The artist Paul Fryer came to stay with me in Somerset. With his raven black hair, dark eyes and compelling presence he always seemed to know what to do, even when it was the wrong thing. He dressed flamboyantly and had a penchant for costume. Over the past year he had turned up at my house garbed as a Bedouin, a Crusader, and a flirty housewife in a sensible frock. As an artist he was best known for his immense electrical devices. He liked to think big. He enjoyed science and knew a bit about chemistry. He manufactured his own drugs, and was always telling me about chemical compounds (though his DMT turned out to be useless to the point of legal when I smoked a pipe of it). He had arrived last summer for the Glastonbury Festival in a baggy white suit with his turn-ups full of pills. He picked out a handful and beamed a smile. ‘The on button’ he said. The pills in the other leg were the off button.
We went to eat at Gigi’s, an old-school Italian restaurant in Glastonbury. It had an aquarium with a rubber fish, a faded poster of the Colosseum in very light traffic, and a framed photo of Sophia Loren on the Artex wall. Paul warmed to the place and said it reminded him of Mama Mia in Leeds. These old-wave Italian and French restaurants were getting thinner on the ground, but were more authentic than many of the ones that were replacing them, like Frankie & Johnnies or Café Rouge. A middle-aged woman sat at the desk in the corner and totted up the bills. I must have been to Gigi’s forty times in the past three years but because they had given up looking for repeat customers – all their trade apart from me was tourists – they always greeted me as a newcomer. When I paid, the woman always asked ‘Where are you-a from?’
At dinner, I asked Paul to recommend a cocktail for mum. He said without hesitation
‘Nitrogen. It’s what the CIA use in political assassinations if they don’t want any traces to be left.’
‘How does it work? Isn’t nitrogen relatively neutral?’ I asked.
‘Yes. That’s how it works. Ordinary air is about 70 per cent nitrogen and 20 per cent oxygen. But we need that oxygen to live. So pure nitrogen gently deprives the body of oxygen. You don’t even realise you are dying.’
It sounded quite promising. Almost relaxing.
‘How does she take it?’ I asked.
‘Best done in a Spitfire gas mask,’ Paul replied munching on battered calamari. ‘I’ve got two.’
I imagined my mum lying on the bed with a fighter-pilot gas mark strapped to her face. It was not the image she was after. Not Ophelia on the bed, with Stanley as her Hamlet. (Stan was not ideally cast as Hamlet. He was a Pandarus at a push. He was not a man of introspection, except when he was wondering how near it was to drinks time and what a certain woman would look like naked.) And Ophelia was very wrong too. Let’s be honest, it’s Lady Macbeth, though I have no idea of the actual fantasy in Susie’s head.
The deathbed image that she imagined would be photographed and published in newspapers (even in 2017 she considered the Internet irrelevant) was of her lying on a lacy bedspread, composed, resolute, like those marble effigies you see in churches. Not dead but asleep. Though in this case not asleep but dead. Thus she conquered even death. Her sunny bedroom filled with soft spring light. The clothes folded in the drawers. Her last to-do list fully completed. Dressing gowns hung up, shoes in pairs. The en suite bathroom sparkling. Stanley and her, laid side by side, holding hands, as though taking an after-lunch nap. Stanley, his eyes closed, but for once not snoring or dribbling. A few well-chosen books (for the photo, not for reading) on the bedside table. Downstairs everything was in order. Maybe a few glasses and a bottle of bubbly on the kitchen island for the pompiers who would tramp in with their heavy boots, and after being told by the doctor that there was no hope, retire respectfully downstairs, drink Susie’s health and exchange stories about what a wonderful woman she was, and how brave to chose the place and time of her death. Some of them would have had previous dealings with her. She loved the pompiers. Her voice fluttered as she said the word. They were one of a number of subjects to which she frequently returned to prove the superiority of life in France over that in Britain. The doctor was another one. The district nurse a third. The mayor, as we know, another. Add the politeness of French children, and of course the food and drink, and she had quite enough to keep the theme alive for as long as you could listen.
The pompiers were a sign of how magnificent French men are. The implication being that the British are useless. They used to roar round in their fire engine to her place when she lived out in the country and crash through the front door in heavy boots and gauntlets to lift Stanley onto the bed when he fell over. Four of them. Without complaint. From Susie’s telling, they seemed somehow to feel it was a privilege to spend an hour or two doing this. She would open a bottle of fizz for them afterwards, and flirt with them and entrance them with stories about her glamorous past while I imagine somewhere – on the other side of the Tarn – a house burnt down.
I couldn’t see a British fireman putting up with her for long.
‘You use pure nitrogen,’ Paul continued. ‘The brain doesn’t panic. It doesn’t notice, and British Oxygen, ironically, will deliver a cylinder. I’ve got the number. You have to put a deposit on the bottle but it’s refundable.’ Susie would like that thrifty touch. It might require a codicil to her will. She loved those. They were her chief disciplinary tool among her family. To my first-born son Guy I leave the returned deposit on the nitrogen canister.
We were discussing other options, Paul running through a list of nerve agents he was familiar with. ‘The KGB love poison. They killed a man the other week in Istanbul.’
The waiter passing the table with a pizza, heard, stopped and said ‘Si, with a poison umbrella.’
We turned to look at him. This felt like a major breach in security to me. Even the waiter in Gigi’s knew what I was planning. But it was a good idea. You could kill Stanley with an umbrella very effectively. You’d just hand it to him and watch him trip over it and smash his head.
But the umbrella fatality did start me thinking along a different and possibly more fruitful line: political assassination. Of Susie, by a foreign power. My hands would be clean. In the late 1970s and ’80s she had had a creditable career in subversive political activism, was a regular visitor to the anti-American protest at Greenham Common and undertook Cruise Watches, when at night she parked up in a lay-by in wait for a missile to emerge from its bunker, hopefully on an exercise and not to start World War 3, and head into the English countryside to set up for a test firing. My mum’s mission was to rush to a phone box, inform other members of the Cruise Watch telephone tree, all on land lines of course, and then tail the nuclear missile and if necessary disrupt its firing. Very annoyingly none ever emerged from Greenham when my mum was in the lay-by with her Thermos and – no doubt – well-thought-out picnic. I would have liked to have heard her story of how she averted a nuclear holocaust in the dead of night in some Berkshire village by wrestling with a man on top of a tank armed with nothing more than a Cox’s Orange Pippin in a string bag.
Susie was definitely at some point being watched by the CIA. In the 1980s the phone at home was tapped, but as so often with US military interventions, it didn’t go quite to plan. When you picked up the receiver you could hear old conversations being replayed, with Americans commenting over them.
Somewhere on a computer chip deep under the Pentagon there was probably a file on my mother. Albeit a slim one. She certainly claimed there was, and it was a matter of pride to her. Quite how I could persuade the CIA to dig it out, review it and see her as a security threat so great that she required termination with extreme prejudice, I wasn’t certain.
In the 1980s Susie joined the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, and then led the Fairford Peace Group. I say led, because its constitution was precisely the kind of dictatorship that the Group was committed to eradicating elsewhere in the world. She still subscribed forty years later to the Campaign Against Arms Trade magazine, surely the most hopeful and hopeless publication ever produced. It has the very annoying feature of looking from a distance like an old copy of Private Eye, and many times I smiled to see it in Susie’s downstairs toilet but ended staring at headlines like: STOPPING THE WORLD ARMS TRADE. PROGRESS SO FAR. And DONATE TODAY! (I have not added the exclamation mark.)
Fairford was the Gloucestershire village where we lived; it had a huge US airbase on its outskirts. It was during the Kissinger years and the US had a policy of keeping armed nuclear warheads in the air round the clock in case of a strike on the US, or, I suppose, the UK. The tankers that refuelled these bombers took off from Fairford at all hours of the day and night, and Susie argued, quite reasonably, that it placed our sleepy little Cotswold village high up the Kremlin’s list of targets. She was never overawed by a challenge, and she decided, with her peace group, five timid locals, to reverse US global military policy and get the base closed down.
Once a year, to distract the public, the Americans and the Ministry of Defence put on an air show, ostensibly for the RAF Benevolent Fund, featuring the Red Arrows and other acrobatic aircraft, which drew thousands of spectators to the base. On the far side of the runway a lot of boozed-up politicians from distant, repressive regimes turned up to buy armaments under cover of this fun day out for all the family. Objective number two of the Fairford Peace Group, after defeating the Pentagon, was to disrupt the air show and stop the arms fair. Susie devised a plan. This is what I was saying about how she had changed. She had said to me ‘I was a bit of a mouse before your father died.’ That had changed. ‘I discovered that widows were on their own, second-class citizens,’ she continued, ‘and while I think men should be the leaders, if you haven’t got a man, you have to do it yourself.’
My father died in winter. He was killed in a car crash on 23 December 1968. He was driving home for Christmas. The line in the cheesy Christmas song has always hurt me to hear. I guess because I hear him saying it. Anyway, we kids got the news on Christmas Eve. I remember looking at the presents around the tree and seeing ones for him, and wanted to move them, in case they reminded Mum that Daddy was dead.
We had a skiing holiday booked in the New Year and didn’t cancel it. I approved of that. I felt that by the day after his death, the time for mourning was over. It was a holiday – it was Christmas! – and therefore we should all be happy. It set the marker for grieving in the Kennaway family. You just bloody well get on with life. But I have little recollection of the skiing holiday. I was stunned. On the first anniversary of his death Susie decided to take us on safari. It was planned as a diversionary exercise I imagine, and was well intended. But while we were there something happened. The transformation of my mum. From mouse to international political militant on a CIA watch list.
We trundled down dusty tracks, looking at animals by day and at night stayed in a good hotel perched on the lip of the Ngorongoro Crater. The dining room was cantilevered over a huge drop and had a breathtaking view of the herds of animals on the valley floor a quarter of a mile away. At meal times the Kennaway family, my mum and four kids between 9 and 15, were led by the maitre d’ through the dining room to a table at the back with a view of the dumpsters and air-conditioning units. I must emphasise that this happened in 1969, which was a different era. Now sexism in Kenya is probably much worse. Susie, after a couple of days of being directed to this table, stopped the maitre d’ as he turned from his lectern to direct us to our gloomy corner, and said ‘No. We are going to sit over there …’
She pointed to an unoccupied table by the plate-glass window overlooking the teeming herds of wildebeests and flocks of flamingos.
‘I am sorry. That table is reserved,’ he said. ‘Please follow me madam.’
‘Stop,’ she said. ‘The fact that I am a woman unaccompanied by a man does not give you the right to give me the worst table in the restaurant. We are going to sit over there. Follow me children.’
She then marched the four of us through the dining room and told us to sit down. I expect I was a bit hangdog. The whole restaurant muttered as we passed. A woman without a man! Possibly divorced. Demanding proper service! The very cheek of it. The maitre d’ with his tiny bow tie hurried after us, and told us again that the table was reserved. I happened to know by whom because I had seen them: an airline pilot and his gleaming family. I have him chisel jawed in a pale blue safari suit with a wide belt sewn onto the jacket. He was travelling with three children but no spouse. I stood up.
‘Sit down,’ my mother said. And to the maitre d’ she said ‘Can you bring us some menus, please?’
The maitre d’ was the undisputed big beast of the dining room, but was being told what to do by a female of the species. Now I see it as courageous and beautiful, but at the time I was ashamed of her. The airline pilot later that evening asked my mum for a dance while we kids larked around in the lifts and the lobby. I watched Susie waltzing with this strange man and thought Great, maybe she’ll marry him and we’ll be a normal family again.
Soon after, Susie discovered we weren’t as rich as my father said we were and she set about starting a business: a restaurant called Pinks, in Fairford, Gloucestershire, where she employed only women, and made a point of always giving women the best tables.
So the Maitre d’ in the Ngorongoro Crater Hotel was the first to meet the irresistible force that Susie became as a widow. Many more met the same fate. Men who thought they could overlook her and ignore her. Men who found out they were wrong.
One such person was Mr Melville-Ross. His name sticks in my memory forty years later. He had the misfortune to be the chairman of the Nationwide Building Society, which sponsored the RAF Air Tattoo. My mother’s plan to sabotage the air show and arms fair possessed her trademark meticulousness. She hounded Melville-Ross in every way she could. She co-ordinated a pinpoint bombardment of letters accusing him of abetting war crimes, and organised a mass withdrawal of funds by customers of his bank. He eventually cancelled the sponsorship. I have no doubt that despite the passage of time, and however doddery Mr Melville-Ross is now, the words Susie Kennaway whispered in his ear would give him a nasty start.
A second front in Susie’s war against the Tattoo involved dragooning the members of the peace group and anyone else she could conscript, i.e. us children (though I managed to desert), to infiltrate the air show posing as employees and hand out pamphlets which looked – at first sight – like official programmes, but which were in fact subversive publications designed and written by Susie, featuring gruesome images and harsh facts about war. Susie made everyone dress in white shirts and black trousers and personally sewed shoulder bags so her little army would look convincing.
The following year I was pressganged into the ranks. This time Susie made placards which featured a drawing of a child splattered with blood holding up their hands, under which was written THE ONLY ARMS WE NEED. The members of the peace group plus me and my three siblings were lined up on the roadside (a specific distance apart) and made to shake this hard-core image of a child with its head torn off at the cars queuing to enter the air show.
At the pre-demo briefing Susie gave the order for us to shout ‘Shame! Shame on you!’ as we stood on the verge, but the peace group were mainly quite shy people, and my heart was certainly not in the project. I was 18, and quite wanted to go in and have a look at the aeroplanes. We all ended up just mumbling something quietly unless she was watching us. I remember standing in burning summer heat – it may have been the 1976 scorcher – being shouted at by men crawling past in their cars. I let my placard drop into the grass and tried to saunter back home but you couldn’t get round Susie that easily and she made me pick it up and get back in position. It was a ghastly day. One small child was so alarmed at the placard he burst into tears and a mother yelled at me that I had ruined their day out.
So … all I had to do was anonymously inform the CIA that my mum, who, I would tell them, had fled from Fairford to avoid being questioned for anti-American military sabotage in the 1970s, had resurfaced in France and was up to her old tricks again. My mum had donated all the documents relating to the activities of the Fairford Peace Group to the Faculty of Peace Studies at Bradford University. If the Americans had no records of her – it just made her more code red. Telephone intercepts would prove she was trying to get hold of a poison. Her target? Who knew? I had once seen a picture of Henry Kissinger on holiday in the South of France, maybe I could say her plan was to settle an old score. With any luck President Trump’s CIA wouldn’t think twice about liquidating her. Then I wouldn’t have to worry.