Читать книгу The Importance of Being Kennedy - Laurie Graham - Страница 5

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.

Ramon N. Mulcahy, New York, 1972