![\"Churchill's](\"https:\/\/www.angelaholdsworth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Churchills-house.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nHyde Park Gate is a cul-de-sac just South of Kensington Gardens. The Churchills lived in a large, brick house almost at the end, different in style from the stucco buildings in the rest of the road.\u00a0 A\u00a0 small gathering of journalists often lurked outside, their ranks swelling with rumours of illness or interesting visitors.\u00a0 Nosey parkers\u00a0 Miss Watkin called them.<\/p>\n
I shared a room with a couple of other girls. Two of us were doing courses, the third was a debutante. She was one of the saddest people I\u2019ve ever known. She came from the kind of family whose daughters had always done the Season but was now basically broke. There was no money for her mother to come and live in London and escort her to teas, drinks parties and balls so she tagged along with another family. She hated every moment of it, particularly the balls, and spent most of her time hiding in the loo till it was time to come home. It seemed a dreadful waste of her family\u2019s dwindling resources. They thought they were giving her a wonderful opportunity and she didn\u2019t dare tell them how miserable it made her. She wasn\u2019t the brightest and never quite got the hang of anything. The washing-up rules were completely beyond her (some sympathy there) and, cruelly, all the rest of us rather relished her confusion over the simplest tasks from washing her hair to answering the phone.\u00a0 During the daytime she was often the only one in to pick up the solitary, shared phone in the hall and the resulting messages were seldom exactly what the caller intended. When she finished the Season she went off to do a flower-arranging course somewhere near Windsor and disappeared from our lives.<\/p>\n<\/a>Miss Watkin had firm views on everything \u2013 appropriate clothes, appropriate food, appropriate language and, above all, manners. She\u2019d been born sometime before the First World War which was when the rot set in. Nothing had ever been the same; standards had gone on slipping everywhere but never in her house. I\u2019ve no idea if she owned it, probably not. More governess than heiress, she cocooned herself (and\u00a0 all of us) in an Edwardian bubble. When we stayed in for dinner, we washed up afterwards. I didn\u2019t know washing up could be so complicated. Everything had to be done in a certain order which I\u2019ve long since forgotten. But I remember knives couldn\u2019t be immersed in water, just gently sponged and rinsed under the tap. Glasses had to be dried with a special tea towel and absolutely never touched by fingers when putting away.<\/p>\n<\/a>The death of Sir Winston was a great excitement for us. We knew he was ill (he had a stroke and died a couple of weeks later) and the street had been bursting with people waiting for news. A day or so after he died I was coming back in the evening, walking through Hyde Park Corner when police arrived and stopped all the traffic. A small cortege of three cars went right across the grassed island in the middle of the roundabout and under Wellington Arch. There were only a few of us who happened to be passing and stopped to stare. A policeman told us it was Sir Winston\u2019s coffin on its way to lie in state in Westminster. He\u2019d never seen the arch opened for cars before. And I\u2019ve never seen it opened since.<\/p>\n