Old men don't forget
Sir: I daresay it was during your machine's disgorging of far more fascinating copy from Moscow that the second sheet of my recent faxed letter to you from France (24 August) went missing, leaving Mr Pere- grine Churchill unanswered on the most
`You'll love it.! We're going to nuke Lyme Regis!' offensive of the charges he chose to level at me, Far from needing to use the 16-year- old Mary to 'gain access to Sir Winston', I had very often 'seen him plain' and he, no less often, had 'stopped and spoken to me'. For one thing, the eastern end of the park belonging to the house my family occupied from 1928-1936 was almost contiguous with the western limits of the Chartwell proper- ty. One of my sisters 'came out' with Sarah Churchill, another was Mary's best friend (see Sir Jock Colville's Diary). Peregrine Churchill's fond Aunt Clementine not only chaperoned a party of her own and my fam- ily on a skiing holiday (she socked us all a day on the Parsenne on her 50th Birthday), in which his sister Clarissa (now Lady Avon) was included, but also visited me when I was a student at Cambridge, remi- niscing, I recall, about Rupert Brooke, whom she had known well, when we took tea in pre-Jeffrey Archer Grantchester. My close friendship with all the family never, despite sometimes serious political differ- ences, thereafter ceased.
And I have been much enjoying my holi- day reading of Mary Soames's always beau- tifully written Memoir of Winston Churchill's Life as a Painter, heart-warm- ingly inscribed 'for Ali — With Love and Friendship as always. Mary. July 1991',
Alastair Forbes
St Briac-Sur-Mer, France
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