Resemblances - My father and Churchill

Especially when Churchill was a youngish man, he looked like my father. My father also looked like Peter Ustinov, and had the same kind of voice. But the Churchill thing is the strangest - they also had exactly the same handwriting. I saw Churchill's writing in the War Cabinet Rooms and could hardly believe the close resemblance.

Sometimes they dredge up a new old pic of Churchill and I have the odd feeling I am looking at my father - or even my brother. There is the same moody intelligence, an abstracted look. I know him so well I almost am the same person - that's how I felt about my father, sometimes.

My father could make you believe he was an amazing, wonderful man, and he traded on this ability, without actually being in any way amazing or wonderful, but he was competent and intelligent, a professional engineer. It was a pity he wanted so much to be more than that, and messed up in business, losing all his money. That was not his only problem. He also like to charm women and to have their admiration. He liked making them laugh. Women of his own class tended to see through him and find him lacking in substance - and he hated their low opinion, so he always went for women of a lower social strata. He used to say he hated "school marms" (educated middle-class women) and refused to come to Parents' evenings. My mother used to ask me with an imploring face if she had to go? I said she had to. The "school marms" intimidated her and she had no idea what to ask them. I advised her to "ask Jackie's mum what she asks". But really, the other mums mostly gave her that excluded feeling too.

A man not unlike my father 

I read something recently about Churchill's relationship with his brother - he tended to bask in the public gaze himself, and not wish his brother to gain the limelight at all. I suppose as children they were in competition for limited parental attention, and that formed Churchill's personality. It must have been very strange to know that your mother is the King's mistress. All the rejection that Churchill suffered in his childhood later came out as depression. But he had a very brave, buoyant personality.

Like Churchill, my father went to boarding school at the age of 7, and was part of that system. He didn't look back at his schooldays with much affection. You wonder if it was emotionally damaging. The only things it gave him were a sense of superiority and the door to Cambridge University. He used to mention Cambridge a lot - but he said , when my mother criticised him for showing off, that going to Cambridge is something worth showing off about.!!