by Paula Byrne
They had been given an ‘enormous room’ with a gas fire and running water, where supper was laid out on the table. Kick loved meeting the other guests, English eccentrics, including an old army major who gave them a print of one of Billy’s ancestors for a wedding present. Tom told Kick that people were ringing up the hotel wanting to have a look at the married couple: ‘of course we’re pleased to death’.
One day they ordered a delicious picnic from the chef and headed off on bikes into the countryside. Billy picked out the ‘longest hill in England to climb but we just managed it’. Billy had borrowed Tom’s bicycle: ‘the seat was so low that I felt I was riding uphill a spike’. ‘Another wonderful day,’ he wrote in their joint diary.
Not quite everyone was a fan of the titled guests. Billy was met in the hall of the inn by an ugly woman who said, ‘You’re Lord Hartington, you don’t [know] me, do you?’ Billy looked at her blankly, until she explained that she was the sub-agent of Charlie White, the man who had defeated Billy in the by-election. ‘What a small world,’ he scribbled in the diary.
They were amused that the chef, whom they thought excellent, had created a new savoury dish called ‘Croûte Cavendish’. When they asked to speak to him, he told Kick that he had almost gone to work for the Kennedys when they lived in the Embassy, but his letter of application had gone astray. Kick thought that the savoury was ‘filthy’ but Billy insisted on eating it. Back in their bedroom they laughed until they were ‘nearly sick’. Then Tom called on them to tell them that he was becoming a Jesuit priest. ‘Never a dull moment’: another lighthearted memory for the diary.
Their happiness was marred by Rose’s distress and the hate mail that they continued to receive about the marriage. What Rose didn’t reveal was that she too was receiving letters criticizing her for Kick’s behaviour in marrying a Protestant. One priest wrote to her, ‘May the Blessed Mother give her the necessary grace to see the error of her ways, before many weeks have passed.’8 There was also negative press in Catholic Boston. Kick sent letters to try to cheer her mother up: ‘Please do not be sad about anything. I’m very, very happy and quite certain about what I have done. My only regret is that none of you were here for the 1st Kennedy marriage. What an event!!! I missed you all so much. You have no idea!’ She also said, ‘I think you knew I’d marry B— some day.’9 She asked her parents to send her a bathing suit, shorts, cotton dresses and a summer dinner dress, a pink dressing gown and a pair of gold and silver evening sandals. It was still so difficult to find lovely clothes with rationing.
Friends who came to stay were impressed by how she handled her new status as a member of the aristocracy. Never one for giving herself airs, she was dignified and kind and took all the extra attention in her stride.10 The Duke, who ‘owns half of Eastbourne’, had ‘given orders for a Kennedy Street’. She made light of the honour: ‘I have chosen to have flowering cherry trees up and down.’11 Though distressed that she was unable to receive communion, she carried on attending mass.
Kick spent much of her time writing to friends and relations. John White congratulated her on her nuptials, and she wrote back: ‘At the moment I am living in a pub, but don’t worry, things will get better and I’ve been in worse places (mainly with you!).’12 In his journal, White, no doubt jealous, was less kind, saying that Billy ‘looked something of a fool’. The staff at the Times-Herald sent their congratulations and she wrote back, ‘When the revolution comes I shall come begging for another go at “Did You Happen to See”.’13
Billy and Kick were dreaming about their life after the war. They planned an American trip to see her family, though Billy was extremely nervous about meeting all the boisterous Kennedys en masse. Kick planned to continue working at the Red Cross until the end of the war and then take up her social duties in Derbyshire. But, for now, she was enjoying herself: ‘Have put on some weight and am getting plenty of sleep. MARRIED LIFE AGREES WITH ME!’14
44
Operation Aphrodite
We are all looking forward now at having Joe home and we only wish you and Billy were going to be along too.
Rose Kennedy to Kick
6 June 1944, D-Day.
‘When we awoke this morning,’ Kick wrote in the joint diary, ‘Billy said he was sure the 2nd Front had started. Planes had gone over unceasingly for two hours. He was quite right. London quiet.’1
Their precious days of uninterrupted joy were coming to an end. The Duchess joined them for the evening and they talked about what lay ahead. The rain poured down. ‘Planes not so plentiful,’ Kick wrote in the diary, but ‘tanks, with waterproof equipment and heavy trucks rumbled by all day.’ The atmosphere was heavy with expectation: ‘The men look ready for what awaits.’2
Fiona and Boofy came for the weekend: ‘B got rather tiddly. He’ll hate that fact remaining for posterity,’ Kick teased. Billy left to get his T.A.B. (typhoid) injection. Kick noted that he was ‘looking very worried’. For once her teasing failed to amuse him: ‘I was in my most maddening mood.’3
The next morning, 13 June, Billy wrote down his feelings in their diary, quoting the schoolboy end-of-term refrain: ‘This time tomorrow where shall I be / Not in this academy.’ Now, of course, it was the end of honeymoon and potentially the end of everything:
Although I have been expecting it daily, it is quite a shock too that it has come. I shall always remember these last months as the most perfect of my life. How beastly it is always to be ending things. This war seems to cause nothing but goodbyes. I think that is the worst part of it, worse even than fighting.4
Billy was ready for the fight, but hated saying goodbye to Kick. They had had just five weeks together since their wedding day. She wrote down her own feelings of joy and sorrow: ‘This is the saddest evening. Ever since May 6th I have had a wonderful sense of contentment. B is the most perfect husband.’5
By 15 June, Kick was ‘ensconced in Marie Bruce’s apartment’. She felt truly alone: ‘I miss B so much. Things seem quite empty without him.’6
Besides the pain of having to say goodbye to Billy and the anxiety about what he would face in France, Kick had to face the terror of the Luftwaffe’s latest weapon, the V1 flying bombs, known as ‘doodlebugs’, that might drop with hardly any warning at any time of the day or night. The worst thing about them was the moment when the engine (said by the novelist Elizabeth Bowen to sound like a hundred diabolical sewing machines) cut out and there was a twelve-second wait before the explosion.
On 14 June a doodlebug dropped dangerously near to Kick: ‘It shook us up quite a bit . . . Nervous night.’ Her diary is full of references to the bombs: ‘Nervous day with doodlebugs expected at any moment . . . they haven’t stopped all day . . . people are absolutely terrified and one senses that the people are always listening first for them to arrive and next for the sound that the dreaded engine has stopped.’7 More than 200 bodies were dug out of the Guards’ Chapel – a place dear to Billy’s heart – after a doodlebug hit during a service. Kick pasted newspaper articles about this tragedy in her diary and noted again that Londoners were far more frightened of the doodlebugs than of any other bombs: ‘the eeriness and the inability to hit back at a human element make them more disliked’. One of the clippings cited remarks from an eighty-year-old woman: ‘Seems ’orrible queer to me. I believe I’d rather have bombs.’ Another article talked of Anglo-American unity in the face of the latest Nazi weapon: ‘They really feel now that when Germany bombs London she is also bombing America . . . The flying bomb has done more than anything could have done to destroy any complacency in America that the war in Europe is won.’8
Perhaps the danger of the doodlebugs, together with Billy’s departure for the Second Front, was the catalyst for Rose. She finally broke her silence at the end of June, sending Kick a cheerful and supportive letter. The Duchess of Devonshire had written a warm note to Rose, telling her how much Kick was loved. ‘It made us very happy to know they all love you so dearly,’ Rose told her daughter. She said th
at she felt bad that she had written an angry letter to Billy (now lost) in the aftermath of the wedding, and she had the grace to apologize. She assured Kick that Billy would be given an ‘equally warm welcome into the family’. Her behaviour, she emphasized, was the result of shock, ‘but that is all over now, dear Kathleen, and as long as you love Billy so dearly, you may be sure that we will all receive him with open arms’. The rest of the letter was news about friends and family, and discussion about clothes. ‘Have you ever thought of wearing woolen gabardine slacks in the country?’ Rose also told Kick that Jack was recovering from yet another operation on his back. She asked Kick to send love to Marie Bruce, and added that she had written to her: ‘I told her that we hope to see her as soon as the war is over, which we think may be soon.’9 Relationships were healing.
On 7 July, Joe Sr wrote to a friend: ‘We hear from Kathleen and she is very, very happy but a little worried about her husband as she hasn’t heard from him for quite a while. You know they stick those Grenadier and Coldstream guards with the Irish guards right out in front.’10 Kick had indeed been worrying about Billy and was relieved when ‘a glorious letter’ from her ‘darling hub’ arrived saying that his regiment was ‘resting’. She told him that she had been staying with his family, and that they had been picking raspberries and his father chopping logs, his favourite pastime. She sent so much love: ‘I doubt it will fit into this tiny envelope.’11 With the war drawing towards its close, her letter was full of references to their future together. The press was beginning to talk about how one day Kick would rank ‘next to the Queen as the most powerful woman in England’.12
The Kennedys, now based on Cape Cod, were looking forward to the return of young Joe. ‘We are all looking forward now at having Joe home and we only wish you and Billy were going to be along too,’ Rose had written in the letter in which she had softened her position on the marriage.13
Joe had completed all his missions successfully, so was due for home leave. But he had other plans. To their surprise, Joe and Rose received a letter from him which stated that he was not coming home: ‘I am going to be doing something different for the next three weeks. It is secret, and I am not allowed to say what it is, but it isn’t dangerous so don’t worry.’14
He and his crew had volunteered for what was in fact an extremely dangerous mission. He told his parents, ‘I persuaded my crew to do it, which pleased me very much,’ but he didn’t reveal anything about the mission.15 The truth was that young Joe had signed his own death warrant.
Meanwhile, his married lover Pat Wilson and Kick planned a short holiday in Eastbourne. Hurrying to catch the train at Waterloo they noticed that a doodlebug had exploded close to the station. The minute they arrived at Eastbourne station, they saw in the sky a group of fighters going after other doodlebugs: then there was a tremendous crash when a V1 landed five minutes away.
Young Joe told the family that Kick, normally so intrepid, was ‘terrified of the Doodles, as is everyone else’.16 The only brightness for Kick was being reunited with him, her great supporter throughout the build-up to her marriage. It was his birthday on 25 July, so Kick and Pat Wilson threw him a party: ‘there was champagne, and a delicious dinner, so I really enjoyed it’. Joe seemed very happy. He was deeply in love with Pat, though he couldn’t see a future with a married woman.
Joe and Kick took a short holiday in the seaside resort of Torquay, and went swimming, despite the terrible British weather. He reported that Kick looked marvellous and joked that he was going grey: ‘I’m getting on, and I had better get a gal while there is some life in the old boy.’ He and Kick teased one another over a typewriter that Joe had and Kick wanted. ‘The Kennedy clan on this side of the Atlantic is doing OK,’ he wrote.17
Joe had kept up Kick’s spirits by reassuring her that fighter planes were chasing the doodlebugs. What few people knew was that, as a response to the flying bombs, a new secret plan called ‘Operation Aphrodite’ had been developed.18 An empty bomber, stripped and filled with 10 tons of TNT, would fly by remote control across the Channel, precision-guided to explode on the launching site of the doodlebugs in Normandy. There was one hitch: these drones could not take off without a pilot. So a crew of two was required to take off and fly to 2,000 feet before activating the remote-control system, arming the detonators and parachuting from the aircraft. Joe Kennedy volunteered his services.
On 10 August, Joe wrote to Jack telling him of his secret mission and praised a recent New Yorker article about his brother: ‘The whole squadron got to read it and were much impressed by your intestinal fortitude.’ He was proud of Jack, but was also writing as a competitive elder brother, a professional and a father figure: ‘What I really want to know, is where the hell were you when the destroyer hove into sight, and exactly what were your moves, and where the hell was your radar?’19 It was typical of Joe to question his brother. Jack loved his brother’s honesty while everyone else was calling him a hero.
Joe joked about his female conquests, and told Jack not to worry: he was not risking ‘my fine neck (covered in the back with a few fine silky black hairs) in any crazy venture’.20 Joe was very well aware of the risks of his mission, but he wanted to return a hero, to outdo his brother.
On the night that he flew, he was given two warnings that the electric circuitry of his plane was faulty. He left Kick a message asking her to explain to Pat that he was going to be a day late. He added, ‘I’m about to go into my act. If I don’t come back, tell my dad – despite our differences that I love him very much.’21
One of Kick’s presents to Joe had been a velvet-lined casket in which he stored his fresh eggs. The night before the mission he and a friend had a fry-up, using up most of his precious eggs. He leant out of the window of his plane, and joked with his men who had gathered around to wish him luck that, if he didn’t come back, they could eat the eggs that remained.22
Twenty minutes after take-off from Fersfield Aerodrome in Norfolk, his plane exploded in mid-air.
Sunday, 13 August 1944.
It was a beautiful sunny afternoon on the Cape, and the Kennedys had just finished a picnic lunch on the big porch of the family home in Hyannis Port. The children sat in the living room chatting quietly and listening to the Victrola playing Bing Crosby’s ‘I’ll be Seeing You’, while Rose read the Sunday newspaper. Upstairs, Joe had retired to his bedroom for a nap.
Suddenly a car pulled up. Two priests got out and came to the house. There was nothing unusual about this; priests often called at the house, so Rose did not feel particularly alarmed. They asked to speak to Mr Kennedy. Rose invited them in and asked them to wait until Joe had finished his nap, but they told her that it was urgent. Their eldest son was missing in action and presumed lost. Young Ted recalled that all the children heard were the words ‘missing’ and ‘lost’: ‘All of us froze.’23
Rose ran upstairs and shook Joe awake. Her mind was ‘half-paralyzed’, but she managed to blurt out that two priests were here with a message. Joe Sr ‘leaped from the bed and hurried downstairs . . . we realized that there could be no hope, and that our son was dead’.24 Ted recalled that when his parents emerged from their conversation with the priests: ‘Dad’s face was twisted. He got out the words that confirmed what we already suspected. Joe Jr was dead . . . Suddenly the sunroom was awash in tears. Mother, my sisters, our guests, myself – everybody was crying; some wailed. Dad turned himself around and stumbled back up the stairs; he did not want us to witness his own dissolution into sobs.’25 Jean, only sixteen, got on her bike and rode to church. Jack turned to Teddy and said, ‘Joe wouldn’t want us sitting here crying. He would want us to go sailing. Let’s go sailing’.26 And that’s what they did. They went sailing.
Rose recalled it slightly differently. In her memory, it was Joe Sr who urged the children to go on with their plans, to be brave, as that’s what Joe would have wanted them to do. She remembered Jack walking on the beach for a long time.
Back in England, Kick was havi
ng her first serious taste of her life as a Cavendish. On 8 August, four days before Joe’s fateful mission, she performed her first official public engagement in Derbyshire. Lady Hartington, dressed in her Red Cross uniform, gave a spirited speech at the Derby Red Cross and St John Carnival in the market town of Bakewell. The Duke of Devonshire’s political agent observed her carefully and then wrote to tell his master what a great asset she would be to the family once the war was over and Billy could resume a life in politics.27
Kick had been spending much of her time with the Duke and Duchess as they waited for news of Billy. In her diary, she pondered on Anglo-American relations, and the differences within the English class system. At Compton Place an American colonel came to tea: ‘I’m always interested in seeing the effect an American has upon an English family such as my own,’ she wrote. She was amused that when she used the word ‘faze’ nobody understood what she meant. Other Americans were invited to tea at Compton Place. One of them was terrified at the thought of an English duchess and had a mental picture of a character from Alice in Wonderland.
Kick spoke at length to Edward the butler about the position of servants in America as compared with England. They discussed why Americans always used people’s first names, ‘which I always do’. He asked her, ‘Would you go to a movie with me?’ She replied that she would ‘do what Lord Hartington wanted and I don’t think he’d approve’. She was puzzled by why the English thought it ‘queer’ that Americans ‘speak to everyone in a normal, friendly fashion’.28
It was to the great relief of Billy’s parents that Kick was with them in Derbyshire when she heard the news of Joe’s death. The Duke later wrote how proud he was of the courageous way that she handled the news. The next day, one of Joe’s friends, Mark Soden, telephoned to say that before he flew Joe had made a will in which he left Kick the typewriter that they had fought over, his beloved Victrola and a radio and a camera. She wrote to Mark: ‘I’m so sorry I broke down tonight. It never makes things easier . . . I don’t know whether I’ll even want to use the much discussed typewriter but it will make me always think of the hard-talker Joe. I still can’t believe it. It’s hard to write. I don’t feel sorry for Joe – just for you . . . and everyone that knew him ’cause no matter how he yelled, argued etc. he was the best guy in the world.’29