The Importance of Being Kennedy
A brilliant new novel by Laurie Graham set in wartime London, which follows Kick Kennedy, sister of future US President JFK, as she takes London society by storm.Nora Brennan is a country girl from Westmeath. When she lands herself a position as nursery maid to a family in Brookline, Massachusetts, she little thinks it will place her at the heart of American history. But it's the Kennedy family. In 1917 Joseph Kennedy is on his way to his first million and he has plans to found a dynasty and ensure that his baby son, Joe Junior, will be the first Catholic President of the United States.As nursemaid to all nine Kennedy children, Nora witnesses every moment, public and private. She sees the boys coached at their father's knee to believe everything they'll ever want in life can be bought. She sees the girls trained by their mother to be good Catholic wives. World War II changes everything.At the outbreak of war the Kennedys are living the high life in London, where Joseph Kennedy is the American ambassador. His reaction is to send the entire household back across the Atlantic to safety, but Nora, surprised by midlife love, chooses to stay in England and do her bit. Separated from her Kennedys by an ocean she nevertheless remains the warm, approachable sun around which the older children orbit: Joe, Jack, Rosemary, and in particular Kick, who throws the first spanner in the Kennedy works by marrying an English Protestant.Laurie Graham's poignant new novel views the Kennedys from below stairs, with the humour and candour that only an ex-nursemaid dare employ.
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LAURIE GRAHAM
THE IMPORTANCE OF
BEING KENNEDY
To Jeremy Magorian,
Venice's own Mrs Thrale
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Accidentally, Through The Keyhole
Chapter 2 - The Right Kind Of Family
Chapter 3 - The Trouble With Blood Fitzwilliam
Chapter 4 - A Perfect Little Doll
Chapter 5 - A Washer And A Dryer And Separate Beds
Chapter 6 - Two-Toilet Irish
Chapter 7 - Three Categories Of Feeble-Mindedness
Chapter 8 - Learning The Ways Of The Enemy
Chapter 9 - Another Little Blessing
Chapter 10 - Kennedys Everywhere, Like A Rash
Chapter 11 - The Sacred Duties Of A Wife
Chapter 12 - No Crybabies, No Losers
Chapter 13 - An Anniversary Trip For One
Chapter 14 - Something In The Blood
Chapter 15 - The Queen Of Bronxville, The Queen Of England And Walter Stallybrass
Chapter 16 - The Fox Supervises The Henhouse And Mr Chamberlain Goes To Munich
Chapter 17 - Other People's Babies
Chapter 18 - Our Pope
Chapter 19 - The Season At The End Of The World
Chapter 20 - Keeping Going With A Cheery Smile
Chapter 21 - Future Prospects Unknown
Chapter 22 - Everything By The Book
Chapter 23 - An Insult Of A Cake
Chapter 24 - A Broken Doll
Chapter 25 - Girl On A Bicycle
Chapter 26 - A Trainee Duchess
Chapter 27 - The Beginning Of The End
Chapter 28 - A Real Winner, With A Bit Of Grooming
Chapter 29 - A Kennedy Poodle
Chapter 30 - Perpetual Light
Chapter 31 - The Latest Thing For Diseases Of The Mind
Chapter 32 - The Official Black Sheep
Chapter 33 - The Irish Card
Chapter 34 - Mr Congressman Kennedy
Chapter 35 - A Day Of Tears
I happened to be in London in January 1970 when I got a call from my office to say my Aunt Nora had died. We were just finishing up the photo shoot for a big piece on platform shoes for Sassy! magazine so I was able to get away to Derbyshire in time for her funeral. Darling Aunt Nora, who'd started life three to a bed in Ballynagore, had a duke and a duchess at her Requiem Mass. If Aunt Ursie had lived to hear that she'd have popped her corset bones.
I didn't really start getting to know Aunt Nora till she ferreted me out in Saks Formal Wear in 1947 and stood me lunch. She had a nifty figure and beautiful skin for a woman in her fifties. She was wearing a tweed suit, I remember, petrol blue, fully lined, with a great corded buttonhole detail. Old-fashioned but very classy.
She said, ‘It's one of the perks of working for a lady who keeps up with trends. When the rest of the world won't be seen dead in a garment it can always be passed along to the help.’
We hit it off right away. She'd been a hazy, absent relation when I was a kid. She did visit, but too rarely for me to know her.
‘Your Aunt Nora is with the Kennedys,’ Mom used to say, and as we had another aunt who was a nun in Africa I also pictured Aunt Nora in a grass skirt and the Kennedys as some kind of ferocious tribe. In a sense I suppose I wasn't so very wrong.
Aunt Nora was a blast. I relished the letters that came each year with her Christmas card, her annual report on life as a gardener's wife on the great Chatsworth estate of the Duke of Devonshire. ‘Another twelve months of 'tater peelings,’ as she called it.
She outlived four of the nine Kennedy babies she'd raised. When Jack was killed in 1963 she wrote me that she had not watched the funeral. She said, Stallybrass was glued to the telly all afternoon but I walked to Hassop and prayed the rosary till it was over. I don't care for the telly myself. They tell you the same thing over and over. Walter loves his cowboy shows and I'll sit with him for company, but I turn my chair round the other way and get on with my knitting. Anyway, Jack's dying didn't shock me the way it shocked the rest of the world. I kept the death watch over Jack Kennedy more times than the sands are numbered and I could have swung for him once or twice too, little devil that he was. But my heart does go out to Mrs Kennedy. This is surely too much even for that tough little nut to endure.
Bobby Kennedy's death and old Joe Kennedy's, she hardly mentioned. Her own health was failing by then, though I didn't realize it. As her beloved Walter put it, ‘Nora were never one to skryke about her aches and pains.’ I asked him if she'd believed there was a gypsy curse on the Kennedys. There had been a lot of stories about that, after Jack and Bobby's deaths.
‘Nay, lad,’ he said. ‘In fact it got on her pippin when folk brought that up. Nora always reckoned old man Kennedy didn't need any gypsy curse to bring him calamities. He brought them on himself, the way he thought he could buy the world, the way he pushed them lads into the spotlight. Pride goeth before a fall, that were her opinion.’
I said, ‘I wish Aunt Nora had written about her Kennedy years. She must have had some stories.’
He said, ‘But she did write about them. That first cottage we had at Edinsor, she sat at the kitchen table and wrote everything down in exercise books. She called it her “Memoirs,” said she were only doing it to stop herself going round the bend with nothing to look at only sheep and trees. She liked the city best, you know, Nora? She liked busyness. She only endured all this beautiful countryside for me, God bless her. Should you like to see her writings some time? If my memory serves, they're in the back of her tallboy.’ So Aunt Nora's notebooks, with multiplication tables printed on the back cover and that old-lady smell of mothballs and dried lavender, came into my possession. This is her story.
