Memories and Adventures. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 13, 1989 by Joe Mysak

Memories and Adventures

IT HAS not been all "No, no, not that one--the other one" for the grandson of the greatest Englishman of the twentieth century. His name has proved to be both a glory and a curse, but instead of taking to the bottle or, worse, becoming a public nuisance, Winston S. Churchill the younger chose instead to enter the family businesses of journalism and politics, and at 49 is a Conservative member of Parliament with a successful career and some very exciting "memories and adventures."

"I had come to realize from an early age," he writes, "that the name of Winston Churchill, which I was so proud to bear, was both a lot to live up to and a lot to live down." He submits some very amusing evidence. For instance, when he and a co-pilot landed in Fez in 1962 (an excursion also chronicled in his earlier book First Journey), a young Moroccan army officer demanded to see their papers. "Unfortunately for me the officer asked me my name. Naturally I told him. He immediately pronounced us drunk and ordered a soldier to arrest us both."

Then there was the time when, running for election in 1967, he was treated to the sight of a Young Conservative canvasser being vigorously shaken by the lapels by a robust old-timer bellowing, "Your bloody Granded murdered everyone on the beaches of Gallipoli!" Churchill writes: "Amazed that such a charge should still be hurled on the political hustings more than half a century after the event, I raced up the street to rescue my young supporter and to explain that it was my 'bloody Grandad,' not his, and that anyway he had his facts wrong."

Harold Macmillan told young Winston upon the death of his father in 1968 that Randolph Churchill had been one of the last to live in the "grand manner." In fact, the same might be said of the son. As a result, his autobiography is free of the struggle that so tried his namesake. He never had to bounce back, as his grandfather once said he had, with the "tenacity of India rubber." Born in 1940 at Chequers, the country residence of Britain's prime ministers (his first memories were of the bright lights of the Blitz), Mr. Churchill was a child of privilege, full of the knowledge that his grandfather was the most important man in the world. Playing croquet with Field Marshal Montgomery at Chartwell, the Churchill country seat, lunching with Hemingway at the Ritz in Paris, performing the duties of a page at the coronation of Elizabeth II: this was the stuff of Churchill's childhood.

H. L. Mencken once noted that not having been born in a log cabin certainly tested one's mettle. Mr. Churchill has no log cabin among his memories, but he still manages a very straightforward approach to his life's story. Nor does he showcase any of the bizarre sorts of nightmares that plague our more fashionable autobiographers. His parents were divorced when he was very young; he bears them no ill will, and professes to love them both. He was sent to Eton, where, as a small, shy lad, he was subjected to the usual schoolboy tortures, but he muses: "The great thing about an English public-school education is the admirable way in which it prepares one for future life. One can go out into the world confident in the knowledge that life can contain few greater discomforts, humiliations, or terrors than those to which one has already been subjected."

Lacking obsessive soul-searching and angst, Memories and Adventures is decidedly old-fashioned: full of charming recollections and dashing exploits. It is not all intimate glimpses of life with the grand old man at Chartwell and of barbecues with the Kennedys at Hyannisport. When young Winston proposed to fly around Africa in a single-engine plane, old Winston objected. "When you were my age," the grandson remonstrated, "you had already come under fire in Cuba, fought on the northwest frontier of India, and were on the point of charging with the 21st Lancers at Omdurman." Grandad relented.

Young Churchill ate crocodile with Albert Schweitzer. He reported from Vietnam, flying missions with American fighters. He covered Israel's Six-Day War, and learned how the war was really won in its first three hours: the Israeli air force was trained to rearm, refuel, and return planes to the air in seven minutes; it took the Egyptians three hours.

Battle experience won him the job of Front Bench Spokesman on Defense for the Conservatives, but his vote against renewing sanctions against white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) cost him a probable ministerial position in Margaret Thatcher's government. "I have reflected long and hard . . ." he writes, "on my decision to cast my vote as I did on that occasion, but what, at the end of the day, is the value of public service--indeed of life--if those involved do not have the courage of their convictions and are not prepared to suffer the consequences?"

Those who come to this memoir seeking tales of Churchill's grandfather will find little not already (and better) covered elsewhere. One does get a somewhat different portrait of the indomitable Randolph, whom Malcolm Muggeridge termed an embarrassment to his friends, a gift to his enemies, and a terror to hostesses everywhere. Churchill's reminiscence of his father is at once madcap and sympathetic. "Each human being is endowed with his or her share of virtues and vices. In my father's case, these were writ larger than most. He could be loud, boorish, offensive, bellicose and downright rude, often without just cause." Drink did not help matters, but, withal, says Winston, Randolph had a large heart. "Only once he had gone, did I realize how much he had meant to me . . ."