The Autobiography of Devon Miles

Knight Industries

I was still posted to Marseille in March of 1949, but already knew that I would be leaving for Canada at the end of the summer after a visit home. After I had resolved my feelings about Wilhelm Busch, my time in the port city was quite enjoyable and I made quite a few friends and acquaintances, including some through my old employer, Monsieur Marché. I also met quite a few British and American ex-soldiers who returned to the area to sort out their old demons, so I was in no way surprised to hear that Wilton Knight was planning a visit.

What was a surprise was that he was coming on his honeymoon, since he had never once mentioned that there was anyone special in his life. At the time of his letter, I just assumed that it was his engineer's personality; personal issues always took a distant second to the mechanical or electrical or hydrological or whatever interesting engineering dilemma he faced, and I was taken by surprise when he wrote, "By the way, Devon, I'm getting married…"

I supposed that he would marry some typical American girl-next-door type. Perhaps a schoolteacher, secretary, or nurse. In other words, the sort of girl who would make sure that a fine dinner was on the table at 6 o'clock, that Wilton's shirts were laundered and pressed before he donned them each morning and who would encourage his endeavors with the sort of Hollywood campus spirit that we British had come to associate with young Americans. I was surprised-no shocked would be a better description-that Elizabeth Blackstone Knight did not fit that stereotype one iota.

The newlyweds arrived by plane from Paris on their way to Monte Carlo by way of Marseille and Saint Tropez. I met them at the airfield, expecting a laughing young girl on Wilton's arm. Instead, by his side walked a tall, thin woman with darting eyes and cheekbones sharp enough to slice steel with. She wore rather heavy, expensive jewelry and a silk kerchief to keep her hair in place in the wind and propeller-wash of the runway. She seemed to take everything in with the sort of fascination that a pawn broker has when evaluating an item to be handed over. Wilton, on the other hand hadn't changed a bit, except for cane he used to balance out his walk, which would be forever effected by the damage to his foot.

I quickly found out that theirs had been a so-called "whirlwind romance". They met when Wilton had discussed financial backing with Elizabeth's father, Garthe Blackstone. Blackstone had made his money in the early days of commercial aviation and had for a time a rather lucrative business in obtaining airmail contracts which he subcontracted to airlines both large and small and even to some individual barnstormers in the hinterlands. He had also quietly invested in some of the early airplane designers' first models. By the time of his initial acquaintance with my friend, he had become what we now call a "venture capitalist" and he saw great promise in some of Wilton's ideas. Apparently so did Elizabeth, but her way of "investing" in Wilton was more personal. As I understand it, Blackstone thought this was an excellent way of keeping tabs on his investment, knowing his daughter as he did.

In those days after World War II, the scientific community was studying nuclear power and weaponry, rocketry, antibiotics, synthetic fibers, and many other technologies that had germinated from the seeds of war. Wilton was interested in other applications of those synthetic fibers, reasoning that they could be the basis for strong, yet light-weight substitutes for metals. His line of inquiry would eventually lead him to develop the molecular bonded shell that protects KITT. Both Blackstone and Elizabeth immediately saw the tremendous potential of Wilton's project, both for good and evil. Neither he nor I knew this at the time; his mind was brimming with myriad ideas for inventions that could revolutionize our world and he was besotted with Elizabeth and surprised that someone as sophisticated as she would pay any attention at all to someone like him. He could not conceive that she (or her father, who had invested in him generously) could have any ulterior motives or that both of them enjoyed power and it's co-conspirator, wealth. I had been immersed in both my duties representing my country and my quest to close the war chapters of my life. My desire to return to something approaching normality partially blinded me to the machinations that the Blackstone's would eventually reveal. However, I knew instinctively that I did not like Elizabeth.

They stayed in Marseille for several days, turning down my offer to stay in my apartment with me in order to indulge in a fine hotel in the heart of the city. Marseille is an ancient town, dating back to the time of the Romans and Greeks and it has some excellent museums, a fine opera and often hosts Grand Prix auto races and part of the Tour de France bicycle marathon. I took the Knights to the opera one evening and was pleasantly surprised to see that Wilton enjoyed it quite a bit. Elizabeth seemed rather bored, claiming that the Italian lyrics were incomprehensible to her and therefore she didn't have a clear idea of what was happening. However, she did enjoy herself when she received compliments on her looks and her stylish evening costume. The next day we rented a small sailboat and enjoyed a day on the water, complete with a picnic hamper with sandwiches, strawberries, and champagne. While Wilton was musing about ways to improve the design of the sailboat and the sails, Elizabeth did something rather strange. She curled up against Wilton's side and began to slide a finger erotically over his bare shoulders and chest. When, after a moment or two, she had her husband's full attention, she looked over at me, winked and batted her eyelashes at me. This exhibition sent a deep chill down my spine and I turned away and literally jumped overboard. I swam about a bit in the warm water trying to comprehend what had just happened and what possible motive Elizabeth could have. Wilton hadn't seen what she did, and the moment was over in a second, but it was indelibly lodged in my brain. To this very day, thinking about it makes me slightly nauseous.

The newlyweds soon left Marseille and spent a week in Saint Tropez. The town had not yet been "discovered" by the international set despite being a favorite destination of Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, but French "New Wave" cinema directors were beginning to show some interest. In any event, it had beautiful beaches and had played an important role in recent history as the first place in France to be liberated in "Operation Dragoon", which Wilton would have fought in, had he not been seconded to the OSS. In his postcard, he reported that Elizabeth was enjoying the sunshine very much and while she worked on her tan, he visited some war sites. She was less thrilled with the cuisine, which after the classic Marseille bouillabaisse, they both found to be somewhat disappointing.

Their last stop on their honeymoon tour was the Principality of Monaco. Prince Louis II had recently died and his grandson, Rainier III took the throne. However, the principal reason for their stop there was the Le Grand Casino. Wilton was not much of a gambler, knowing how much advantage the house usually had, but Elizabeth enjoyed the games and the atmosphere, and so they spent a week in the shadow of the Belle Epoque edifices. During the day, they would tour sites such as Oceanographic Museum and spend their nights in the casino. Apparently, Elizabeth was quite good at games of chance, and left the principality somewhat richer than when she arrived. Wilton was already doing quite well in his business ventures and so enjoyed indulging his wife at the tables.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I arrived in Quebec in time to enjoy the wonderful colors of the Fall leaves, but soon enough learned how cold the wind could be off the St. Lawrence River. Quebec is a wonderful place and is the only walled city in all of North America. The old town could have been lifted in its entirety from any old French quarter except for the Quebecois accent, which took me a while to adapt to. The cuisine was French as well, with local products adapted so that sometimes food that had been familiar to me in Marseille took on an unusual twist. And that first winter of 1950 found me learning to ski and ice fish; activities that, unfortunately are rare to find in southern California and Nevada.

As the second Secretary of the British mission I had a variety of tasks, one of which was coordinating with the local authorities on cultural and educational events. I mentioned previously that my mother's attempts at matchmaking were doomed because I had met an American in Marseille. Carolyn was a writer and taught Contemporary Literature in a small college in New England. We met at an international writer's conference the year before when I was still in Europe and it was indeed love at first sight. Her marriage was all but dead. Her husband found it difficult to resign himself to a wife whose writing was garnering her growing attention, while he toiled away at an uninteresting job in the family business. There were two young children as well and one of his complaints was that Carolyn was not putting them (and him) before her writing. At the time I couldn't comment on that one way or another. Later, when I got to know the children, I saw that they had an excellent, attentive, and loving mother. However, when I first met her, Carolyn was engaged in a very angry divorce proceeding with her husband and, I might add, his family.

At the time that we met, I had no idea that I would be posted to Canada, and lest I become a factor in the dissolution of her marriage, Carolyn and I could only exchange a few, bland letters. I had let it be known that I would very much like a position in North America or the Caribbean but being almost at the bottom of the totem pole, I had very little chance of getting my wish. To say that I was surprised at being sent to Quebec is a grand understatement. What extraordinary luck to be less than a day's drive from Carolyn!

By February, when the weather had just barely started to warm and when snow was still a weekly occurrence, Carolyn's divorce papers were signed. At last we were able to communicate freely between each other, writing almost daily and calling each other on the weekends. My supervisors must have wondered why I tried so hard to put together an international seminar of contemporary writers but unfortunately, I was not able to bring the project to fruition. However, during the spring school break, while her children spent the week with her in-laws and now ex-husband, Carolyn came up to Quebec for a lovely, romantic holiday with me. Eventually I met the children and it felt like we could become a family.

I continued to hear from Wilton. He was becoming more and more successful, developing many things for the military, the aviation industry and getting into robotics before anyone really knew what that was. He never spoke of his war experiences, but it was clear from his projects that he was intent on finding methods to make hand-to-hand combat obsolete, or at least to render it as un-lethal as possible. He was soon a multi-millionaire and while Elizabeth enjoyed the world of wealth, Wilton couldn't care less. He was apt to show up to the office in a worn pair of chinos, an old flannel shirt with a slide rule in the pocket and a pencil behind his ear, much to his wife's despair. Money, however, could not buy them everything. Toward the end of 1950, Wilton confided that Elizabeth had been pregnant but had miscarried.

They came to Quebec early the next spring and met Carolyn. We had been discussing marriage but decided to wait until I knew what my next posting would be before we decided anything definite.

I was expecting the four of us to have an enjoyable time together, although I still did not like Elizabeth. It turned out that Carolyn found her to be equally unlikeable. She called her "fashionably manipulative" and really didn't endear herself to Wilton with her cool response to his wife. For her part, Elizabeth didn't hide the fact that she looked down her nose at Carolyn, a single, working mother long before the term was ever coined. I also suspect that she might have been jealous of Carolyn's identity as a mother of two. Despite the beautiful spring, the relationship between the four of us was rather frosty. The Knights returned to California to try once again to start a family. Wilton's letters became less frequent, but he never completely stopped communicating with me. He mostly wrote about how distraught Elizabeth was about her difficulties in having a successful pregnancy, experiencing several more miscarriages over the next few years. I heard very little over that period about Knight Industries.

Carolyn and I had hoped that my next posting would be back in Europe, the Caribbean or anywhere there was a French or German speaking country. I would be a First Secretary and much more secure and in a place where we could be married and raise the children. Since she was a citizen of an ally, there was no difficulty in my marriage to her in terms of my diplomatic work at the time; if I progressed to a much more senior level, we would have some issues to resolve. Typically, however, First Secretaries were sent to several different missions and embassies before moving up further, so we had years before her citizenship would have to be addressed.

We were shattered, naturally, when I was to be sent to Africa. In the early 1950s the continent appeared calm on the surface, but I knew that there was turmoil beneath the surface that would inevitably boil to the surface. The end of the British Raj in India and the fighting that erupted there during the partition and the next year in the Levant over the newly born Israeli state was the indicator that liberation movements would break out in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia in the years to come. I was first sent to Tunis in Libya which had just declared independence. There was no way that I could marry Carolyn under those circumstances. We discussed my leaving the diplomatic service, but I couldn't imagine what else I could do to support us. The idea of begging for a position in Father's bank made my stomach twist into a knot and I had insufficient education to become a professor in the field of International Relations. I thought about returning to school to join the law profession, but it seemed impractical to start all over again at the same time as raising a young family. And I had to admit to both Carolyn and myself, that I did not want to leave diplomatic service, and even looked forward to a certain degree, to being in the midst of African Independence movement. With many regrets, tears, and much heartache, we ended our relationship.

Libya had gained its independence from Italy through a British-administered United Nations trusteeship at the end of December of 1951, by which time I had been in-country for five months. I stayed another six months as part of a team negotiating continued British military support and watched the parliamentary election devolve into chaos over the course of the spring. At the beginning of September of 1952, after a few months home for a holiday, I joined the mission in South Africa as the push and pull of apartheid triggered ever greater demonstrations and counter-reactions. I was there for quite some time, long enough to learn a great deal of Afrikaans and to come to intensely dislike the South African government.

I received a letter at the end of 1953 while I was stationed in Pretoria from Wilton, announcing the birth of his son Garthe. He informed me that his son had been a bouncing eight-and-a-half pounds, born by caesarian section and that he and Elizabeth were besides themselves with joy. His father-in-law, although battling cancer, was also thrilled with his grandson and namesake. It seemed like everyone in the Knight-Blackstone family had finally achieved all that they desired, and I sent Wilton a congratulatory letter and sent the baby some traditional shweshwe cloth in a typical, indigo-colored pattern. Wilton later reported that it made Garthe's blue eyes appear even more blue.

I spent the rest of decade in Morocco, my old playground of Algeria and in Kenya. Wilton informed me in one of only two letters sent in 1955, that not quite twenty months after Garthe's birth, Elizabeth had delivered a little girl that they named "Jennifer". While Garthe took strongly after the Knight side of the family in looks, Jennifer was right from the start a miniature version of her mother.

In 1960, I was briefly sent to what was then called Tanganyika (to become Tanzania shortly), before being recalled home prior to being sent to Germany.

Father had not been well for some time and George was carrying more and more of the burden of the bank. At the same time, Mother was becoming rather more forgetful. Arthur, as the eldest brother asked to meet with George and I to discuss our parents' conditions.

It seemed that Father's years of smoking had finally caused cancer of the lungs, although he was in denial, saying only that the Great Smog of 1952 was the cause of his chronic cough and that with age, his breathing was naturally worsening. As the aristocrat that he was, he did not think much of the National Health Service and was convinced that his doctor, a young Jamaican, was incorrect about the diagnosis. He was much more concerned with Mother's obvious early senility. He begged us to make sure that if he ever could not care for her in their home, that we would hire a live-in nurse. He was adamant that we not hospitalize her.

Of course, my brothers and I wanted to make sure that our parents were comfortable and well-cared for. Arthur and George certainly had the funds to insure that there would be no reason for them not to remain in their home and not to have the professionals around them to provide for their needs. Some renovations were made to their town home to make it more comfortable and safer for them and I was delegated to keep them company in the country house until the construction was finished.

It was a difficult time for all of us, but since I was with them all day, every day while my brothers were in London, I watched them decline by millimeters. Father spent increasing amounts of time in his favorite chair, alternately reading and dozing. His once forceful baritone sometimes could not sustain itself over a long sentence or when he was tired and would be nothing more than a hoarse, forced whisper. I noticed that at those times, Mother became more anxious and nervous, no longer able to understand that he was mortally ill and in need of her patience and understanding. Indeed, as the days and weeks went by, she had less and less patience and ability of attend to a task and would become aggravated and angry when the world no longer seemed to work as it once had.

When we finally got back to London, I asked for (and was granted) an extension of my leave from work. It was obvious that Father did not have many more days to live. Once back in the town house he took to his bed and never again left it. On the other hand, the changes in the house, small as they were, only increased Mother's confusion. I would find her walking around at all hours of the day or night, often walking into closets, thinking they were the front door or the large saloon, or unable to find her way out of the kitchen with its doors to the backyard, pantry, larder, and hallway.

I remember as clearly as if it were just this morning when my brothers, sisters-in-law and I surrounded Father's bed. He had summoned me at about 5 a.m., knowing that he was going to die soon and asked me to call for the others. Although he was having difficulty breathing, he was lucid until the end, speaking to each one of us in turn. Mother was too confused to join us for any length of time, but Father did have a last moment with her before she wandered out of the room again. And then he quietly, easily, passed on. Mother would join him eight months later.