She checked her face and hair in a vanity mirror and was about to knock when she noticed the varnish was far from dry. She gave the door a gentle tap with the toe of her shoe and entered on a barked command from within.
Eisenhower was seated at a desk from which smoke rose in a long plume from a cigarette smouldering in an ashtray. A cigarette between his fingers added to the hazy atmosphere. Even the windows seemed smeared with a yellow patina of nicotine. Beyond the trees on the square flaunted green canopies which swayed gently in the breeze.
The desk was piled high with box files on one side and two stacked wire mesh trays overflowing with correspondence on the other. A blotting pad lay between them. Eisenhower was staring at a noticeboard covered in green felt which stretched the length of one wall. Memos in paper of various colours, some typewritten, others handwritten in an illegible scrawl, were pinned to the board.
Kay coughed. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “I had trouble getting in.”
Eisenhower frowned, looked at her and said, “Yeah, I know, it’s chaos around here.”
He took a drag from his cigarette, stubbed it out and looked at the wire trays. His frown deepened.
“Thank you for the fruit,” she said.
“Don’t thank me,” he said. “I just want to know whether you can drive for me – for good this time.”
“Of course I can. You just have to sign a document and ...”
Eisenhower cut her short. He rose from his chair, picked up a wire basket and let it drop to the desk with a thud, sending a snowdrift of papers fluttering to the floor.
”I came here to fight a war, not sign bits of paper! Get the car and let’s get out of here.”
And that’s how it started, in a smoky room with missives and memoranda of war scattered across the walls, the floor and the desk, while through the window the summer foliage of ancient trees murmured a rebuke at the smoky chaos around the new commander.
The war seemed like thunder from distant mountains that summer. The blitz of London and the big cities was not over but had lessened to a point where people accepted the raids as they did rationing – “just one more bloody thing to put up with” summed up the war-weary mood among the populace.
The newspapers were full of the campaigns in North Africa where British and German armies seemed to take turns to advance and retreat and the name of the garrison port of Tobruk became a symbol first of British defiance and then of another defeat.
Eisenhower moved through a daily routine that rarely varied: breakfast at Claridge’s followed the inevitable complaint to the kitchen about the lack of strong, steaming black coffee; then to the embassy, on to the War Office and back to the embassy for a sandwich-on-desk lunch and more coffee. Twice a week red circles in the diary announced lunch or dinner with Churchill at Downing Street.
Kay drove him everywhere even on what would otherwise have been short walks. Eisenhower’s face and uniform were by now well known to Londoners. Churchill had finally persuaded him not to walk the streets of the city. The prime minister insisted that there were enemy agents in London who would happily take a knife or a gun to the commander if they saw him.
“Complete nonsense,” Ike told Kay, “but I’ve got to keep the old man happy.”
Kay felt like a character in a play that summer in which her boss, as she called him, bestrode the stage and various players came in from the wings to take up their lesser roles.
There was Butch – Harry Butcher – very much the star of the ensemble, who handled the press. Colonel Ernest Lee from Texas, known to all as Tex, looked after the office, while “Mickey”, Sergeant Michael McKeogh, was Ike’s valet, personal orderly and part-time cook.
Ike called this his family and he treated them with the care, attention and occasional bad temper that he would his own children.
“And you’re family now,” he told Kay.
She was surprised and a little nervous at the designation. The others in the team would hardy welcome a mere driver and a half-Brit, as they called her, into their ranks.
“Thanks boss, that’s great to hear.”
“I mean it,” he said. “You’re a member of the team. Where are we going, by the way?”
They were driving west out of London after a familiar explosion and the cry of “Get me out of here!” The reason this time was not any of the myriad military and political problems that flowed from the mysterious code word “Torch”, but the pressure placed on the commander by London’s society ladies.
London’s society ladies, starved of eligible males and anxious for the prestige of transatlantic celebrity, showered the American embassy with invitations to luncheons, cocktail parties and dinners. Tempting inducements were handwritten on the margins of the stiff cardboard invitations: Noel Coward would be attending a cocktail party right across from the embassy in Grosvenor Square; a brilliant new actor called Laurence Olivier would be among guests at a very small dinner party.
Telephone calls followed and then supposedly chance meetings took place in the foyer of Claridge’s. It proved too much. Kay suggested a move to the Dorchester.
“It’ll be the same there. If I hear another Brit lady calling me her daahling general I’m going to explode. I’ve got to get out of town.”
That morning late in July, with the sun doing its best to convey a sense of summer, she drove him west out of London, skirting the Thames.
“Look up there,” she said, pointing to Windsor Castle. Ike was boyishly excited by the sight of ancient turrets and ramparts and the royal standard flying from the towers.
“Straight out of Disney,” he said.
Kay too was excited. She was family. The others might not like it, but she had joined Eisenhower’s inner circle of those he trusted best and worked with closely.
She deserved it, she told herself; it was a fair reward for the hours spent waiting in the Packard and the guidance she gave him about the hidden history of London and the arcane social habits of the English upper classes.
He had almost dismissed her as his driver when she told him that he could not smoke at formal dinners before the royal toast at the end of the meal. Every man Kay had ever known smoked cigarettes, pipes and occasional cigars, but she had never know a smoker like Eisenhower. Part of her duties lay in ensuring the day began with at least three packs of Marlboros in her handbag. By the end of the day he would always have smoked his way through them all.
The smoking rule at formal dinners, the forelock-tugging deference shown by Claridge’s staff to guests, the importance attached to clothes according to the time of day or season irritated the “simple farm boy from Kansas”, as Ike liked to call himself.
“Trouble with you Brits is everything is about class. Even the working class seem happy to be just that – lower than everyone else. They lack ambition. It’s pathetic.”
“I’m not a Brit, I’m Irish,” she replied.
They were driving back to London past the playing fields of Eton. Kay decided not to tell him that the boys there still had to wear top hats.
“Let’s have a drink. Take me to a pub,” he said.
She swung the car off the main road and drove into Eton village. A large black bull swung from a board over mullioned windows. Above the door a legend in fake medieval script read: Rest here a while and drink in peace. They walked in. It was late morning. There was a group of old men at the bar hunched over half pint glasses of beer. Behind the bar a young girl barely in her twenties was reading a magazine. Ike took off his peaked cap and hung it on the back of a chair.
He was just another senior officer having an illicit drink with his girlfriend as far as the drinkers were concerned. No one paid any attention as he and Kay sat down with gin and tonics at a table in a window bay. Ike held up his glass and clinked it with hers.
“Funny thing is, I’m getting used to this without ice,” he said.
“You can get used to anything, sir,” said Kay.
”Not the war,” he said. “Never that. And don’t call me sir. We’re off duty.”
Kay was not off duty at all. She was sitting drinking warm gin with the most senior American officer in Britain. Such familiarity would have been unthinkable in the presence of a British officer.
The drinkers had separated into one group playing cards and the other dominoes. The men talked in low voices, hardly disturbing the solemnity of the room. Occasionally they paused to light pipes or cigarettes, glancing shyly at the strangers in the bay window.
The bargirl remained bowed over the pages of the magazine, raising her head from time to time to flick a damp tea towel at a fly. The clock behind the bar measured the minutes in metallic whispers.
Framed prints on the walls showed horse-drawn coaches pulling up beneath the Black Bull sign with a whip-waving driver on top and a man blowing a bugle beside him. Above and below these tributes to the romance of Victorian travel posters warned that careless talk cost lives and urged people to eat more vegetables.
The timeless calm of the scene and the sense that nothing in the Black Bull had changed since the days of the mail coach eased the way for a second round of drinks. Kay could see the physical change in her boss. Everything about him loosened and relaxed as if he had submersed in a warm bath.
Kay knew that she was incidental to the pleasure he took in the calm of a very English pub. He had slipped away and returned to the early days in Abilene where daily life was made up of hour-long bible readings with his mother, wholesome food on the table but never enough for seconds, and frequent fist-fights with local boys.
Eisenhower finished his drink and lit a cigarette.
”You don’t sound Irish to me,” he said suddenly.
“I don’t have the Irish brogue you hear in the films, if that’s what you mean, sir,” she said, “but I was born in County Cork and that’s as Irish as you can get.”
The Packard was outside. She was on official duty. She was careful how she addressed her boss.
“But you’re not really Irish, are you?”
“How far back do you want to go? Daddy’s family settled there generations ago. But you’re right, we’re Anglo-Irish.”
He wanted to know more. Whether he was really interested or just being polite she could not tell. She told him of running wild with her two sisters as they grew up on a small estate in County Cork. The Great War had passed the children by except for the shadowy absence of their father, a distant figure they hardly knew and of whom it was said that “he was doing his duty in France”. Then came peace and the teenage years. There were horses to ride, boats to sail and young men to flirt with as the girls grew older.
Kay stopped, aware that she had talked too much.
“Go on,” said Eisenhower.
“We had the most wonderful childhood. We thought it would never end,” she said. “We didn’t know at the time how lucky we were. Looking back it was like a dream.”
“That’s the trouble with dreams – you have to wake up,” said Ike. He got to his feet and put on his cap carefully, adjusting it so that the braided peak was at the correct angle to his face.
The drinkers in the pub turned slowly and stopped talking. The bargirl looked up. The peaked cap transformed the middle-aged officer with receding sandy hair, and a companion who looked young enough to be his daughter, into an image all too familiar from newspapers and newsreels. A babble of conversation broke the silence as Kay held the pub door open for him.
Eisenhower said nothing on the drive back to London. She knew what he was thinking. He had had a brief moment of escape. Everything about the Black Bull had pleased him. He would want to go back but that was impossible. The drinkers would talk, the visit would become the property of the newspapers. People would come and stare if he returned.
They drove past Richmond Park, where Kay remembered playing golf on the course in pre-war days. At the thirteenth hole they always saw a small house through a screen of trees, a Hansel and Gretel cottage that looked as if it had been lifted straight from a Disney film. It was called Telegraph Cottage and had once been a gamekeeper’s lodging.
She swung the car off the main road and drove through the park. Ike had returned to his newspaper and did not notice the detour. She parked on a side road. Telegraph Cottage looked exactly the same as she remembered it.
“What do you think, sir?” she said.
Ike looked up. “About what?”
“You wanted a country place near London, didn’t you?”
There was general dismay among Ike’s team at his sudden decision to move from the luxury of a London hotel to what he called his “bolthole in the woods”.
Telegraph Cottage was just a little doll’s house. It was totally unsuitable for a commander of Ike’s rank, too small and so far from London that nobody would ever find it. What would Churchill think? The answer was obvious: he would be appalled that the most senior American commander had chosen such humble quarters.
Eisenhower brushed aside such arguments. He loved the place. Kay had found a caretaker with a key. They had been given a tour. There was a cosy sitting room with a large fireplace, a dining room, a small kitchen and pantry on the ground floor, and three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs.
A carefully kept garden fenced off at the rear gave onto a woodland path which led to the thirteenth hole on the golf course.
Telegraph Cottage became Eisenhower’s weekend retreat, and, increasingly, where he returned at night during the week. Kay could make the drive in twenty-five minutes from Hyde Park Corner with the help of a US flag fluttering from the bonnet of the Packard. When Eisenhower finally relented and agreed to the installation of a phone at the cottage he ensured that it was a direct line only to his office in Grosvenor Square. He said Churchill would never be off the line otherwise.
That didn’t stop the prime minster. He made an immediate visit and was given a guided tour of the house and the garden. Kay trailed the two men and listened with an astonishment that Churchill clearly shared as Eisenhower outlined plans to grown vegetables, especially his favourite runner beans, in the garden.
Churchill considered these plans while puffing on his usual cigar.
“Napoleon played chess to take his mind off forthcoming battles – and you are going to grow runner beans?”
He paused.
“Good,” he said, speaking slowly, stretching the word out to emphasise wholehearted approval. He had come straight from the House of Commons and spoke as if he was still in the chamber. At the end of the visit the prime minister drew Kay aside.
“I hear you are responsible for finding this remarkable sanctuary,” he said in a low growl.
“Yes, sir,” said Kay, bracing for a rebuke
“Good. Make sure you continue looking after our general.”
Kay blushed, nodded and mumbled, “Yes, sir.”
The move to Telegraph Cottage was accomplished within days. Butch, Tex and Mickey shared the two remaining bedrooms while Kay was given lodging nearby in a house owned by two elderly ladies.
Every morning at 7 a.m. she drove to the cottage and began the day over breakfast, reading out to her boss the schedule she had typed out the night before. The rest of the staff ate in the kitchen.
Kay’s elevation in Ike’s family hierarchy was noticed and resented. She was a newcomer to an intimate circle, an arriviste seeking to profit from association with a famous man.
Worse still in the eyes of the “family”, she was a woman, not young, stranded somewhere between youth and the lower slopes of middle age, but with that undefinable appeal to an older man.
It was not only Eisenhower’s immediate aides who cast a cold eye on the new arrival in his team. Senior British and American staff officers invited to join breakfast meetings returned to London
with exaggerated accounts of the informality of Telegraph Cottage and priggish comments about the presence of Kay Summersby at Eisenhower’s side.
Those who queried Ike’s absences from London were simply told that he liked it that way. He would tell people that he slept much better at Telegraph Cottage in the peaceful surroundings of Richmond Park than in the grand hotel rooms of Mayfair. During the day he found the peace to work and think denied him in Grosvenor Square.
Motorcycle despatch riders arrived almost every hour, but the phone rarely rang. Birdsong replaced the steady thrum of central London. The occasional roar of anti-aircraft guns reached the sanctuary of Richmond like the sound of distant drums.
Most days Kay still drove the boss to London for meetings, but he usually insisted on returning by nightfall. There were plenty of winks and nudges from the girls in the Motor Transport Corps and especially from Charlotte, who regularly appeared at Kay’s side, as if by chance, in the ladies’ lavatory.
“You’re getting on very well with the big boss, aren’t you, doll?” she said one evening, applying mascara to her long eyelashes from a bottle marked Revlon. Her bright red lipstick was real too. It was typical of Charlotte to produce such make-up as if it was the norm in wartime London, whereas most girls used burnt cork for mascara and beetroot juice on their lips.
“I’m doing my best – we all are,” said Kay, accepting the offer of the mascara brush. Charlotte might be snobbishly inclined to mention her grand connections at Buckingham Palace rather too often, but she was also generous with the benefits that came her way.
“Oh, come on,” said Charlotte. “He’s mad for you, everyone can see that.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Kay, handing back the mascara brush. Charlotte handed over the lipstick.
“Has he kissed you yet?”
“Charlotte, behave yourself!”
“One of the girls swore she saw you two having a quick smooch in his office.”
Ike and Kay Page 4