Page 113 of An Invitation to the Kennedys
‘What does it mean?’Brigid asked again.
‘I don’t know,’ Honor said, distraught.‘But not knowing isn’t good enough.We must tell Doris, in case she understands better than we do.But I cannot get hold of her.I have tried.I have written and telephoned – to her flat, to that restaurant, Horcher’s, that she goes to – and I cannot get her.’
‘Chips is trying now.He says there are people he can ask …’
‘People,’ Honor repeated.‘What people?’
‘Does it matter, if they answer?’
Honor heard the sound of a door slamming downstairs, then Chips’ footsteps, urgent on the stairs.They both went to meet him.‘Anything?’Honor called out as he came up.Her voice was thin in the quiet, heavy house.
‘I may have found Doris.It’s possible she’s in France.On her way home.’
Honor sat down suddenly, on the top step.Her legs felt cotton-woolish, as though she had been ill.‘But when will you know?’she asked.
‘We are not the only people trying to find someone,’ he said, but he said it gently.‘In truth, it feels like all of Europe is on the move.They will telephone me when they can.’
He sat beside her on the step and tried to take her hand.Honor pulled it away but she stayed beside him.They would hear the telephone better from there.Brigid squeezed in on the other side and for once Honor was glad for the broad sweep of that foolishly grand staircase, that it could fit them all.Brigid put an arm through hers and they drew close.Andrews hadn’t lit the hall lights and so below them was only gloom.The house was silent and the square outside too.It was as though all the city waited in that moment with them, on the edge, above the dark.
Afterword
Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, two days after Germany invaded Poland.That was the end of a long period in the UK of trying to avoid war by appeasing Hitler.
Indeed, Chamberlain’s words, in that radio address, talking about the ultimatum issued to Germany to withdraw troops from Poland, were: ‘I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed.’
Throughout the late 1930s, while Chamberlain was indeed trying to ‘win peace’, there were many, like Churchill, and Basil Blackwood, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava – ‘Duff’ in this book – who were certain that Hitler couldn’t and shouldn’t be appeased, and that war was inevitable.
Joseph P.Kennedy, ambassador to the Court of St James from 1938 to 1940, father of John F.Kennedy and eight other children, including Kick, was very much of Chamberlain’s view: prevent war, whatever it took.
That radical difference of opinion and policy is the backdrop to this story of Kennedys and Guinnesses.After writingThe Other Guinness Girl, which is largely the story of Honor and Chips, I discovered mentions in Chips’ diaries of the Kennedys – and of balls and parties the two families had both attended – and a particular detail that made me laugh.Brigid Guinness, Honor’s youngest sister, and Kick Kennedy were almost exactly the same age.At Brigid’s coming-out dinner, she sat beside Billy Cavendish, who later married Kick; while at Kick’s coming-out dinner, she sat beside Prince Friedrich, ‘Fritzi’, who later married Brigid.
That was enough to send me off thinking about all the ways in which their lives must have intersected.The story is mostly invented, but drawing together bits and pieces of real life, in a way that I believe fits plausibly with the rest of these characters’ real lives.
There is a curious pocket of silence in Chips’ diaries, from 7 August to 1 September 1938.He writes nothing, and when he resumes, it is to say that Honor has been ‘nervous and unhappy and a little mad’.It’s unusual for him; he was generally pretty diligent at recording his doings.I wondered what had happened during those three weeks.Perhaps things he felt it would be unwise to write about?A house party, to which he has invited various players in the escalating European conflict …?I’ve filled in the blank with my own imaginings, but with, I hope, proper regard for the known truths.
Kick Kennedy did leave England in 1939, but she came back a year later, and joined the war effort in London.Her parents were certainly unhappy at the idea of her marrying Billy Cavendish, heir to the Duke of Devonshire – almost as unhappy as his parents were – but marry they did, in May 1944.Billy was killed four months later, in September, while trying to take a town in Belgium from the German Waffen-SS.Kick died four years after him, in 1948, in a plane crash.
The marriage of Brigid and Fritzi was a wish dear to Chips Channon’s heart.He writes about it as something to be aimed for as early as 1936, when Brigid was only sixteen – at the same time as he speculates that Fritzi could leapfrog his father to succeed his grandfather as kaiser (August 1936:Prince Fritzi came to see me … I told him that I hope, and even thought, that he might become Emperor.He must be tactful, he must perfect his English … he must be manly … he agreed with all that I said.)
Fritzi and Brigid met many times before the war, but it was only when Brigid went to nurse him after an accident involving a tractor, shortly after Fritzi was arrested, interned and then released, that they got engaged.
I was intrigued by the idea that this was when they fell in love – when he was weak and she was looking after him.
They married after the war, in 1945, and had five children.Fritzi died in 1966.He had been missing for two weeks before his body was discovered in the Rhine.The exact circumstances of his death – suicide or accident – were impossible to determine.
Chips’ own marriage, to Honor Guinness, was unravelling fast at the time this book is set.He writes very openly, first about the lack of ‘marital relations’ between them, and then about an affair Honor has had, in a way that is really quite eye-poppingly horrible:
Entry for 20th August 1937:I then knew that H was Palffy’s mistress, although she has only seen him three times … It is a plot, probably to get money out of Honor … Very calmly I accused her of having an affair with that obvious ruffian … She sat down and admitted the truth.My marriage has crashed in ruins at my feet … Men never find H attractive, certainly not men of his type.He wants her money, and I am not going to let him.
In fact, Honor did meet someone – Frantisek Václav Svejdar, whom she married after her divorce from Chips in 1945 (a divorce in which she gave up custody of their son, Paul).Frankie was a Czech pilot who came to England and joined the RAF after the fall of Czechoslovakia.He and Honor married in 1946 and lived for a long time in Ireland.People who knew them then tell me that they were very happy together, and adored one another.That Frankie was jolly and funny and easy-going, far less handsome than Chips, but a truly kind and nice man.I’m happy to think that all this lies in Honor’s near future at the end of this book.
Doris is an entirely invented character.She first appeared inThe Other Guinness Girl, and I just liked her far too much to let her go.I found it hard to leave her fate so unresolved at the end of this book – I want her to be safe, on her way back to England, or even to America – but the truth is that I couldn’t believe it would be as easy as that.So many people got ‘lost’ in the weeks after war was declared – sent this way and that among the great movement of people, all desperate to get to a place of safety; all trying frantically to decide where that was.Many eventually made their way to where they wanted to be, but not all.
This is a work of fiction, but within that, I have tried to be faithful to the facts.And so I have kept the end deliberately hazy, as a reflection of that time.
The detail about Chips’ cigarette lighter – a gift from Göring whom Channon describes as ‘the most lovable, he is large, flabby, mischievous (probably sexually vicious, for I saw in his grey eyes the look I know well), intelligent, eunuch-y’ – is correct, although my twist about Doris nicking it clearly is not.Ambassador Kennedy did indeed gather Kick’s British friends, young men such as Hugh Fraser and Billy Cavendish, and show them film footage of soldiers killed and injured in the First World War, exactly as I have it here, only he did that in London.His intent apparently was to persuade them that war must be avoided, but all it did was infuriate them and make them more resolved than ever to fight.The mention of Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin is also accurate – he was an active opponent of Nazism from the start, and in August 1938 he was sent secretly to London to plead with British authorities to abandon the policy of appeasement and join an anti-Nazi coup.Chamberlain dismissed his mission as unimportant, but Churchill was sympathetic.
Unity Mitford did indeed shoot herself in the head when Britain declared war.She survived, and was hospitalised in Munich, where Hitler frequently visited her.He also paid her bills and arranged for her return home.She lived almost ten more years but never fully recovered and was apparently ‘incontinent and childish’, according to the neurosurgeon who attended her.
