Laurie Graham - The Importance of Being Kennedy

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I've had a good life. I've had my span.’

But she'd only had forty-seven years and she could have had more if she hadn't been such a muggins about taking off her vest in front of the doctor. She died in the autumn of 1911 and before the year was out Edmond took off his thinking cap and announced he was marrying the Clavin widow from Horseleap and bringing her to our home. So my mind was made up for me. I couldn't have stayed in the house with that woman. She'd a face would turn fresh milk. Margaret sent me the fare and I was on my way.

Marimichael went into a cotton mill when we got to Boston, same as her sister, and Margaret could have got me a start at the grocer's where she worked, but Ursie had bigger ideas.

She said, ‘You've a brain in your head, Nora. Use it. Nursing would be suitable. The uniforms are very attractive.’

But I liked the idea of going into service, somewhere where I'd have my own room.

I said, ‘If I'm going to wipe BTMs and mop up dribble I'd as soon do it for a nice sweet little baby as somebody who smells of sickness or some grouchy old feller. I'll go for a nurserymaid.’

‘Just be sure it's the right kind of family,’ she said. ‘A doctor, or a lawyer, like Mr Jauncey. Cultured, professional people. There are people who have money to run a full staff but no breeding. You don't want to end up with a family like that.’

I got a start with the Griffin family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to look after Loveday who was three and the baby who was on the way, Arthur. Ursie seemed to think they were good enough for me, even if they were a bit modern. Dr Griffin was a scientist at the university but he thought nothing of pushing the bassinet out on a weekend. There was only me, a housemaid, a woman who came in on Mondays to do the laundry and a man who helped with the garden. Mrs Griffin did all the cooking and I had every Sunday off and one night a week. I used to meet Margaret at a soda fountain and she'd give out to me about Ursie while we watched the boys go by. That's where we met Jimmy Swords and Frankie Mulcahy.

It's a funny thing about boys. They go around in pairs and if one of them is good-looking the other's sure to be a poor specimen. That was Frankie. He always looked like he'd lost a dollar and found a cent, but Margaret fell for him, and Jimmy was keen on me. The only problem with Jimmy and Frankie was they worked as fish porters. They were always washed and shaved and dressed in a nice clean collar and tie when we saw them, but there was still that smell. You can never get rid of it. Jimmy seemed steady though. We never quarrelled, and the Griffins liked him because he used to bring oysters for them or a lobster, when he came to walk me out.

I had my nursery and my own room up under the roof and I had my beau. I was very suited, but then Dr Griffin said he was moving to a different university, in California, and I had to decide whether to go with them. Ursie thought I should.

She said, ‘You've made a good start, Nora, now build on it. The Griffins think highly of you and you mustn't flit from position to position. It doesn't inspire confidence.’

But Jimmy didn't want me to go.

He said, ‘I'm putting money by. Stay in Boston and we'll get married. Next year.’

So the Griffins went off to California and I applied for a new position, in Beals Street, Brookline. The Kennedy family. They had a little one just walking, Joseph Patrick, and another one on the way.

I had to go to the house to be interviewed and inspected by Mrs Kennedy. She's only a year or two older than me and people say she has the secret of eternal youth. To look at us now you'd think I could give her a few years, but that first day I met her she seemed quite the little matron. First thing she told me was how she had to be most particular about the help she employed, because of her position.

She said, ‘My husband is president of a bank.’

The house was nothing to shout about and neither was the money they were offering.

She said, ‘And I expect you recognise me.’

But I didn't know her from Atty Hayes's donkey. She laughed.

She said, ‘You're a newcomer. If you were Boston-born you'd know my face from the dailies. I'm Mayor Fitzgerald's daughter.’

Well, you couldn't be in Boston five minutes without hearing of him, so that satisfied her. She rattled on, perched at her bureau like a neat little bird, telling me all about her travels and the big names she'd met. She even had tea brought in, and I still didn't know if I had the job or not.

‘I was my father's right-hand woman,’ she said. ‘My mother didn't have the nerves for public life so I went everywhere with him. But now of course I'm too busy running my own home. Mr Kennedy works very long hours in business.’

And that was the truth. I was there three weeks before I properly met him. He'd get home late and leave again early. He was a tall carrot-top of a man with a tombstone smile and ice-blue eyes. He came up to the nursery one Saturday morning and started throwing Joseph Patrick up in the air to make him squeal.

He said, ‘I'm Joe Kennedy. You have everything you need? Anything you need, tell Mrs Kennedy. Money's no object. And make sure this boy of mine eats his greens. I have big plans for him.’

Mrs K gave me a book to read the day I arrived, on how a nursery should be run. Everything was to be done by the clock. When the new baby came she was going to nurse it, but between feeds there was to be no picking it up or rocking the cradle. If it cried, it cried. And little Joseph Patrick wasn't to be played with, except for half an hour of nursery rhymes and physical training in the afternoon. He'd to learn to entertain himself with toys, and the only time he was allowed to snuggle on my lap was for his bedtime story.

She said, ‘Too much petting makes a child fussy and it's a very hard habit to break.’

‘Yes, Mrs Kennedy,’ I said. And I did try to follow her rules but it didn't seem a natural way to raise a child. Well, she didn't have to know everything that went on in my nursery. I had my routines and she had hers. She'd walk to St Aidan's every morning to early Mass, and then she'd do the marketing and write letters till lunchtime. Always a chicken sandwich and a glass of milk. In the afternoon she'd take a nap, and then have her hair done or go to the dressmaker's and once a week Mayor Fitzgerald would come to tea. The way Mrs K talked him up, ‘His Honour this, His Honour that,’ it was like expecting the President himself. It was such a let-down the first time I saw him. He was just a crafty-looking old knacker riding round in a limousine car, but Mrs K thought the sun shone out of her daddy's fundament.

Sometimes on a Friday night Mr K would have some people in for bridge, business gentlemen and their wives, but otherwise she didn't see a soul. Her mammy never visited, nor her sisters, and the neighbours on Beals Street kept to themselves.

The Ericksons' maid said, ‘She thinks she's the cat's pyjamas, your missis, but nobody round here's impressed.’

We knew war was coming. It seemed to have nothing to do with us back in 1914, but we could feel it just around the corner by the start of 1917. Mrs K said it was a terrible unsettled time to be bringing a new baby into the world but at least Mr Kennedy wouldn't have to go away to fight. She said he was too old, but he wasn't. He was twenty-nine, same as Jimmy Swords.

Jimmy and Frankie Mulcahy both volunteered. There were a lot of the Irish who wouldn't, not wanting to take sides with the English, not even against that terrible Kaiser, but Jimmy said, ‘I'm an American now and Americans are going to fight so I'm with them.’

Not Mr Kennedy though. All of a sudden he got a management position at the Schwab shipyard in Quincy, reserved occupation, and when they drafted him anyway he went to a tribunal to appeal and he won. Mrs K said they'd made an error when they tried to draft him because he was engaged in vital war work, but that was only because Mayor Fitzgerald had pulled strings to get him in at the shipyard. Whichever way you cut it, Joe Kennedy was a draft-dodger. But that's water under the bridge. God knows, we've had another war since then and what he got away with in 1917 he's paid for in buckets since.