The inner thoughts of Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill live on, thanks to the foul mouth of his 104-year-old parrot who lives at a garden centre in southeast England. "F*** Hitler! F*** the Nazis!" says Charlie, a female blue and gold macaw which Churchill bought in 1937, two years before the outbreak of World War II in Europe.
"Parrots are remarkably adept at mimicking sounds and voices," says an article about Charlie in the February issue of Jack, a British men’s magazine, which hits the newsstands on Thursday. "So when Charlie gives her opinion of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, it is rendered with a Churchillian inflection," it said. Following Churchill’s death in 1965, Charlie was sold to pet shop owner Peter Oram, who keeps her at the garden centre in Reigate, Surrey, where she wanders around the grounds in summer but stays indoors in the winter. "She is a very old parrot," Sylvia Martin, who works with Oram, told Jack. "She has become increasingly quarrelsome — and, if the truth be told, is now looking a little scruffy."
Give the parrot a scotch on my tab. |