I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air.
They fly so high, nearly reach the sky,
Then like my dreams they fade and die.
Oh, fortune’s always hiding,
I’ve looked everywhere.
I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air.
It had been a hard winter of hacking coughs and sore throats; Marigold had fallen ill twice, and once it had become necessary to summon a physician. The family rented a seaside cottage at Broadstairs for that summer of 1921. Clementine, leaving there, and Winston, boarding a train in London, would travel by separate routes to the remote Scotland estate of the Duke of Westminster. The elder children would later entrain to join them, Marigold being left at Broadstairs with a young French governess. The Duckadilly’s sickness returned. Before leaving the shore, Randolph wrote his mother on August 2: “Marigold has been rather ill, but is ever so much better today.” The improvement was only temporary. Alone with the young governess, after her brother and sisters had departed, she sickened again. Her throat grew worse; by August 14 she had contracted septicemia. The governess was slow to call the doctor and slower to telegraph Clementine. By the time her mother reached her bedside, the Duckadilly’s condition was grave. Clementine telegraphed Winston, who arrived on the next train from London. On Monday, August 22, he wrote Curzon: “The child is a little better than she was, but we are still dreadfully anxious about her.” On Wednesday evening she began to sink. Clementine was sitting beside her. Suddenly the little girl asked: “Sing me ‘Bubbles.’ ” Her mother tried. She struggled. She tried again. Marigold put out her hand. She whispered: “Not tonight… finish it tomorrow.” But Clementine never finished it. On Thursday the child died. She was two years and nine months old. Her mother and father were at her bedside when life fled from her, and long afterward Winston told Mary, now grown, that Clementine shrieked in agony, “like an animal in mortal pain.” He could not speak of his own agony. On Saturday they buried Marigold in London’s Kensal Green cemetery. Press photographers arrived, but Winston appealed to them to leave, and they did. He wrote Lord Crewe the following week: “We have suffered a vy heavy & painful loss. It also seems so pitiful that this little life sh’d have been extinguished just when it was so beautiful & so happy—just when it was beginning.” The governess was dismissed, but dismissing the grief was impossible. “Alas,” he wrote Clementine when he was next separated from her, “I keep on feeling the hurt of the Duckadilly.” She wrote back: “I took the children on Sunday to Marigold’s grave and as we knelt round it—would you believe that a little white butterfly… fluttered down & settled on the flowers which are now growing on it. We took some little bunches. The children were very silent all the way home.” And seven months later, on April 4, 1922, he wrote her: “I pass through again those sad scenes of last year when we lost our dear Duckadilly. Poor lamb—it is a gaping wound, whenever one touches it & removes the bandages & plasters of daily life.” To the end of her life Clementine could never speak of her lost child. Mary, the last of the Churchills’ children, was born that autumn. She grew up puzzled by the identity of the little girl whose framed picture stood on her mother’s dressing table, wondering who she could be.149
Marigold’s death was one of three to sadden the family that year, though the other two, coming after fruitful lives, were easier to bear. The Countess of Airlie, Clementine’s austere grandmother, expired at the age of ninety, and Winston’s mother died of complications after an accident caused, appropriately, by a pair of fashionable but impractical Italian shoes. At sixty-seven Jennie was a Bright Old Thing, the grayest flapper in postwar Mayfair. She was still on the watch for new experiences. Meeting a jovial, monocled RAF officer at a party, she persuaded him to take her up, sitting in the wickerwork of his little passenger cockpit and soaring over Kent at ninety miles an hour. “An extraordinary experience,” she told her friends. “Right above the clouds in a little coupe.” She played a part in a film. She was forty years older than the rest of the cast, but one of the other actresses said, “She was just one of us.” She scorned a Philadelphia clergyman who denounced short skirts, saying that people, not clothes, were moral or immoral. Long dresses, said she, speaking with the voice of experience, were no insurance against sexual license.150
Returning from a lively trip to Rome, Jennie was on her way to a tea party, hurrying down a staircase in her new shoes when, three steps from a landing, she tripped, fell, and broke her left leg. It was a simple fracture; the bone was quickly set. She was convalescing in her new home in Westbourne Street, just around the corner from Sussex Square, when, two weeks after the fall, gangrene set in. Winston, informed, sent for a surgeon. Immediate amputation was necessary. Jennie calmly said she would learn “to put my best foot forward” and added: “Be sure you cut high enough.” The cut was above the knee. Over the next two weeks she appeared to be healing. Suddenly, after a hearty breakfast, the femoral artery in her left thigh hemorrhaged; she passed into a coma, and was dead before noon. Winston had hurried over in his pajamas; he was with her at the end. DEATH OF LADY RANDOLPH, said the news posters; LADY RANDY GONE. Asquith told a reporter, “She lived every inch of her life up to the edge,” and Churchill wrote a family friend: “She suffers no more pain; nor will she ever know old age, decrepitude, loneliness…. I wish you could have seen her as she lay at rest—after all the sunshine & storm of life was over. Very beautiful & splendid she looked. Since the morning with its pangs, thirty years have fallen from her brow. She recalled to me the countenance I had admired as a child when she was in her heyday and the old brilliant world of the eighties & nineties seemed to come back.” Her last husband was hurrying home from Nigeria, but before he could reach England she had been buried in Bladon churchyard beside Lord Randolph. Shane Leslie wrote: “The feeling shewn was very considerable.” After the others had left, Winston stood alone by the open grave. He wept; and threw in a spray of crimson roses. But he was mourning his own lost youth, and the imperial glory of those years, as much as his mother. To Lord Crewe he wrote that the England “in wh you met her is a long way off now, & we do not see its like today. I feel a vy great sense of deprivation.”151
Jennie herself had never given him a sense of fulfillment. There had been a time when he had needed her help, or rather the help of her powerful admirers, but that had long since passed. Since 1908 the overarching figure in his life had been his wife, and none of his other relationships, not even his love for his children, held him as closely as the matrimonial bond. It was not seamless. An oddity of the triumphant Churchill marriage, and possibly one reason for its success, is that Winston and Clementine usually took separate vacations. In 1919 they toured occupied Germany, and she accompanied him to the Cairo conference, but those were official occasions, offering no moments of intimacy. It was not until 1921 that they left England for their first joint holiday since before the war. Even then they shared their Nice beach with Sir Ernest Cassel and his granddaughter Edwina, the future Lady Mountbatten, and they had hardly settled in when Winston was recalled to London. He wrote Clementine that he hoped she would continue to enjoy the sunshine in his absence “& preen yr poor feathers in it,” adding, in another letter, when she was competing in an Eaton racket tournament: “I hope you are having fun & tennis & above all recharging yr accumulators.” In 1925 and 1927 they would visit Venice together, but usually one of them remained in London while the other relaxed in this spa or that lodge. In most instances the vacationer was Winston. Clementine stayed at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in February 1921, participated in a tennis tournament later in the year, and spent subsequent summers at Frinton-on-Sea, Cromer, or Broadstairs with the children, but that was the extent of her recreation in the early 1920s. Winston was always urging her to cut loose: “I strongly recommend yr going to the Ritz & pigging it there while passing thro London.” She never did. Her Spartan sense of duty kept her home.152
That was one re
ason. She had another reason. Their taste in playgrounds was, literally, miles apart. Clementine, unlike her husband, had been raised in a thrifty home and taught to distrust the voluptuous. If abroad, she instinctively sought to justify the trip by improving her mind. She enjoyed brisk sight-seeing when she did cross the Channel, preferred British seaside resorts if she needed relaxation, and disliked the exotic Riviera. Winston detested galleries and museums. He liked to hunt, play polo, and, eager for lush surroundings and colorful scenes he might paint, sought, to use his word, “paintatious” locales bathed in bright, continual sunshine. Each tried to convert the other. Neither succeeded. If wealthy friends lured them to villas on the Mediterranean, she would decline or make only a brief acte de présence. Winston would reluctantly appear at a cottage she had rented on an English beach, play with the children for a day or two, and depart muttering excuses.
Occasionally she resented his absences. Early in 1922, when he was staying in southern France, first with Lady Essex and then with Beaverbrook, she had been nursing Diana, Randolph, and a maid through bouts of flu. Winston wasn’t there to catch it, and she was glad for that, but she sent him a long letter describing her “deep misery & depression.” She wished “I were with you basking in the sun.” The only letter she had received from him had been typed, which was “piling Pelium on Ossa coming after one of the most dreary & haunted weeks I have ever lived through” with “all the sad events of last year, culminating in Marigold, passing & repassing… thro my sad heart.” After posting it, she wired him, asking him to destroy it unread. He wrote: “My darling, I cd not bear not opening yr letter in the cream coloured envelope, in spite of yr telegram. In law it was my property once it was delivered to me, & any letter from you is better than none at all. My poor sweet…. I am so sorry you had such a churlish message. I do so love & value yr being pleased to hear from me, & even the shadow cast by that pleasure when disappointed is dear to me.” He had, in fact, written her at length, in his own hand. The letter had been delayed in the mail, which perhaps was just as well, for it bore alarming news: “I must confess to you that I have lost some money here; though nothing like as much as last year. It excites me so much to play—foolish moth.” Clementine always worried about his gambling, but once it brought her a pleasant surprise. On one of those rare occasions when she accompanied him to Monte Carlo, she left the tables early, finding the play and the players tiresome, and retired to bed. He stayed with the green baize and hit a lucky streak. When she awoke next morning she found every inch of her bedspread covered with bank notes.153
The Duke of Sutherland rescues a sunburned Churchill at Deauville
Despite her anxiety and periodic threats of mutiny, she approved of his trips, pleased that he had “Painting for your leisure and Polo for excitement,” and he kept her fully informed of all his activities. September of that year found him at Dunrobin, the Duke of Sutherland’s castle in Scotland, writing: “In the afternoon I went out and painted a beautiful river in the afternoon light with crimson and golden hills in the background.” That same year he reported from the Riviera: “Yesterday Monday & today I have painted or am about to paint at Consuelo’s villa. I have done a beautiful picture of Eze which I know you will want, but wh I cannot give you because Consuelo & Balzan praised it so much I gave it to them. Now I am doing one of the workmen building their house—all in shimmering sunshine & violet shades…. A big beastly gt cloud has just come over the mountains & threatens to spoil my sunshine. Isn’t it cruel! And these tiresome stupid inhabitants actually say: they want rain. It is too much.” Ever alert for choice gossip or the misbehavior of the eminent, he added a postscript to one letter describing Asquith’s arrival at a party given by Sir Philip Sassoon: “The old boy turned up at Philip’s party vy heavily loaded. The P.M. accompanied him up the stairs & was chivalrous enough to cede him the banister. It was a wounding sight. He kissed a great many people affectionately. I presume they were all relations.”154
“No gambling—I lost only 500 francs & was frankly bored by it,” he wrote cheerfully from Deauville a few months later. Thence he proceeded to Paris, took the night sleeper to Bordeaux, crossed to Mimizan by boat, and continued on to Biarritz by train. The Duke of Westminster’s stables excited him: “24 magnificent steeds & any number of hounds. I am going to ride every morning to try to get myself fit.” Clementine was expecting Mary then, and he added: “I think a gt deal about the coming kitten & about you my sweet pet. I feel it will enrich yr life and brighten our home to have the nursery started again. I pray God to watch over us all.” She replied from Frinton: “I love to think of you resting & painting and riding in that lovely forest.” She was “getting very stationary & crawl even to the beach with difficulty. I long for it to be over. It has seemed a very long nine months.” Later he wrote: “Your own adventure is vy near now & I look forward so much to seeing you safe & well with a new darling kitten to cherish.” Late in August he joined the family at Frinton, where he promptly organized the children, their nanny, and his bodyguard—this was only two months after the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson—to join in the construction of a gigantic sand fortress, which then made a brave if hopeless stand against the rising tide. In September they were back in London for Clementine’s last confinement. The sorrow of the lost Duckadilly would never fade completely, but “Mary the Mouse” was doubly cherished for the void left by the sister she would never know.155
Churchill was not dawdling abroad while Clementine raised the family at home. He swam, he rode, he painted, he gambled, he cruised on Beaverbrook’s yacht. But he also worked furiously on manuscripts, and no one knew better than his wife that this toil was absolutely necessary for their financial survival. After acknowledging a gambling loss he noted: “But I have earned many times what I have lost by the work I have done here on my book.” Usually he worked in bed from breakfast until noon, but writing from Mimizan he described an altered regimen: “I ride from 7:30 to 9, work at my book till lunch, 12:30.” Unless the skies were overcast—in which case he kept writing—afternoons were spent at his easel. After dinner he resumed work, continuing until the early hours of the following morning. Clementine prayed that the manuscripts would sell. The children were unaware, as Mary recalls, of “how fragile was the raft which supported our seemingly so solid way of life.” From time to time they were told, “Papa and Mummie are economizing,” were lectured about the need to turn off lights and reprimanded for long telephone conversations, yet, in Mary’s words, the manner of the life her parents led “belied the insecurity and fragility of their financial situation. They lived and entertained elegantly; they traveled; they brought up and educated their four surviving children handsomely. But had Winston’s diligence, health, or genius failed, the whole fabric of their life would have crashed, for they literally lived from book to book, and from one article to the next.”156
Winston having fun at the beach
Like most writers he derived his income from various sources: newspaper and magazine sales, publishers’ advances, royalties from books sold in England and other countries, and the sale of first serial rights—selections from books which appear in periodicals before publication date. And, like every other ink-stained wretch, he could never be certain of future income. During his two years out of Parliament he supported his life-style by writing, apart from books and edited collections of his speeches, thirty-three articles for the Empire Review, Pearson’s Magazine, the Daily Chronicle, the Strand Magazine, Nash’s Pall Mall, English Life, the Sunday Chronicle, John Bull, the Weekly Dispatch, the Daily Mail, and, in the United States, Cosmopolitan. His earnings from these alone were about £13,200, or, with the pound pegged at $4.86, about $64,152, the equivalent of $200,000 today. It made him unique among upper-class British politicians, most of whom had private incomes or lived on parliamentary salaries, and Clementine worried about that. She recognized the absolute necessity of his free-lancing, but was afraid it might be considered beneath his dignity and therefore an obsta
cle to high office. Her eye was on No. 10. Eventually, she believed, Winston’s moment would come. She thought it might arrive in the near future. Once returned to the House, his gifts would carry him straight into the cabinet, where his chief rival—Stanley Baldwin not yet having consolidated his strength—would be Curzon, or, as she called him, the “All Highest.” She wrote Winston: “I have a sort of feeling that the ‘All Highest’ rejoices every time you write an Article & thinks it brings him nearer the Premiership, tho’ I think that a man who had had to bolster himself up with two rich wives to keep himself going is not so likely to keep the Empire going as you who for 12 years have been a Cabinet Minister & have besides kept a fortuneless Cat & four hungry Kittens.”157
Churchill with Mary, aged two, at Chartwell
At that time he was considering a piece on his painting. She thought it a bad idea; to her it smacked of hackwork. What, she asked him, was he going to write about? “Art in general? I expect the professionals would be vexed & say you do not yet know enough about Art…. Your own pictures in particular? The danger there seems to me that it may be thought naif or conceited.” The Strand had offered him £1,000 for two articles, to be illustrated by four-color and monochrome reproductions of his landscapes. She was “as anxious as you are to snooker that £1,000 & as proud as you can be that you have had the offer; but just now I do not think it would be wise to do anything which would cause you to be discussed trivially, as it were.” Nevertheless, he went ahead. The result was his charming essay “Painting as a Pastime,” which was later republished in Thoughts and Adventures, a collection of his pieces, and, later still, combined with an article on “Hobbies” he had written for Pall Mall, was issued as a slender volume which sold 5,000 copies in Great Britain, was published in the United States, translated into French, German, Finnish, and Japanese, and ultimately appeared as a Penguin paperback. Among the pieces he ground out during his exile from Parliament between 1922 and 1924 were “Who Rules Britain?,” “The Case for Singapore,” “Plugstreet,” “Socialism and Sham,” “The Danger Ahead in Europe,” “Should Strategists Veto the Channel Tunnel?,” “My Dramatic Days with the Kaiser,” “If We Could Look into the Future,” “My Own True Spy Story,” “When I Risked Court Martial in Search of War,” “A Hand-to-Hand Fight with Desert Fanatics,” and profiles of Kitchener, MacDonald, Birkenhead, and Lloyd George. It occurred neither to him nor to Clementine that a time would come when, once more in political Coventry and with the survival of England at stake, he would arouse the nation with powerful articles in the press. During the 1920s he wrote for newspapers and magazines with money as his chief object. In a typical note to his wife on August 14, 1923, he reported: “I have 8 articles to write as soon as the book is finished: £500, £400, & £200. We shall not starve.”158