Black Diamonds (60 page)

To begin with, there was some confusion over the identity of the passengers. The police had found a passport in the woman’s handbag: an American passport bearing the name ‘Lady Hartington’. Joe Kennedy was staying at the Georges V hotel in Paris when he was woken in the early hours of the morning by a call from a reporter asking him to confirm reports that Kick – rather than Billy’s brother’s wife, Debo Cavendish, also called Lady Hartington – was dead. As Joe left the hotel later that morning to travel by train to the Ardèche, he told reporters he hoped there had been a mistake over his daughter’s identity. But he knew it was Kick. Among Joe’s personal papers there is a note written on Georges V headed paper. ‘
Written by me
,’ it says, ‘½ hour after notified of Kick’s death’:

No one who ever knew her didn’t feel that life was much better that minute. And
probably
we know so little about the next world that we must think that they wanted just such a wonderful girl for themselves. We must not feel sorry for her but for ourselves.

At Wentworth, within hours of the crash, the Estate swung into action. Harry Sporborg, Peter’s business partner, took charge, sending Peter’s racing trainer to France to identify his body. Before plans could be made for the funeral five days later, a number of sensitive matters had to be dealt with first. Rowena Sykes, a nineteen-year-old maid at the house, was at home in Jump, a pit village a few miles from Wentworth, when she received a message the morning after Peter was killed. ‘It was Whitsuntide and I’d got the weekend off. Next door to where I lived there was a hair-dresser. She had a telephone. It was the only one in the village, nobody had telephones in them days. A neighbour came round and said there was a call for me. It was Mrs Lloyd, the housekeeper. “Would I go back to the house straight away,” she said. All the maids were called back. There were seven of us. £1 12 shillings and sixpence a month we got. We had to go up to Lord Fitzwilliam’s bedroom and strip it. Move the pillows, open the windows, change the sheets, everything. He’d been in there with the Kennedy girl a few days before. They wanted her scent got rid of because Lady Fitzwilliam [Obby] was on her way up from London to Wentworth for the funeral. Then we had to go and clear out the Chapel. There was all this furniture, and pictures and what have you in there. It had all gone in when the soldiers took over the house. It had never come out, it was still there. They wanted to put Peter’s coffin in the Chapel – to lay it in state before they buried him in the Church.’

It was left to Joe Kennedy to deal with the formalities of Kick’s death. On the evening of Friday 14 May, after identifying her body, he phoned home to Hyannis Port where the rest of the family had gathered.
Unsurprisingly
, he said nothing about her disfiguring wounds. He told the family how ‘beautiful’ she looked. She had been found on her back ‘asleep’ with her shoes gone. Wasn’t that just like Kick, who always went barefoot?

Joe alone was confronted by the gruesome – and uncomfortable – details of Kick’s death. Soon after identifying her body, the police handed over her personal effects. As well as a family photo album and a string of rosary beads, they included a vaginal douche. The daughter of America’s most prominent Catholic family, and the widow of a man once mooted as a husband for England’s future Queen, had died on her way to an illicit weekend with a married man.

Hours after the plane crashed, the Devonshires, the Fitzwilliams and the Kennedys closed ranks. They used both Ilona Solymossy – Kick’s housekeeper – and Peter Fitzwilliam’s secretary as conduits to channel an acceptable version of the story to the Press. ‘Chance Invite Sends Kennedy Girl to Her Death’, read the headline in the
New York Daily News
, a newspaper owned by Joseph Patterson, an associate of Joe Kennedy’s. The paper was the first to ‘break’ the story of the ‘circumstances’ leading to the couple’s death. Quoting Peter’s secretary, Kick was described as an ‘old friend of both Lady and Lord Fitzwilliam’s’. ‘Lady Hartington’, the paper reported, had ‘casually encountered Lord Fitzwilliam’ at the Ritz Hotel in London. On discovering that she was unable to secure a train or plane ticket to visit her father in the South of France, the paper continued, Lord Fitzwilliam offered her a seat on the plane he had chartered to visit ‘racehorse breeders’ on the French Riviera. ‘Lady Hartington,’ so the paper alleged, ‘had been delighted with the offer of a lift.’ The inconsistency of the facts – that Joe Kennedy had been in Paris, rather than the South of France – did not trouble the
New York Daily News
. Nor did the fact that the French Riviera was not known for its racehorse breeding.

In Britain, a virtual news blackout was imposed. Of the four tabloids with the highest circulations, only one, the left-wing
Daily Mirror
, printed the story. On the Friday, the morning after the accident, the
Daily Mail
, the
Daily Express
and the
Daily Herald
had all carried reports in their Stop Press columns that a British light aircraft had crashed, the identities of the passengers as yet unknown. Yet in the days that followed, there was no further news – no reports even that Kick and Peter had been killed. High up in the organization of each of the newspapers, someone had clearly decreed that the story be pulled.

Joe had
Kick’s body transported up to Paris where it lay at the Catholic church of St Philippe du Roule, watched over by a nun from the Order of the Sisters of Hope. For four days, Kick’s final resting place remained undecided. Responding to inquiries from the Press, Joe, dazed, answered, ‘I have no plans. No plans.’

It was finally agreed that Kick would be buried at Chatsworth, the Devonshires’ home in Derbyshire. The Kennedys left the arrangements for the funeral to the Duchess of Devonshire. They did not even choose her epitaph. ‘Joy she gave, Joy she has found’ were the words the Duchess chose to be carved on the headstone above her grave.

Yet, for all Joe Kennedy’s faults, Kick had been right to place her faith in him. Four months later, writing to the Duchess of Devonshire, on whom he had lent heavily in the days after Kick’s death, Joe was still paralysed by grief. ‘Dearest Moucher,’ he wrote:

It probably isn’t news to you to know that I thought about you a great deal since I came back to America. I think that the only thing that helped me retain my sanity was your understanding manner in the whole sad affair. I would like to be able to tell you that I am very much better, but I just can’t.

I can’t seem to get out of my mind that there is no possibility of seeing Kick next winter and that there are no more weeks and months to be made gay by her presence. I realize that people say, ‘You have many other children, you can’t be too depressed by Kick’s death,’ and I think that, to all intents and purposes, no one knows that I am depressed. In fact, I have never acknowledged it even to Rose who, by the way, is ten thousand per cent better than I am. Her terrifically strong faith has been a great help to her, along with her very strong will and determination not to give way …

I know I tried to tell you, while I was in London, how grateful I am to Edward and you for your whole attitude in those dark days. I don’t know whether I made myself very clear or not, but it will do no harm to repeat again that I will never forget it and I will always be deeply grateful to you and your family …

Joe was the only member of the Kennedy family present at Kick’s funeral. Neither her mother, Rose, nor her brothers and sisters were there. For Rose, as Lem Billings, a close friend of the family’s recalled, ‘
that airplane crash
was God pointing his finger at Kick and saying NO!’ Days before the funeral, Rose had arranged for a memorial Mass card to be sent out. The prayer printed on it was a plea for plenary indulgence, applicable to souls in purgatory. One of Kick’s friends tore it up in a rage. Those who had loved and now mourned Kick could not forgive Rose. ‘Somerset Maugham [the celebrated British novelist] came to stay with us out in Tanganyika some years after Peter died,’ Barbara, Peter’s niece, remembered. ‘And he told us that Kick’s mother had put a curse on her daughter. She’d put a curse on her own daughter, that’s what her friends believed.’

Rose lied about Kick’s death until the day she died. In her autobiography,
Time to Remember
, she wrote that Kick and a ‘few friends’ were returning from a holiday on the Riviera en route to meeting Joe in Paris when the plane crashed. There were no public foundations set up in Kick’s name or privately published commemorative books, as there were after Joe, Jack and Bobby died. Kick’s brothers and sisters knew not to talk about her in their mother’s presence: even her brothers imposed their own vows of silence.
Independently
, Jack and Bobby visited Ilona Solymossy in the months after her death. On leaving the housekeeper, their parting words were the same: ‘We will not mention her again.’ In 1951, when Bobby Kennedy’s eldest daughter was born, he wanted to name her Kathleen Hartington Kennedy: the family had one stipulation – that she never be referred to as ‘Kick’.

On 20 May 1948 Joe Kennedy stood in the sheltered graveyard behind Edensor Church at Chatsworth and watched Kick’s coffin being lowered into the earth. He had lost his eldest and favourite son, Joe: now his favourite daughter was being laid to rest in the grounds of a famously anti-Catholic family in a foreign country from which, a decade earlier, he had been asked to leave. ‘I can still see the stricken face of old Joe Kennedy,’ Alistair Forbes recalled nearly thirty years later, ‘as he stood alone, unloved and despised, behind the coffin of his eldest daughter amid the hundreds of British friends who had adored her and now mourned her.’

At Wentworth, Peter’s funeral had taken place the previous day.

37

The gypsies came before dawn, scattering flowers along the road leading to the church where Peter was to be buried. In his father’s day, an avenue of splendid lime trees, carefully pollarded by the Estate labourers, had lined Church Drive, but now, on one side, just three of the trees were left. The others had been uprooted by the excavators that had wrecked the fields beyond. The denuded landscape, the mounds and craters of naked limestone, stretched away to the south as far as the eye could see. The flowers stood out against the brilliant white of the road. The original grass track had long since been covered by thousands of pieces of limestone debris from the fields nearby.

At three o’clock, the hour given by the Estate officials as the likely time when Peter’s coffin, mounted on a bier pulled by eight of the Fitzwilliams’ employees, would leave Wentworth House, there was no sign of the gypsies. They had scattered the flowers and gone – a Romany custom to honour the souls of those who had been kind to them.

The funeral was private: the first private funeral in the history of the Earls Fitzwilliam. The orchestrated public mourning performed at Peter’s great-grandfather’s funeral in 1902, and at those of previous Earls before him, belonged to the past. Overnight, after vesting day – 1 January 1947 – the day Britain’s collieries were transferred to public ownership, the numbers employed by the family had fallen from thousands to hundreds. A skeleton staff of just eleven servants remained on duty at the house: with the acreage subsumed by the open-cast mining operations, even the Estate departments were being slowly run down.

Yet still, on the morning of 20 May 1948, thousands came from the villages around Wentworth. ‘
He were a grand lad
,’ May Bailey, the former scullery maid at the house, recalled. ‘He were popular.

Everyone liked him, they wanted to see him off.’ But tragedy, as some admitted, and the macabre symbol of the Fitzwilliams’ and Wentworth’s catastrophic unravelling, also drew the crowds. ‘Ay,’ said one man from the village, ‘they said they’d brought him home, but I doubt there was much left of him in that coffin. They told his mother he had died asleep, that his body had been thrown out of the plane and was barely touched. I heard different: they said he was in pieces, and not many pieces at that.’

Along Church Drive, the crowd started forming at two o’clock.
At the top of the road
, by the green door that led into the gardens of Wentworth House, they came to pile wreaths of flowers on to the waiting farm carts. An hour later, heads were bared when the green door opened for the coffin, draped in a Union Jack, drawn by the Fitzwilliams’ eight employees.

Maud, Obby and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Juliet, led the procession that followed the bier as it was hauled the mile from the house. Maud was bowed by grief; a crêpe funeral veil shrouded her face. ‘I don’t think she ever got over it,’ Lady Barbara Ricardo, her granddaughter, remembered. ‘She absolutely doted on Peter. He was more important to her than anything else. The extraordinary thing was later in life, when she was much older – I suppose she must have been in her seventies – my mother went up to see her one Christmas and my grandmother showed her a photograph of Peter. She said to Mummy, “Elfie darling, do tell me, who is the man in the photograph? I often look at it and I can’t work out who this handsome young man is. Who is he?” Mummy said, “Darling, it’s your son.” She said, “Darling, I don’t have a son.” My mother said, “Mummy, you did have a son. He’s gone now.” Somehow or other, the kindness of the good Lord – or who, I don’t know – enabled her to forget. Misery and fate and everything else had caused her to lose that part of her memory.’

The farm carts, loaded with the wreaths of flowers, joined the procession, separating the three women from the other mourners. A decrepit figure in his mid-sixties, wearing an unusually tall black silk top hat – a sartorial relic from the Victorian age – walked at the head of the long line that followed behind the carts. His mourning suit was ill-fitting: the trousers were too short, inelegantly hitched around his waist, and the tail coat too long. The very sight of him, his position in the bleak procession, told a sorry story: Eric, Peter’s successor – the new and 9th Earl Fitzwilliam – was the last of the 6th Earl’s male descendants left.