Priscilla Read online

  My mother also told me that Priscilla was at one time engaged to the actor Robert Donat, whom I had seen in The 39 Steps, and yet this interested me less than her life in France, even if I did wonder why she had chosen Raymond over Donat.

  Priscilla died in 1982, but her fate obscurely moved me. What had gone on in France? What had she done during the war? Why did she not return to England after getting out of the concentration camp(s)? Why did her father – by then a well-known author and broadcaster – never mention on the airwaves or to my mother the fact that his eldest daughter was isolated throughout the war in Occupied France? I pictured her crouched before an illegal radio-set in a Paris atelier, listening to my grandfather’s voice on the BBC, speaking to the troops. Did he ever transmit to Priscilla a personal message that only she could interpret, like one of those mystifying coded messages to the Resistance, such as Venus has a pretty navel or The hippo is not carnivorous? Could Priscilla have been in the Resistance?

  And what was the bond that existed between Priscilla and her first husband which compelled her to keep bobbing back to see him, despite the fact that she had remarried?

  Raymond’s first wife could not be mentioned. She had run off with his best man at the end of the Second World War, leaving Raymond to bring up their two small children. Raymond never forgave her and he never saw her again.

  Priscilla was thirty-one when she married Raymond, and a nervous stepmother to Tracey and Carleton, who were six and four at the time. I knew from my mother how sorely Priscilla had wanted her own children, and how the lack of them was a disappointment. When in my forties, having children of my own, I tried to find out more about her, Tracey let me have Priscilla’s haphazardly filled scrapbook. I did not suspect that even more intimate details were to come my way and that the scrapbook was but the first in a trail of unexpected discoveries which would give insight into Priscilla’s thoughts and feelings at crucial moments in her life.

  On the scrapbook’s opening page, scissored out of the Nursing Times, was a studio portrait of myself at eighteen months. I had always felt a bond with Priscilla (and the times we sat together watching her television served to deepen it), but not until I saw this photograph did I appreciate how she must have taken an interest in me from early on. Turning the stiff grey pages, I smelled her scent again.

  The scrapbook contained articles which intensified Priscilla’s mystique. She had ‘danced for Anna Pavlova’ in the words of an obituary of her. In another cutting, from a pre-war fashion magazine, Priscilla was pictured standing on fake snow, modelling Mainbocher’s green gaberdine plus-fours. The most electrifying discovery was a report from the Chichester Observer that was pasted on the reverse page with Bassano’s photograph of me, and referred to an incident that took place in 1950, seven years before I was born.

  A woman who won 50,000 francs – about £50 – by backing a 50-1 outsider at a French race meeting and who bought a crocodile-skin handbag with the winnings was fined £35 with £2 costs at Lewes today for customs offences.

  Mrs Priscilla Rosemary Thompson of Church Farm, East Wittering admitted trying to smuggle the bag through Newhaven Customs and making a false declaration to Customs officers. She was said to have been formerly married to a Frenchman and to have escaped from a German concentration camp with papers provided by the Resistance movement.

  Then this: Until France was liberated she lived the life of a hunted animal.

  The handbag reminded her of Paris before the war. The inside was black-lined and smelled less of alligator than of stale Chesterfields. In it she kept her cigarettes, reading glasses, green Hermès diary and pencil (‘You’ll find a pencil more useful,’ the shop-lady had said, ‘you can rub it out’). She carried it all the time. One cutting showed Priscilla at the Goodwood Fashion Parade, in a grey flannel suit, white beanie cap; and the bag over her shoulder.

  Priscilla had bought it with Raymond’s winnings from a horse race in Deauville. It was a time of crippling restrictions. Exchange Control was at its most severe. On 1 September 1950, she and Raymond landed back in Newhaven when a customs inspector approached.

  She felt herself perspiring. He looked like a railway policeman, one of those who stopped her outside the Métro to check her identity papers.

  Raymond did not know this, but on visits to Paris she could still hear the march of synchronised boots, down the Champs Elysées, past the Traveller’s Club.

  Footsteps on the pavement or a dog yapping at her fur coat, and everything reassembled into the courtyard at Besançon, snow on the ground, her handbag open for inspection. On that occasion, she had gone through the contents with a German woman, keeping only her comb.

  Her upswell of dread at the sight of a uniform had never diminished. Once, when her five-year-old stepson was behaving in a particularly mulish fashion, she said ‘Carleton, I despair of you’ – and marched him to the police station in East Wittering, very nearly getting there.

  ‘How much further?’ Carleton wanted to know, and she, despairing all the more because he was willing to go along with this, said: ‘No, no, I think we’ll have to go back.’

  Carleton observed that though she kept schnauzers, she passionately hated Alsatians. He wondered if she had been hounded by them.

  She had tried to obliterate another memory – of the bright light in her face and the SS man behind the desk who wanted details of her past four years, how she spent them, who with.

  The inspector, Mr Druitt, asked to see her handbag.

  Eleven days later, Priscilla stood up in the County Hall in Lewes and pleaded guilty to customs offences. But she wished to make a statement.

  ‘I have spent a considerable part of my life in France having lived there from 1925 to 1932 and subsequently from 1937 onwards.

  ‘I was married to a French citizen in 1938 and was living in France when the country was occupied by the Germans. In view of my original British nationality I was arrested and put in a concentration camp in December 1940, but in 1941 I was able to obtain my release on grounds of ill health and from then onwards until 1944 was living in France with false papers.

  ‘As the result of this, I was on several occasions arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, once for more than 24 hours, and as the result of these experiences have been afflicted with a nervous horror of any sort of interrogation by any sort of official.’

  Repatriated to England in 1944, she married her present husband in 1948. She had returned to France on average twice a year. She was quite accustomed to customs formalities.

  ‘On this particular occasion I was asked to show my handbag and asked where I had obtained it.

  ‘I very foolishly stated that it was a present from my first husband and I did not know its value, but I gave him my first husband’s correct name and address.

  ‘On my statement not being accepted, the recollection of previous interrogations in France came back to me and in somewhat of a panic I maintained my story.’

  She closed by saying how sorry she was and that the reason for subsequently making a false declaration was ‘the idea gained from my previous experiences that the only thing to do was to stick to my original story and avoid any prolonged interrogation.’

  As a result of her plea, reduced fines were imposed. But her appearance in court had rattled Priscilla. When she faced the magistrate, she felt that he was sitting in judgement on her years in Occupied France.

  4.

  TRUCK DRIVER

  My father did not pretend to know what made Priscilla tick, but he was familiar with her reticence. His own father, an army doctor in the First World War, had not elaborated at any time on his three years’ service in France. ‘I came to realise that what he’d seen in Ypres was incommunicable. The gap was so great between him and his listeners, he didn’t feel he could bridge it.’

  Priscilla was like many of those my father befriended in Paris in the 1950s, who, having survived the war, protected their memories of it; her years in France fell into the category of wh
at the French call ‘les non-dits’.

  I was just too young to question Priscilla’s father – he died when I was eighteen – but I read what he had written about her in Buffets and Rewards, one of his three volumes of autobiography.

  ‘Priscilla, born in 1916, is lovely. She contracted a disease of the leg when she was training to be a dancer in the Russian ballet in Paris.

  ‘She married just before the war a Frenchman of whom I know little beyond the fact that he was a count and drank port in the morning.

  ‘On 12 May 1940 she was in Amiens. So were the Germans. Apparently they treated her reasonably in her first concentration camp. Indeed, she prevailed upon the sentimental German camp doctor to release her on the grounds that she was about to have a baby. She was not, of course, about to have a baby. She was indiscreet about this. When they caught her, they put her into another concentration camp in the Vosges where life was much less pleasant. When I next saw her she had divorced her husband. She remarried, an Englishman this time who grows strawberries and tomatoes on the Sussex coast. He too had already been married and had two small children.’ That was all.

  I wondered what more Raymond, who died in 1988, might have added. He had worked in Air Force Intelligence before he met Priscilla, during the war bicycling every day from Bosham to Hayling Island; in his long absences, his first wife was left free to nurse, and then fall for, his best man, who had come to stay with them on being released from a POW camp. But not even Raymond was able to extract further information from Priscilla during the thirty-four years of their marriage. I know this because after Priscilla died he told his daughter-in-law that Priscilla could never discuss with him what had happened in her previous life.

  Carleton and Tracey confessed to growing up with ‘a total lack of curiosity’ about Priscilla’s past because, they said, ‘she didn’t build it up in any way’. And so for every one of us – sisters, husbands, brothers-in-law, stepchildren, nephews – it became easy to read nothing unusual in Priscilla’s reluctance to speak about the war. Her choice to bury herself in silence seemed part of a normal omertà, consistent with my paternal grandfather’s clamp-down.

  Annette Howard, whose much-decorated father had been a POW of the Japanese at Kwai Bridge, was Priscilla’s god-daughter. ‘I was used to people not talking about things, so it didn’t surprise me that Pris didn’t want to talk.’ And yet from conversations with Annette and others, an idea formed about what Priscilla had got up to – in part because of what Priscilla omitted to say, but also because of details that emerged and were given interpretations which she did not strain herself to deny.

  Her god-daughter was raised on a story that Priscilla drove trucks during the war in northern France – an arena in which she had performed, apparently, ‘incredibly well’.

  Priscilla’s neighbour, Vicky, who had designed a dress for her, told me: ‘I know she’d been a pretty brave lady in the Resistance.’

  A woman called Phyllis, who had worked as a mushroom picker at Church Farm, understood that Priscilla was dropped behind enemy lines – ‘as a translator, that’s what I was led to believe,’ and recalled an injury to her leg. A wound? It seemed plausible. And perhaps explained why she hid her legs and body and never wore a bathing costume when she came to stay with us.

  It was exciting to imagine that Priscilla might have worked in the French Resistance and that this was the reason she did not talk about her past; why there was always a finger to its lip. Those who behave heroically say little. The rule of the female agent Agnès Humbert was ‘Admit nothing’. Women like Humbert or Odette Hallowes used code names that were difficult to trace and never appeared on any list. Most continued their normal lives, forgotten when the war ended. Could this have been the case of my truck-driving aunt?

  I spoke to Annette’s sister Judy, who was certain that Priscilla was an agent. ‘She was in SOE in France and was tortured by the Germans. And when she came back from France she had no hair. I was told by my mother, “Priscilla brushed her hair and it all grew back again.” So I’ve brushed my hair religiously ever since.’

  5.

  THE PADDED CHEST

  One day – a year or so after Priscilla died – my mother revealed to me that she had been kept in the dark about Priscilla’s existence, and that she had not met her sister, or known anything about her, until the last months of the war. She was in her first term at Cheltenham Ladies’ College when she received a letter from her father, who, pricked into action by Priscilla’s return from Occupied France, was writing to break the news that my mother and her younger sister Imogen had an older half-sister; moreover, not one half-sister but two. About the upbringing of these two girls, Priscilla and Vivien, and about the circumstances of their lives until 1944, my mother admitted that she possessed, even now, only the haziest outline.

  The idea that my mother had been unaware of her father’s other family until the age of thirteen was too irresistible not to follow up, and I contacted Priscilla’s sister Vivien.

  Vivien was four years younger than Priscilla and so totally different from her that it was hard to understand how they could be sisters. They were unalike physically – Vivien was dark, Sophia Loren to Priscilla’s Grace Kelly – and they were unalike in temperament as well.

  I had seen little of Vivien as a boy; her life had been marred by the death of her eldest son, as a result of which she had developed peculiar beliefs about the afterlife.

  At her home in Henley, Vivien seemed relieved to have the excuse to unburden herself. In her slow and deliberate voice, she provided details of their childhood, first on the Sussex coast and then in Paris.

  ‘Frightened of life’ was how Vivien described her late sister, with whom she had, I felt, a fond but not always easy relationship, one in which Vivien was the sibling making the effort. ‘When she was growing up, she was always terrified of everything, always having nightmares.’ Priscilla’s fear manifested itself most scarily in sleep-walking. ‘She used to stand on the top of the stairs, screaming – but sound asleep.’ Everyone had been relieved when she married the Vicomte.

  Vivien was present at Priscilla’s wedding in Paris in December 1938, but had returned to England before the German invasion and could shine no light on Priscilla’s marriage or on her life during the Occupation. Nor could Vivien provide details of Priscilla’s experience in the concentration camp, not even its name.

  Vivien died in 2004. Another five years went by before I decided to pursue my interest into Priscilla’s French past.

  In the summer of 2009, I contacted her stepdaughter Tracey whom I had not seen since I was four years old and living in Paris; Tracey had for a short while been my nanny. I explained how curious I still felt about Priscilla, and asked if my aunt might have left behind any personal papers.

  ‘It’s odd that you should ring up now,’ Tracey said.

  She had in her possession a cardboard box filled with photographs, letters, diaries and manuscripts, including a stab at a novel, which Tracey had salvaged, soon after Priscilla’s death, from the striped padded chest at the end of her bed – ‘on which the telly used to sit’.

  One glance at the material had convinced Tracey that it was too private to show Raymond and so, without mentioning to her father what she had found, she chucked everything into a box to be stored away, and only lately had she come across it again. She had never examined the contents in depth because, she said, they related to Priscilla’s life before she met Raymond.

  Tracey had been wondering what to do with the box.

  * * *

  In France, they are known as the Dark Years; in wanting to pull down a padded lid on them, Priscilla was not unique.

  I had discovered from reading and talking to people about this period that certain sections of the French National Archives in Paris are still closed to the historian, beginning with the year 1940. The same secrecy surrounds the police archives, or what remains of them – the Wehrmacht when they retreated took back to Berlin the most impo
rtant files, many of these being shipped on to Russia in 1945. Even now, you cannot discover what denunciations were made against your family seventy years ago in France. Most of the Gestapo’s archives in Paris, in particular those concerning the group known as ‘the French Gestapo’, were destroyed in the autumn of 1944. Archives in London are hardly more helpful. MI6 keeps secret most of its papers, and the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA) for which Priscilla’s best friend Gillian Sutro worked, was so afraid of Vichy infiltration that few records were kept.

  Aside from the difficulty of access, there is the magnitude of the destruction: those papers burned in courtyard bonfires or dumped into the Seine or obliterated in Allied bombing raids, like the archives of Caen, the city which controlled the region in which Priscilla’s Vicomte lived.

  Furthermore, this was a time of restrictions. It seems inconceivable in this Internet age that someone could live no more than twenty miles away across the Channel and yet not be able to make contact with their family in Sussex, by letter or by telephone. But this describes the hermetic news black-out that existed between 1940 and 1944.

  The Occupied Zone was sealed off. Carrier pigeons were forbidden, no photographs out of doors were allowed to be taken, and anyone who concealed letters on their person risked severe punishment. The Germans outlawed letters in packages, any writing on the backs of photographs, and books with passages underlined. Priscilla could not write abroad – even if she had the means; paper shortages compelled Jacques Audiberti to compose his novel Monorail on strips of wallpaper.

  As a result, fewer people wrote things down at the time (and some of the diaries that historians have depended on turn out to have been written up long after the events). As for those who did write to each other in Occupied France, it is surprising how little correspondence has survived. Hard for us to believe, it was not a time to keep letters. And Tracey told me that she had a box of them.