I MADE VERY LITTLE PROGRESS

It is said that famous men are usually the product of unhappy childhood. The stern compression of circumstances, the twinges of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in early years, are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious motherwit without which great actions are seldom accomplished.

--Winston Churchill, describing the childhood of his great ancestor, John, Duke of Marlborough

Modern psychologists and pedagogues would call Winston Churchill's childhood far from ideal. His early picture of his mother: "In a riding habit, fitting like a skin and often beautifully spotted with mud . . . she shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly--but at a distance." Even more remote was his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, brilliant and erratic Chancellor of the Exchequer (1886), who died when Winston was 20. Lord Randolph thought that Winston was not bright enough to study law; one day after watching the boy play with his host of 1,500 toy soldiers, Lord Randolph decided Winston's career should be the army.

Early arithmetic lessons from a governess came hard: "The figures were tied into all sorts of tangles and did things to one another which it was extremely difficult to forecast . . . You had to borrow one or carry one, and afterwards you had to pay back the one you had borrowed. These complications cast a steadily gathering shadow over my daily life."*

At seven he was sent to St. James's School: "How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years. I made very little progress at my lessons and none at all at games."

He did almost as badly at Harrow. He was kept in the lowest form because he could not learn Latin and Greek, only English. "Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence--which is a noble thing." He is grateful to Harrow, and tries to be fair: "Harrow was a very good school." But Churchill cannot refrain from one last bite: "Most of the boys were very happy, and many found in its classrooms and upon its playing-fields the greatest distinction they have ever known in life."

Finally, after two failures at examinations, he got into the military college at Sandhurst. He passed out proudly, eighth in a class of 150. Sent to Bangalore, in southern India, Churchill became a brilliant polo player, and discovered books--Plato, Aristotle, Gibbon, Macaulay, Schopenhauer; he made an intense study of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. When nobody at the Bangalore garrison could tell him what the word "ethics" meant, he began to read in search of answers. It was a long quest, for Churchill was to spend his life in politics and to learn with his friend John Morley that "those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand the one or the other."

Churchill went into politics after his only success--the army--turned into disappointment. He discovered that he could not live on his subaltern's pay, -L-250 a year. He quit the army in 1899 after taking part in the last old-style cavalry charge, the one in which Kitchener at Omdurman fastened Britain's grip on the Sudan. He ran for Parliament from Oldham, and was beaten.

"Twinges of adversity" had shaped his "tenacious motherwit" for the years ahead.

*Churchill never overcame his early repugnance to figures--except on one fleeting occasion which he describes: "I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all--Depth beyond depth was revealed to me --the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus --or even the Lord Mayor's Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how one step involved all the others. It was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go!"

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