从18岁起，她便跟随这位英国领袖周游世界。“我当时非常怕他，”她后来回忆道。
Starting with the British leader at age 18, she traveled the world with him. “I was terrified of him,” she later recalled.
温斯顿·丘吉尔最后一位仍在世的私人秘书塞西莉·杰梅尔于周四在纽约市去世，享年97岁。她负责记录丘吉尔口述的演讲稿。她的看护人玛丽·皮扎雷利证实了这一消息。
Cecily Gemmell, Winston Churchill’s last surviving personal secretary, who took down the British prime minister’s speeches as he composed them aloud, died on Thursday in New York City. She was 97. Her caretaker, Mary Pizzarelli, confirmed the death.
人称“奇普斯”的杰梅尔女士于1947年夏天、18岁时首次进入丘吉尔的圈子。当时正值丘吉尔作为英国战时首相在1945年大选中落败后不久，举国上下仍沉浸在震惊与失落之中。虽然他作为将世界从希特勒暴政下拯救出来的领袖声名显赫，但德国虽已投降而日本尚未投降，这一事实仍令他蒙受了政治上的挫败。
Ms. Gemmell, known as Chips, first entered Churchill’s orbit in the summer of 1947 at the age of 18, arriving in the still-stunned aftermath of his 1945 general election defeat as Britain’s wartime prime minister. His reputation as the man who had saved the world from Hitler’s tyranny was titanic, but his electoral ejection from No. 10 Downing Street before final victory — Germany had surrendered, Japan had not — remained humbling.
担任丘吉尔的速记秘书必须年轻。这位被称作“老头子”的领袖通常会在深夜长时间口述，因此耐力至关重要。杰梅尔女士加入了这个由聪慧能干却常常疲惫不堪的年轻女性组成的团队；这支队伍堪称丘吉尔私人秘书的精英行列——除一人外均为女性，其历史可追溯到两次世界大战期间的1902年。杰梅尔女士去世时，她是这个行列中最后一位在世者。
Youth was a requirement for a Churchill stenotyping secretary. “The Old Man,” as he was known, dictated so long and so late into the night, as a rule, that stamina was essential. Ms. Gemmell joined a team of extraordinarily bright and capable, if often exhausted, young women, and a proud line of exceptional Churchill personal secretaries (all but one of them female) that extended back through both world wars to 1902. At her death, Ms. Gemmell was the last. Ms. Gemmell was ushered into Churchill’s presence for the first time at his new postwar London residence, 28 Hyde Park Gate. Churchill was just back from a hospital stay.
杰梅尔女士首次面见丘吉尔是在他战后位于伦敦海德公园门28号的新居。当时丘吉尔刚从医院出院，床铺被挪到了楼下的餐厅，他正坐在床上抽着雪茄。那时，年仅十几岁的杰梅尔女士即将从久负盛名的霍斯特夫人秘书学院毕业；丘吉尔一家长期以来一直将该学院视作招聘秘书的渠道。
His bed had been moved into the downstairs dining room and he was sitting up in it, smoking a cigar. The teenage Ms. Gemmell was on the verge of graduating from the venerable Mrs. Hoster’s Secretarial College, which the Churchills had long used as a kind of employment agency.
“我当时非常害怕他，”杰梅尔女士后来回忆道，不过他其实“非常和善”。
“I was terrified of him,” Ms. Gemmell later recalled, but he was “very benign.”
“‘你好，亲爱的，’他这样问道。我想我当时和他握了手，”她在接受丘吉尔档案馆的口述历史项目采访时说道，“他看上去极其友善，让我鼓起勇气与他交谈。”丘吉尔的首席秘书乔·斯特迪·昂斯洛“不得不急忙把我拉走，”她说，“但就在那次会面之后，我的人生便开启了新篇章。”
“‘How do you do, my dear?’ he asked. I think I shook his hand,” she recalled for the oral history project at the Churchill Archives. “He seemed so incredibly friendly that I felt emboldened to talk to him.”Jo Sturdee Onslow, Churchill’s secretary in chief, “had to rush me away,” she said. “But on that interview, my life started.”
起初，杰梅尔女士被安排给丘吉尔的文学助理丹尼斯·凯利工作，负责整理首相在二战期间留下的文件，为丘吉尔撰写战争回忆录做准备。这些文件都保存在丘吉尔位于肯特郡的乡间别墅查特韦尔庄园里，因此她也在附近的韦斯特汉姆村找到了住处。她骑着自行车往返于查特韦尔，途中要爬上一座“极其陡峭的山坡”；不过至少下山时就轻松多了。
Ms. Gemmell was initially assigned to Churchill’s literary assistant, Denis Kelly, cataloging the prime minister’s World War II papers in anticipation of Churchill writing his war memoirs. The cache was housed at Chartwell, Churchill’s country home in the county of Kent, and so a place was found for Ms. Gemmell to live in the nearby village of Westerham. She bicycled back and forth to Chartwell, pushing the bike up “an incredibly steep hill” that, at least, “was a cinch coming back down.”