(One of a series of posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)
Lady Violet Bonham Carter first met Churchill when she was 19.
In Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait she tells us about that first meeting with Churchill whom she soon grew to love. He did not return her love, but they formed a deep friendship that lasted the rest of his life. Lady Bonham Carter was one of the few people outside the family permitted to visit Churchill’s bedside in the days just before his death on Jan. 24, 1965 :
I first met Winston Churchill in the summer of 1906 at a dinner party to which I went as a very young girl. […]
I found myself sitting next to this young man who seemed to me quite different from any other young man I had ever met. For a long time he remained sunk in abstraction. Then he appeared to become suddenly aware of my existence. He turned on me a lowering gaze and asked me abruptly how old I was.
I replied that I was nineteen. “And I,” he said almost despairingly, “am thirty-two already. Younger than anyone else who counts, though,” he added, as if to comfort himself.
Than savagely: “Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short it the allotted span for all we must cram into it!” And he burst forth into an eloquent diatribe on the shortness of human life, the immensity of possible human accomplishment. […]
[He did so] in a torrent of magnificent language which appeared to be both effortless and inexhaustible and ended up with the words I shall always remember: “We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glowworm.”
By this time I was convinced of it - my conviction remained unshaken throughout the years that followed. (pgs. 3&4)
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