Priscilla Read online

  SPB’s correspondence fills two trolleys at the BBC’s sound archives in Caversham. His producers, who included George Orwell and Graham Greene’s cousin Felix, experienced the same problems with his handwriting as did Priscilla, and routinely had it typed out. ‘Dear Petre, Thank you for your brief illegible letter,’ is a typical complaint.

  So atrocious was his handwriting that when invited to lecture at Bomber Command he sent back a letter asking if he could bring his wife. A telegram came by return: DELIGHTED BRING BITCH BUT STATE SIZE BECAUSE OF RATIONING. He answered that his wife was not a bitch, weighed 9 stone 6 pounds and stood 5 foot 7½ inches. The reply this time: SOME MISTAKE SURELY NO BITCH 9ST 6LB WE HAVE TWO MASTIFFS BETTER LEAVE BITCH BEHIND. The ‘bitch’ was my grandmother. Alone in being able to read what he had written, to Winnie fell the task of typing out his journals and books.

  He never owned a house. As his fame grew, so did the procession of visitors to the homes he rented, in Sussex and then, after war broke out, in Oxford. My mother remembered meeting Henry Williamson (‘he didn’t like beds and slept on the floor’), George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, John Betjeman (he gave the speech at her wedding) and A. P. Herbert.

  Graham Greene told me that he, too, had made a pilgrimage to see my grandfather. A scourge of old fogies, SPB had been kind to him when he was a young writer and he felt genuine gratitude – which Greene acknowledged by using his name for a character in Brighton Rock: ‘See that man going to the Gents’? That’s Mais. The brewer. He’s worth a hundred thousand nicker.’

  In the real world, SPB was worth nothing of the sort. It seems unfair on him that he flourished at a time before journalists with his profile were properly paid. I grew up with the lesson that his fame had brought him no fortune at all. And yet he continued to cling to a hope – which Priscilla inherited – of writing that one book which would rescue him from penury and the bailiffs, and earn a life-changing sum greater than the £100 advances which he latterly received for Books I Like, its sequel More Books I Like, and for leisurely travel books such as Mediterranean Cruise Holiday, South African Cruise Holiday, Continental Coach Tour Holiday.

  He wrote in his diary on 30 December 1939: ‘I would give a great deal to write a really good book that would move people.’ But he was too oppressed by financial worries and depression to apply to his own work the craftsmanship that he admired in his successful friends. His syntax betrayed his agitation. ‘I still feel I have it in me, but I can’t as yet dig down to it because I’ve never had enough time to write it before having to switch off to earn quickly money to live meanwhile.’ In his struggle to maintain some kind of footing, he may have been unable to sit with his work longer. One of his radio producers complained: ‘You seem to write books faster than I can write letters,’ after receiving a copy of SPB’s ‘boy’s book’, The Three-Coloured Pencil – puffed by its author as ‘a superb achievement in the true Buchan manner which I hope you will both approve and read in that order’.

  SPB most aspired to write a book like The Thirty-nine Steps. He regarded John Buchan’s spy thriller, published in 1915, as containing one of the finest descriptions of a man-hunt that he knew, and was twice spurred to emulate it. The Thirty-nine Steps was among the first novels that he sent to Paris for Priscilla to read in her convalescence, and which caused Doris to complain in her sharp voice: ‘You always have your nose buried in a book.’

  With Gillian’s support, Priscilla recovered her health – until the day arrived when she could stand up. Gillian observed her walking across the bedroom and recognised how Priscilla had grown while she had been ill. The transform­ation was striking. The immature girl who had spent a year on a stretcher was a young woman with a figure. Her puppy fat had fallen away, her straight hair had sprouted back in thick blonde curls. Her body was riper, and she was as tall as Doris.

  Her mother did not hide her resentment. ‘You think you are pretty. Fair hair and blue eyes are very commonplace – your sister and I with our dark hair and grey eyes are far more interesting. We are exotic.’ She made personal remarks about her daughter in front of others: ‘Priscilla is developing quite nice breasts.’ Priscilla would blush furiously and leave the room.

  Doris insisted on dressing Priscilla in itchy black woollen stockings which French children never wore, causing Priscilla to feel self-conscious. Her only attractive clothes were a white broderie Anglaise party dress and a tweed suit which Doris had bought her – grudgingly – on Boo’s persuasion.

  Boo was another who appreciated how Priscilla had changed.

  Doris and Boo were not getting on. Their violent rows woke Priscilla in the night. The arguments had grown more acrimonious since it became clear that SPB was most unlikely to sue Doris for divorce. Doris later explained to the divorce court judge: ‘He said it would ruin him and nothing was done.’

  On Boo’s part, the friction caused by his Catholic guilt over their unorthodox marital state was sharpened by Doris’s flirtations with Gillian’s father, and by her tendency to nag Boo about his drinking habits and short temper.

  On Doris’s part, Boo’s inability to earn a living from his writing was too reminiscent of her husband.

  SPB paid them a visit, leaving Winnie in a café while he called on Doris. It was the only time he came to see Priscilla in Paris. Looking around the apartment, he recognised the oak commode, the Persian carpet. Priscilla and Vivian ran up to give a welcoming kiss. Priscilla dragged him off to inspect the books in her bedroom.

  Boo said that he would not be joining them for lunch.

  ‘He only takes his meals in liquid form,’ said Doris after he left.

  ‘I hope he never comes back at all.’ Priscilla scowled.

  There was a reason for Priscilla’s vitriol. Years later, Vivien discovered that Boo had tried to molest her.

  Boo’s interest in Priscilla had started when she was back on her feet. He took her side in any argument with Doris and offered to help Priscilla with her homework or piano practice. Soon he was paying too much attention, said Vivien, ‘nothing beyond attempted caresses in unmentionable places, but naturally causing anger and upset’. Priscilla told Gillian: ‘Whenever I ask him to help me with my Latin he starts mauling me.’

  The tariff that Boo imposed for his Latin tuition was that she should kiss him and let him shove his hand under her skirt. Priscilla found this sinister, but was not frightened until one night, while Doris was away, Boo got drunk ‘and tried to rape me’. Priscilla revealed this to her mother only when, during one of his trips to London, Boo wrote to say that he would not be returning. Priscilla found it difficult to forgive her mother’s reaction: ‘She slapped me hard on the face. She blamed me, of course, for the break-up. Slowly, I was beginning to see her as she was: a selfish, vain, stupid woman entirely wrapped up in her own affairs.’

  The family packed their belongings and left for England. Priscilla was sixteen. They would never hear from Boo again. The next time Priscilla read his name she was sitting in a London cinema watching Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Man Who Knew Too Much – and saw Boo credited as the screenwriter, and remembered his exploring fingers.

  9.

  MARRIED ALIVE: 1936

  When Priscilla returned to London in 1932, her father already had one daughter with Winnie. Doris finally served divorce papers on SPB because she wanted to marry again. In 1934, after being abandoned by Wyndham-Lewis, and following a series of unhappy relationships, including one with the English cricket captain Wally Hammond, Doris was introduced to an adventurous young naval surgeon, Bertie Ommaney-Davis.

  Bertie was twenty-nine and had recently received a congratulatory telegram from George V for sailing a 54-foot ketch without an engine from Hong Kong to Dartmouth. Practically the first woman he met on stepping ashore after a year at sea, with only four naval officers for company, was forty-two-year-old Doris. ‘He fell like a ton of bricks,’ said Vivien. ‘He was out of his mind with love. I couldn’t think what the hell he was on about.’ But Doris
saw in the infatuated Bertie an anchorage, and after ten choppy years hoped to start a life with him ‘and have someone she could call her lawful husband’. The problem was that in order to end her twenty-one-year marriage, either she or SPB had to agree to be the guilty party. And SPB, after initially agreeing, refused.

  To read the press coverage about Doris’s unsuccessful petition is to be reminded of the shame that hedged the subject of divorce. In 2011, there were 144,000 divorces in Britain. For the first time, more than half the children born in Britain were born out of wedlock. But what we now take for granted was inconceivable seventy-five years ago.

  Nothing more characterised the judgemental atmosphere in which Priscilla was raised than the Matrimonial Causes Act, unaltered since 1857. To obtain a divorce in 1936, it was essential that both parties did not agree to seek one: an agreement constituted collusion. To protect the sanctity of marriage one party had to be seen to be at fault. This role fell by tradition to the husband who, even if not guilty, was advised to travel with an amenable woman to a hotel, normally in Brighton, and there arrange to be caught in flagrante by a credible witness – explaining Doris’s request for Priscilla to ‘give evidence and say in court that she had seen her father in bed with Winnie’.

  The MP and writer A. P. Herbert who did most to change this antiquated law was a friend of my grandfather. In his 1934 novel Holy Deadlock, Herbert drew on details of SPB’s domestic situation to lampoon the ludicrous legal pickle in which SPB had found himself – and as a result Herbert believed that he ‘helped to create a more favourable attitude’ to divorce law reform.

  The Maises’ divorce case was heard two years after Herbert published Holy Deadlock, and marked a watershed, mobilising public opinion, drawing attention to an unjust statute, and stimulating Parliament to reform it. After Doris appealed to ‘the discretion of the court’, Justice Bucknill decreed that neither party was fit for marriage, both of their records being ‘too bad to allow either to be free to contaminate other partners’ – and according to this twisted logic refused to grant a divorce. Until their deaths, SPB and Doris would be ‘joined together in unholy matrimony’ – in Herbert’s phrase – or ‘married alive’. In November 1936, four months after Justice Bucknill delivered his verdict in the community’s interest, Herbert introduced a more humane Matrimonial Causes Act, which became law on 1 January 1938 and allowed divorce without requiring proof of adultery. Priscilla’s evidence, and specifically the requirement that forced Doris to make her daughter testify against her father, had played a contributory part.

  Another reason why Justice Bucknill decided against granting Doris’s petition was that SPB fought it.

  At the time that Doris had first requested a divorce, in 1925, SPB was not so hostile to the idea: he could cast himself as the wronged party without injuring his standing as a journalist. The arrival of Winnie and a child complicated his position. Plus the fact that he now worked for the BBC. When Doris got in touch again nine years later, after meeting Bertie, SPB agreed not to defend her action. His one condition: she would have to divorce him. He changed his mind only after Doris’s lawyers demanded that he play the guilty partner.

  First, SPB could not stomach the systemic hypocrisy of the conditions. It was Doris who had run off – not once, but twice. He explained in the witness box that he wished the whole truth to be brought into the open in order to preserve his reputation. One after another, he named his wife’s lovers. Brownrigg. Wyndham-Lewis. A man called Frank Young (Doris denied this). He may not have known about Wally Hammond or about Gillian’s father.

  Second, SPB wished to keep his job. He could not, professionally speaking, risk entering the public record as a divorcé. The BBC, in which he had now forged a successful career, was an institution that refused to employ divorced people on its staff. In 1929, the director-general John Reith sacked his senior engineer merely for being cited in a divorce case; in the following year John Heygate was expelled from the BBC after eloping with Evelyn Waugh’s wife. It is likely that Reith would have withdrawn his patronage even from such a well-known freelance as SPB, and evidence exists that for a time Reith did so. A confidential internal memorandum from the head of children’s programmes reads: ‘Mr Mais is seeking further work in Children’s Hour . . . Am I right in believing that there is a feeling militating against this speaker?’

  This was the punitive situation that A. P. Herbert had dramatised in Holy Deadlock, converting SPB’s dilemma into the character of Martin Seal, ‘who was employed by the British Broadcasting Corporation and must not be so much as breathed upon by scandal’. Seal’s predicament was SPB’s: ‘He’s on the BBC and is afraid of losing his job. They’re very particular. Used to run Children’s Hour. He’s one of the announcers now . . . It would never do for the British public to hear the “Weather Report” from the lips of a co-respondent.’

  Either SPB’s fear that a divorce would jeopardise his career was greater than his concern to keep secret his irregular domestic life, which was about to become still more irregular since Winnie was eight months pregnant with their second child; or else he hoped that once he contested Doris’s petition, she would withdraw it. Whatever his calculations, they misfired. Asked to lie, he was punished for telling the truth. He wrote in his diary: ‘I am unable to regard the law of the land with anything but suspicion and contempt after that.’

  The financial and social repercussions were mortifying. SPB was ordered to pay the costs of £880 (approximately £50,000 in today’s money). ‘I am reduced to no assets. I cannot overdraw for 18 months.’ He was forbidden to take communion in his local church – ‘I was excommunicated,’ he wrote with bitterness in his diary; and when his youngest daughter Imogen was born one month later, The Times refused to let him place an announcement in the birth column.

  Doris had to change her name to Mrs Ommaney-Davis, although she and SPB remained legally married. Meanwhile, Winnie, who had changed her name by deed poll to Mais, remained unmarried, with Priscilla, the legitimate daughter, a standing reproach to her two illegitimate daughters. It was something that Winnie lay awake thinking about every night. Four years later, when they moved to Oxford, she remained in a permanent panic, not only about what was going to happen if their new social circle found out, but anxious as to how SPB would earn a living. ‘The ensuing scandal did nothing to enhance his repute among his public,’ she wrote in an unpublished memoir – yet another instance of my extended family and their friends writing stuff down, and so enabling me to reconstruct their story. ‘Lectures, broadcasting and commissioned work all suffered.’

  It is not too much to say that Vivien had her life altered by the scandal. She told me that after the News of the World printed a double-page spread on the court case, ‘I wasn’t fit to know. I got an exemption from my matriculation and I had to lodge with the cleaner.’ To avoid anyone suspecting her of being Sheila Mais, as she had been christened, she changed her name to Vivien Irving and went to work as an au pair in Germany.

  Doris’s divorce case was partly why Priscilla left London early the following year. She wanted to wait in Paris until the dust had settled. But that was not the only reason. She was also three months pregnant.

  10.

  MEETING ROBERT: 1937

  The encounter that marked Priscilla’s whole life took place after she had spent five years back in England, on a fine spring day in 1937, at a moment when she least expected kindness.

  On that morning, 11 March, she had caught the train from Victoria. She bought a newspaper, then stumbled – no hat on, gripping an ochre suitcase – along the platform and into the carriage, upholstered corner seat, with a book.

  Under a grey lamb coat, a gift from her mother on her twentieth birthday, she wore her one and only black suit. She had £5 in her pocket, borrowed from a friend.

  The train journey – second-class, to Newhaven – was tedious. She cleared a patch on the pane and stared out in detachment at the green fields, struggling to break her connectio
n with the past.

  The fields threw her back against her will to another spring day and SPB seeing her off at Newhaven – alone again – on the French steamer. But it hurt Priscilla to think of her father. They were too similar, as her mother kept pointing out. Always remembering and regretting mistakes.

  Priscilla drummed with her fingers on the window – another of her father’s traits. She had wanted a child so much. She felt sick and young and very frightened. And Tom, the man who had got her pregnant, not even seeing her off.

  The truth was, Priscilla did not much care what happened to her.

  There is such rich detail both in her unpublished novel and in her diaries that we know to a remarkable degree what she was thinking. We even know what she replied when the passport inspector at Victoria station enquired how long she planned to be away: ‘It depends on a lot of things.’

  Being under twenty-one, she had needed her parents’ consent for a new passport. She had sent a wire to her mother asking her to come urgently to London. Doris, self-engrossed and living in Tintagel with her besotted young naval surgeon, was irritated more than shocked to learn that her daughter was expecting a child by a feckless South African, Tom Ewage-Brown. Priscilla had met him after Doris announced that she was moving with Bertie to Cornwall and Priscilla would have to find digs and earn a living. Tom was renting the next room in Priscilla’s Earl’s Court hostel, thirty years old, in advertising, drove a Ford V8 very badly and owned an exotic uniform, from the period when he claimed to have fought in Bolivia. They had moved in to a double room in Lexham Gardens on his promise to marry as soon as he was earning enough to keep them both. But no sooner were they installed than Priscilla discovered that she was pregnant and that Tom had a Chilean girlfriend. His reaction was hysterical. She should have been more careful, they could not afford it, she had got herself into this mess, she could get herself out.