Ike and Kay

by James MacManus

  The food was served – cold chicken, ham, bread, fruit and cheese; the president ate with relish beside her while Kay toyed with her food, wondering how to make conversation. Would she be revealing state secrets if she asked about the next stage of his overseas tour – the journey to Tehran where Roosevelt and Churchill would meet Stalin?

  The president finished the first course, wiped his chin with a napkin, turned to her and began to talk. He asked about her Irish background, lowering his voice as if holding a purely private conversation. She told him about her childhood in County Cork, riding bareback, swimming in the freezing waters of the Atlantic, listening to stories from country folk of a long-ago famine that had blighted the land.

  Roosevelt listened gravely and shook his head when she mentioned the tribulations of the Irish people at the time of great hunger and mass emigration across the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. He did not condemn, merely remarking: “The British loss was our gain.”

  Then he wanted to know about women in wartime England: what jobs did they do, did they work the same hours as men in the armaments factories, and exactly what was a woman “clippie” on a London bus?

  Roosevelt had the political trick of listening carefully, making her feel as if he was really interested in what she said; but she didn’t think this was a political game – he really did seem interested, especially when she told him how she had first met the then two-star general Eisenhower on a foggy morning in London.

  “Yes, Ike told me how you two met up,” he said. “He also told me you were the best driver he had ever had. So from now on, on this trip, I want you to keep driving me. Could you do that?”

  She nodded, said yes, and looked down the table to where Eisenhower was watching the conversation. Everyone at the table was trying to listen. Roosevelt then put his hand on her arm and patted it.

  “Thank you, child,” he said. She realised that this great man, the president of the United States, was flirting with her.

  “Tell me what plans you have, I mean your career, your future?” he asked.

  “I just want to continue to serve the general,” she said, “until the end of this war.”

  There was nothing else she could have said, but Roosevelt pondered the remark as if she had delivered a weighty opinion worthy of consideration.

  “How would you like to join the Women’s Army Corps?” he said quietly and suddenly, as if the thought had just occurred to him.

  She sat back in surprise. The question felt carefully timed and well planned. Ike and he must have discussed it. These two great men had obviously found time to talk about her future, which was both gratifying and somewhat alarming.

  “Nothing I would like better,” she blurted out. “But that’s an American unit and I’m not an American citizen.”

  Roosevelt laughed at that and again nodded down the table to an aide. The pencil and notebook had come out again.

  “Well, who knows,” he said. “Stranger things have happened.”

  The president had only once, and briefly, turned to the rather irritated official on his other side, and at the end of lunch Kay understood exactly what was meant by the famous Roosevelt charm. She felt that she had entered a magnetic force field.

  Before leaving, the Roosevelt smile had faded as he leant towards her and said, almost in a whisper, “Mind you take good care of our commander.”

  She had assumed the offer of military rank in the American army was just one of the many half-promises a charming, flirtatious man, who led the greatest nation on earth, occasionally made; a throwaway line that would be forgotten and swept aside like confetti after a wedding. It was just another desert mirage.

  North Africa that summer of 1943 threw up many such illusions. By night the desert froze under a clear sky scattered with countless stars that seemed close enough to touch. By day the sea of sand could have been the backdrop for a film set. Kay pulled back her tent flaps in the command camp every morning to look out at sand dunes rising and falling to the horizon in waves of molten copper.

  Fantasy and reality merged in such surroundings. It did not take much imagination to place a distant horseman on the dunes waving a curved scimitar and urging his followers into battle.

  The president’s visit was swiftly followed by that of Winston Churchill, who was anxious to have his own desert picnic. Wearing a broad-brimmed panama hat, a linen suit and walking with a silver-topped cane, the prime minister strode across the desert to the chosen place for lunch, planted his cane in the sand and gave a customary two-fingered salute to the group of officers.

  It was one of those occasions the prime minister loved: a long table shaded by an awning with his generals seated around him and white-robed Arab servants serving food and wine while he served up the conversation. Kay was grateful that this time she was seated at the far end of the table from the very important visitor.

  Someone posed the question that Roosevelt had been unable to answer – the origins of the word picnic.

  Churchill brushed the question aside. He wanted to hear every detail of the German retreat and defeat in North Africa and Rommel’s recall to Berlin. He enjoyed the account of the Allied victory as much as the food placed in front of him. He had not, however, forgotten the question.

  “French used it first – picque-nique – a shared repast taken with friends in a country setting – seventeenth century – no one knows where it came from. Would you be so kind as to pass the wine?”

  Seeing both leaders far removed from the trappings of power at home, watching them meet their generals and ordinary soldiers amid the heat and flies of the desert, Kay realised that both men were supremely happy. They were on the road to victory and Hitler was destined for defeat. They knew too that in Dwight Eisenhower they had found the general to bring the war to the conclusion. After his desert lunch Churchill had drawn her aside and said, building on his own words the previous year and echoing those of Roosevelt: “Thank you for taking good care of our commander.”

  The assumption behind those words was that Churchill thought she and Ike were lovers. Kay liked to think so too. The kiss had changed everything.

  The touch of his lips on hers lingered long after they had broken apart. A simple hurried kiss in the dark hold of a transport plane had opened something in her heart and she hoped in his. She felt as ancient explorers must have done when they broke into the burial chamber of an Egyptian pharaoh. Secrets between two people had at last been revealed.

  She had been sitting a few rows behind him on a night flight from Tunis to a camp in the desert. The cabin was dark and others on the plane were all asleep. She felt a hand on her shoulder.

  “Have you got an aspirin? I have a hell of a head.”

  “Of course. Sit down.”

  She groped around in her bag and shook a pill from a bottle.

  “You’ll have to dry swallow it,” she said.

  He had sat beside her for a while. In the dark cave of the aircraft hold, deafened by the noise of the engines, surrounded by sleeping bodies, they felt alone and at peace. Nothing could have been less comfortable or more comforting.

  He took her hand and squeezed it in the darkness. She had turned towards him, as he did to her, and they had held each other in an affectionate hug. It had felt a perfectly natural thing to do and it was just as natural when they began to kiss, not a snatched backseat cinema kiss, but a kiss that seemed to go right through her.

  He had slipped his hands inside her jacket and cupped her breasts, still kissing her, when the plane hit turbulence. For a few moments they clung together tightly, his hands pressing into her as the plane shook and shuddered. People sleeping around them had begun to wake as the big aircraft rolled and bucked.

  They quickly straightened up, guiltily adjusting clothing. Ike had gone back to his seat as people around began to wake up. They had landed in darkness and gone straight to their qua
rters. He took her hand outside his tent and held it for a few seconds. Then he turned away without saying a word. There was no offer of a nightcap. There didn’t need to be.

  She felt different the next day, not foolishly so, smiling at strangers and giggling at every passing remark. Woman of her age did not indulge in the love-struck attitudes of the young. She just felt happily, confidently different. The kiss had told a story and she was beginning to see, or hope she saw, where that story would end.

  Ike acted no differently towards her the next day nor gave any sign that he, the Allied commander, had found himself in the arms of his driver, personal secretary or whatever her title, the night before. She still had no official title beyond that of driver. She would talk to him about that the next time they were alone.

  Meanwhile he spoke to her as he always did, army style: short clipped decisions to be acted on without argument or discussion. There was the occasional growl but more often a word of thanks delivered with a slight smile. Once or twice she tried to catch his eye but he did not notice, or if he did he ignored the obvious intent behind the way she looked at him.

  It was very much business as usual, a fixed routine that unfolded throughout the day as if nothing had changed. Kay reminded herself of the kiss by recalling every move they made as they huddled between sleeping troops in the dark hold of the plane. She wondered if he had any idea what happens to the human heart when it is lifted, as he had lifted hers on that plane. Perhaps not. It was up to her to make him understand. Their embrace was not another fantasy of the Arabian night.

  Tex and Mickey saw the difference in her. She was sure of it. They smirked and whispered behind her back. She didn’t care.

  She decided to do something for him that would surprise them all. The war in North Africa was over. The Allied commanders were meeting day and night to plan the next stage of the war, the attack on Sicily and beyond that the Italian Peninsula. There was talk of trips to Cairo to see the pyramids and to Jerusalem to see the holiest places in Christendom. Kay had other plans.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said to him one morning.

  They had just finished the usual breakfast in the camp canteen, fresh rolls, honey, yogurt and gallons of steaming black coffee.

  “I don’t like surprises,” said Ike, looking at his watch and wondering why the car had not been brought around.

  “She’s called Dawn. You’ll like her.”

  “She?” said Ike looking up. Kay was smiling. ”Look over there,” she said.

  The six-year-old bay mare stood with her right hoof tipped forward as if anxious to get going. Her freshly groomed coat was glistening in the sun. Alongside stood a handsome black horse.

  A young Arab woman held both horses and looked shyly at Eisenhower as he walked over.

  “Where did they come from?” he asked, patting the bay. The woman mumbled something inaudible. He looked at Kay who smiled and shrugged.

  “All right, silly question,” he said.

  “I thought you might like a ride. We’ve got time.”

  “Nope. My car is due.”

  “Not for another half hour.”

  Ike raised his eyebrow, looked at her and then smiled.

  “Okay, you win, let’s go; which is mine?”

  “You’re on the bay,” she said. “She’s a Cleveland, a thoroughbred. You’ll like her, she’s calm and sensible.”

  “Just like me, you mean?” said Ike, patting the horse.

  She was pleased and smiled. When he made fun of himself like that it meant she had taken the war off his shoulders, if briefly. They rode across hard sand towards a line of dunes and broke into a canter.

  She turned and looked back. Two helmeted military escorts were following in a jeep. That had been the arrangement. She had worked it all out, including the route to an old dried-up marsh that filled up on winter rain and retained enough moisture to attract a variety of birdlife in the dry months.

  “Great exercise,” he shouted.

  “I know. We all spend too long sitting on our backsides every day,” she shouted back, twisting and turning in the saddle.

  She rode well, leaning slightly forward with her seat raised slightly from the saddle, hands holding the reins gently but without slack, feet in stirrups gripping the belly of the horse. He followed as she guided them along a path through the dunes hardened by generations of herdsmen.

  They pulled up at the summit and looked down at a swathe of desert darker than the rest, hinting at water below the surface.

  “Where did you learn to ride?” he said.

  “I was pretty much brought up on a horse,” she said. “My father put me on a pony when I was just three, I think. I fell off of course but he caught me and put me back up. We weren’t given saddles until we were ten. That’s how we learnt.”

  “That’s the only way to learn anything,” said Ike. “This was in Ireland?”

  “Yes. It was cold and wet in winter, warm and wet in summer. We had chilblains and runny noses all the time. It didn’t matter. We thought everyone grew up like that. And where did you learn to ride, if I might ask, sir?”

  “In the army,” he said. “When I was commissioned in 1915. The military moved on horseback then. There were no jeeps in those days.”

  Ike didn’t say there had been no ponies in his childhood either. He had grown up very much on the wrong side of the Union Pacific railroad tracks in Abilene, a frontier cattle town in Kansas. There was no piped water, the unpaved streets kicked up mud in the winter and dust in the summer, and there was little enough money for a family of six boys living in a two-storey wooden house with their parents. He hadn’t mounted a horse until his second year in the army.

  He followed her as she flicked the reins, took the horse into a trot and then into a full gallop down the path through the dunes.

  They pulled up, breathless. Kay laughed. Eisenhower was breathing hard and feeling the sweat prickle against the back of his shirt.

  “Oxygen clears the head and fires up the brain,” she said.

  “Maybe, but I think you’re going to get me into trouble,” he said.

  He looked back. The jeep escort had just cleared the rim of the dunes and was coming down towards them with difficulty, the wheels slipping and sliding in the sand.

  “Don’t worry. I told everyone who needs to know that you wanted a ride today,” she replied.

  “Did you now?” he said with an edge in his voice that hinted at reproach.

  She smiled nervously. Perhaps she had gone too far. It was the first time they had been alone since the plane ride.

  “It’s good for you,” she said. “It’s a breath-taking way to start the day.”

  “Time to go,” he said and wheeled his horse into a canter up the dunes and towards camp.

  8

  January 1944

  The old year had ended with a Christmas snowstorm that cast a white shroud over London and Paris. The roll-call of Allied victories that autumn and the slow-moving slaughterhouse of the Russian advance, which ground whole German armies into the mud and blood of the battlefield, had spiced the festivities in Britain and across the Channel in occupied Europe.

  The national conversation in bars, in front of home fires and at Christmas tables was remarkably similar. If the Red Army could make progress against the Wehrmacht in the east, when would the Allies open a second front with an attack in the west?

  Kay waited at an airport outside London on a bitterly cold morning in early January 1944 knowing that the answer to that question was about to arrive on an overnight flight from Washington. It seemed that she spent half her life waiting at stations and airports for a man who rose in rank every time he stepped onto English soil.

  Now, this January morning in 1944, Eisenhower was coming down the steps of the aircraft as he always did – slowly, looking around at the face
s below – with four stars on his shoulder. His retinue, or family as he referred to them, followed with the baggage.

  She watched him as he came down the steps. He looked tired after a long flight. The skin on his face was sallow and baggy and the eyes clouded. She could tell from his tight smile that he wanted to get through the formalities and on the road to London as soon as possible.

  Ike had always been an impatient man, driving himself and others towards the next item on the agenda, the next thing to be done, the next objective. It was always the next with him.

  She watched him looking around, his eyes resting briefly on the faces of the greeting party. She knew he was looking for her. His eyes opened and gave a quick smile when he saw her hanging back behind the main party. Then the smile vanished and he began shaking hands and returning salutes.

  With the formalities completed he walked over to her. Tex followed with two large suitcases. She allowed herself a small smile and saluted him, quite unnecessarily because as a motor transport driver she had neither military rank nor its obligations.

  “Good to see you,” he said. “Have you been behaving yourself?”

  She blushed. He had never been quite as familiar in public before. She wondered for a moment whether he had missed her, then dismissed the thought.

  “What are you driving today?” he asked.

  “Same old Packard, sir.”

  “Let’s get moving. Tex, stow the bags and get in!”

  She drove out of the airfield past lines of Nissen huts and turned onto the London road. She could see in the mirror that he had begun reading files passed to him by Tex.

  He looked up, caught her eyes in the mirror, and said, “How was Christmas for you folks over here?”

  “Just fine,” she said, telling a lie to curtail the conversation. He was tired and needed to work and she needed to concentrate on the drive.

  In fact she had hated Christmas that year. It was the fifth such celebration in wartime England and it had passed in a haze of cheap gin and Bing Crosby endlessly singing, “I’ll be home for Christmas” on the radio. The bombing had become sporadic and the threat of invasion had long faded, but people were tired of the rationing, the blackout, the four inches of permitted bath water, the watered-down beer and the constant efforts by the Ministry of Food to persuade them that slabs of revolting dried fish from South Africa called snoek were edible.