Black Diamonds (48 page)

Veronica, like many of her contemporaries, was bowled over by Kick’s informality. Small things made a deep impression – like the way, after a game of tennis, she would slip off her shoes in front of strangers in the state rooms of some stately home. To her generation, Kick’s lack of inhibition, in contrast to the strict social conventions they had been taught to observe, was a breath of fresh air. Swiftly, she became hugely popular. In the mornings, she and her brothers would ride out together along Rotten Row in Hyde Park; there were dances and dinners every night. She was invited to all the grandest house parties, staying with the Dukes of Devonshire and Marlborough at Chatsworth and Blenheim Palace, as well as with the Astors and the Cecils at Cliveden and Hatfield House.

In September 1939, the party came to an end.

Days after the Nazis invaded Poland, Joe Kennedy, fearful for the safety of his family – and to Kick’s frustration – insisted she and her mother and sisters should return to the States. ‘I can’t get excited about landing but I suppose it will come when we sight that Statue of Liberty,’ she wrote to her father on 18 September from on board the US liner
Washington
. ‘It can’t be eighteen months since we were on this boat going in the other direction. It all seems like a beautiful dream. Thanks a lot Daddy for giving me one of the greatest experiences anyone could have had. I know it will have a great effect on everything I do from herein.’

‘
All my ducks
are swans,’ Joe once said of his children, but Kick was ‘especially special’. She had grown up participating with Jack and Joe Junior in the spirited conversations that took place over meals in the Kennedy household, the other children sitting with their governess on a small table of their own. ‘Those three – Joe Junior, Jack and Kick – were like a family within the family,’ a friend of the Kennedys recalled. ‘They were the pick of the litter, the ones the old man thought would write the story of the next generation.’

‘So-o-o what’s the sto-o-ry?’ was one of Kick’s catchphrases. Months after her return to England in the summer of 1943, she would become the story.

A story that her devoted father could never have imagined – or wanted to see written.

‘Today it is windy and wet and we really are getting near England. I really am becoming quite excited at the thought,’ Kick wrote on 27 June 1943 as the
Queen Mary
drew close to land.

The seagulls picked the ship up first, followed by a large flying boat which circled, then darted away to report its arrival. Kick stood on deck among the thousands of soldiers lining the rails. Relieved the journey was over, they chatted excitedly, reporting every low-hanging cloud as landfall. The ship turned and swerved constantly. Its lines of approach were narrower now, the threat from German U-boats greater. The waters close to England were the most dangerous of all. Four Spitfires roared out of the haze shrouding the horizon. Buzzing above the ship, they flew so close she heard the whistle of their wings.

The
Queen Mary
was due to dock at Glasgow. From there Kick planned to catch an early-morning troop train to London with the other Red Cross recruits. She had deliberately told none of her friends that she was coming. Staring out across the horizon, hoping to catch her first sight of land, her excitement was tinged with trepidation. It had been nearly four years. During her absence she had felt desperately left out. In Washington, she had transformed her flat into a shrine to her pre-war life, covering the walls with photographs of her English friends, as one American ruefully remarked, ‘
a living room
of Lords and Ladies’. Everyone she had known before the war had joined up; the men were fighting overseas or stationed at training camps around Britain, her girlfriends working in armaments factories or at secret Government establishments like Bletchley Park. Kick had longed to be part of it, but her father had forbidden her to leave America. Desperate to get back to England, in the second year of the war she had even persuaded her brother Jack to intercede on her behalf: ‘Kick is very keen to go over,’ he wrote to his father, ‘and I wouldn’t think the anti-American feeling would hurt her like it might us – due to her being a girl – especially as it would show that we hadn’t merely left England when it got unpleasant.’

The Ambassador had been the chief cause of the ‘anti-American feeling’ – more accurately, the anti-Kennedy feeling. The tide of the family’s popularity had turned. Vilified in the British Press, branded ‘Jittery Joe’ and ‘Run Rabbit Run’, his fierce opposition to America’s intervention in the war and his defeatist pronouncements on Britain’s ability to win it had caused him to be loathed. ‘Mr Kennedy is a very foul specimen of double crosser and defeatist,’ a Foreign Office official reported in a memo initialled by Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary. ‘He thinks of nothing but his own pocket. I hope this war will at least see the elimination of his type.’ In 1939, after the Nazis conquered Poland in eighteen days, Kennedy had announced that England did not stand a ‘Chinaman’s chance’. His views remained unchanged as the war progressed: ‘The British have had it. They can’t stop the Germans and the best thing for them is to learn to live with them,’ he told his aide as the Battle of Britain blazed. Hounded out of London by Winston Churchill, in November 1940 the Ambassador had been forced to resign.

From the outset of the war, Kick had taken the opposite stance to her father, publicly advocating America’s intervention long before Pearl Harbor. A passionate Anglophile, she ended her letters to her friends with popular patriotic catchphrases – ‘There’ll always be an England’ and ‘The English lose the battles but they win the wars’. Yet, having got to England at last, Kick was nervous that she might find herself a social pariah. Not having shared or suffered the hardships of war, bearing the stigma of her father’s anti-British pronouncements, she feared her old friends might shun her.

Britain, in the throes of war, was a very different country to the one she had left behind. At the mouth of the Clyde, the roofless houses, the burnt-out buildings, the piles of rubble where the bombs had fallen, were clearly visible from the
Queen Mary
. The GIs crowding the decks were aghast at their first sight of war: they had seen pictures of it, they had read about it, but this was real. The ship dropped anchor at the centre of the harbour; on the quay opposite, the tiny figures of a band of pipers swung into view. Dressed in kilts, they paraded up and down playing martial music – an official greeting party sent to pipe the American troops into the war. Scores of lighters, flat-bottomed boats designed to carry the soldiers to shore, hugged the sides of the
Queen Mary
; it would take as long to offload the 18,000 men as it had to pack them on to the ship. Waiting her turn to get on to the lighters, standing for what seemed like interminable hours alongside the GIs with their heavy packs and rifles at their shoulders, other anxieties troubled Kick.

One, particularly, had preoccupied her during her last months in Washington.
In her absence
, many of her closest English friends had become engaged or married: Sissy Lloyd-Thomas and David Ormsby-Gore; Janie Kenyon-Slaney and Colonel Peter Lindsay; Debo Mitford and Andrew Cavendish. Kick was twenty-three years old. In a letter to Janie, after hearing the news of the engagements, she had confided: ‘Sometimes I feel that I am never going to take that on. No one I have ever met made me completely forget myself and one cannot get married with that attitude.’ Her inability to fall in love upset her deeply, as John White, who wanted to marry her, recalled. A few months before leaving Washington, Kick, on the verge of tears, had said to him, ‘
Listen, the thing
about me you ought to know is that I’m like Jack – incapable of deep affection.’

It was not from want of admirers. ‘I think she probably had more sex appeal than any girl I’ve ever met in my life,’ recalled Tom Egerton years later when he was in his early seventies. ‘She wasn’t especially pretty, but she just had this appeal.’ Kick’s scrapbooks from her debutante days are full of love letters and messages from would-be suitors. ‘Darling Kick, when – oh when’, reads one; ‘You’ll always mean everything to me’, another. She had had many offers of marriage; before the war, William Douglas-Home, to whom Kick was ‘the merriest girl you ever met’, had proposed to her at dawn by a fountain at Hever Castle. The next morning, she appeared to have forgotten all about it and asked him, so he remembered, to drive her to some other beau. In 1938, Peter Grace, the American shipping heir, had crossed the Atlantic to claim her. On knocking at the door of 14 Princes Gate he was told by the butler that she had gone to the races. He went straight back to Southampton and caught the boat home. ‘We were close,’ he later recalled,

I had taken her out every night in New York, but I don’t blame her. She was a young girl, extremely attractive around all these dukes and princes. She was getting around in the highest circles in England. To some people if you get in with all the highfalutin people in London, that sweeps you away. I sort of figured she was caught up on that glamour, and you can’t fight that.

Yet the dukes and princes had not captured Kick’s heart either. It was as if she was playing a game with them. In the months before her departure for England, she had shown Betty Coxe, her flatmate, letters that she had received from her various English admirers. Which did Betty think was the most appealing, she had asked. After playing the same game with her brother Jack, she had been teasingly cautioned: ‘I would advise strongly against any voyages to England to marry any Englishman. For I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it has come time to write the obituary of the British Empire.’

Within days of arriving in London, any doubts Kick had that she might not be welcome had been dispelled.

Yesterday Lord Beaverbrook rang up and asked me down for the weekend. I am going to dine with him next week even though he said, ‘this admirer is the combined age of all your other admirers’. Lady Astor also rang and asked me to come to Cliveden. She said Jakie [Astor] had been invited to stay with the Duchess of Kent but refused until he found out whether or not I was coming to Cliveden.

As soon as word got out that she was in town, the invitations flooded in. ‘Everyone has been more than kind – it’s been sort of overwhelming,’ she wrote to Jack a month after her arrival.

In our country one would take such hospitality for granted more or less but coming from the English it’s quite unexpected and very, very comforting. I feel that my devotion to the British over a period of years has not been without foundation and I feel this is a second home more than ever. No one with the exception of Mr Aurean [sic] Bevan, MP for Wales has mentioned a thing about Pops which fact has quite amazed me … Of course a lot of it I can put down to British reserve which feel that some things are better left unsaid but mostly I blame it on their ability to make friends which last all their lives. They are slow about it at first but once made then it’s lasting – wholly and completely.

In London, blitzed and battered as it was by war, the social scene was swinging. ‘You had to go out. Life had to go on,’ remembered Kick’s friend Lady Virginia Ford. ‘You had to behave in what to a later generation would have seemed an uncaring manner. But dear heavens if you didn’t do that you would have gone mad.’ At the most glamorous venues, big bands played through the night until dawn, the evenings following a set pattern. For those up in London on leave, the first priority was to discover who was in town. Women working at factories or at Government establishments were given one day off in every eight; officers in the forces, stationed in Britain at training camps and airfields, were entitled to forty-eight hours’ leave a fortnight. With so many people scattered, as Sally Norton, the daughter of Lord Grantley, recalled, Kick’s set depended on a ‘bush telegraph’, run by Mr Gibbs, the hall porter at Claridges. ‘Ah, Miss Norton,’ Gibbs would say. ‘Lord Hartington is in London. Miss Kenyon-Slaney is staying here. Lord Grantley is over at the Ritz, and here is his room number.’ If the ‘Mr Gibbs’ system failed, everyone knew to congregate at the Ritz Bar at eight for drinks. The taxi service ‘Rely On Us’, which continued to operate throughout the blackout, would ferry them around town – to dinner at the Mirabelle before going on to the Caféde Paris to dance. At two or three in the morning, they would move on to the fashionable Four Hundred Club, where they would stay until it was time to catch the milk train back to camp or to work.

Kick was lucky to be based in London. The American Red Cross had assigned her to an exclusive officers-only club in Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge where her job was to boost the morale of the GIs – as she described ‘5½ days of jitter-bugging, gin rummy, ping-pong, bridge and just being an American girl among 1,500 doughboys a long way from home’. The London posting meant that Kick could go out most nights, her admirers queuing up to escort her.

On her first Saturday night in London, it was Billy, Marquess of Hartington, who took her out.

Of all Kick’s suitors, in every respect but one, Billy was the most eligible. The eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire, his family owned over 180,000 acres of land in Britain and Ireland, bringing in revenues of more than a quarter of a million pounds a year. In addition to their main seat at Chatsworth, they owned Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, Compton Place at Eastbourne and Lismore Castle in Ireland. They had several townhouses in London, including Chiswick House on the River Thames. ‘
Chiswick?
’ Billy’s grandmother had famously questioned. ‘Oh, we sometimes used it for breakfast.’

Kick had met Billy, who had been mooted as a husband for Princess Elizabeth, at a Royal Garden Party at Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1938. Like Kick, he was nice-looking – as opposed to good-looking. Almost six feet four inches tall, he had a slight self-conscious stoop; his hair was dark, his face pale and elfin, its most striking feature his dark ‘Labrador’ eyes. Aged twenty at the time, he had fallen in love with Kick. ‘I remember going to a dance and sitting next to Billy,’ recalled the Countess of Sutherland, ‘and he spent the whole dinner telling me how wonderful Kathleen [Kick] was.’ As Fiona Gore, the Countess of Arran, remembered, ‘here was this lively American girl who through some odd circumstance had become the toast of the town, and she was paying all this attention to Billy. It gave him such confidence. She swept him right off his oh so steady feet.’