is to be seen’.
Always loving and kind towards Kick, he told her that Palm Beach had been unseasonably cold and that she hadn’t missed much, and that Jack had been in hospital for two months: ‘we are trying to find out what is the matter with him’. Then he wrote, ‘I am terribly proud of the way you handled yourself over there and your whole attitude towards everything and I am sure you will get a great deal out of your year abroad … Try to get all you can out of this trip, because it will be of great help to you in everything you do hereafter.’10
Kick wrote back uncomplainingly: ‘Understand perfectly – Really didn’t expect to go but thought I might as well ask.’ She wasn’t, however, about to give up on her dream of Derek and Cambridge. ‘It would be more fun to go later when everything could be arranged. Everyone says the crew races are better than the hockey match anyway.’11 She kept her letters home breezy and cheery. ‘I still have no asma so everything is daisy’; ‘It has been raining nearly every day since we have been back’; ‘Going to see La Boheme this coming Sat. Really, I shall be educated.’ She went to lectures on Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare’s Henry V: ‘it was excellent and I understood it quite well’.12
But she was also determined that Rose should not spoil her summer plans. Her hint about the boat races disguised the fact that Richardson, persistent and not prepared to give Kick up easily, had issued an invitation for her to be his date for his college’s prestigious May Ball at Cambridge (which actually takes place in June).
The only problem was that Rose was planning to visit Kick in Paris at that time. Kick knew that her mother’s presence would stop her from going to the May Ball, and she was determined not to let this happen. It was the first time she defied her in matters of the heart. It would not be the last. She tried to persuade Rose to visit earlier in the spring: ‘School lets out the tenth of July and by that time think I shall be quite ready to get home. So it would be rather silly just to come over and go right home for you.’13 She did, however, drop in that Richardson was writing to her. She had promised that she would stay away from French men, having decided, though, that they were ‘really not as bad as they are made out to be’.14
Kick still suffered from homesickness. She was only fifteen, a continent away from her beloved family, and surrounded by people speaking French. Mother Superior wrote to Rose with an update on Kathleen’s progress, on her ‘home-sickness’ and on her French, which she still found so difficult. Despite not wanting Rose to spoil her Cambridge plans, she desperately missed her: ‘If it is not too much trouble Mother please come over because it will be so much easier to get through this year.’15
Kick was clashing with the Reverend Mother, and told Rose that she had been criticized for being ‘rather stuck on my own ideas and won’t listen to anyone else’.16 The Reverend Mother was right to see that she had a stubborn streak and would stick to her guns if she thought she was right.
One of Kick’s Noroton friends, Marie Celeste O’Malley, was visiting Europe with her sister. Marie Celeste was then staying on at Neuilly to get some extra tuition in Latin and Maths before attending Manhattanville College. Kick told her mother that the two girls were on their way to Garmisch for the Winter Olympics. Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler had presided over the opening ceremony on 6 February.
Kick’s friendship with her English roommates continued to flourish. They were her first taste of England and she was intrigued. Derek had written to her from England telling her all about the funeral of King George V who had died on 20 January. His eldest son, David, had succeeded as Edward VIII. Kick reported to her mother that Derek thought the funeral ‘the most impressive sight he had seen while in London’.17 Kick had listened to the coverage of the funeral over the radio. Her English friends attended a service, and Kick reported to Eunice that they now wore black bands on their arms. She was genuinely amazed at their response to the King’s death: ‘Have never seen anything like the love they had for the old king and more than love for the new king.’
She was also aware of the gossip that circulated about the wild new King: ‘Mrs Larkin herd some stories of the new Prince [crossed out] King – She has plenty of Scandal.’18 All the girls knew that the dashing Prince of Wales had been in a relationship with the married American Mrs Wallis Simpson. Having so much enjoyed the lecture on Henry V, the play about the former wild and dissolute Prince of Wales, Kick loved the idea of the handsome raffish Prince falling in love with a twice-divorced American, who was fashionable but not especially beautiful. Kick was beginning to express an interest in the English aristocracy. She told her social-climbing mother that ‘the Earl of Dudley and [his sister] Lady Patricia Ward’ were at Gstaad.
Kick was approaching her sixteenth birthday and she wanted some fun. ‘Just think am almost 16 years old. Sweet Sixteen. Oh My,’ she wrote to Eunice.19 She was always finding funny stories about Convent life to amuse her siblings. She was given the honour of being sacristan at mass, which involved ‘laying out the Priest’s things and fixing the altar’. By mistake she poured oil rather than wine into the priest’s bottle. Luckily her mistake was discovered before the priest got round to drinking the oil.20
She was also learning just how attractive she was to boys. Rose intuited that Kick was up to something with Derek. Just before Kick’s birthday on 20 February, she cabled her parents to suggest a time for a birthday phone call. There was a mix-up and she forgot to put in the word ‘birthday’. Rose feared the worst, panicked and telephoned immediately. Not because she thought Kick was ill or homesick, but because she feared that her headstrong daughter had eloped. Kick wrote: ‘When you said you thought I had eloped I didn’t know what to think. Hope you don’t think I’m gallivanting like a chicken over here. Thought something dreadful had happened when I heard you were calling.’21
She had a lovely birthday. Honey Fitz had sent her candy, which she couldn’t eat until Lent was over, as she had given up sweets. Her English friends gave her a picture frame, a Spanish friend a compact, and she got a huge box of crackers ‘from the Irish girls’.22 She went to a movie and then enjoyed a birthday chocolate cake and read her cables from her parents and several of her Noroton friends. She kept them all.
The rain continued to pour down throughout February. Kick was depressed about hardly seeing the sun, and longed for ‘Paris in the Spring’.23
She had heard from her family about Jack’s serious illness, and she was delighted when he was well enough to write to her. ‘Thought you might have died off,’ she wrote, disguising her deep anxiety about him. ‘Glad to hear you are finally out of hospital and getting very tan under Florida’s sunny skies.’24 She gossiped about all the girls who had been asking after him, and teased him about them finding ‘Jack Kennedy the cutest thing’. She told him that she was planning a trip to Italy and that the following year she wanted to go to Germany to learn German.25
In February, shortly after her birthday, she attended a magnificent ball at the Paris opera house. She was dazzled by the gowns, the jewels and the women wearing plumes in their hair. She wore a white gown trimmed with velvet, and danced with a young officer who
