Ike and Kay

by James MacManus

  “But Summersby – that’s not an Irish name, is it?”

  She looked down at the white starched tablecloth. No, that wasn’t an Irish name. That was the very English name of her very English ex-husband. They had married at the outbreak of war, thinking to seize a little happiness before the bombs fell.

  Like all such marriages, and there were many like that at the time, it had quickly proved a failure. Summersby was a good-looking young publisher, although she never knew what he actually did. When he was called up and shipped out to a regiment in India they both accepted the parting as final. The divorce papers eventually followed.

  She had told none of her friends of the marriage, although her family knew and had surprisingly given their blessing. Her mother had been quite open in hoping for a grandchild that would allow Kay to return to the family home in Ireland, far from the dangers of London. But Kay and her husband had agreed not to bring any children into a world of such tumult.

  Instead they enjoyed the licence granted by a registry office wedding to spend a great deal of time in bed, which, as became clear, was all they had in common.

  She remembered those pleasures with clarity as one remembers the look and taste of a good meal. Sometimes, at night, she would recall the intimacies they had shared and find satisfaction in such memories. After all, as Kay told herself, if Proust could find his past in a madeleine cake dipped in tea, why should she not find release and sleep in the recall of happy hours in the marriage bed?

  They had arguments, of course, sometimes bitter fights about his drinking and her extravagance. But what he called “the sweet clemency of sex” always ended the rows. He used the phrase more than once. She liked it. He had obviously read it somewhere.

  “Where did you get that from, the stuff about the clemency of sex?” she asked.

  “I read it somewhere,” he said. “You like it?”

  “I might if I knew what it meant,” she said.

  “In sex we find forgiveness for our deceits and the betrayals,” he said.

  “What are you talking about? Who’s betraying who?” she asked.

  “We deceive and betray ourselves. All the time. We find forgiveness in fucking.”

  “I hate that word. It’s vulgar. And I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

  He sighed and she knew he was going to patronise her because with his Oxford degree and smart friends in the literary world of London he was so much more intelligent and well read than her. He never said or suggested that but he certainly thought it. She could tell.

  “Let me put it this way,” he said, “making love strips us bare. We go back to our beginnings. Before the fall from grace.”

  “What, you mean the garden of Eden, original sin and all that nonsense?” she asked, thinking she could forgive him his intellectual snobbery and sins, original or otherwise, because he was so good in bed. If that was the clemency of sex it was certainly sweet.

  Now he was gone, swallowed up by the war like so many others. Someone was waving a hand in front of her face.

  “Hey we’ve lost you – come back,” said Eisenhower. “You were telling us about your family name.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Summersby was my husband’s name. My ex-husband, that is. My maiden name is a bit of a mouthful – MacCarthy-Morrogh.”

  She watched them looking at her, thinking she didn’t look old enough to have had a husband and now be engaged again. She had always looked much younger than her age and certainly didn’t look thirty-three.

  She had a clear, almost radiant complexion for which she thanked the Irish weather, dark brown hair, blue eyes, a bob nose and, as an early boyfriend had told her, “a smile that suggested a kiss on the lips”. The boyfriend quickly went, as they all did at the time, but she liked the phrase so much she wrote it in her diary.

  She had always known that men liked her looks. Her smile and a good figure had got her a modelling job in London when she managed to flee the rural solitude of the Irish west. Then came marriage, the war, the divorce and finally the job no one else wanted – driving an ambulance at a time when the long months of the phoney war meant there was little to do. But she had stuck to it, partly because it gave her wartime status in the shape of her uniform, but mostly, she knew, to put her whirligig past behind her and do something sensible with her life.

  And here she was, having dinner with two very important American generals in one of the smartest hotels in London. The mention of her maiden name had suddenly made them curious.

  “What did you do before this?” asked Eisenhower. She told him she had been driving an ambulance in the Bermondsey district of the docks during the Blitz.

  She tried to stop there, but Eisenhower wanted to know more. The laughter at the table stopped as she gave a brief description of nights during the bombing when she would drive a vehicle with shredded tyres over smouldering rubble while a nurse in the back desperately tried to give help to badly wounded women and old men.

  The young men were away fighting and the children had been sent to the country. It was always women and old men in the back of her ambulance. And they were usually badly burnt. The smell of cindered flesh was terrible, but she got by with the help of black market whisky. She never drove her ambulance sober in those days, she told them.

  Eisenhower didn’t take his eyes off her for a second as she talked.

  “I want to go there,” he said suddenly. “Tomorrow.”

  “Where, sir?”

  “Bermond … whatever it’s called. Down by the docks. Show me.”

  “Sir, you have meetings all morning.”

  “All right. We’ll go when there’s a break in the diary. How far is it?”

  “About twenty minutes.”

  “Let’s do that. You’ll come, Clark?”

  It wasn’t a question. Clark nodded.

  The Packard nosed slowly through what was left of the streets of Bermondsey the next day. The rubble had been cleared onto wasteland where once terraced housing had stood. The bomb damage across the river in Mayfair had merely left gaps in streets like missing teeth. Here on the south bank of the Thames, below Tower Bridge, acres of London had been levelled. Skeletons of buildings and warehouses stood forlornly awaiting the wrecker’s ball. Old people were still picking through the rubble in a fruitless attempt to find belongings. As usual, small children who had escaped evacuation to the dubious attractions of the countryside were playing amid mounds of broken bricks.

  The Americans said nothing as they surveyed the scene. They asked her to stop by a tea stall and got out. Eisenhower put his hands on his hips and looked around. There was still a smell of brick dust and burning in the air.

  “You drove an ambulance here?” he said.

  “Yes. They were going for the docks. Night after night.”

  “When was this?” asked Clark.

  “The Blitz. A year ago. The bombing is nothing like that now.”

  “Poor people. Poor London,” Eisenhower said.

  The general returned to Washington not long afterwards. She drove him and General Clark to Northolt airport outside London where senior British commanders were lined up to bid them farewell. General Montgomery was not among them. Everyone was sheltering under umbrellas from a light June rain.

  On the journey to the airport, Eisenhower and Clark were unusually silent. She knew what her boss was thinking. He had been alarmed by the state of the American forces in Britain. They were growing in number every week as men disembarked from troopships and planes, but they were far from ready for war. Soldiers, airmen, sailors, logistics staff, medical staff, cooks, engineers, an entire army was being assembled without being told of their mission.

  Again and again she had heard him say in the back of the car that the senior American command in Britain was made up of men who had fallen asleep on the job. Idle and incompetent were w
ords that had flown around the back seat of the Packard. She also knew that although Montgomery irritated the hell out of him, as Eisenhower put it, he valued him as a professional soldier.

  In these last three weeks the Packard had become more a travelling conference room than a car. Sometimes Eisenhower had had three aides squeezed in with him and they had talked openly in front of her, even when it came to the code word “Roundup”, the plan to take the fight to the Nazis in occupied Europe.

  Eisenhower’s mission, to assess and report back to the White House what was needed to mount a cross-Channel invasion, who should lead the Allied forces, and above all where and when the invasion should take place, had never been announced; indeed Kay sometimes wondered whether anyone in London beyond the prime minister realised what was being discussed in the back of her car.

  Every now and then, after an intense session of argument and discussion about the complexities of the invasion and the difficulties of dealing with Prime Minister Churchill, General Montgomery and a host of senior British military and civilian personnel, she would suggest a drive into the country. In the rear seat, angry and exhausted, they would stop thumping fists into the leather seats. The aides would look at their boss. Eisenhower would nod.

  She would take them to a pub on the banks of the Thames in Oxfordshire. The boss had loved those trips. Everyone called him Ike, but she preferred to call him the boss, and he seemed to like that. They all preferred gin and tonic to warm English beer, even if there was no ice and lemon, and they would try to play a game of dominoes on the bar while she persuaded the publican to provide plates and cutlery for the pork pies she had brought from the hotel. You could get almost anything to eat at Claridge’s, but nothing in an English country pub.

  Ike would sit on the pub deck on a weathered wooden chair looking at the river and talk about suddenly important questions such as Clark’s idea to take a rowing boat for “a quick paddle on the Thames”, as he put it.

  Eisenhower retorted that it was one of the dumbest ideas he had heard since his father-in-law suggested he train as a Gaucho in Argentina and go into the beef business.

  “Just think of it,” he said, “two American generals with a real war to fight seen rowing on the Thames. That would be a great picture for the papers. What would people think?”

  “No one will ever know,” said Clark, “and it will be cool on the water.”

  It was indeed a very hot day that day. On the river, boats were being rowed by elderly men wearing blazers and ties while their ladies in cotton summer dresses lounged in the stern beneath white parasols. Ike merely smiled.

  “Listen, dope,” he said. “This is England, where everybody knows everything. You don’t know the press here. They’re like spiders, they get everywhere.”

  The two men had looked at each other, then back at the river. Then they had laughed, perhaps, she thought, at the absurdity of the waterborne costume drama in front of them. The traditional pastime of boating on the Thames seemed a very English form of defiance against the mad world over the horizon.

  That was the memory she liked best of the whirlwind two weeks he had been there: Ike sitting by the Thames with his service cap placed on a wooden table by a tall glass of warm gin and tonic. His time in England had passed like a morning. Now she was taking him to the airport to report, not on a mission achieved, but on the huge task ahead.

  She drove the Packard straight to the foot of the aircraft steps at Northolt, noting that the face in her mirror looked older, wiser and perhaps sadder than when he had arrived. The propellers of the plane were already beginning to turn. She got out, opened an umbrella and held it over the generals as they shook her formally by the hand, thanked her and began walking down the line of the dignitaries.

  At the aircraft steps, Eisenhower paused, turned, and walked back to the car. He reached into the back seat and brought out a small box prettily tied in tissue paper and red ribbon. He handed it to her. “This is a thank you from both of us.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said and laid the umbrella against the car.

  “Go on, open it.”

  It was a box of dark chocolates, a luxury that had not been seen since the start of the war.

  He smiled. And then he was gone up the steps and into the aircraft before she could find the words to thank him.

  She watched the plane take off and vanish into low cloud. She knew she would not be seeing her general again. He was going to be given a third star and promoted to something very important in Washington. They had talked about it in the back of the car. She had already been assigned as driver to another American general, this time one in the air force.

  She took a last look up at the empty sky, got back into the Packard and put one of the chocolates into her mouth. She leant back, savouring a delicious, long forgotten taste, and then picked up another one.

  3

  June 1942

  He had come back, of course.

  She had read of his appointment in The Times. The announcement from the White House stated that General Dwight Eisenhower had been promoted to Commander of European Theater of Operations. The news was given front page coverage and was announced on the BBC in news bulletins throughout that day, 24 June 1942. She had ringed it in red in her diary. She knew exactly how long he’d been away because she’d eaten one chocolate a day from the box he’d given her. There were two layers, and when she ate the last one three weeks had passed.

  She had been driving a very different American in the meantime, General Tooey Spaatz, commander of the US air forces in Britain. She loved the name, which made him sound like a mad comedian from the music hall era, but sadly Spaatz was a grimly silent character who never offered her a word of thanks. When he did speak, it was from the back of the car, and only to ask how long it would take to get to their destination. She would give an estimate and he would snap back, “Make it faster.” She began to feel more like a fighter pilot than a staff car driver.

  He had a suite at Claridge’s which at any time of the day or night resembled the Hollywood version of a cocktail party – the smoke, the noise, the badges of high rank on the men’s uniforms and the smart dresses of the women, many of them actresses who had come straight from West End shows, created an atmosphere completely at odds with his coldly impatient character. He would stride through the mêlée, shaking hands, making brief conversation here and there, greeting well known names from the stage, and then vanish into a small sitting room. She would accompany him, as was her duty, and for an hour or more she would sit there while he slumped into a chair at a desk, occasionally picking up a document to read and then sighing deeply. But mostly he sat back gazing at the ceiling. He would do this for what seemed like an eternity, and then he would look up, seemingly surprised to see her, and say, “Thanks, Kay, I guess I won’t be needing you any more tonight.”

  The scene was repeated several times during the four weeks she served him, and she learnt to take books and magazines with her to fill the silent hours. She also understood that the long periods of concentration were the general’s way of coping with the deaths of his young countrymen, whose names and ranks clattered into his office every day on the teleprinter.

  The US Eighth Air Force had by then joined the RAF in large-scale daylight raids on Germany, and initially losses were high. Every week new planes fresh from factories across America arrived at British airbases, while ships unloaded the bombs, bullets and spare parts with which they would be armed and serviced. Young American pilots, bomb-aimers, navigators, gunners, aircrew, mechanics and armourers also arrived in their thousands.

  They were young, fresh-faced kids with the minimum of training. Most of them had never left their home state before, let alone been abroad. She could tell he felt they were his responsibility, that too many were dying in the skies over Europe.

  Then came one fine summer evening when she pulled up outside the hotel and General
Spaatz flung himself into the back of the car almost before it had stopped. “Northolt airport,” he barked. “And step on it.”

  She knew not to ask why, but drove with her hand on the horn all the way out through west London to the new airport that was being carved out of farmland. She understood the reason for the hurry the moment she arrived. A long line of VIPs were lined up beside steps alongside the runway. A B2 bomber had just landed and was taxiing slowly to the greeting party. It came to a halt, and scarcely had the propellers stopped turning than the doors were opened and a broad-shouldered figure with a big smile stepped out and down the steps. Eisenhower was back.

  He had three stars on his shoulders now, she noted; he was commander of the “whole shooting match”, as he put it later. He shook hands with the VIPs and then noticed her standing by the car. He came over straight away, trailed by Spaatz, who was his usual unsmiling self.

  “Kay, how are you?” he said. “I gather Tooey here has been hiding you in the air force. You want to drive for me again?”

  Spaatz spared her the embarrassment of a reply. “Now don’t take Kay away from me,” he growled. “She’s the only driver I’ve found who really knows London.”

  Eisenhower just laughed.

  “I have some fruit for you, Kay,” he said and walked away.

  The next day a basket of bananas, mangoes and peaches arrived on her desk. The following morning she was asked by a grumpy General Tooey to train a replacement driver. He seemed genuinely sad to see her go and shook her warmly by the hand.

  A week later she presented herself at General Eisenhower’s Grosvenor Square headquarters. She was late. A marine guard had refused her entry and then another marine on the reception desk made her wait half an hour while making several telephone calls.

  The name Eisenhower may have been trumpeted across the nation by the BBC, but no one in the American embassy seemed to know where he was. Kay finally found herself outside a large oak door glistening with a coat of recent varnish. A stencilled notice carrying the words Theater Commander hung from a hook on the door.