The Importance of Being Kennedy (20 page)

The air raids started up again after Christmas, firebombs mainly. Walter was tearing his hair out. Instead of taking cover, folk stayed out on the street, watching the fires. I could see why. People had grown accustomed to the raids, and anyway, a lot of the shelters were smelly and dirty. And the ones that were clean only stayed that way because they were kept locked, so it didn’t matter how much the sirens wailed, you’d to wait till a warden came with a key. Walter said they’d had to do that because of people thieving the lightbulbs.

“No sense of right and wrong,” he’d say. “No sense of pulling together. In 1940 all you thought about was beating Hitler. Now it’s every man jack for himself.”

He had a point. We had bus strikes that winter too, fired up by the unions. We’d gone through the Blitz and we’d gone without food and none of that got me down the way those bolshies did, sitting at their bus depots spouting about revolutions while hardworking people walked home. We were rushed off our feet at
the Rainbow Corner, there were so many GIs in town. The word was they were getting ready for the big invasion into France, but the invasion kept not happening.

Kick came back from Palm Beach without any joy. Mrs. K had been so worried she’d gone to the expense of placing a telephone call to the Duchess, and Her Grace had agreed with her that it was out of the question for Lord Billy and Kick to get married. The Devonshires didn’t want it and the Kennedys wouldn’t allow it, so that should have been the end of that, but Kick always was a tryer. She went off to Farm Street to see Father D’Arcy. And cold comfort she had of him too.

He said if she married in the English Church it would be no marriage at all in the eyes of the Catholic Church. She’d be living in sin and headed for eternal damnation, unless Lord Billy died first and she had time to make an act of contrition before her own death. As a matter of fact, I thought Father D’Arcy was wrong, because Our Lord would never have been so petty-minded over two good Christian souls, and even a man who’s been to the seminary can make a mistake, but he threatened her with the terrible wrath of God and that was something her Daddy’s dollars couldn’t buy off. That had been her last big hope, but Mr. K was dead against the match too. He was building his empire, laying the foundations ready for his boys after the war, and even the girls had their place in his scheme.

As Joe explained it to us, when the time came for him to run for office he’d be depending on the Catholic vote.

“The way it is,” he said, “if the first Kennedy to get married does it with an Episcopalian, it’s liable to split the vote. There’ll be Catholics who’ll say, so much for the Kennedys being our kind. I love you, Sis, but not enough to let you lose me my first election.”

We were on pins. You could see Lord Billy loved Kick to dis
traction and a man can’t be blamed for the church errors of his forebears, but I truly wished Mr. Churchill would get a move on with the invasion and cancel all leave, before there was time for them to do anything rash. May 1 she came round to see me.

“Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy,” she said. “Debo’s had a baby boy. And Billy and I are engaged. Really, properly, officially engaged. You’re the first to know.”

Well, a baby’s always good news, maybe specially a war baby. Lord Andrew was serving overseas and Kick said the baby was his double, so it was a comfort to Lady Debo. And lots of people get engaged without anything coming of it. Getting unengaged isn’t so difficult. I thought she’d be brought to her senses once Mrs. Kennedy’s cablegrams started raining down damnation on her and the Devonshires pulled Lord Billy back into line.

We had a good old hug, just like the old times. She said, “I’m so happy, Nora. Billy’s just the sweetest boy I ever met.”

Then she said, “Can you get time off on Saturday, you and Walter? We’re getting married at Chelsea Town Hall.”

That was the Monday. Walter said Their Graces would never wear it.

He said, “It cannot be, Nora. She’s a nice enough lass, but it cannot be.”

We heard nothing more till Thursday night. When I got home from the Red Cross young Joe was waiting for me, sitting in the scullery, turning the charm on Hope with a bar of soap and a bottle of OK sauce.

“Compassionate leave,” he said. “I’m here to stand up for Kick on Saturday morning.”

He’d been that afternoon to see the Devonshires’ lawyer, with a message from Mr. K about money.

I said, “Does that mean they have your Mammy and Daddy’s blessing?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “Dad told me to pull out all the stops and give her the best wedding I can, in the circs. But Mother, well, I’m afraid she’s taken it very badly. She’s gone to a clinic. The quack says she needs complete rest.”

He’d brought some clothes coupons for Kick.

He said, “The guys on my station rustled them up, like a kind of wedding gift. Is it too late to get a dress made do you think?”

It was all hands to the pump. We had a volunteer at the Rainbow Club who’d been a finisher at Molyneux. She spent all day Friday running up a little sheath dress, pale pink moss crepe, very simple, and Hope baked a cake with the last of our cocoa powder. Kick had rings under her eyes. After she’d had her first fitting, Joe took her horseback riding in Hyde Park, trying to get her to relax.

She kept saying, “I don’t want this to kill Mother.”

And Joe kept saying, “It won’t. Mother’s made of reinforced steel.”

The Duke and Duchess had asked the Archbishop of Canterbury if he’d give them a blessing after the registry office, and then he asked the Bishop of Westminster if he’d like to come along and give them a Catholic blessing too, but he wouldn’t of course. He said either they were married in the sight of God or they weren’t and it wasn’t for him to change the rules.

A box of camellias was sent down from Chatsworth.

“Such as they are,” Walter said. “Nobody’s kept the roots aerated, Nora. It’s a wonder to me they’ve not rotted in the ground.”

It grieved him to see such poor specimens used for a Devonshire wedding, but Kick was thrilled to have them, and the bottles of champagne wine brought up from the Chatsworth cellars and a diamond bracelet that had been in Lord Billy’s family for centuries. Their Graces might not have approved of the match, but
once they knew there was no stopping it, they did everything they could to give them a happy day.

Walter said, “That’s because they’re highborn people. They know how to behave.”

I said, “I suppose you mean, not like the Kennedys.”

He said, “All I’ll say is, Kick’s done very well for herself and your Mrs. Kennedy has no occasion to be so standoffish. From what I hear her people still have the bog sticking to their boots.”

I said, “They do not. Mrs. K is a Fitzgerald and they’re quite the Irish gentry in Boston, and old Mr. Kennedy was very well thought of. Anyway, it’s easier for Protestants to give way over things of the faith. They don’t have so much to lose. And I’m sure one of the reasons Their Graces are being nice about it is they’ve grown to love Kick.”

She was a girl who was very easy to love.

Saturday morning Joe brought her to the Town Hall in a hackney cab. He was in his dress blues and Kick had borrowed a little ostrich feather hat with a bit of pink veil to match her dress. Joe led her in on his arm and we followed behind, with Sissy Ormsby-Gore as a kind of matron of honor. None of her other friends had been able to get away at such short notice. When I think what a splash we’d all looked forward to when the Kennedy girls got married. Every one of them would have been the wedding of the year. But Kick ended up with a little hole-in-the-wall wartime wedding, and it wasn’t just Hitler they were up against. Herself was across the ocean, covered in frownies I’m sure and praying for a last-minute cancellation.

Lord Billy was waiting inside with the Duke and Duchess and his sisters. He had young Lord Granby for his best man. Lady Astor had turned up too, said she wanted to show solidarity. The old crackpot would never have come if we’d had a real wedding with a Nuptial Mass, of course. Wild horses wouldn’t get her into
a proper church, but I reckon she liked the idea of Kick defying Mrs. K. Anyway, she brought rose petals to throw, so she helped to take the bleakness off the occasion.

It was all over in ten minutes. William John Robert Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, and Kathleen Agnes Kennedy. There were photographers waiting outside from the dailies, and after they’d snapped them we walked to Eaton Square to a house belonging to one of Lord Billy’s uncles. All the Red Cross girls from Hans Crescent were there, and some of the officers too, come to toast the bride and groom.

A cablegram arrived just as they were cutting Hope’s austerity wedding cake. It was from Mr. K. It said,

There was a separate one arrived from Herself, but Joe tucked it in his pocket and let it slip his mind until after they’d left for the honeymoon. Then he showed it to me.

Heartbroken
, it said.

Seven little words that took all the joy out of the day. Oh I wished Rose Kennedy ill when I read that wire, though I’d never have said so to Joseph Patrick. He’d really done his level best, for Kick and for his Mammy and Daddy.

I said, “It’s early days. Maybe she’ll come round.”

Joe said, “Yeah. Maybe. And at least she didn’t manage to get the Town Hall struck by lightning.”

Lord Billy had ten days’ compassionate leave, so they went down to Compton Place, to where it all started that weekend
back in ’38. And not only for Kick and her Lord Billy. That was the first time I met Walter too, studying me in his rear mirror as he drove us from Eastbourne station.

I said, “Remember when we came down for the horse racing? She was worried about how to carry on if she met Their Graces, when to curtsey and all that, and now she’s on the way to being a Grace herself.”

He said, “I do remember. Not as much as I remember her lady’s maid, mind. She was a cracker. I wonder what ever became of her.”

Walter had grown fond of Kick, never mind what he thought of the rest of her family. He called her “my lady” when it was time for us to wave them off to catch their train. Oh and how she covered me with kisses.

She said, “I’m so happy I could burst. And you know, after Billy’s gone back to camp, I’m going to write to Mother again. I think she just needs time to get used to the idea. I think she’ll rather like having a trainee Duchess in the family, don’t you? It’ll be a kind of talking point. And once she realizes nothing else has changed, that I still say my prayers and everything, I think she’ll come round. God is good, Nora. He won’t punish me for marrying Billy, and I’m sure Mother will dote on our babies, as long as they’re baptized Christians.”

Mrs. Kennedy dote on Protestant grandbabies! Well, God may be good but still, no sense in dancing in a small boat.

We knew something was up. The last week of May the military were all on the move, heading out of London. Rainbow Corner was nearly deserted. There was so little for me to do there, I took in a pile of Walter’s socks to mend. Everything was quiet but not a nice kind of quiet. They’d warned us we might have to clear the lounges and the canteen ready to set up hospital cots, to be prepared for a flood of casualties, though it never came to that. I walked home down the Haymarket and Pall Mall one evening and it was like being in a ghost town. I didn’t see a single uniform. It was the night before D-day, except we didn’t know it at the time.

Kick was down in Hampshire, billeted at an inn so as to be near where Lord Billy was stationed. She’d heard from all her pals when they read about the wedding, and Nancy Tenney even asked her if she’d turned Episcopalian enough to be godmother to her baby girl, but from Mrs. K and the rest of the family she heard not a thing. I knew Euny and Pat wouldn’t dare write, not as long
as Herself held out, but Jack was down at Palm Beach recuperating from the operation on his back, and Lem Billings was there to keep him company, invalided out with shrapnel in his legs. It wouldn’t have hurt the pair of them to drop her a line and wish her well. Young Joe was the only one to really stand by her.

I said, “You did the right thing.”

“You reckon?” he said. “Well, I hope so. Mother’s still steaming and I’m not exactly in Dad’s best books. First I drop Law School, then I connive with the Devonshire Prods. So there goes the first Catholic presidency. I’ll be lucky to get elected borough councilor now. Maybe I’ll go into the movies instead.”

He could have done. He was the handsomest of my Kennedys by far. Jack and Bobby were too scraggy and Teddy was like a suet dumpling.

Joe’s tour of duty was nearly over, but he was very smitten with a girl he’d met, so he wanted to stay on. Patricia. He showed me her picture. She was older than him, married, with children. There was a lot of that went on in the war. Lonely women.

He said, “Don’t look at me that way, Nora. Her marriage wasn’t happy even before she met me.”

I said, “And where’s the husband?”

North Africa, he thought.

I said, “And what do the children call you? Daddy the Second?”

He said, “They call me Joe. It’s no problem. They don’t all have the same father anyway. The girl’s from her first marriage.”

She was nice-looking, but I’m sure he could have done better than steal a fighting man’s wife, and a secondhand one at that.

I said, “So what’s to be done? Your Mammy’ll be back in the convalescent home if she hears about this.”

“I’m working on it,” he said. “Main thing is, I want to stay here. I’ve volunteered for another tour of duty.”

They said we’d made great gains on D-day, that the tide had turned and Jerry was on the run. Well, he might have been on the run, but that didn’t stop him pausing to send those doodlebug rockets to torment us.

It was a Sunday morning when the first one came to London. I’d just got back from early Mass at Farm Street and Hope had set me scraping carrots for a pie. We didn’t hear a plane because there was no plane, just a big vibration that made the milk pitchers dance on the dresser. Then the two Joans, ATS girls who had a room on the top floor, came thundering down the stairs. They said there was black smoke rising from over by Buckingham Palace. That got Stallybrass out from behind his newspaper.

He grabbed his helmet and his bike and he was off down the Mall, didn’t even wait for orders. The Joans gave us a running report. Sirens, more smoke, then Lord Melhuish in his shirtsleeves and three more of his ARP men setting off on their bicycles. It was the barracks chapel that had been hit, in Birdcage Walk, packed to the doors with guardsmen and their loved ones, singing the first hymn.

We didn’t see Walter again till nearly midnight. He came home covered in brick dust and soot, fit to drop, but he couldn’t sleep.

“The roof fell on them, Nora,” he kept saying over and over. “It’s a bomb with an engine and when it runs out of juice it just glides down and explodes. It brought the roof in on them. What kind of folk bomb churches?”

I don’t know that they had picked out a church, though. I’m not making excuses for Jerry, but bombs fall where they fall, especially the doodlebugs. But Walter had it in his head that it had been done out of spite.

“Nay,” he kept saying. “Bombing on a Sunday morning. That’s not decent. That never should be.”

He cracked me up. He never sets foot in a church.

The guards’ chapel was the start, pretty much, of the rocket bombs. It didn’t flatten the altar, nor the bishop. He lived to tell the tale. But there were plenty of others not so lucky. One hundred and fifty dead, they reckoned, people at prayer, just minding their business on a beautiful summer morning. They said the rockets flew on their own all the way from France though how they did that nobody could ever explain to me.

Everybody seemed to know what should be done except Mr. Churchill. Walter said they should send ack-ack units down to Kent and Sussex, to catch the rockets before they crossed the coast and bring them down into the sea, and eventually they did just that, but we took a beating in London first. Five years of war and I’d never had hysterics, but I came close to it the night a doodlebug hit Victoria railway station.

There were a lot of GIs expected by train and they were shorthanded at the Donut Dugout so I was asked to work a late turn, serving them coffee and smokes. I’d just turned on to Wilton Road when I heard it pop-pop-popping, like a motorbike in the sky. I couldn’t see it. Then the noise stopped dead, as if a plug had been pulled out, so I guessed what it was.

Walter had been telling me all week what I had to do if I heard the noise stop.

“You must take cover, Nora,” he kept saying, “because if the blast doesn’t get you the flying glass will.”

But my legs wouldn’t carry me. I was frozen to the spot and God knows what would have happened to me, but a big Polish soldier boy pushed me inside the doorway of the Grosvenor Hotel, and then the blast came and blew in all the lobby windows. We stayed crouched down together for a long time. I could smell his breath, like sausage meat. Then we heard people starting to move about in the street again and when I stood up I realized I’d
wet my drawers. I thought, well, I can’t work in these all night, so I wriggled them down and kicked them into the doorway of the movie theater. I suppose whoever found them must have thought they were all that was left of somebody. Tragic, mystery drawers.

There was glass underfoot, like gravel, and a bit of dust, but it was business as usual at the canteen. And all through the night, as well as the smell of java, there was a wonderful fragrance in the air, like new-mown hay. It was leaves, an ARP warden told us. The smell of thousands of leaves that had been stripped off the plane trees by the blast.

I worked my turn, did whatever I was asked, though I don’t think I was much use to anyone that night. I even smoked a cigarette, my first and my last, nasty, choking thing. I’d seen things in the Blitz, and been out in the middle of raids and firestorms, but nothing had frightened me like the doodlebugs. And that one down at Victoria was only the start of it.

All that summer they tormented us and the casualties were terrible. Lady Melhuish was one of them, who lived just along the street in Carlton Gardens. She was an American lady, but very highly connected. She had an office job in the Wrens and she was just taking a walk along the Aldwych, out on her lunch break, when a rocket hit the Air Ministry. A body fell on her, sucked out of the building by the blast. Walter came home from his rounds with the story.

“See, Nora,” he said. “You think I make a fuss, but the point is she didn’t take cover. If people had seen what I’ve seen, bits pulled out of the rubble down at Birdcage walk, they’d be more cautious. I had to take charge of rounds tonight. His Lordship came down for the roll call, but he was in no state to do anything else. He held up very well when they lost their boy, but I reckon this has rightly finished him.”

Young Joe came and paid us a call the first weekend of
August and brought Kick with him, Lady Kathleen as everybody was calling her now. Lord Billy’s regiment had been posted overseas, to France she thought, so she’d decided to come back to town and see if the Red Cross could find anything to keep her occupied. She was staying at Cynthia Brough’s in Cheyne Walk. Lady Cynthia was in the Air Transport Auxiliary, gone for days on end flying new Spitfires from the factory line out to the air bases, then having to wait for a ride back. She’d adopted a little terrier dog, but she didn’t like to take him up with her, in case something went wrong and she had to bail out and leave him to perish, so she was glad to have Kick stay at her flat to look after him.

I quite thought Joe had come to say good-bye. He’d served his turn and he could have gone home.

But he said, “I’m not going, Nora. I’ve volunteered for a new assignment, so I’ll be staying on.”

As Kick said, staying on meant he could carry on with his married lady friend too, but it wasn’t only love that was driving him. I knew it still niggled him that he hadn’t sunk any U-boats while wee Jack had got a medal and a hero’s welcome. Kick kept trying to get out of him what his new assignment was, but of course he couldn’t tell us. All he’d say was that it was something big, something that could be the big turning point in the war.

“It could mean the beginning of the end,” he said. “You’ll hear all about it soon enough.”

And so we did.

It was a Sunday afternoon, gray and muggy. Hope was putting up a few jars of carrot jam and Walter was resting his eyes. I was pressing my skirt, ready to work an early-evening turn at Rainbow Corner, when there was a rapping at the front door. We hardly used that entrance anymore. We spent near enough all our time down in the scullery and used the tradesman’s door.

It was Lady Cynthia, very smart in her dark blue serge and her aviator wings, though I didn’t know her for a minute, she’d had her curls cropped so short.

“You won’t remember me,” she said. “Cynthia Brough. Is Kick here by any chance?”

But I hadn’t seen Kick in nearly two weeks.

She said, “I’ve had U.S. Navy brass on the blower, trying to track her down. Any idea where I’d find her?”

All I could think was she might have gone down to Compton Place. She liked to spend time with Their Graces when she could, learning all about the family and the estates and everything she’d need to know for when she was Duchess of Devonshire. “Studying graceship,” as she called it.

Cynthia said, “I’m afraid it must be about her brother. He must be missing or wounded.”

I don’t imagine they even knew yet up at Hyannis. It was morning there. Herself would have been on her way back from Mass. Jean and Teddy might be out to Osterville for a regatta. Pat and Euny would likely be on the tennis court and Mr. K would be up on his veranda reading the Sundays. I could just picture them. And then any minute that telephone would start ringing.

I went to St. Patrick’s on Soho Square and lit a candle, but I didn’t learn any more till Tuesday night, when a note was delivered by hand.

Joe killed
, she wrote.

I had a photograph of him, I know I did. It was taken on the strand the first summer we went to Cohasset, Mr. K with
Joseph Patrick in one arm and Jack in the other, both in their wee sailor suits. Well, I searched everywhere for that picture the night I heard Joe was dead, but I couldn’t find it. As the family grew, he wasn’t my favorite, but those first few months he was my only Kennedy and such a handsome child. Those were happy days. And when Jack was born Joe didn’t like sharing me. “Mine,” he’d say, and he’d try to push Jack off my lap.

When a serviceman was killed you got no details. We didn’t hear until after V-day exactly what had happened, but I knew Joseph Patrick well enough to guess. He was the kind of lad who was never satisfied till he was doing the daringest stunt, till he’d given Jack and Bobby and Teddy something crazy to beat. And that was the sum of it. There’d been just a few of them, a select band who’d volunteered for something that hadn’t been tried before, to try and knock out the doodlebug launchers over in France. Flying a bomb was what it amounted to, a Liberator airplane packed with dynamite. They had to fly it so far, to set it on the right track, and then parachute out before it blew up. Except that the first few they tried blew up while the aviators were still inside so there was talk of calling the whole business off. There would have been no dishonor in devolunteering until they’d made it safer, but if you advised Joe against doing a thing it only made him the more determined.

Kick wrote again when she got home.

When first I heard what Mr. Kennedy had had done to Rosie, all I could think was what a monster he’d turned out. He couldn’t stand to be beaten, he wouldn’t have anything stand in the way of his big plans, not even one of his own darling girls, and he thought everything in the world could be fixed by pulling strings and spending dollars. I’d felt sorry then for Mrs. K, because he’d likely waited till she was up to Maine for a rest cure and then sneaked Rosie away to the hospital. Mrs. K might have despaired sometimes of teaching Rosie her letters, but a mother’s love is a mother’s love. That’s what I’d thought. But when I heard how she was after Joe was killed, I changed my mind. Not speaking to her own daughter, when she’d flown across the ocean to be with them and share in their loss. If losing that boy didn’t soften her heart, if it didn’t make her treasure Kick and count her blessings, then what kind of mother was she?