MEMOIR
My Grandmother Was Winston Churchill’s Private Nurse
A stash of wartime love letters reveals an extraordinary story
I grew up with Winston Churchill, but I never knew why. A signed photograph of him sat on my grandmother’s mantelpiece for as long as I can remember. In a bookcase there were copies of his autobiographies, some signed and dedicated to her. There was a family myth that she’d looked after him during the war, but it was never explained properly.
It didn’t become a proper story until she died. Too late, of course, to ask her any more about it.
In the months before her death her mental acuity was dissolving, and she was living in a liminal world between this one and sometime in the past. She would say things like, “I went to France yesterday. Just for half a day. We went on the boat and then we came back. Just to see the beaches.” She hadn’t left the home she lived in for six weeks.
Her existence in the present was bleeding into her past, a century of memories finding their way through time. She didn’t have dementia and she didn’t get upset. In fact, she seemed happy to be drifting between now and then, visiting places and experiences she recognized with people she knew, all of whom were dead.
