The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (22 page)

The shabby clothes are insignificant, except in revealing what came first for Jennie; she wore a diamond in her hair but didn’t see to it that her son was dressed properly. But childish fears of being abandoned are easily aroused. Staying away on horseback until the entire household is fearful of an accident, and telling a little boy that you are about to leave on a train—information he does not need—are bound to unsettle him and leave scars afterward. It is in this context that his relationship with his nanny assumed such importance. Her role in his childhood cannot be overemphasized. She was the dearest figure in his life until he was twenty; her picture hung in his bedroom until he died. He wrote: “Mrs. Everest it was who looked after me and tended all my wants. It was to her I poured out my many troubles.” After reading Gibbon’s memoirs he wrote: “When I read his reference to his old nurse: ‘If there be any, as I trust there are some, who rejoice that I live, to that dear and excellent woman their gratitude is due,’ I thought of Mrs. Everest; and it shall be her epitaph.” An even more revealing tribute appeared in his second book, the novel
Savrola
. He wrote of the hero’s nanny:

Jennie in Ireland, about 1877

Why irrational? Childless women have maternal feelings, too; surely it is understandable that they should lavish affection on other women’s children entrusted to them. Anthony Storr comments upon this passage: “Churchill is showing surprise at being loved, as if he had never felt he was entitled to it.” This is part of the depressive syndrome. Most infants are loved for themselves; they accept that love as they accept food and warmth. But in Winston’s case, as his son later observed, “The neglect and lack of interest in him shown by his parents were remarkable, even judged by the standards of late Victorian and Edwardian days.” That anyone should love him became a source of wonder. The uncritical devotion of “Woom” (derived from an early attempt to say “woman”) was inadequate. He could hardly have failed to sense that the woman was a servant. Affection from others had to be earned; eventually he would win it by doing great things. At the same time—and this would cripple his schooling—the deprivation of parental attachment bred resentment of authority. One might expect that his mother and father, the guilty parties, would be the targets of his hostility. Not so. The deprived child cherishes the little attention his parents do give him; he cannot risk losing it. Moreover, he blames himself for his plight. Needing outlets for his own welling adoration, he enshrines his parents instead, creating images of them as he wishes they were, and the less he sees of them, the easier that transformation becomes. By this devious process Lord Randolph became Winston’s hero, and his mother, as he wrote, “always seemed to me a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power.” His resentment had to be directed elsewhere. Therefore he became, in his own words, “a troublesome boy.” His mother called him “a most difficult child to manage.” Toward the end of their years in Ireland Jennie engaged a governess for him. He couldn’t stand her. He kicked, he screamed, he hid. There is a story that one day a parlormaid was summoned to the Little Lodge room where he was having his lessons. The maid asked the governess why she had rung. Winston said: “
I
rang. Take Miss Hutchinson away. She is very cross.”
¹¹

Mrs. Everest

That was precocious. He was just approaching the age of assertiveness, with consequences which would not be realized until he was ready for boarding school. Most of his Irish memories were passive. There was the mist and the rain and the red-coated British soldiers and the breath-taking emerald greenery. There was the time in Phoenix Park when he ran away into the woods, or what he thought were woods; actually, he had just crept under some shrubbery. Once Woom organized an expedition to a pantomime show. When they arrived at the Theatre Royal it had burned down; the mournful manager said all he had left was the key to the front door. Already insatiably curious, Winston demanded to see the key and was awarded a black look. Another day the duke unveiled a statue of Lord Gough, and his grandson would remember “a great black crowd, scarlet soldiers on horseback, strings pulling away a brown shiny sheet, the old Duke, the formidable grandpapa, talking loudly to the crowd. I even recall a phrase he used: ‘And with a withering volley he shattered the enemy’s line.’ ”
^*
Woom dressed him in a sailor suit and took him to a photographer. Freckled, redheaded, and pug-nosed, the likeness gives the impression of violent motion suddenly arrested, and in fact he was already hyperactive; from the time he had learned to talk his lips had been moving almost incessantly. Woom, the nanny-cum-chauvinist, kept him quiet with chilly tales about the “wicked Fenians.” They were not wholly fanciful. The ancestors of the Irish Republican Army were active, and they were a murderous gang; two years after the duke’s successor arrived in Dublin, his under secretary and a companion were hacked to death with long surgical knives within sight and hearing of the Vice Regal Lodge. Mrs. Everest had good reason to be wary, and she was. One afternoon when Winston was riding a donkey beside her she saw some soldiers in the distance and mistook them for Irish rebels; she screamed and frightened the donkey, which reared up, unseating its young mount. Winston recalled: “I was thrown off and had concussion of the brain. This was my first introduction to Irish politics.”
¹²

In the early 1880s the Churchills’ banishment ended. Randolph had laid low when visiting in London, but he had never really abandoned politics; three years earlier he had slipped across the Irish Sea and spoken to his Woodstock constituency, attacking Disraeli’s lackluster Irish policy. (“The only excuse I can find for Randolph,” his mortified father had written a Tory leader, “is that he must either be mad or have been singularly affected with local champagne or claret.”) Now he ran for Parliament again in the family borough and was elected by 60 votes—something of a triumph, for there were only 1,071 voters in the borough, compared with today’s typical constituency of 50,000. Moreover, he was bucking the tide; Gladstone had overthrown Disraeli and would be prime minister for the next five years. That meant a new viceroy in Dublin. Back in London, Randolph moved his small family into a new house at 29 St. James’s Place, next door to Sir Stafford Northcote, the leader of the Conservative opposition in the House, and opened negotiations for his re-entry into the Prince of Wales’s favor. Victoria approved. She had already told her son that she could not continue to exclude Randolph from court festivities. Sir Stafford approached Disraeli and wrote in his diary: “I asked him whether Randolph Churchill was forgiven yet in high quarters. He said he was all right so far as the Queen was concerned, but that the Prince of Wales had not yet made it up with him.” Four years were to pass before HRH and Randolph sat at the table together, at a dinner given by Sir Henry James, MP (the future Lord James of Hereford), in March 1884. Afterward the prince sent word to Sir Henry that “R. Churchill’s manner was
just
what it ought to have been.” Yet all bygones were not to be bygones.
Vanity Fair
reported the “full and formal reconciliation” between the two but added: “It is understood, however, that while Lord Randolph feels much satisfaction at being again on friendly terms with the Heir-Apparent, he does not propose to become intimate with all the Prince’s friends.” Randolph would never forgive those Tories who had turned their backs when HRH had ostracized him. He would remain a member of the Conservative party, but would be a rebel within it. After his death his son would step into the same role. Thus, in a sense, one source of Winston’s rebellious stand against Neville Chamberlain in the 1930s lay in Lady Aylesworth’s bed.
¹³

Randolph’s brief but spectacular political career was just beginning when Winston reached the age of full awareness, first at St. James’s Place, then at Beech Lodge in Wimbledon after Randolph and Jennie had toured the United States, and, finally, at 2 Connaught Place, a block from Hyde Park and Marble Arch and the first house in Mayfair to be equipped with electricity. All three homes had large nursery wings; Winston lost himself in fantasy there, playing with his steam engine, his magic lantern, and his toy soldiers. Already he had more than a thousand lead soldiers. Year by year the collection would grow. It is not clear who first gave them to him—Randolph, perhaps, or perhaps Mrs. Everest, who was provided with cash to be used at her discretion—but relatives learned that, when in doubt about presents, a gift of tiny dragoons or lancers would be prized by him. He now had a brother, or half-brother, Jack. Six years separated them, however, and there appears to have been no attempt to find playmates for Winston. Woom took him to pantomimes, Drury Lane, Madame Tussaud’s, and for walks in the park. But mostly he was alone. He loved it. The time flew—“It is the brightest hours,” he wrote of these years, “that flash away the fastest.”
¹⁴

In
Cradles of Eminence,
their study of childhood patterns found in the lives of men who later distinguished themselves, Victor Goertzel and Mildred George Goertzel found that Winston’s family provided “multiple examples of the qualities in parents and other relatives which seem to be related to the production of an eminent man. There was respect for learning, an experimental attitude, failure-proneness, a plentitude of opinionated relatives, and turbulence in the family life as a result of the erratic behavior of his irrepressible uncle and father. During the time that Winston was thought dull, he was, like other boys, evidencing qualities which presaged ability.” But that was hindsight. It was no consolation to Woom. She worried about her charge. When not lost in thought, he was in constant motion, jumping up and down, leaping from chair to chair, rushing about, and falling and hurting himself. He seemed to have no sense of personal safety. His love of martial poetry was obsessive. He had a speech defect, and one miserable cold after another. But his interest in politics was, for a boy his age, decidedly precocious. When Disraeli sickened in March 1881 and died six weeks later, Winston could talk of nothing else. He later recalled: “I followed his illness from day to day because everyone said what a loss he would be to his country.”
¹⁵
In one way, his anxiety for Disraeli was a boon to Woom. It gave him an incentive to read. She had given Winston a book,
Reading without Tears
. Soon he was forming letters. His first letter, undated, was to his mother: