Chip

Official aide-de-camp to Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Quebec: Subaltern Mary Churchill, of the Auxiliary Territorial Service.

At a press conference in Quebec, charming, 20-year-old Mary told reporters she was quartered in the Citadel, on the same floor as her father. "I run errands and make myself useful whenever I can," said she. "Papa mostly works, and very late. Occasionally we see a movie, and last night we saw Disney's South American film, Saludos Amigos." Asked What the P. M. calls his aide-de-camp, she replied: "He just says, 'Mary, where are you?' "

Youngest of Winston's four surviving children,* Mary Churchill spent many a childhood hour building brick walls with her father at their Westerham country home. She loved to ride, take long country walks; she took charge of all pets. At six she astonished a reporter by demanding: "Are you going to be a Conservative or aren't you? Because if you're not, I shall cross your name off and whenever I pass you I shall say: 'Shame! Shame!'"

Mary Churchill would be of the jukebox generation, but she is British; she would be serious about small things, but she has watched too many big minds grapple with too many big problems. She has grown up to be intelligent without thick lenses, mature without even half trying. She seldom goes to London's gaunt nightclubs, does not smoke, but loves to dance. Her newest, proudest possession: a pair of gold earrings cut like wheat tops and curled along the edge of her ears from top to bottom. She bought them herself.

Most of her dates are with British and U.S. officers her own age. When one of them took her to see the prize fights between British and U.S. soldiers, she saw her first boxing. She asked everyone around her about the rules, cheered, chewed gum.

In the war, she thought chauffeuring U.S. officers too soft, chose instead to work in soldiers' canteens and a hospital library. Then she volunteered for the ATS, was inducted as a private. "When I mentioned it to mummy and daddy," she said, "they were delighted that I should choose the ATS and so keep the Army in the family." She scrubbed steps, washed windows, was assigned to an anti-aircraft unit in the London area.

Last winter Mary was elevated to the rank of second subaltern, which pays her about $12 a week, before taxes. At her ack-ack battery she shares a room in a camouflaged wooden hut with another ATS officer. On duty she eats in the officers' mess. Drinks are available, but Mary seldom has one. The battery has a hockey field near the barracks. Mary plays inside forward.

For her battery's wall newspaper, Mary wrote last year: "Democracy means caring and striving and quite often fighting. If our postwar world is going to be brave and new, it will be because we make it so, because we fight to win the peace as sternly as we are now fighting to win the war."

*Diana (Mrs. Duncan Sandys), 34 is a second officer in the WRENS, has a three-month old daughter;Randolph, 32, is a captain in the British Army, last reported in Sicily; Sarah (Mrs. Vic Oliver), 28 refused a film offer and became a flying officer in the W.A.A.F.

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