The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (71 page)

Thus interest grew on both sides, fomented by aunts and cousins, Lady this and Lady that, until, on August 7, the Duke of Marlborough invited Clementine to a small party at Blenheim. The same mail brought a note from Winston. He hoped she would come because “I want so much to show you that beautiful place & in its gardens we shall find lots of places to talk in, & lots of things to talk about.” His mother would act as chaperon—there were royal chuckles when the King heard that—with F. E. and Margaret Smith the only other guests. The next day he wrote her again; he thought she would like Sunny, and would “fascinate him with those strange mysterious eyes of yours, whose secret I have been trying so hard to learn…. Till Monday then & may the Fates play fair.” Clementine could have had little doubt of what awaited her at the palace, and she felt, she later said, a “sudden access of shyness.” She was down to her last clean cotton frock. The other women would have maids, and she would have to stand for fear of crumpling her skirt. Nevertheless, she arrived at Blenheim outwardly poised on Monday, August 10. That evening the stage for his proposal was set. After breakfast in the morning they would walk in the rose garden.
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In later years Churchill said that “at Blenheim I took two important decisions: to be born and to marry. I am happily content with the decision I took on both those occasions.”
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He neglected to mention that Clementine had had something to say about the second, and that his dilatoriness had nearly lost her. Always an early riser, she was prompt at breakfast Tuesday. Winston wasn’t there. She waited for him. And waited. He was fast asleep. Mortified, she considered returning to London immediately, and no one who knew her doubts that she meant it. Luckily, Sunny intervened. The duke sent his cousin a sharp note and, in his role as host, asked her to join him in a buggy ride around the grounds. They returned a half hour later to find Churchill yawning at the horizon.

The walk was postponed until late afternoon. They were in the middle of it, and Winston was just about to clear his throat, when the skies opened and wrapped them in sheets of rain. Fortunately an ornamental little Greek temple overlooking the palace’s great lake offered refuge, and there, drenched and shivering, he asked her to marry him. She said yes, but swore him to secrecy until she had her mother’s consent. He couldn’t keep his word. The skies cleared, they strolled back to the palace, and the moment he saw his friends he broke into a run, waving his arms and shouting the news. That night in her bedroom Clementine wrote him a love letter, addressing it by drawing a heart with “Winston” lettered inside it—the first of the endearing missives they would exchange throughout the rest of their long life together. The next day he picked a bouquet of roses for her to take home and, to make amends for breaking his pledge, wrote his future mother-in-law asking her “consent & blessing.” He told her, “I am not rich nor powerfully established, but your daughter loves me & with that love I feel strong enough to assume this great & sacred responsibility; & I think I can make her happy & give her a station & career worthy of her beauty and her virtues.” He never mailed the letter—he was apt to do this—but Lady Blanche took him into her heart anyway. She wrote Wilfrid Blunt: “He is gentle and tender, affectionate to those he loves, much hated by those who have not come under his personal charm.” At the moment he was also busy; the wedding was scheduled for Saturday, September 12, less than three weeks after the formal announcement, and there was much to do. Congratulatory notes required answers (two were from Pamela Plowden and Muriel Wilson). He picked Linky Cecil as his best man, and asked Welldon to speak at the service. Presents had to be acknowledged. In the happy English tradition of political civility, gifts arrived from Balfour and the Chamberlains. The King sent a gold-headed walking stick; Sir Ernest Cassel, £500.
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On the appointed Saturday the guests, including Sir Bindon Blood, Ian Hamilton, and Lloyd George, gathered in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. Even here the groom could not elude controversy;
Tailor and Cutter
described his attire as “one of the greatest failures as a wedding garment we have ever seen, giving the wearer a sort of glorified coachman appearance.” Blunt wrote in his diary that Churchill had “gained in appearance since I saw him last, and has a powerful if ugly face. Winston’s responses were clearly made in a pleasant voice, Clementine’s inaudible.” Appropriately, the reception was held in Lady St. Helier’s home. In his new post Churchill had defended the right of costermongers to trade in the street, and “Pearly Kings and Queens,” cockneys whose costumes were adorned with pearl buttons sewn in elaborate patterns, danced outside in Portland Place.
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Winston later wrote that he and Clementine “lived happily ever afterwards.” It was, in fact, a great marriage, but few brides have had to adjust so quickly to their husband’s careers. She was given a glimpse of the future immediately after the wedding ceremony, when she found him with Lloyd George in the church vestry, earnestly talking politics. At Blenheim, where their honeymoon began, he revised the final text of his book on Africa, and in Venice, their last stop, he was toiling away at official papers and memoranda, belying his letter to his mother from there: “We have only loitered & loved—a good & serious occupation for which the histories furnish respectable precedents.” In Eichorn on the way back they stayed with an old friend of Winston’s, the Austrian Baron Tuty de Forest, who had been educated in England. Winston and the baron had a marvelous time shooting, but Clementine found the household stiff and the baroness dull. She was glad to be headed home, and was excited by the prospect of being presented to her husband’s constituents in Dundee. Her oddest experience on the wedding trip had been her first encounter with Winston’s underwear. She wore cheap chemises, but his underclothes, she whispered to a wide-eyed Violet Asquith when they returned and dined at Downing Street, were made of pale pink, very finely woven silk; they came from the Army and Navy Stores and “cost the eyes out of the head”—about eighty pounds a year, she calculated. When Violet “taxed him with this curious form of self-indulgence, he replied: ‘It is essential to my well-being. I have a very delicate and sensitive cuticle which demands the finest covering.’ ” He invited her to examine the texture of the skin on his forearm. It was, he proudly told her, “a cuticle without a blemish, except for one small portion of my anatomy where I sacrificed a piece of my skin to accommodate a wounded brother officer on my way back from the Sudan campaign.”
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Like other lovers, they invented pet names for each other. Clementine was “Cat” or “Kat”; Winston was “Pug,” then “Amber Pug,” then “Pig.” Drawings of these animals decorated the margins of their letters to each other, and at dinner parties Winston would reach across the table, squeeze her hand, and murmur, “Dear Cat.” After a garden luncheon, Blunt entered in his diary: “He is
aux plus petits soins
with his wife, taking all possible care of her. They are a very happy married pair. Clementine was afraid of wasps, and one settled on her sleeve, and Winston gallantly took the wasp by the wings and thrust it into the ashes of the fire.” She became pregnant the month after the wedding. Not knowing the child’s sex, they created the name “Puppy Kitten,” then shortened it to simply “P.K.” The imminent arrival of the P.K. made a move from the little house on Bolton Street imperative, and early in 1909 Churchill took an eighteen-year lease, at £195 a year, on a house at 33 Eccleston Square, in Pimlico, between Victoria Station and the Thames. Clementine was economizing wherever possible; on April 27 she wrote Winston: “I had a long afternoon with Baxter & carpets. The green carpet is lovely & will do beautifully for the library. It looks like soft green moss… I tried hard to make the red stair carpet do for the dining room, but it is really too shabby.” A “green sickly looking carpet” from Bolton Street “does Puppy Kitten’s room.” One servant’s room could “be done for about £2.” She had “written to the people who are making the blue stair carpet to ask what it will cost to cover dining room entirely with the blue—(4/6 a yard).”
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In May they moved in, and three months later Clementine gave birth to a girl, whom they christened Diana. Away watching army maneuvers that September, Winston wrote his “dear Kat,” begging her to “try to gather your strength. Don’t spend it as it comes. Let it accumulate…. My darling I so want your life to be a full & sweet one, I want it to be worthy of all the beauties of your nature. I am so much centered in my politics, that I often feel I must be a dull companion, to anyone who is not in the trade too. It gives me so much joy to make you happy—& often wish I were more various in my topics.” Diana was followed, less than two years later, by their son, Randolph, “the Chumbolly.” Winston wrote from Blenheim: “My precious pussy cat, I do trust & hope that you are being good & not sitting up or fussing yourself. The Chumbolly must do his duty and help you with your milk, you are to tell him so from me.” She replied, “I am very happy here, contemplating the beautiful Chumbolly who grows more darling & handsome every hour, & puts on weight with every meal; so that soon he will be a little round ball of fat. Just now I was kissing him, when catching sight of my nose he suddenly fastened upon it & began to suck it, no doubt thinking it was another part of my person!”
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These notes are only partly attributable to his travels. She was a lark, he a nightingale; they tried having breakfast together two or three times, he later said, “but it didn’t work. Breakfast should be had in bed alone.” Since one was often bustling about while the other slept, they left hundreds of these missives for each other. All testify to a devotion that never flagged, though, like every other couple, they had their edgy moments. In the beginning his sudden and unexpected absences made her wonder if there were other women in his life. Her challenge does not survive, but we have his reply: “Dearest, it worries me vy much that you should seem to nurse such absolutely wild suspicions wh are so dishonouring to all the love & loyalty I bear you & will please god bear you while I breathe. They are unworthy of you & me. And they fill my mind with feelings of embarrassment to wh I have been a stranger since I was a schoolboy. I know that they originate in the fond love you have for me and therefore they make me feel tenderly towards you & anxious always to deserve that most precious possession of my life. But at the same time they depress me & vex me—& without reason. We do not live in a world of small intrigues but of serious & important affairs…. You ought to trust me for I do not love & will never love any woman in the world but you and my chief desire is to link myself to you week by week by bonds which shall ever become more intimate & profound. Beloved I kiss your memory—your sweetness & beauty have cast a glory upon my life. You will find me always your loving & devoted husband, W.”
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He once said: “It is hard, if not impossible, to snub a beautiful woman; they remain beautiful and the rebuke recoils.” Clementine’s acquaintances forgot that at their peril. Her response to slights was swift and literally unanswerable, for she simply departed. Once, when they were playing bridge at Canford Manor, Ivor Guest, one of Winston’s cousins, lost his temper and threw his cards at her head. She rose from the table, went to bed, and in the morning, ignoring Guest’s profuse apologies, left for London with her dismayed husband in tow. Again, she was in the Green Room at Blenheim, replying to a letter from Lloyd George, when Sunny said: “Please, Clemmie, would you mind not writing to that horrible little man on Blenheim writing-paper?” She flew upstairs and packed. Sunny begged her to stay, but she was off on the next train from Woodstock. Winston, who hadn’t been with her, was tepid in his defense of her, and she resented that; she believed she had hoisted the Liberal banner against Tory spite. When she had calmed down she wrote him: “My sweet and Dear Pig, when I am a withered old woman how miserable I shall be if I have disturbed your life & troubled your spirit by my temper. Do not cease to love me. I could not do without it. If no one loves me, instead of being a Cat with teeth & Claws, but you will admit soft fur, I shall become like the prickly porcupine outside, & inside so raw & unhappy.” He replied that “I loved much to read the words of your dear letter,” and this was followed by a rare Churchillian admission of self-doubt: “At times, I think I cd conquer everything—& then again I know I am only a weak vain fool. But your love for me is the greatest glory & recognition that has or will ever befall me: & the attachment wh I feel towards you is not capable of being altered by the sort of things that happen in this world. I only wish I were more worthy of you, & more able to meet the inner needs of your soul.”
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Clementine was as complex as her husband, but in many ways his antithesis: less gregarious, always reserved, often lonely in the midst of people, and far more critical of others. In those days she admired Lloyd George—many women did, and he exploited them; his promiscuity was so extraordinary that it had won him the sobriquet “Goat”—but she didn’t like Guest or F. E. Smith, who went on to be Lord Birkenhead, lord chancellor of England; or the young Canadian millionaire Max Aitken. It puzzled her that “F.E.,” as everyone called him, should be Winston’s best friend. His brilliance and dazzling wit were lost on her. She saw him as simply an archconservative Tory. Yet Winston and F.E. went on summer cruises together and founded the Other Club (the House of Commons being
the
Club), where bitter political rivals dined amicably in one another’s company and took up their weapons again afterward, the constitution providing that “nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics.” Churchill later wrote of F.E. in
Great Contemporaries:
“Never did I separate from him without having learnt something, and enjoyed myself besides.” He and F.E. were also fellow officers in the QOOH, the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, and took the field each spring in the regiment’s annual camp, held in Blenheim Park. He and Clementine would engage in bantering correspondence during these gentlemanly maneuvers. “We are going to bathe in the lake this evening,” he told her in a typical note. “No cats allowed! Your pug in clover, W.” And she would assure him that while he was gone, “your lazy Kat sits purring and lapping cream and stroking her kittens.”
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