DAVID HOCKNEY

K by Nigel Nicolson

K for me is Kay – and Kay is a girl and an intersection of small streets named after her. Let me explain.

It was April 1944. The front line ran through the middle of Cassino, and we were sitting in (preferably under) the ruins facing the Germans at a distance that varied between 200 yards and the thickness of a wall.

The town had been pulverized by bombardment, and only from air-photographs could one distinguish its original plan. From these we could make out quite distinctly a criss-cross of roads near the centre, in the unmistakable shape, odd for a grid-patterned town, of the letter K. So it was code-named Kay, like a hurricane.

The girl? She worked for the American officers’ club in Naples, which was immensely popular with the British, since the food was better than in our club, and the girls prettier.

I think she was called Kay Summers – anyhow, Kay. We loved her. We told her about her eponymous road-junction, and said that we had it named after her. She asked to see it, and one quiet night we led her, dressed as a Grenadier Guardsman, to stand for fifteen seconds on the spot where the downstroke of the K meets the diagonal. She was illuminated by a sudden parachute flare – but that was by a happy chance.

Kay has been obliterated by the rebuilding of Cassino. Kay has been rebuilt too, slightly stouter, but has not been obliterated. She teaches a class of juniors in Tulsa, Oklahoma.