Ike and Kay

by James MacManus

  She had been waiting in a conference room. The British field marshal bustled into the room with an aide. He looked at Kay sharply and said, “Who are you?”

  “Summersby, sir. I’m with General Eisenhower.”

  “You’re his driver, aren’t you?”

  “I’m his assistant, sir.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve told you, sir. I’m with General Eisenhower.”

  “You’re his driver. You have no security clearance to be here.”

  “I am security cleared by the supreme commander, Allied Forces, sir.”

  She felt her face colouring and her Irish temper rising. She was damned if she was going to be pushed around by this pompous little man. She could see Montgomery’s aide raising his eyes to the ceiling.

  “I shall have to ask you to leave,” snapped Montgomery.

  “I can’t do that, sir. I am under General Eisenhower’s orders to remain here.”

  “Well where is he, for God’s sake?”

  “Taking a leak, sir.”

  Montgomery looked at her as if she had slapped him.

  “What did you say?”

  Before Kay could reply the aide stepped forward and whispered into Montgomery’s ear.

  “Well why didn’t you say so?” he barked at Kay.

  “I just did, sir.”

  “Inform me when he arrives,” Montgomery said and left the room.

  Kay thought the scene was funny, but Eisenhower did not laugh when she told him about it later.

  “Montgomery is a royal pain in the ass and always has been,” he said.

  By strange circumstance it was Montgomery’s refusal to meet his commander-in-chief at the Versailles headquarters that brought about Kay’s last drive as General Eisenhower’s chauffeur. Pleading pressure of work, Monty insisted on meeting Eisenhower at his own headquarters in Brussels.

  The two men decided to end an argument that had divided the American and British Allies for weeks. The scene was set for another grim showdown. The Allied commander and his immediate staff set off in a convoy of cars in heavy rain that had prevented a journey by air.

  Kay drove the lead car behind the military escort. The mood in the car at the prospect of the meeting ahead was not improved by the weather. The downpour continued throughout the journey. The motorcycle outriders were quickly soaked to the skin, while those in the car peered through a waterfall of water on the windscreen.

  In Brussels Eisenhower went straight into the meeting at Montgomery’s headquarters. The debate was lengthy and acrimonious. Waiting outside, Kay heard the soft growl of her boss turn to harsh-edged anger. It was like listening to a chainsaw on wood. Montgomery had a voice like an old crow cawing at dusk. He spoke in clipped sentences peppered with “With respect” and “You must surely see”.

  Eisenhower hated the effortlessly patronising tones of the British commander. In fact he hated Montgomery. Kay sat outside, trying to look disinterested, as the conversation raged within. The clash of voices and the thud of document folders being slapped onto the table were clearly audible in the corridor.

  Various aides walked past and looked at her strangely. From fragments of conversation she gathered that Montgomery wanted a single thrust in overwhelming strength to bring the war to an end while Ike preferred a broad-front strategy. The argument ended when the British field marshal was ordered to accept the American strategy. Eisenhower rolled his eyes at her as he left with a look that said “Get me out of here”.

  Montgomery took swift revenge. Stories began to appear in the British press that the war was being unnecessarily prolonged by the supreme commander’s tactics.

  The criticism spread. The press began to suggest that the American general was “detached” and was spending too much time “with his lady chauffeur on the golf links at Reims”.

  The Allied commander had set up a new forward base that autumn at Reims, famous as the champagne capital of France. The snide newspaper comments thus cleverly projected the notion of Eisenhower’s champagne lifestyle spent at ease on the golf course with his lady driver, companion, bridge partner and perhaps mistress. The gossip brought into the open the question that was increasingly being asked within the Allied command and by the accompanying press corps: just what was Kay Summersby’s role?

  No one knew, but everyone liked to speculate. For the first time, the British press began to publish the same photographs of the commander-in-chief and his driver as those circulating in the US media.

  Until then, whether by a quiet word from Winston Churchill to his old friend, the newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, or simply prurience on the part of the press, Summersby’s name and photo had never appeared anywhere in Britain.

  “You know what they’re saying about you, don’t you, doll?” said Charlotte.

  Kay had flown in from the Allied headquarters at Versailles that morning with secret papers for delivery to the American embassy. She and Charlotte were having coffee in the same small café near Grosvenor Square where Kay had breakfasted on the morning she’d first met Eisenhower. It was exactly as she remembered it. Greasy Formica table tops, a waft of frying in the air and the same limited menu: weak tea with powdered milk, porridge and braised liver with onions or fried spam. The Allies might be winning the war, but the food in London had not improved.

  “No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me,” she replied.

  She was pleased to see Charlotte again. They had last met in London a month before D-Day for a quick drink in a dubious Soho club. Entry was gained by ringing three times on the doorbell and waiting for a key wrapped in a sock to be thrown into the street from an upper window.

  Charlotte had friends everywhere, and she was greeted warmly that night by a colourfully dressed woman of indeterminate age called Margot. They had climbed two floors up a rickety staircase to find themselves in a large room full of people drinking and talking very loudly. They had drunk gin and talked of Charlotte’s new boyfriend, a thirty-year-old American with a mysterious job at the embassy.

  “He’s very big, you know,” Charlotte had said, and laughed.

  “What on earth do you mean?” Kay had replied.

  Charlotte had laughed even more, spilling her drink. “Don’t come the choirgirl with me, doll.”

  Now Kay was hearing about a new boyfriend, this time a married man who worked in a government department supervising the nation’s water supplies. Judging from Charlotte’s deprecating remarks about his personal hygiene (“when he takes his socks off the pong is awful”), he would soon be replaced.

  “There’s plenty of fish in the sea for a single girl in London,” Charlotte said. “I don’t go out with men in uniform because they just vanish off to the war and get killed, but I do like a married man. They get the train home at night to some dreary wife in the suburbs, so you don’t have to wake up with them in the morning.”

  Kay laughed. Charlotte’s outrageous descriptions of her love life were a tonic after a 4 a.m. start and a bumpy flight through low cloud over the Channel.

  “So what are they saying, whoever they are?”

  “They’re saying you’ve become Ike’s mistress and that you put a smile on that grumpy face of his.”

  Kay frowned and put her mug on the table with a thump.

  “Firstly, he’s got every right to be grumpy – have you any idea what’s happening over there?”

  “Come on, doll, I’m not being serious. But you can hardly blame people for talking. You pop up in the background of every photo taken of him.”

  “So?”

  “So – what about it?”

  “For God’s sake, Charlotte, I am not his mistress. We’re not having an affair – that’s just nonsense. You mustn’t repeat things like that.”

  Charlotte looked at her and raised her mug. “This is the best coffee
in London. You know why? This place is right next to the embassy and they provide it. You can get anything out of the Americans if you try.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “All right, I won’t say another word.”

  “Promise me.”

  There was silence. Charlotte leant forward, looked with theatrical exaggeration to her left and right, and whispered: “What’s he like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When the lights go down. You know. Do tell.”

  “You’ve got a disgusting one-track mind.”

  “I’m a disgusting one-track kind of girl. Why not? Anyone could die at any time in this town. It’s all very well for you – you’re safe over there in France. Here we get these rockets coming out of nowhere without a sound, just a whoosh, a big bang and then bodies everywhere.”

  Kay sipped her coffee. Charlotte was right. It was very good, shipped in from America probably. And it was true. She was safe in France. She knew nothing of the horrors of life under the V2s in London. Her mother made much of the danger despite living miles away in Surrey.

  “So come on,” said Charlotte, “What’s he like in the sack? Those army men can come three times a night, they say. It’s all that steak. I’ve never had such luck. I won’t tell a soul. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Kay laughed. Outrageous, funny and obsessed with sex, Charlotte was just what she needed right now.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” she said.

  “You mean there’s nothing to tell me.”

  “Precisely. And no man I’ve ever met has or could come three times a night, by the way.”

  Charlotte laughed. ”You haven’t lived, doll,” she said.

  They smoked their cigarettes in silence, eyes wandering over the crowded café where the smell of unwashed bodies, smoke and rancid fat congealed into a malodorous fug.

  “I am never, ever going to get married,” said Charlotte suddenly.

  “Don’t be silly – you’re young. The war won’t last for ever.”

  “No, doll, it’s not that. It’s just that, well, I know a lot of people who’ve died, most of them very young. I just want to have fun. Anyway, can you imagine waking up next to the same man for the rest of your life?”

  “Yes I can, actually.”

  “Well, bully for you. But it won’t be your General Eisenhower, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Oh, do shut up, Charlotte.”

  “Anything you say, doll. But remember what they say.”

  “Which is?”

  “A woman in love will believe anything.”

  Kay was suddenly irritated. She looked around for something to throw at her friend, a bread roll perhaps. Charlotte just didn’t understand. Or perhaps she understood too much, which was even more aggravating.

  “He’s winning the war for us,” she said with the emphasis of a teacher talking to a sleepy classroom. “He’s doing a great job and he’s under a lot of pressure. I’m just one of the team. It’s my job – right?”

  “Don’t be a crosspatch,” said Charlotte.

  “I’m not cross. It’s just that you talk as if I was having a raging affair with my boss.”

  “Well aren’t you? You certainly seem to spend an awful lot of time together.”

  “That’s hardly surprising, is it?” Kay snapped. She stood up looking for the door.

  Charlotte got up from her chair, gave Kay a quick kiss on the cheek and whispered, “You know the mark of a true gentleman?”

  “Go on.”

  “A man who takes his watch off before he gets into bed.”

  “Do you think of anything else, Charlotte?”

  “What else is there to think about – the bloody war?”

  She gave Kay another kiss on the cheek and said, “Don’t forget what I said.”

  “Carpe diem?”

  “No. A woman in love will ...”

  Kay turned and left.

  The discomfort of a packed military aircraft on the way back to Paris that evening was made worse by bad weather which threw the plane around the sky as if it were a toy in the hands of an angry child.

  Kay fought to keep down her nausea as people around her began vomiting into brown paper bags. She pretended that she was on a scary carnival ride in one of the travelling circuses that occasionally toured Ireland when she was young.

  That didn’t help. She played the numbers game instead. It was two years since she had met Dwight Eisenhower, well two years and two months to be exact since this was August 1944. It was just over three years since she had become a Motor Transport Corps driver and four years since she had begun driving an ambulance in London.

  She had joined the ambulance service when the streets of London were peaceful and the only sign of war was the signature of the Battle of Britain written in vapour trails in the sky. Her mother had told her it was a safe and sensible way of doing her bit for the war effort. A month later, in September 1940, the Blitz began and she found herself in the middle of a war zone.

  The numbers would take her back through marriage, divorce and the long dreamlike years of childhood in Ireland. And now she was thirty-five years old. She felt as if she had lived several lifetimes in the last four years.

  The war had gone on too long. It had stripped people of their old lives and flung them into a new and violent world. Too much had happened too quickly. No wonder a woman like Charlotte had thrown herself into casual sexual encounters as a means of coping with a world in ruins.

  Charlotte told her that one night in the blackout during the bombing she had clung to a passing stranger against the railings of Eaton Square in London’s fashionable Belgravia. They had been terrified as shrapnel and masonry flew around them. Fear turned to lust. He had unbuttoned his trousers and she had raised her skirt. Kay always felt amused and slightly jealous when she heard such stories.

  Her own life had hardly been virtuous. Bedded by all the wrong men, then married, divorced, engaged again and now, finally perhaps, just maybe, she was in love.

  The plane found calmer weather as it left the clouds on the approach to Paris. The cabin reeked of vomit and the pale-faced passengers scrambled down the ladder in relief. All Kay wanted was a hot bath and a long sleep. After that she would suggest to the boss that he arrange a small drinks party for his staff and chosen members of the press corps. It was time everyone cheered up. The Allies were winning the war after all.

  A week later a small ceremony took place in Eisenhower’s office to which the press were not invited. The row of champagne bottles in ice buckets on a side-table was an unusual extravagance. Kay looked around the room.

  The Falstaffian figure of Colonel T.J. Davis, an old friend of Ike’s but officially his adjutant general, was opening bottle after bottle, sending corks flying to the ceiling with loud pops. Kay knew that Ike and Davis had served together under the leadership of General MacArthur in the Philippines, a searing experience under an egotistical boss which had created a warm friendship between the two men.

  If the colonel was opening champagne, clearly this was no ordinary briefing. Kay looked around to see the usual crew of staff and aides, all of whom were looking at her rather oddly, she thought. She wondered if she had missed a briefing note.

  Ike was in one corner peering at speech notes.

  Something special was about to happen, probably a surprise visit by one of the political grandees, Churchill or de Gaulle. Her uniform was a crumpled mess and her hair needed a good brush – she wished someone had told her this was happening. Her smarter second uniform was hanging pressed and freshly laundered in her room. She just about had time to change, and began to edge towards the door.

  A hand took her arm and she turned.

  “Where are you going, just when we need you,” said Colonel Davis.

  “I’ll be back i
n a minute,” she said.

  Davies smiled and pointed to Eisenhower. “Sure thing, but first could I ask you to stand over there by the boss.”

  Kay looked across the room. Eisenhower was smiling and beckoning her over. She walked towards him, conscious that everyone was staring at her. She had not an idea in her head except the consoling thought that Ike never bawled his staff out in public.

  He motioned her to turn and face the room, looked down at his notes and said, “Most of you will know that the army way at times like this is to get to the point – and then get to the champagne. So let me ask Miss Kay Summersby a question: will you accept a commission as Second Lieutenant in the Women’s Army Corps of the United States Army?”

  The surprise was total. She swayed on her feet and felt her legs buckle. Then Colonel Davis was speaking loudly and solemnly, swearing her in as a member of the American Armed Forces. She managed to mumble her assent. Eisenhower stepped forward, took her arm and steadied her. Grinning, he pinned two gold bars onto her shoulder epaulettes. Champagne was handed round in fluted glasses.

  After driving him many tens of thousands of miles, she was no longer his driver. From now on she would ride in the back of the car as his secretary, diary keeper, bridge partner and co-owner of the dog they both loved.

  This was Eisenhower’s answer to the innuendo and the gossip of journalists, and to anyone who questioned the presence of Kay Summersby at his side.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “I feel like someone has sent in a rocket to the moon and I’m slowly floating back to earth. I’m amazed. But how? I’m a Brit.”

  He leant forward and whispered in her ear. “Citizenship comes next. Don’t worry, I’m fixing it. The president has agreed. You’ll be a Yank soon.”

  That was what she wanted above all else. With citizenship she could return to America at the end of the war and work with him in Washington. He had promised her a commission in the Women’s Army Corps and he had done that; he had promised her citizenship and she knew that too would come.