The Importance of Being Kennedy

by Laurie Graham

  Then in the middle of June he turned up at Carlton Gardens. His Lordship and an Easter card from Rosie both arrived the same day.

  Darling. Nora I miss. you, she wrote.

  Do you have baybies.yet. I got a new. gridle. Mother. says I am FAT. Your.loving Rose Marie Kennedy.

  According to Kick, Rosie had been playing up. She wants to go dancing, she wrote,

  and she doesn’t have any partners except Jack and Joe. She threw a scent bottle at Mother because she wasn’t allowed to come to the Hunt Club ball and even Fidelma couldn’t calm her down. Went to Jack’s graduation with Mother, Euny and Bobby. The Commencement speech was about the war and Americans having to be prepared to fight and a lot of the boys boo’d and hissed. It was beastly to think of all my friends in England. Went sailing with Win Rockefeller. Also to Mary O’Keefe’s wedding where I was bridesmaid, taffeta dress, kind of candy pink, GRUESOME, and to Anne McDonnell’s where I was just a regular guest. Henry converted so they could be married at Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. His folks are the Fords, I mean THE FORDS, and they didn’t like him doing it but he did it anyway. Everyone seems to be getting married except KK. Have Andrew and Debo named the day? I expect Billy will be next. I’ll bet Sally Norton’s pulled out all the stops to get him now I’m off the scene.

  Well, I thought, that didn’t sound like a girl who was breaking her heart over Billy Hartington. And it would all be grist to Mrs. K’s mill, that a good Catholic girl like Anne McDonnell had landed herself a Ford and stayed true to the faith.

  All through that summer the Germans did nighttime raids along the south coast, but we still didn’t see anything to worry us in London. September 7 it started. The day before my birthday. Seeing it was Saturday Walter said we should get out of town for some fresh air. We took sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade and went for a bike ride in Richmond Park. We both fell asleep under a tree and we didn’t start back till getting on for five.

  As we turned towards Chiswick Bridge I heard Walter say, “Oh my Lord,” and when I turned to look, the sky over to our right was packed with Jerry planes, wave after wave of them heading in towards the West End, or so it seemed. We were too far away to hear their engines, but then we saw smoke from the first hits. We’d ride a bit, then stop and watch and everybody you spoke to had a different opinion about where the bombs were falling. Nobody seemed in any rush to take cover. “They’re miles away,” some people were saying. But it wasn’t until we got to Hyde Park that we started to get the facts. It was Rotherhithe that was burning, far down the river, nowhere near the West End. The Surrey Docks had been hit.

  Hope was in a state by the time we got home, shaking and sweating. She kept saying, “Where were you? I thought you’d been blowed up. I thought I’d never see you again.”

  Walter said, “We were miles away. We had a lovely afternoon out. Take an aspirin. Have a cup of tea.”

  “I can’t drink tea,” she said. “They’ll be back. They’ve only gone home to fetch more bombs. They’ll be back to get us next.”

  She wanted the three of us to go down into the shelter with a carboy of water and some tins of chopped ham.

  Walter said, “I’ve to get to my post. But you go down if you’d feel happier. Take your knitting. Nora’ll go with you.”

  I thought, Nora won’t.

  She said, “You shouldn’t have to go to any post, Walter. You did your bit last time. They shouldn’t expect you to do anything at your age.”

  “Hope,” he said, “at my age I have to do what I have to do so the ones who aren’t my age can go up the line. If there’s another war after this, I’ll sit it out. You have my word. Now give me my flashlight.”

  I left them arguing. The ATS girls who were billeted upstairs had all been called in for duty, so I changed into my uniform and went straight out again, to the depot, to see what had to be done. They sent me out to Bermondsey with Lady Baxendale and a mobile canteen. “Call me Lally,” she said. We were brewing tea for firefighters and stretcher-bearers and anybody else who looked in need of a breather.

  Things eased off for an hour or two during the evening and Lady Lally thought maybe we should head back to the depot to replenish stocks, but before we could shut up shop the word came that enemy planes had been sighted again, heading our way. Then we heard them. They came in low, bombers and fighters, wingtip to wingtip, making a horrible German droning noise. Our planes had a much friendlier sound. And you felt as though every one of those Jerry planes had a bomb with your name on it. It came into my mind, what Mammy always said:

  “Nora, God won’t let you hang if he means you to drown.”

  But that was the rub. The not knowing what God had in mind for you.

  I wondered if I’d ever see my Walter again. Her Ladyship kept us going though.

  “This is more like it,” she kept shouting. “Now Jerry’ll find out what the British are made of.”

  It was five in the morning when we got back to the depot, and we only went then because we’d run out of tea. The heat from the fires had scorched the paint along one side of the van, and the girls coming on duty said we looked like chimney sweeps.

  “Go home if you can,” Lady Lally said. “Clean up, get a spot of shut-eye and report back here for more of the same.”

  Hope was frying bacon and kidneys for herself and her officer gentlemen when I got home. Her stomach seemed to have settled down.

  “We’ve had a very bad night,” she said. “There was a bomb fell on Pont Street. You missed all the excitement.”

  Walter said, “Aye, Nora. Missed it all. By the look of you you’ve been holed up at the Ritz, getting your nails done and drinking them champagne cocktails.”

  I said, “You should see the fires around the docks. I’m supposed to take a break and then go back. There’s hundreds homeless.”

  He said, “I’ve got something for you, sweetheart. I were thinking about it all night. It’s very perilous what you’re doing, going in while there are raids on and buildings burning to the ground. I want you to wear this, in case you get buried alive. Happy birthday, darling. Now give it a try, give it a toot.”

  A tin whistle on a length of clothesline. That was what I got for my birthday in 1940, and I have it still.

  We read in the newspaper that a new American ambassador had arrived in London, Mr. John Gilbert Winant. He and Mrs. Winant had been met at Victoria station by the King himself. It was the first I knew that Mr. K had been replaced.

  Recalled, Walter reckoned, because of his opinions.

  Walter said, “He’s nowt but a defeatist. We don’t need his kind.”

  Mr. K had been going around saying England didn’t stand a chance against Hitler and might just as well surrender.

  I said, “He’s worried America will get dragged into it. He’s worried for his boys.”

  He said, “It shouldn’t be a question of getting dragged in. America should step forward and volunteer. They were late enough turning up last time.”

  I didn’t rise to it. All I know is, when we did turn up we made short work of it, and a lot of poor doughboys paid the price. A hundred thousand of our boys never came home after the Armistice, so nobody can say America didn’t do her bit.

  I said, “Well, I’ll shed no tears over Mr. and Mrs. K, but it does make me sad to think the children won’t be coming back. I had some good times with them. And everybody loved them over here.”

  “Not everybody,” he said. “All that bloody commotion when they arrived. Photos in the papers. The Emerald King and his family. Emerald King! King Yellow Belly if you ask me.”

  The report said the retiring Ambassador had been no stranger to controversy but had enjoyed cordial relations with Neville Chamberlain. So that must have been in October, because poor old Chamberlain was dead by the start of November. Some said he’d a cancer but most people thought he was just plain worn out and brokenhearted.

  It was a funny thing, but when I heard Mr. K had gone I felt different, as if I coul
d settle down to my new life. My Kennedys wouldn’t be coming back and I’d burned my bridges, so I just had to get on with it. It was for the best, really. Walter was a good man. It wasn’t fair on him to be pining for the past.

  Lord Billy was stationed just outside town in Elstree, so we saw him once in a while, when he had a night off. One time he brought Sally Norton back to Carlton Gardens, so she could change into her dance gown. She was a beauty, I must say, even in her factory boiler suit. My Kick was natural and pretty but she was a girl still, and a tomboy. You could see Sally Norton had the makings of a real lady. Everybody said she could easily have gotten into the Women’s Royal Navy, because Lord Mountbatten was her godfather and he was head of Combined Operations, but credit to her, she stuck at the factory work until they found out she spoke the German lingo pretty well. Then they packed her off somewhere top secret.

  I had all the Kennedy news with Fidelma’s Christmas card, but it didn’t arrive till March.

  Everything’s in the doldrums here, she wrote.

  The Ambassydor resigned, I suppose you know. Mrs. K reckoned it was because of his stomick ulster but that’s her story. The dailies said he jumped before he was pushed because the President had had enough of him saying Germany’s going to win the war.

  Herself’s got her brave smile on but she’s simmering, you can tell. She loved all that Excellency business, having tea with the Queen, wearing a tarara five nights a week. Well now it’s finished and it’s all Mr. Ks fault because he couldn’t keep his trap shut.

  Teddy has a new brace on his teeth. Rosie’s been teaching Jean to knit so she can make a scarf for her war effort. Kick’s seeing the Killefer boy and the Macdonald boy but she’s away to Long Island just now, to be bridesmaid again. Bobby has had boils, brought on by to many new schools if you ask me. Mrs. K thinks he might have a vocation for the Church. She wants him schooled by the Brothers but Mr. K wants him tuffened up and got ready for Harvid college.

  Herself was tidying her linjery drawer and gave me some of her old stays, but she asked for them back the next morning. She said, “Fidelma dear heart, on second thoughts I’d better keep that corsylette. There may be shortages.” It was a terrible worn old thing. She was lucky I hadn’t firebacked it because that was all it was fit for. I said, “That’s all right, Mrs. Kennedy. I never use the things myself.”

  “Oh but you should, dear,” she said. “Once a woman has let her line go she can never get it back.”

  She’s a riot, that one, strapping herself into corsets when she’s nothing but a bag of bones, and Euny’s going the same way. She doesn’t have an ounce of flesh on her. Poor Rosie had better watch out. She’ll be back on short rations once we get up to Hyannis again and Herself sees how her bozzoms are tumbling out of her swimming costume.

  Don’t know what’s to become of us, Brennan. Jean’s going to Noroton and Teddy won’t be long till he’s a weekly boarder. You did the right thing, marrying your man. Does he have a brother?

  There had been a lot of talk about being prepared for whatever Jerry threw at us, plans for this, plans for that, but it was a different matter when it really came to it. There was no rest from the raids, day after day, and whatever was being tried to stop them, it didn’t appear to be working. The barrage would go up, but the bombers still got through.

  And down at the Women’s Voluntary we didn’t always know what we were doing. We made it up as we went along. We were sent out with a soup kitchen one morning, over to Millwall, where whole streets had been flattened, but when we got there they already had a soup kitchen, organized by one of the vicars. What they really needed were baby napkins and blankets, and a bath chair or two for the old folk who’d been bombed out of their houses and were too frail to walk.

  People were nice enough to us. They seemed glad to see friendly faces even if we hadn’t turned up with what they needed, and ladies like Lally Baxendale cheered them up.

  “Not to werry,” she’d say. “The impossible marely takes a little longer.”

  The local pols were a different matter. Their names were mud. All that huffing and puffing and promises they’d made, but when it came to it, there weren’t shelters fit to be used nor provision made for the homeless.

  Hilda Oddy used to say, “Never mind Hitler. If it carries on like this there’ll be a bloody revolution. Some of those councilors could find themselves strung up.”

  But the pols fought back, of course. Some of them put it about that it was only the working people who were getting bombed. That the toffs had their houses marked with special paint on the roofs so they wouldn’t get hit. That they were just waiting for the Jerry bombs to get rid of the lower classes and the Socialist troublemakers, then they could carry on as before, only under new management. King Ribbentrop and Queen Wally Windsor.

  Anybody talked like that around me, I told them. We had raids on the West End too, and casualties, but there are always the ones who’ll never allow the facts spoil their argument. Walter was shaken, some of the stories I came home with. The thieving and the lying and the profiteering. Just because we were fighting a war didn’t mean everyone was behaving as if they were out of the Boy’s Own comic. But Hope and Walter had been raised to believe a councilor knew better than a constituent, same as a Duke knew better than a gardener, and only God, the King and Winston Churchill knew better than the Duke of Devonshire.

  Sometimes I think Walter wondered what he’d taken on with me, but once the Blitz got serious neither of us had a lot of time for wondering about anything. He was out on ARP patrol every night, and if I wasn’t working I’d be in the scullery with Hope, helping her with the mending, half dead on my feet.

  Hope wasn’t quite the termagant she’d have liked you to think. She’d scowl at her sewing basket, scowl at the milk jug, but it didn’t signify anything. It was just the hang of her face, and anyway she mellowed with me when she saw I hadn’t ruined Walter or tried to step into her size sevens. We grew to be quite companionable.

  Breakfast was about the only time me and Walter had together. A pot of tea and a slice of bread and pork dripping, and then he’d walk me partway to work, hand in hand as far as Westminster Bridge, like Darby and Joan. We were crossing the Mall one morning early, drizzling rain and the sky still dark, when we heard the sound of hooves, and blow me down if a zebra didn’t come trotting through Admiralty Arch, heading up towards Buckingham Palace. We’d heard on the wireless the Regent’s Park zoo had taken a hit that night.

  I said, “We’d better herd him back.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s none of our business. That’s a job for the zoo people.”

  I said, “But how will they know he’s here? If they’ve been bombed out there could be lions and tigers and all sorts on the loose. They won’t be worrying about one harmless little zebra. We should at least shoo him back to Trafalgar Square. See if we can find a policeman.”

  “Nay, Nora,” he said, “you must stay away from it. It’s a wild animal.”

  It was a dear little thing, shaking its head, swishing its tail.

  I said, “It’s only like a horse with a striped cover. I thought you knew about horses.”

  He said, “I do and this is nothing like a horse. It’s from tropical climes for one thing. It could be full of disease. Now steer clear of it, I beg of you. Leave it to the zebra people. It’s their job.”

  That was the difference between us. Apart from the army, all he’d ever known was the Devonshires, and in those big houses everybody has their place and keeps to it. The pastry cook doesn’t make gravy and a button can’t be stitched on till the sewing woman’s been sent for. Well, if I’d kept to my place I’d still be in Ballynagore being lorded over by Edmond and the Clavin widow. Surplus to requirement was my place there, sleeping on the pullout in the kitchen. But you learn different ways in America. You learn to make your own place and use your head. Me and Walter have had more than a few words on that topic over the years.

  And I’ve often wondered what b
ecame of that little zebra. I hope he didn’t end up as horse steaks. When people are on short rations there’s no telling what they might do.

  23

  An Insult of a Cake

  Me and Hope saw in 1941 sheltering under the kitchen table with a bottle of Wincarnis Tonic Wine. The All Clear had sounded but we’d made ourselves comfortable and neither of us could be bothered to move.

  She kept saying, “It’ll be different this year. Walter says there’ll be a big push and it’ll all be over by summer.”

  As if Winston Churchill kept Walter Stallybrass informed of his plans. Hope was missing her Derbyshire hills and her kitchens and her big pantries full of meat and eggs and fruit put up in bottles. Every night she dreamed about food. Rationing wasn’t such a hardship if you’d worked for Rose Kennedy, but Hope’s belly was rumbling all the time.

  “I dreamed I was making a pork pie last night,” she’d say. “It was a beauty. Six pounds of boned shoulder, six trotters to make the jelly. That’s the first thing I’m going to do after we’ve beaten Hitler. Make a big pork pie.”

  It was a good thing we didn’t know then how long we’d have to wait for that pie.

  The firebombs had started right after Christmas and we didn’t get much respite till May. People in the East End thought they were the only ones to suffer, but we had our share. Jermyn Street, the Admiralty, and then there was the terrible night the Café de Paris was hit, the Caff, as Kick and her pals called it. It was their favorite place to go dancing, and Jack and Joe’s too, when they were in town. If Mr. K hadn’t stood firm about them all going home we might have had three of them to bury, which doesn’t bear thinking of. We’ve had tragedy enough, as things have turned out.

  I was out in Poplar with a mobile canteen, serving tea and sandwiches after a dive bomber attack, and I heard an old boy saying that the people caught in the Caff had had it coming to them.