splendid state rooms were opened up for the occasion.
