Kay smiled and put a hand to her mother’s cheek. The skin felt thin, like tissue paper. She held her hand there, feeling her mother pressing her cheek against it. She had indeed left suddenly because she didn’t want the inevitable family arguments that would follow her announced intention to seek her fortune in the mysterious and alluring metropolis called London.
Her mother had followed a year later, the year war broke out. She had come to look after her daughter, she said. In fact she too wished to escape the loneliness of life in rural Ireland with the added incentive of fleeing a failed marriage.
Kay had been luckier than most. Her slender good looks were in vogue at the time. To the astonishment of her family, and especially her parents, Kay became a model for the Worth fashion house and appeared in Vogue and other fashion magazines in the spring of 1938 wearing the flowing gowns created in Paris for wealthy ladies of Europe and especially America.
It was the second idyll of her life; the golden haze of cocktail soirées, dinners in fashionable restaurants, weekend parties and a succession of affairs with amusing but hopeless men lasted until 1939.
The threat of invasion and the start of the Blitz had brought Kay a stark choice. Return to Ireland or find a job that would pay the rent of a one-room bedsit near Victoria Station. Life as a model had placed Kay on many a magazine cover but had earned her scant financial reward.
The only commercial skill she possessed lay in her driving licence. She had been accepted first as a hospital driver ferrying outpatients to and from their homes in South London, and then, when the bombing inflicted heavy civilian casualties, as an ambulance driver. Her mother had not been pleased.
Mrs MacCarthy-Morrogh was asleep, her head resting against the wing of the well padded armchair. A waiter removed the glasses, looked questioningly at Kay, and moved silently away.
Code names multiplied that autumn, confusing conversations as those concerned struggled to remember their meanings. “Torch” became “Gymnast” and then “Torch” again. “Challenger” was replaced by “Beaver” and then by “Bayonet”, an unlikely name for a train, thought Kay, but what a train it was.
The camouflage-painted locomotive had just two carriages with a private sitting room, a dining room, meeting rooms and bedrooms for eight people. Every room was panelled in teak, the cutlery was silver, the crockery bone china and the glassware crystal.
This was Eisenhower’s travelling headquarters gifted by Winston Churchill for the occasional long journey north of the border to Scotland.
“Where did Winston get this from?” asked Ike.
They were travelling north at speed. aiming to get to the west coast of Scotland at midnight.
“It was part of the royal train apparently, sir,” said Kay.
“You and your royal family,” said Ike.
“I like our King, sir,” she said.
Ike looked up from a document marked most secret.
“You’re only Irish when you want to be.”
“That’s not fair, sir.”
They were seated at a desk covered in a scatter of maps and papers as the countryside slipped past. The plan was to visit six beaches on the west coast between midnight and 2 a.m. to observe night-time landings carried out by American infantry.
Butch was passing papers across the table to Ike who studied them and handed them on to Kay for filing. Several aides stood in the background wondering, as junior staff do on such occasions, whether there was any reason for them to be there.
She spread maps on the table, trying to judge the route they would take up the coast later between beaches, some little more than coves, marked for the simulated invasion. The weather was calm. The moon would be no more than a silver sickle.
The conditions would be nothing like those of the African landings in a few weeks’ time. But Eisenhower argued to himself that at least it would give his troops their first experience of trying to get themselves, their heavy weapons and light transport from a ship to the shore at night.
The train rocked slightly at speed, slowing only when passing major cities. After supper everyone leant back in their seats, allowing the hypnotic sounds of wheels pounding the track beneath them to summon a few minutes’ sleep.
No one dared go to the sleeping quarters unless Eisenhower changed his mind and did so himself. He had given orders that no alcoholic drinks were to be served on the journey and no one was permitted to sleep. Everyone was to work through the night.
Kay stared at the reflection in the window. Everyone in the compartment had their eyes closed. Eisenhower too was looking at the window and caught her eye. Their reflections looked at each other, as if two strangers had entered the carriage. Ike leant forward. She turned from the image in the window to face him.
“Who’s looking after the dog?” he asked.
“Mickey,” she said, “at the cottage.”
Eisenhower nodded, leant back and closed his eyes.
Several cars were waiting at the small station, heavy British Humbers entirely unsuitable for the work that lay ahead that night. Kay took the lead car and drove into pitch darkness with only her sidelights on and without so much as a white line on the small roads to guide her.
She slowed the car to a crawl. After fifteen minutes Eisenhower snapped at her to speed up. She dared not. Bog, thick heather and deep ditches lined each side of the road. The fingernail paring of a moon cast little light. The rest of the night dissolved into chaos for all concerned.
The inspection party arrived late at every beach and at every beach Ike blamed Kay for driving at the speed of a legless tortoise, as he put it. With great difficulty Kay resisted the temptation to point out that since the invading troops and the landing craft were nowhere to be seen on any of the beaches their arrival time hardly mattered.
She tried to explain that the roads, some no more than tracks, demanded caution, and it was better to arrive late than not at all.
“Don’t argue with me,” he had said in a clenched voice that betrayed anger at the shambles around him. “Just do as you’re told.”
“What, even if it means driving you into a ditch?”
She shouldn’t have said that. Don’t answer back was the golden rule for government drivers. He wheeled on her, pushing his face close to hers.
“You’re going to be driving me in the desert soon. You’ll be on operations. That means you’ll obey my damned orders, understand?” Kay flinched. If it had not been so dark he would have seen mutiny in her eyes. He turned away and walked to a group of officers huddled on the sand dunes. Beyond lay a beach bare of the troops that were supposed to have landed there an hour earlier.
The group climbed back aboard the train at 4 a.m. Having vented his anger at what he termed “a bloody farce and an utter waste of time”, Ike went to his sleeping quarters.
Kay and Butch looked at each other. It was obviously their fault. The next morning she drove her boss in silence to Telegraph Cottage. He spent most of the time in the back scribbling memos, muttering oaths, then tearing up the memos and starting over. No one dared speak. It was as if a storm cloud had settled in the car and was about to unleash lightning. Kay shared the general relief when they arrived at the cottage.
The front door opened to release a small bundle of black fur which flung itself barking at Eisenhower’s legs. He handed a briefcase to Kay, bent down and patted the dog. He looked up and smiled.
“He’s in great shape, isn’t he? How are you feeling – OK?”
It was as close to an apology as she was going to get. Kay smiled.
“Fine, but I could with some sleep.”
“We all could. First order of the day – everyone take a nap for an hour.”
Mickey cooked the boss’s favourite dinner that night: steak with fried potatoes and a green salad. The puppy bounded from room to room, getting under feet and causing general irrita
tion to everyone but Ike.
Cards were produced afterwards and Kay, Ike and Butch sat down for a three-handed game of bridge bidding for the dummy. Mickey busied himself in the kitchen while Tex, who regarded bridge as an effeminate version of poker, read a newspaper.
It was on their first hand that Ike suddenly said, “I’ve got a name for the dog.”
Everyone waited.
“Telek.”
“What?” said Butch.
“Telek,” said Ike. “Kay, what do you think?”
“How do you spell it?”
“T E L E K,” he said.
Seeing the general mystification he rose and put the cards on the table.
“You work it out, fellas, I’m going to have a nightcap.”
Eisenhower sent his staff to bed but called Kay back. This is how most evenings at the cottage ended. They sat opposite each other with Telek curled up on the carpet between them. Kay poured a weak whisky for him and a gin for herself. Ike sank back into the sofa, raised his eyes to the ceiling and started talking.
There was only one thing on his mind: Torch. The word burned like a flame between them. He was excited, confident and restlessly impatient to give the final command for the invasion.
He talked almost to himself, inviting no interruption, giving no details, but musing on the strategic victory within his grasp: eviction of the German army from North Africa. For once Churchill and Roosevelt were in complete agreement. This was the first step in the defeat of Hitler in Europe.
“You’ll be driving an armoured Cadillac,” he said. “Big one-ton beast.”
“How exciting,” she said. “When do we go?”
He raised his glass and she poured another whisky. He drank and said, “You’ll be coming later by ship. Better that way.”
Damn, thought Kay. Better for whom? Not for her. It meant a ten-day voyage in some troop hulk all the way down the west coast of Ireland, through the Bay of Biscay and into the Mediterranean. There were German U-boats in the Med.
“Any chance I could be with you on the plane, sir?”
The formality of the request was designed to make him see its logic. After all, he would need a driver the moment he set foot in Africa – and someone to take notes, fix meetings and pour the late-night drinks.
“No. I wish I could but it’s not possible,” he said.
Of course it was possible. He only had to issue an order. She was thinking how to make the point tactfully when he said, “You mustn’t tell anybody, not even your mother.”
“I’ve signed the Official Secrets Act, sir. You know I would never say anything to anybody.”
“How is she, by the way?”
They talked about their mothers, a safe topic far from what Kay wanted to discuss. Ike’s mother had died some years earlier.
“They never leave you, mothers,” he said.
“Mine certainly never leaves me,” she said, thinking of the weekly teas in the Dorchester for which she always seemed to pay.
“No, I’m being serious. What’s that old saying? Every man dies alone. It’s not true. Every man dies with his mother’s hand in his. A mother is the first and last thing any man sees on this earth.”
“That’s very romantic,” she said.
He laughed. “No one’s ever called me romantic.”
“And what about women – do they die alone?”
“Don’t complicate things, Kay. Women are the mothers – don’t you see? They never die.”
There was no sensible rejoinder to that remark. Kay tried to think of a way of steering the conversation back to her transport to Africa. As if Ike guessed her thoughts and sought to deflect them, he suddenly rapped out a question.
“What do you think of Telek?”
“The name?”
“Yes.”
“A lot of people are going to wonder what it means.”
“Let them wonder. And you?”
“I think I’ve worked it out.”
It wasn’t difficult. Telek fused the first four letters of Telegraph Cottage with her own initial K. Ike said he found peace and contentment in his sanctuary in the woods of Richmond Park. Now he had chosen to acknowledge to those who could work it out the importance of Kay Summersby in his life.
The professional family around the general also worked it out very quickly. The thin tendrils of gossip about Kay and the Allied commander now clung closer to both of them. Kay never raised the subject because she knew Ike would pay more attention to a passing fly. The raised eyebrows and the whispered gossip behind his back never seemed to bother her boss.
After months of working on his staff and now about to accompany him to North Africa, Kay was no longer just a driver – she had become a personal assistant, mixer of cocktails, partner at bridge and hostess of Telegraph Cottage. She noticed that Tex, Butch and Mickey had kept watchful eyes on the way she had risen within the family circle.
She had heard them talking among themselves in the kitchen at the cottage one day. She had missed the start of the conversation but heard a voice, she thought Mickey’s, saying, “They’re closer than two coats of paint.”
“You think she’s getting it from him?” said another voice, Tex this time.
“Nah, he’s too smart.” Mickey again.
“I wouldn’t bet your pyjamas on that,” said Tex.
“Cut this talk, guys, it’s not right.” This was Butch, very much the senior member of the family. Kay knew he always spoke up for her. She knew too that it was not just Ike’s family that referred to their relationship as being closer than two coats of paint. The worst of the canteen gossip had turned them into lovers at the heart of the Allied command while the mildest rumours suggested merely that their relationship was affectionate but chaste.
Kay did not ignore the rumours, she hardly could with Charlotte giving her knowing smiles and asking silly questions whenever they met.
But she denied them to herself, and to others by stating simple facts: General Eisenhower trusted her and appreciated her work. She was very efficient. If at the end of the day he asked her to join him for a drink long after the others had left, so what? They would sip whisky, exchange small-talk about the goings-on of the day, and occasionally laugh at the absurdities of military red tape.
That was her job and if it took them to the edge of innocence it did not take them beyond. This man would never love or need anyone more than the wife who waited for him jealously in Washington.
That’s what Kay told people. But it was a lie. She knew it even if he didn’t.
5
February 1943
The torpedo struck the Strathallen just after midnight in the Mediterranean, forty miles from the Algerian coast. Kay and two other woman sharing the cabin were thrown out of their bunks onto the floor.
The wail of a siren signalled the order to abandon ship. They had been warned this might happen. The orders were simple: dress quickly in warm clothing, do not take luggage or pause to find any valuables such as jewellery.
The Strathallen was a converted liner shipping two thousand troops to the North African campaign. Kay had been ordered to join the ship and report to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers. It was just before Christmas 1943. They were only a day from port when under the starlit sky of a Mediterranean night the German U-boat struck.
Kay and her companions scrambled into a lifeboat as the ship listed heavily. Around her on a calm sea she saw other lifeboats filled with troops. There were many more in the water swimming for rafts, wreckage, anything to stay afloat. There were shouts from the ship as the angle of the list increased.
She should not have been on the Strathallen at all. It was against regulations for a Motor Transport Corps driver to leave London. Eisenhower had plenty of pool drivers to draw upon in North Africa. But he insisted that she, Kay Summersby, be at his si
de for what was proving to be a bitter campaign against Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Ike had personally signed the movement order. No one thought to question it.
She spent the night and most of the next day in the lifeboat until a British destroyer picked them up and put them ashore at a small port on the Algerian coast. Hours later the voice of Tex came over a crackly phone line from the general’s headquarters in Algiers.
“We heard about the Strathallen. He’s been worried sick about you. Here he is.”
And then Eisenhower was on the phone, the same old American twang synthesised through static into a voice from outer space.
“Kay, are you all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank God. You had us really worried there.”
“A lot of people didn’t make it.”
“I know. You worried the hell out of us. I’ll send a plane to pick you up in the morning. Get some sleep if you can.”
The next morning Kay walked into the St George Hotel in Algiers, once one of the most luxurious in North Africa. Now the marble floors were caked in mud as soldiers tramped in from the rain-washed streets outside.
She felt naked without a proper uniform. Her skirt was stained with salt. She wore a borrowed blouson jacket over a torn shirt and a headscarf over messy hair. Her stockings were in tatters and her shoes looked as if they had been dredged from the sea, which is exactly what had happened to them.
Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at the drenched waif who had stepped in from the rain. Tex appeared, ushered her past armed sentries into Eisenhower’s office, and left. Ike rose from his desk beaming and walked to her.
“Welcome to Africa, Kay!”
“Sorry, sir. I look a mess. I haven’t got a thing left, it all went down with the ship.”
“You look OK to me. Let me take a look.”
He put his hands on her shoulders turned her around.
“Well, not much damage that I can see,” he said.
And then he embraced her, holding her so tightly that she could feel the buttons on his uniform pressing into her chest. He stepped back, his face reddening with embarrassment.
Ike and Kay Page 6