Woom alone attended to his errands. She was anxious about his well-being and missed him terribly; in her long, gushing letters she told him again and again that she was always at his beck and call. She asked, “Did you get your luggage alright to Harrow this time it is always best to take it with you from the Station…. Have sent you 3 Black Waistcoats let me know dear also if you receive a small parcel of 2 shirts &c I sent off yesterday. I am sending you 1 dozen new Handkerchiefs on Monday with the hamper. Are you always going to have the room to yourself or is it only temporary. Old Mr Wickes sent me a lot of lovely grapes from Ventnor out of his green house. I am so glad you are well my sweet mind & try to get through the exam my precious loving darling old lamb—much love & kisses from Your old Woom.” If he neglected to write her, she was reproachful: “My darling Lamb, I have been looking for a letter from you all last week. I never have heard anything about you for a whole week. Are you well dear…. Did you get a Pocket Book or a Memorandum Book from me I sent you one…. Do send me a line there’s a dear Boy & tell me what you are going to do. Did Mamma bring you a Birthday present. I have no news to tell you so with fondest love to you my darling. I am ever your loving W.”85
His mother had not brought him a present. Unlike her husband, Jennie remembered Winston’s age, but she doesn’t appear to have been much more thoughtful. “His Lordship has postponed his arrival for a fortnight, so you will not see him,” Woom wrote in a typical midweek letter to Winston; “Mamma has been away since Saturday.” Except for two years when Randolph rented a house at Banstead—it was here that Winston built his great fort, together with a homemade catapult which hurled green apples at a nearby cow—Winston and Jack spent their long holidays with Woom, often in the Balaam cottage at Ventnor. Even at Banstead, Woom was usually in loco parentis, the only adult on the spot. She wrote Jennie from there in 1891: “I hope you got Master Winston’s letter he wrote last evening. They are both so happy & delighted & in towering spirits…. They are so happy and well I should like to keep Master Jack here until Mr Winston returns from Canford…. It is so much better for them than London. I am desired to enclose drawings of last night with their best love & kisses. Your ladyship’s obednt servant E. A. Everest.”86
Lord Randolph was usually to be found these days at the Jockey Club. His most successful horse was a yearling he named “Abbess” after a French novel Jennie happened to be reading at the time. Abbess won, among other races, the Oaks at Epsom, the Manchester Cup, and the Hardwicke Stakes—over £10,000 in prize money. Unfortunately for her owner, when she won the Oaks at twenty-to-one, Randolph, convinced she couldn’t do it, had bet all his money on another horse. The story went around the London clubs; it was regarded as characteristic of his recidivous disloyalty. He was down now, and his critics were kicking him mercilessly. The Spectator reported that parliamentary debates showed “that Lord Randolph’s power to impress, if not to interest the House of Commons, is dwindling rapidly. The House watch his gyrations with languid curiosity or mild amusement…. Most of them probably think that it was indeed a memorable, a very memorable, mistake to put so feather-headed a politician as Lord Randolph Churchill in the position in which he was expected to counsel gentlemen on the Ministerial side of the House, and did counsel them with more or less cleverness for a few weeks.” To escape this sort of thing—and perhaps to flee from the winks of London society, which saw Jennie openly reaching for younger and younger men—Randolph decided to try his hand at journalism. He sailed to Cape Town for three months, after reaching an agreement with the Daily Graphic, which would publish his letters from there. Even these pieces vexed the Review of Reviews: “Lord Randolph Churchill in his time has played many parts, but not even in the famous somersault which terminated his career as leader of the House of Commons and possible leader of the Conservative party has he afforded the public a more unseemly exhibition of irresponsibility than in his letters from South Africa. They furnish the culminating evidence, if further evidence were necessary, as to the impossibility of Lord Randolph Churchill as the leader of men.”87
Such a man, in such straits, is ever alert for slights. When Abbess won the Manchester Cup, again at twenty-to-one, Randolph harvested £2,202 in prize money plus his enormous winnings from his bets. He sent Winston a five-pound note. When instant gratitude was not forthcoming from Harrow, he was furious. Jennie wrote: “Your Father is very angry with you for not acknowledging the gift of the £5 for a whole week, and then writing an offhand careless letter.” Of course, money wasn’t what Winston wanted from his father. Welldon knew that, and he wrote Lord Randolph, tactfully suggesting that it might “perhaps not be disagreeable” to His Lordship and Her Ladyship to come to Harrow sometime and take “at least the opportunity of seeing what Winston’s school life is like.” Winston hoped they would come for Speech Day, when he would be honored for his feat of memory with Macaulay’s Lays. He checked timetables and wrote his father: “If you take the 11.7 from Baker Street you will get to Harrow at 11.37. I shall meet you at the station with a fly, if I can get one…. You have never been to see me & so everything will be new to you.” He wrote his mother: “Do try to get Papa to come. He has never been.” Papa refused. The relationship between these two had long been doomed. Randolph had sent him a bicycle, but Welldon wrote Jennie the following month: “I am sorry to say Winston has fallen off his bicycle and hurt himself…. The Doctor calls it ‘slight concussion.’ ” Later Winston wrote his mother that he had decided to have the bike fixed and then exchange it for a bulldog. Jennie didn’t care—“Do as you like about yr bicycle”—but Woom foresaw trouble if Randolph found out: “What on earth is the good of your having a Bull Dog unless it is to keep us all in terror of our lives…. Besides His Lordship gave you the Bicycle & he would not like you to part with it.” Winston found her argument persuasive. Offending his father was the last thing he intended. Randolph’s African journey excited him. He wrote him in Johannesburg: “Have you shot a lion yet?” He was still Randolph’s most loyal partisan.88
His father’s criticisms of conditions in South Africa, brought on by commercial exploitation, were appearing in the Daily Graphic. Savage rebuttals of them had spread from the Spectator and the Review of Reviews to virtually every serious newspaper. Winston excitedly wrote him: “You cannot imagine what vials of wrath you have uncorded [sic]. All the papers simply rave. Shareholders, friends of the company, and directors from Sir Donald Currie to the lowest Bottle Washer are up in arms. Truth, the Speaker, Standard and others including even the Harrow Gazette devote a column to ‘Lord Randolph’s Grumbles.’ The Standard quotes the Speaker & is particularly offensive. It states that—but oh I will not bore you with the yapping of these curs hungry for their money bags.” Winston’s vows of filial loyalty seem to have brought father and son to the brink of cordiality. Randolph replied to one of them, “You cannot think how pleased I was to get your interesting & well written letter.” But the moment swiftly passed. It was like that flash of green in tropical sunsets just before the sun vanishes over the horizon. It lasts but a microsecond and is followed by total darkness. Randolph was approaching the last stages of his terrible disease. Ahead, for his family, lay horror.89
Jennie flourished during her husband’s South African absence. She was deeply in love with Count Kinsky, and when not sleeping with him she spent virtually every moment entertaining friends. No. 2 Connaught Place was always full. Then, to her annoyance, the annual Eton-Harrow cricket match rolled around. Cricket still bored Winston, but the match at Lord’s was an annual social ritual, a great occasion for the boys at both schools to wear top hats, ride around in glittering coaches with the aristocracy, and feast on strawberries and cream. To Winston’s consternation, his mother told him that her social calendar was full; there was no room for him at the Connaught Place house. Indeed, there was no room for her. She had invited so many guests that she had been obliged to move in with her sister Clara at 18 Aldford Street. Unappeased, he wrote her: “Think how unhappy I
should be being left at Harrow when 90 out of every hundred boys are enjoying themselves. You promised I should come…. I was terribly frightened when I got your letter this morning. The Possibility of my not being able to come being to my mind entirely out of the question. Could you not ask Grandmamma Marlborough to let me come stay with her (at least)…. My darling Mummy I am sure you have not been very much troubled about me this term. I have asked for no visits & I forfeited the pleasure of seeing you on Speech Day therefore I do hope you will endeavour not to disappoint me utterly with regard to July 11th and 12th.” Two days later she replied: “Oh! dear oh! You silly old boy I did not mean that you would have to remain at Harrow only that I cld not have you here.” She suggested that Clara might “put you up.” That proved impossible, and Woom wrote him the next day: “Well my dearest the reason Mamma cannot have you at home is the house is to be full of visitors for the race week which commences on the Tuesday tomorrow week. But I don’t see why you could not go from Friday till Monday because you could go by yourself.” Since she herself would be billeted elsewhere, he could stay with her “and then perhaps Aunt Clara or some one would see you off to Harrow.” That evening it was settled. He would stay with Duchess Fanny on Grosvenor Square.90
Actually, it turned out to be Winston’s most memorable boyhood weekend. Despite Jennie’s lack of maternal instincts, her strong erotic drive assured a constant string of sensitive suitors, some of whom sensed Winston’s loneliness, understood his yearning for an affectionate father figure, and were eager to give him strong arms to lean on. On the morning of Friday, July 10, 1891, sixteen-year-old Winston arrived at Baker Street Station, watched the early innings at Lord’s, took a hansom to Grosvenor Square, and lunched with Duchess Fanny. That evening John Milbanke took him to dinner at the Isthmian Club; afterward they attended the Naval Exhibition. (“Most beautiful models & guns of every description,” Winston wrote Jack. “Got home at 11:45.”)91 His great treat, however, came the following day. Kaiser Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany’s Second Reich and now in the fourth year of his reign, was visiting Queen Victoria, his grandmother. All London knew he would be appearing at the Crystal Palace, where a special exhibition awaited him, and that the public was invited. Count Kinsky decided to take Winston.
Charles Andreas Kinsky, son of an Austrian prince and a Liechtenstein princess, was then thirty-five, two years younger than Jennie. In appearance he was the apotheosis of what a man of the world should be. Tall, powerfully built, handsome, with a bristling mustache, he wore his top hat at a jaunty angle and, superbly tailored, glided across drawing rooms with effortless grace. Nine years earlier, riding against heavy odds, he had become the first amateur to win the Grand National. Disdainful of danger, he repeatedly risked his life steeplechasing. In 1881, the year he met Jennie, he had been appointed honorary attaché at the Austro-Hungarian embassy. Since then he had become an imperial chamberlain. Impetuous and hot-tempered, he was as much in love with Jennie as she with him. Now he meant to charm her son. Back at Harrow afterward, Winston would write Jack, for whom he set down all his experiences on that glorious day, that he spent part of the morning at Lord’s. “Of course you know Harrow won by five wickets. I could not ‘smash an Eton hat’ as I had to leave the ground early to go to the Crystal Palace.” Then Kinsky picked him up and “drove me in his phaeton.”92
The palace, a glass-and-iron conception of Joseph Paxton and Victoria’s Albert, had been built in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and then moved to Penge, in South London. From Lord’s it was an eight-mile ride, but Kinsky had brought a copy of the July Strand Magazine, which carried “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes short stories. Winston thought it a capital yarn and Kinsky a capital fellow. After he had finished the tale of Irene Adler’s ingenuity, they sang that year’s most popular song, already a hit though still only in rehearsal at London’s Gaiety Theatre:
Ta-ra-ra-boom-der-ay:
Did you see my wife today?
No, I saw her yesterday:
Ta-ra-ra-boom-der-ay!
And then they were there. The first sight to greet Winston was a menagerie of “Wild Beasts. (wonderful never seen anything like them.)” Next came a parade, before the seated spectators, of two thousand firemen and a hundred engines, marching past the kaiser and his kaiserin to the music of a military band. Winston was especially interested in the guest of honor. He had brought a sketchbook, and there, in the crowd beside Kinsky, he made his first surviving attempt in the arts. He wrote Jack: “I must describe the Emperor’s uniform. A helmet of bright Brass surmounted by a white eagle nearly 6 inches high.” Wilhelm also wore “a polished steel cuirass & a perfectly white uniform with high boots.”93
After “the Engines trotted past & finally all the lot Galloped past as hard as they could go,” the count took Winston to dinner. The maître d’ told them the restaurant was full, that he couldn’t possibly seat them, but “Count K. spoke German to him & it had a wonderful effect.” The dinner was “very tolerable,” with “lots of champagne which pleased your loving brother very much.” More fun lay ahead. The major event that evening was to be a display of fireworks for Wilhelm. Finding time on their hands before it began, Kinsky took Winston to another exhibition, which, when they arrived, turned out to be closed. Instead, they visited a nearby feature attraction, an “Aerial Car,” which raced along a wire rope “nearly 300 yards in length & awfully high.” They waited in line ten minutes. Then the car broke down, and a distant cannon signaled the start of the fireworks. The count led Winston over a rail and was preparing to leave when “a half breed sort of Kaffir who was in charge” tried to stop them by grabbing Kinsky’s coattails. The count, “whom you know is immensely strong,” grabbed “the blackguards hand” and crushed his fingers. At that “the Mulatto” dropped the coattails, swore, and told Kinsky he should think himself “ ‘d——d lucky’ ” that he wasn’t pitched over the banisters. “ ‘By——’ said Count Kinsky ‘I should like to see you touch me.’ ‘You go and learn manners,’ retorted the cad. ‘But not from you’ said Count K.” Then the crowd howled down “the scoundrel” and “we went on our way angry but triumphant.” It is an incident right out of Chatterbox, Nick Carter, or Karl May. The uppity ruffian of inferior race accosts our hero, is defied by him, and slinks away. Boys of Winston’s class believed that sort of thing happened all the time, that it was the classic confrontation between the wicked and the just. And because Winston never entirely put away childish things, part of him would go on believing it to the end.94
The kaiser, whose image would later alter in Winston’s eyes, was in all his splendor that night. Pyrotechnists opened their display with volleys of rockets. Next came “two great set pieces of Cornflowers & Roses (the Emperors Favourit Flowers) which afterward changed to the heads of the Emperor & Empress.” Then the battle of the Nile was refought in the sky. “The ships actually moved & the cannonading was terrific. Finally L’Orient blew up.” It was an ironic moment, though they did not appreciate it. That was how they saw war then: brilliant girandoles, flares, Catherine wheels, candlebombs, and whizbangs, celebrating the feats of daring of the intrepid Nelson and his “band of brothers” aboard the Vanguard while honoring the gallant French squadron who went down nobly—and apparently bloodlessly—when thirteen of Napoleon’s men-of-war were annihilated and strewn across the waters of Abukir Bay. No horror, no agony, no bestiality; just puffs and streaks of blinding color against the serene night sky. No spectator was more deceived than the guest of honor, and Winston, grown to manhood, would be among those who had to cope with the consequences of his deception. But he himself had been dazzled, that evening; he too had believed in what the French called la Gloire. The day, he thought, had been perfect, and when the display ended “we went & got our coat & had each an American drink & then we went to our carriage. Count K. drives beautifully & we passed with our fast pair of horses everything on the road.”95
If that was the high point of
his Harrow years, the low point came five months later. Jennie was becoming increasingly exasperated with the reports from Welldon. Again and again she tried to convince Winston that his record now could affect his whole life, pleading with him to “stop and think it out for yourself and take a good pull before it is too late.” Now from Paris, now from Monte Carlo, now from Mayfair (“I would go down to you—but I have so many things to arrange about the Ascot party next week that I can’t manage it”), she implored him to tackle and master languages, his biggest bugbear. He was by turns contrite, confident that next term his marks would soar (which they never did), or teasing. His sense of timing was poor. When he learned that her purse had been snatched at Monte Carlo, he wrote carelessly: “C’est Dommage, because at the same moment I must put in a request for ‘un peu plus d’argent.’… Don’t go to that Casino. Invest your money in me, its safer…. You are a bird.” She was not amused. She had also begun to find his company irritating. He was an awkward teenager; in a letter she described him as “just at the ‘ugly’ stage—slouchy and tiresome.” Something drastic, she decided, must be done. A hint of what it would be came in a letter she wrote Randolph during Winston’s Kinsky weekend: “Welldon says W should have special help for the French this summer.”96