The Importance of Being Kennedy

by Laurie Graham

  Lieutenant John Kennedy, it said, son of the former American Ambassador to London, has been commended for bravery following an incident in the South Pacific. Kennedy, a college swimming champion, swam through treacherous currents to rescue eleven crew members.

  Swimming champion, my eye. With those spindly arms and legs! When Jack was in the water he made more splash than progress. Joe was the swimmer. But that’s newspapers for you. Kick said her Daddy had had the story written up much bigger in the New York Times. She was so proud of Jack, and so was I. No one knows better than I do how he’s struggled. If there’s a sickness that boy’s not had, I can’t call it to mind.

  I heard from him eventually, laid up in a hospital bed. His back had been hurt when the boat was sunk.

  Darling Nora, he wrote,

  Please excuse the scrawl. I’m lying here in nothing but my skivvies, back in the land of the free and the home of the brave which I didn’t believe I’d see again. I managed to keep a good attitude most of the time but there were bad moments when I thought we were all goners. Joe’s really itching to see a little action himself since Dad got my name into the papers, and so is Bobby, though I can’t believe that shrimp’s old enough for anything more than a Wianno Junior regatta. I hope for both their sakes they don’t draw the South Pacific. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. All the time I was there I hardly met a single dusky maiden willing to coat me in coconut oil. I don’t know what the Navy has in mind for me next. I guess it would have been quite a boost to JP’s great future career if he’d had a kid brother die defending Old Glory, but he’s just going to have to get along on his own considerable talents and I’m going to have to get out and find myself another piece of war to fight.

  Wish you were here to cool my fevered brow. Some of these nurses are cute but many of them are not.

  Your ever loving Silver Star, Jack

  As the summer wore on Kick seemed to get more days off than she did days on, and she never worked a weekend. Come Friday afternoon she’d be off to see Sissy Ormsby-Gore and her babies, or down to Compton Place. The Daily Mail newspaper had a picture of her in her Red Cross uniform, riding a bicycle along Basil Street, to show how American girls of every rank were doing their bit. Mr. K made sure it got published in America too. “Girl on a Bicycle” it was called, but I heard people call it “Girl Getting a Free Ride.”

  It didn’t buy you much to be a Kennedy by 1943.

  But came September we had another Kennedy in town. Joseph Patrick’s squadron was posted to England, to a base in Cornwall, and he came up to London, on a forty-eight-hour pass. Kick brought him round to Carlton Gardens, made me close my eyes.

  She said, “You have to guess who it is. You can feel but no peeping.”

  I knew by her giggling it was one of the boys and the smell of tobacco gave him away, but I let them string me along.

  He’d brought us nylons and tinned fruit. He looked so natty in his flying jacket. He wasn’t allowed to say where he’d be flying or even exactly where he was stationed.

  “We’re just here to whup the Germans,” he said.

  I said, “And how about Jack? Didn’t he do well?”

  “Yes,” he said, “all of a sudden the little punk’s a great big hero. Hell, if he keeps this up they’ll be naming a street for him.”

  He said it so sour.

  I said, “Now, Joe. He did well even to get into the forces when you think of all the sickness he’s had. Those Navy doctors must have winked at his medicals. And you were always his champion, you know. So don’t begrudge him this.”

  He said, “I don’t begrudge him. Anyhow, there’s still plenty of war going on. I’ll top him yet.”

  Kick said, “Jack’s gone back to finish his tour of duty, Nora. They patched him up at Guadalcanal and he’s gone back on patrol. And Daddy wrote me that Bobby’s volunteered for the Reserve too. Just think. I’ll soon have three brothers in Navy blues.”

  Joe said, “Bobby just better get a move on before Jack wins the whole damned war for us.”

  He was smiling, but I knew he was rattled. When you’ve known them from a wean, you read them like a book.

  Walter didn’t warm to Joe. “He’s full of himself for a youngster,” he said.

  Well, not such a youngster. Joseph Patrick was twenty-eight, and full of himself is only what a Kennedy boy is raised to be.

  I said, “He’s a good lad really. A rascal for the girls, but you should see him with Jean and wee Teddy, how he watches over them. He’s the grandest big brother to them. And you know he’s had his Daddy and his Grandpa Fitzgerald cooing in his ear since he was in his crib, telling him he’s going to be president of the United States, so you can’t expect him to be a shrinking violet.”

  He said, “Lord Billy’s known from the cradle he’ll be the Duke of Devonshire but he don’t saunter around like he owns the place.”

  Wherever Joe was flying, he headed back to London when he was on leave, always in his precious flying jacket, always puffing on one of those nasty little black cigars. Every time we saw him he had a different girl on his arm, every one a beauty, and he always brought something for us. Hand cream, fresh eggs. Onions, he brought one time, all the way from Scotland in his kit bag. And a piece of parachute silk for Hope to make us new bloomers.

  There were times when you felt you couldn’t stand another day of war and there were times when life didn’t seem so bad. Perhaps you can get used to anything. Perhaps we were just getting cleverer at making do. Walter’s Pig Club made a difference, that’s for sure. There had been one started on a bomb site in St. James’s Street and Walter had tried to join that, but they said it was for Fire Service members only.

  He said, “Ruddy glamour boys, they think they’re God’s gift because they can go through red lights. Nobody appreciates the ARP. They think you’re a joke. But we should be entitled to affiliation, the kind of work we do. We get involved in fires. I’d like to see what it says in their constitution.”

  I said, “Why don’t you start your own Pig Club. You’ve acres enough at Kew.”

  “And every inch put to good use, Nora,” he said. “It could be tricky. Permission might take some getting. It’d have to go through channels. Ministry of Food, probably.”

  I said, “That’s not the way. Get the pig, then ask permission. It’s all part of the war effort. They can’t shoot you for it.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “They can hang you for looting.”

  I do believe if Adolf Hitler hadn’t invaded Poland, Walter Stallybrass would still be in Derbyshire, doffing his cap to the assistant under-gardener and scared of his own shadow.

  I love a pig myself. For looks I’d have a big ginger one, but they’re slow growers. We could still have been waiting for our Christmas roast come Easter, and gingers are very prone to wandering as well. Our Margaret forgot to latch the gate on a ginger we had one year at Ballynagore, and he turned up the other side of Kilbeggan with a twinkle in his wee eye. Well, they couldn’t have any escaping pigs at Kew, not with all those top secret crops of national importance. Anyhow, the head man, not such a flutter-guts as my husband, said, “Bugger permission. People have to eat,” and they got an Old Spot, which is a nice-mannered, home-loving type of pig, and when his time was up they turned him out onto a patch of kale for his last supper and then shot him with a rifle. He’d had a good life, doing his bit against Jerry, and we had our first taste of pork crackling since 1939.

  Kick flew home for Christmas so she could go to Palm Beach and see the family. It must have been something her Daddy fixed. No one was supposed to go anywhere, wasting precious fuel, if it wasn’t for war work, but Mr. Kennedy’s dollars still opened doors and freed up seats on transports.

  She said, “Say lots of prayers for me, Nora. I’m going to talk to Mother about marrying Billy.”

  I said, “Then you’ll need someone who’s better at praying than I am. You know she’ll never countenance it.”

  “Well,�
� she said, “it’d mean I’d be a Marchioness and then a Duchess eventually. I think she’d like that, don’t you? And Billy’s going to talk to his Mama and the darling Dookie. We could maybe do something like bring our boys up as Protestants and the girls as Catholics. Don’t you think?”

  I said, “What I think doesn’t signify. If your Mammy is against it as well, try to change the direction the wind’s blowing.”

  “The thing is,” she said, “Billy reckons the invasion’ll happen in the spring. And then, who knows? It’s not like ordinary times. We really don’t want to wait.”

  I knew what she was thinking. That Herself might be softened, now she had boys of her own in uniform and it had become a regular thing to marry in the heat of the moment. But Mrs. Kennedy didn’t think that way, war or no war. She harped back to her “duties,” drummed into her at Sacred Heart, and she planned for the future, how her boys would run America and the girls would make good Catholic marriages. She didn’t have a peck of sentiment in her.

  I said, “Will you visit Rosie while you’re over? Will you take her some candy from me?”

  “Sure,” she said. “If I have time. If Mother thinks it’s a good idea.”

  26

  A Trainee Duchess

  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 distraction 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.