The Importance of Being Kennedy

by Laurie Graham

  He said, “All the very best, Miss Brennan. It’s going to be a desolate house now you’ve all gone. We’ve never had anything quite like the Kennedys here.”

  I got a bus as far as Hyde Park Corner and then walked the rest of the way, up Piccadilly, to give myself time to think. Nora Brennan, spinster, lately of 14 Prince’s Gate, formerly nursery maid to the family of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. Future prospects, unknown.

  The Devonshires’ house was going to be used as a billet for army officers, with Walter living in as caretaker. He’d tried to enlist again, in the Sherwood Foresters, but they wouldn’t have him because he was getting on for fifty and he had asthma brought on by mustard gas during the last lot. The Civil Defense had snapped him up though.

  He said, “Civil Defense’ll take anybody. You should see us. Talk about the bottom of the barrel. Talk about the broken biscuits.”

  They’d made him an Air Raid Precaution Warden, assigned to Lord Melhuish’s depot, just along the street.

  When I got to Carlton Gardens there were two faces I hadn’t expected to see. Lord Billy’s brother, Lord Andrew, in town for a night or two before he went back to Cambridge University, and Hope Stallybrass, sent down from Chatsworth to be cook and housekeeper.

  The first thing she said to me was “I knew you were trouble the first time I clapped eyes on you.”

  Walter said, “Nay, Hope, stop that. You promised you’d give it a chance. You promised you’d be nice.”

  She said, “I never promised. I said I’d try. But now I see her I’m all roiled up again.”

  I said, “What is it you’re supposed to be giving a chance? Me? What do you think I am, a stray dog he’s taken in?”

  I felt like the floor had fallen away under my feet.

  She said, “We were champion till you turned his head. Taking up with women at his time of life. He’s forty-nine, you know?”

  Walter said, “Pay no heed to her. She’s just got to get used to the idea.”

  I said, “No, she doesn’t have to. I won’t stay. I won’t live with atmosphere. I’ve given up everything to come to you, but I’ll go back to Mr. Kennedy cap in hand if I have to. I won’t put up with this.”

  He had his arm round my shoulder.

  “You’re too old, Walter,” she kept saying. “You never needed a wife before. Why now?”

  He said, “Because I never met Nora before. Now give over, Hope. Stop being so hurtful. It don’t make any odds to you. It’s my bed she’ll be sharing, not thine. And I’d have thought you’d be glad of the company. I’m not going to be here to listen to your yapping. I’m going to have my air-raid duties.”

  She was standing at the kitchen table, scowling, folding and refolding the same few tea cloths. I’m not a crybaby as a rule but I’d had a terrible day, and when I started so did she.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Two women blarting. I’m off out.”

  I said, “Will I make a pot of tea?”

  “Aye,” she said. “Go on. Make it strong.”

  Nothing more was said till the kettle had boiled and I was stirring the brew.

  She said, “I’ve always looked after him.”

  I said, “He asked me to marry him. I thought he’d have told you.”

  “He did,” she said, “but I thought it were one of his phases he were going through.”

  I said, “Has he had a lot of phases?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Before camellias it were hydrangeas and before that it were motorbikes. I’ve nowt against you as a person, Nora. But it’s a big upheaval. And there’ll be shortages, likely. You’ll be an extra mouth to feed.”

  I said, “I have my ration book.”

  “Well then,” she said. She cut me a slice of sponge cake.

  She said, “But what will you do all day? There’s nothing here for a lady’s maid.”

  I said, “I’m not a lady’s maid. I was the Kennedys’ nurse and dogsbody and spare aunty and now I’m going to do war work.”

  She said, “I can’t have interference in my kitchen, that’s all. Just so you know.”

  And she poured me another cup of tea.

  I went to the Women’s Voluntary first thing the next morning and they sent me directly to a transit canteen in a temperance hall near Waterloo station, me and a girl called Hilda Oddy. Hilda had been working in a tobacconist’s in Lambeth Palace Road but she thought she’d be able to get something a bit more exciting seeing we were at war. The Navy was her first choice. The Navy was everybody’s first choice. Hilda’s trouble was she was walleyed. My trouble was I was old and I was a foreigner. Spreading margarine onto sliced bread for hungry soldier boys, that was our first strike against Adolf Hitler, and when there was a lull in convoys they had us unraveling old woolens so the yarn could be used for servicemen’s socks.

  Walter wanted to take out the marriage lines right away, but I wanted time to smooth the rough edges off Hope. I knew what a life my sister Margaret had had living under the same roof as old Mrs. Mulcahy.

  I said, “When Hope stops sighing every time you call me ‘darling,’ you can go to the Town Hall.”

  He kept saying, “Don’t dilly-dally too long, Nora. I might get snapped up.”

  And then, when I was ready, there was a wait for wedding dates. Everybody was scrambling to get wed before the world ended.

  A note came from Mrs. Moore. Rosie was to be awarded her teaching certificate and Mr. K wasn’t able to attend, so she wondered would I think of going, with her and Mr. Moore? They picked me up on the Saturday morning.

  Mrs. Moore said, “Well? Let’s see the wedding band?”

  I said, “I’m still a single woman. We’re trying to get a date before the end of the year. I’d have loved Rosie to be there.”

  “Can’t be done,” she said. “We’re taking her home, sailing on Wednesday. But I brought you something. I was packing and I thought you might like to have it. You’d suit it better than I do.”

  It was a little blouse, oyster silk with mother-of-pearl buttons.

  She said, “It could be your ‘something old.’”

  Rosie was looking a picture, twenty-one and in full bloom.

  I thought, You’ll turn a few heads when you get back to New York. I wasn’t sorry it wouldn’t fall to me to keep her on a short tether, for my heart wouldn’t have been in it. Safeguarding her from admirers was going to be a full-time job for somebody.

  She’d had her hair cut shorter, as a lot of the girls were doing.

  She said, “It’s the War Effort. I want to do everything I can for the War Effort.”

  Sister Isabel presented her with her certificate, with a special mention for perseverance.

  She said, “You’re a credit to your family, Rose Marie. And you’ll be a great gift to little children, wherever you teach.”

  There was talk that there might be a job for her at St. Gertrude’s when she got home, helping with the kindergarten class.

  Rosie said, “We’re going home, Nora.”

  I said, “You are, sweetheart, but you know I’m not coming with you this time? I’m staying here and getting married.”

  She covered me with kisses. “Nora’s getting married,” she kept saying. “Nora’s getting married.”

  She’d bought little Christmas gifts to take home for Teddy and Jean. They were all wrapped up but she insisted on getting everything out to show us.

  She said, “Getting married is nice. That’s what I’m going to do. When you have babies, Nora, I’ll come and help you. Then when I have babies, you’ll come and help me.”

  I said, “I don’t think your old Nora will be having any babies.”

  “Yes you will, yes you will,” she said. “That’s what happens after you get married. He squeezes you and squeezes you and makes you feel nice and then you get a baby.”

  I said, “Well, don’t you be in any hurry to do that. You’ve all the world to enjoy first. Now, will you write to me? Will you remember to do that?”

&nbs
p; “I’ll try,” she said. “I might put the dots in the wrong place, but I’ll try.”

  Sister Isabel laughed. She said, “That’s been my only failure with Rose Marie. With the full stops it’s either feast or famine.”

  We brought her away with us in Eddie Moore’s car and they dropped me off. When it came to it I hated to let her go. Since the day she was born I’d always known where she was and when I’d see her again. But standing there in Carlton Gardens it was a different kind of good-bye. Like the real end of me and my Kennedys. The fog hadn’t cleared all day and it was starting to get dark though it was barely three. Walter came out to say good day to the Moores and he kissed Rosie on the hand, very gallant. She loved that. She was hanging out the back window, smiling and waving as they drove away.

  “Don’t forget,” she shouted. “It’s the squeezing that gets the babies.”

  I don’t know what the neighbors must have thought.

  Me and Walter were married the week before Christmas. There was a young Guards’ major, billeted at Carlton Gardens, came with us for a witness, and my new pal Hilda from the canteen. Hope stayed home, to boil a corned beef for the wedding breakfast, she said, but I think she was making her little point.

  I wore my good tweed traveling suit and the blouse given me by Mrs. Moore, and the Devonshires sent me a silk rose to pin to my lapel. It broke Walter’s heart that I couldn’t have a Chatsworth camellia, but those days were gone. The big house had been requisitioned, and anyway, men couldn’t be spared to grow flowers.

  As we went into Caxton Hall there was a young couple coming out, him in his regimentals, her in a mink car coat. She looked at me.

  “Is it Kennedy?” she said. It was young Ginny Vigo, just got married to Lord Balderston. She said, “Gracious, everyone seems to be getting hitched. Pam Digby’s marrying Randolph Churchill, you know, and they’ve practically only known each other five minutes. Do send my love to Kick. Tell her I’m in the ATS now, driving army brass around. Such a lark!”

  I did write to Kick, and to Ursie and Margaret and Deirdre, but Ursie was the only one I heard from in a long, long time.

  If you must marry, she wrote,

  you at least seem to have chosen a man who has a steady position with a good family, unlike Margaret whose husband can’t hold down any position. Mr. Jauncey looked up the Devonshires and they appear to go back to the 17th century.

  They say this will be a long war. I just pray they’re wrong and that we don’t get dragged in. If Margaret’s boys had to go away I don’t know what she’d do. Val does deliveries for Pinckney’s Dry Goods after school and keeps himself and Ray in shoe leather.

  I’d never known cold like that winter we were first married. We had stores of coal and wood, but nobody could say when we’d be able to get any more, so we had to be careful with it, huddling round the kitchen range at night, putting off going up into those frozen beds. I was glad to be out of the house first thing. If I walked fast enough, across Horse Guards and over Westminster Bridge, I was warm by the time I got to the Women’s Voluntary.

  We were a mixed bag there. You could find yourself cutting sandwiches with a ladyship or just somebody normal like Hilda. They were all friendly though, until the IRA started setting bombs. Then I got a few remarks, especially after the one that went off in Park Lane, but then they died down when the refugees from Belgium started coming through. They soon forgot to knock the Irish once they had the Belgians to complain about.

  It’s a funny thing, but I remember it as a grand time, those first few months of waiting for the war to get going. I was newly wed, of course, with sloppy little billydoos left for me, in my dressing-gown pocket, or on the saucer with my first cup of tea of the day. Good morning, Beautiful, he’d write. And they were always signed, Stallybrass. He had a nice hand, for a man who hadn’t had a lot of schooling.

  But it wasn’t just that I was happy with Walter and happy to be doing my bit. London felt different too. Nobody was using their motors, conserving whatever juice they had left, so the streets were quiet, as though they’d been cleared for a big parade. Everybody was on foot and people gave you the time of day. And then there was the blackout, with every little chink and crack of light covered so the Germans couldn’t see where to bomb us in the dark. When they first brought it in you couldn’t even use a flashlight without you put paper over the end, to dull its light. A house the size of Carlton Gardens took near enough half an hour to get the blinds up every afternoon and I was never convinced it was worth it. They reckon the Thames shines so silvery the only way the Germans would have missed London was if you could have blacked out the moon itself. There was a lot of cursing about the blackout, people feeling their way for lampposts and the edge of curb, banging their shins and turning their ankles, but it didn’t bother me. When we were weans there was many a time we walked home from Grandma Farley’s, all the way from Ennell to Ballynagore with nothing to guide us but the moonlight on the lough. We Brennans all had eyes like farm cats.

  I almost even liked London being blacked out. It reminded you that something very big was afoot, that the world had changed and there was no turning back. It was exciting, though it hardly seems decent to say so now. A real adventure. But we weren’t even into 1940.

  22

  Everything by the Book

  Mr. Kennedy went home for Christmas, as I learned from Kick’s letter. After all that fuss about who would travel with Rosie, she could have sailed with her Daddy and saved Mrs. Moore the bother. They were all down to Palm Beach for Christmas. I dreaded the day the war stopped letters getting through. Those weans might not have been my responsibility anymore but there wasn’t a day passed when I didn’t think of them.

  Mother’s very cross with you for running out on us, Kick wrote,

  but I think it’s so romantic. Maybe I’ll come back and marry Billy and then we’ll both be Devonshires, kind of!

  But in the next line she told me she’d been out dancing, to the Stork Club with Laurence Babb, and to the Plaza with Clarke McGill, so she seemed to be getting over Lord Billy.

  Euny’s doing brilliantly in school needless to say but she’s gotten so thin Fidelma says she must have a tapeworm, [it went on]. Rosie’s going to St. Gertrude’s. She’s trying to write you a letter too. Mother’s going traveling, to South America or South Africa or South somewhere. She says she can’t stay at home vegefying just because horrid old Hitler ruined things for us in Europe.

  I miss London like crazy. Sally Norton’s working in an airplane factory and having such fun, and Sissy’s getting married to David Ormsby-Gore the first furlough he gets. By the time you get this they’ll probably have done the deed. And is it true Ginny Vigo married Chick Balderston? Gosh, the war must really have gone to her head. She used to say he had hands like dead fish. I guess he must look pretty good in his uniform.

  It’s such a bore being stuck over here. When I get back to school we’re meant to be putting on a fashion show. Yawn, yawn!!!

  Kick wasn’t the only who was bored. Walter wasn’t accustomed to sitting idle, but they didn’t have much to keep them occupied at the ARP post except do their blackout rounds and get a load of cheek if they caught anyone showing a light. “Little Hitlers” one housekeeper in Angel Court called them. That’s how soon people forgot we were at war and all supposed to be pulling together.

  Being called names didn’t bother Walter.

  He said, “Never underestimate the ignorance of folk, Nora. People like her’ll be the first to start skriking if Jerry drops a bomb on her. Hitler’s playing a canny game, mind. If this drags on much longer people’ll get careless. He’ll be able to walk right in and catch us napping. It weren’t like this last time. There were no sitting around waiting for something to happen.”

  Walter volunteered in 1915, him and all his pals together down to a recruitment post in Bakewell. They joined the Sherwood Foresters and got assigned to a battalion called the Robin Hoods and the first place they were posted to was Du
blin. He cracks me up with that story.

  “See?” he says. “I were on the lookout for a nice black-haired colleen even then.”

  He was too late for this colleen. I was long gone to Boston by the time Walter Stallybrass arrived to put down the rebels. The Easter Uprising, as it was called.

  “We were at Watford, doing basic training,” he tells it, “then all of a sudden we were on a train to Liverpool and shipped out, no idea where we were going. They don’t tell you anything in the army. When we landed, a lot of the lads thought we must be in France. Started giving the local girls the old parlyvoo. We had it easy that time. But of course we had Passchendale coming to us, did we but know it. That were a real war.”

  And we had another real war coming to us, gradually getting closer while people were complaining about having to black out their windows. First Norway fell, then the rest went like dominoes. Denmark, Belgium, Holland. Walter said it looked like we couldn’t help but play in the Cup Final. There’d be nobody left, only England and Germany.

  We were run off our feet with refugees at the Women’s Voluntary. Every day new trainloads, from different countries, and yet somehow they all looked the same. All beat, all just getting through life an hour at a time. The time flew and you never knew when you turned up in the morning what you’d be asked to do. You might be on delousing heads, or sorting secondhand shoes that had been donated. Palm Sunday of 1940 me and Hilda Oddy spent all day washing beer bottles so they could be used for baby milk.

  Lord Billy’s brother Lord Andrew got engaged that Easter, to Kick’s friend Debo Mitford. She was one of Lord Redesdale’s girls. Everybody said it was a very nice match, but there was no celebration. Lord Andrew had to go straight off to training camp. Lord Billy had already been posted, France, we thought, though nobody knew for sure. You had to feel sorry for anyone who had a son old enough to fight in those days. When France fell and the lucky ones came straggling home we expected to see Lord Billy’s face any minute, but the days passed and there was no sign of him. Nobody said anything but we were all thinking the worst. He was in the Guards and they’d suffered heavy losses in the retreat.