The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (23 page)

His second, also to her, was written on January 4, 1882, at Blenheim, where he was visiting his grandmother:

Still at Blenheim—Jennie was in a frenzy of preparation for the Season—he learned on March 20 that his father was afflicted with a serious infection. He wrote another note: “My dear Papa, I hope you are getting better. I am enjoying myself very much. I find a lot of primroses every day. I bought a basket to put them in. I saw three little Indian children on Saturday, who came to see the house. Best love to you and dear Mamma. I am, Yr loving son Winston.” Very likely Woom helped guide his hand in these first attempts; his subsequent childhood correspondence, scrawled while he was away from her, is peppered with misspellings. But writing already came easily to him; his fluency would grow year by year, undiscouraged by the infrequency of replies from his parents. Arithmetic was another matter. His struggles with it seemed hopeless, and led to his only real battle with his nurse. He remembered afterward: “Letters after all had only got to be known, and when they stood together in a certain way one recognized their formation and that it meant a certain sound. But the figures were tied into all sorts of tangles and did things to one another which it was extremely difficult to forecast with complete accuracy. You had to say what they did each time they were tied up together. It was not any use being ‘nearly right.’ In some cases these figures got into debt with one another: you had to borrow one or carry one, and afterwards you had to pay back the one you borrowed.” He tried, he tried again, and again; he gave up, threw down his pad and paper and stamped on them. Patiently Woom explained. Impatiently he shook his head. He fled; she pursued him. He threatened to attack her with his toy soldiers. She wasn’t intimidated by that, but she did surrender when he shouted that unless she quit he would bow down and worship graven images. In time his grasp of numbers improved, yet he never fully mastered them, as England would learn to its sorrow when he became chancellor of the Exchequer.
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H
e was seven years old and his parents decided it was time he left home. On November 3, 1882, five weeks after the start of the autumn term, he was enrolled as a boarder at St. George’s School near Ascot, a place famous for its women and horses. St. George’s was an expensive school—fifty-two pounds for the first month, payable in advance—which prepared boys for Eton. Winston wept when told he must go. “I had been so happy in my nursery,” he wrote later; “… now it was to be all lessons.” Precisely how he traveled there is unclear. Jennie rode with him to Paddington Station in Randolph’s private hansom, but on the train platform they parted; she gave him three half crowns and sent him on alone. He lost the coins, panicked, found them, and arrived trembling. It was late afternoon, and dark. A master led him to a desk, handed him a thin, brown-green Latin grammar, told him to memorize the declension of
mensa,
and departed. When the teacher returned, Winston reeled off a perfect recitation. The man seemed satisfied, and Winston, encouraged, asked, “What does it mean, sir?” He was told, “
Mensa
means a table.” Winston pointed out that according to the book, one of the forms would then be translated as “O table.” He asked why. The master explained that this was the vocative case, that “you would use that in addressing a table.” Astonished, the boy blurted out: “But I never do.” The master snapped: “If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely.”
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That was the quintessential St. George’s, the school in microcosm. Churchill would remember “how I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years. I made very little progress at my lessons, and none at all at games. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude and range my soldiers in line of battle on the nursery floor.” However, he did not tell his parents that. At the end of his first month there he wrote his father, “I am very happy at [s]chool. You will be very plesed to hear I spent a very happy birthday,” and the same day he wrote Jennie, “I hope you are quite well. I am very happy at school.” But this is unsurprising. Boarding-school boys who feel wretched and badly treated seldom mention it in letters home. They think the flaw is in them, and they hide it. He doubtless assumed that his father would have snorted had he complained, and he was probably right. Like all Victorian children of his class, he had been taught to keep a stiff upper lip, so he did. Now and then he hinted at his immense yearning to quit St. George’s. In March he wrote: “30 day [sic] more and the
Holidays
will be
Here
.” Then: “Only 18 more days.” And then, on the eve of his next vacation: “I am comeinge home
In a month
.” He dragged out the end of his letters, as though he could not bear to break this frail tie with his family:
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Mostly he wrote of trivia. “We went to hampton cort palace.” “We went to see the picture gallry.” “Give my love to my ants.” He had caught another cold, but wrote, “My cough is nearly well now.” Still another cold followed six months later; it hung on and on before he could report: “I am all wright and well. I have been allowed to go back into my own room.” It is doubtful that his mother had known he had a room. Certainly she didn’t know what it looked like. She never came. And he mourned her absence. That is the one thread that runs through his pathetic little correspondence: he desperately wanted visitors. “It was so kind of you to let Everest come,” he wrote in the summer of 1883, but Woom, and then Woom and Jack, seem to have been the only ones who came. Ascot was a short hansom ride from Mayfair—trains from Paddington were even quicker—but neither Jennie nor Randolph found the trip convenient. So his pathetic pleas were unanswered. He begged his mother to “come and see me soon,” to “Come & see me soon dear Mamma.” He wrote, “I am wondering when you are coming to see me?” and, “You must send somebody to see me.” The least she could have done was reply. She seldom did. On June 8, 1884, when he was nine, his accumulating resentment flared briefly: “It is very unkind of you not to write to me before this, I have only had one letter from you this term.” The back of one of his notes tells us something about her priorities. On it are scribbled lists of guests for two dinner parties. She had time to entertain “Sir R. Peel,” “Consuelo,” “Duke of Portland,” “Ld Marcus,” and sixteen others, but she couldn’t spare a few minutes to slake her small son’s thirst for a line or two of love. She planned feasts for her friends. Winston asked for bread, and she gave him a stone.
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Randolph, surprisingly, did send him a gift that year. It was a copy of
Treasure Island
. Winston devoured it and promised to be worthy of it: “I will try to be a good boy.” Most boys at St. George’s tried to be good, though, and without incentives from home. The penalties for failure were dire. Since the Churchills were not the only influential family to be gulled into sending their son there, we know a good deal about the school. It was an upper-class version of Dotheboys Hall in
Nicholas Nickleby
. The regimen was fierce: eight hours a day of lessons, followed by football and cricket. There was fagging, and there were floggings almost every day, the chief whipper being the Reverend H. W. Sneyd-Kynnersley, a sadistic headmaster who would lay as many as twenty strokes of birch on a boy’s bare rump. Given Winston’s extremely sensitive skin, this must have been excruciating. Yet he became, and remained, the school’s chief rebel. He excelled in history, but refused to learn Latin verses he did not understand; in his words, “Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.” Pitted against authority for the first time in his life, he defied it, refused to curry favor, and was, as a consequence, beaten until he shrieked. He later wrote: “My teachers saw me at once backward and precocious, reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the Form. They were offended. They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal, but I was stubborn.”
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His rebelliousness did not arise from the dignified resolution of a mature man standing on principle. Principles were indeed at stake, but he couldn’t have known that. He was less than ten years old. His behavior was intuitive. To others he simply seemed a disobedient, mischievous little boy. Maurice Baring, who entered St. George’s shortly after Winston left it, wrote: “Dreadful legends were told about Winston Churchill, who had been taken away from the school. His naughtiness appeared to have surpassed anything. He had been flogged for taking sugar from the pantry, and so far from being penitent, he had taken the Headmaster’s sacred straw hat from where it hung over the door and kicked it to pieces. His sojourn at this school had been one long feud with authority.” His masters and even his schoolmates, with the conformity of youth, were appalled. Baring said: “The boys did not seem to sympathise with him. Their point of view was conventional and priggish.”
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One afternoon Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, a political ally of Randolph’s and a founder of the Tory Primrose League, called at Connaught Place and asked Jack if he was good. Jack said, “Yes, but brother is teaching me to be naughty.” Actually, Jack would never be naughty. Though he was born of the same mother and shared the same family life, his development was the opposite of Winston’s. He resisted nothing, accepted what he was given, turned inward, and grew up to be an inoffensive man from whom little was expected or given. Boys like Jack create no difficulties for their parents. He was the kind of son Jennie wanted, and the contrast with his sibling pained her. As early as December 26, 1882, she wrote Randolph at Monte Carlo—the familial Christmas rites, so beloved by other Victorians, seem never to have been celebrated at Connaught Place—“As to Winston’s improvement I am sorry to say I see none. Perhaps there has not been time enough. He can read very well, but that is all, and the first two days he came home he was terribly slangy and loud. Altogether I am disappointed.” Sneyd-Kynnersley, she said, had assured her that the masters intended “to be more strict with him.” She meant to try her own hand anyhow; “it appears that he is afraid of me.” That was an odd admission from a mother, but perhaps it was true; a fearsome mother was at any rate preferable to maternal indifference. But she failed. Nothing intimidated him, certainly not St. George’s. One riffles through his report cards there with mounting rage and amazement. It seems to have occurred to no one that a fresh approach might improve the behavior of this very difficult child. In his first accounting to Jennie the headmaster noted that Winston “has been
very
naughty.” Then: “He is still troublesome.” Next: “He is, I hope,
beginning
to realize that school means work and discipline.” And then: “He is rather greedy at meals”—a peculiar description of a youthful appetite. After that, according to Sneyd-Kynnersley’s comments, it was all downhill. His conduct was “very bad”; he was “a constant trouble to everybody and is always in some scrape or other”; he could not “be trusted to behave himself anywhere”; he had “no ambition”; he gave “a great deal of trouble.” There is a sense of impending crisis in all this, and it crystallized when Winston, flayed beyond endurance, fled home to Mrs. Everest. Woom undressed him and recoiled when she saw his back and bottom crisscrossed with welts. She summoned Jennie, and the sight of his wounds told her what he, in the mute, tortuous language of a child, had been trying to tell her for two years. She immediately removed him from St. George’s and entered him in a small school run by two maiden sisters in Brunswick Road, Brighton. It is unclear what, if anything, passed between her and the headmaster. Very likely Randolph knew nothing of the incident; his own letters show that he did not even know how old Winston was. But it is satisfying to report that two years later Mr. Sneyd-Kynnersley, aged thirty-eight, dropped dead of a heart attack.
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