The snag was the year.
15.
WAR OF NERVES
After the mobilisation scare in the autumn, the streets were no longer dark or empty; there were buses again and Britain’s Prime Minister was a hero, as Pétain was to become. Even Robert bought a Chamberlain umbrella, shielding Priscilla with ‘mon chamberlain’ from the snow that fell. But the peace was short-lived. ‘In our time’ had been the time of her engagement. On her way home from cookery school, she halted before the Figaro building and read the newspapers pinned up in glass cases. Fares and stamps were going up. And the price of telephone calls. Vertès did not think there would be a war. Robert was convinced there would.
They were staying at Dinard with Georges and Yolande in August 1939 when the explosive news came that Germany had signed a pact with Russia. Priscilla remembered the last seashore walk, the smell of seaweed and salt. She filled her lungs with the wind blowing from across the Channel.
War was declared a week later. From her hotel room on the Polish border, the Daily Telegraph’s reporter Clare Hollingworth telephoned the British Embassy in Warsaw. ‘Listen!’ and held the telephone out of the window to catch the roar of the invading German tanks. ‘Can you hear it?’
Priscilla and Robert rushed back through torrential rain to Boisgrimot. Robert was mobilised and ordered to a unit near Rouen: to prevent German agents from working out the size of the French army, a soldier had delivered his call-up papers in person.
He donned a uniform of sorts, a pair of requisitioned dungarees, but had to provide his own boots and a torch. On a moonless night, Monsieur Carer drove them to Carentan. The station name had vanished. Priscilla watched her husband of nine months step on to the train, two haversacks slung across his shoulder, shaking out a handkerchief to wave, and felt like one of the trees stripped of its iron railings in the now anonymous town square. They still loved each other.
Paris was militarised – you needed a pass to enter the city. She was to stay at Boisgrimot, in the care of his mother. Robert had seen too many separations in the last war, people not finding each other again. She wrote: ‘It didn’t occur to me not to obey orders. I was used to being treated like a child.’
The chateau overspilled with evacuated Doynels. Yolande and her children; Marie-Thérèse and her children; de Thieulloy children. It had to be explained to them why their fathers had gone away. Georges and Guy had joined their units believing that a trembling Hitler would not attack before the spring. Robert was more pessimistic – the French were gearing up to fight the last war, pushed into this one by the British. With censorship of troop movements, it was hard to know what was going on.
At night in the drawing room, where Yolande with a pained expression stood in for Georges, they prayed for peace. Protected by the priest, the thick-boughed canopy of oak trees and the pigeons in the dovecote, the chateau closed its eyes. Monsieur Carer walked around the house checking the shutters for cracks of light. Priscilla remembered September and October chiefly as a period of religious silence, no bells; and a landscape without signposts. Only the searchlights groping above Caen.
Battle recommenced over the bathroom. Priscilla still insisted on going through Yolande’s bedroom, past her sister-in-law’s new clothes, sent on approval and laid out on the bed. Priscilla, recognising one dress, did not reveal that she had modelled it. She hated Yolande’s deformed elegance, her polite insolence, her virtuous bristle. Yolande, who had not believed for one second in Priscilla’s alleged origins, had started to air gentle doubts about Priscilla’s ability to provide Robert with an heir.
On their walks through the garden, Adelaide was asking questions. Yolande, hair frilled out from under another absurd hat, nodded, her powdered nostrils growing wide. Yes, why not? Nine months. She should be pregnant by now. The cries of small boys racing each other along the untrimmed hedges rammed it home. It was one reason why Robert had been called up: he had no children.
Adelaide patted her arm. She had not had her first son René until two years after marrying.
With no maternal responsibilities, Priscilla milked the cows, helped Monsieur Carer to paste brown paper strips on the windows, stitched curtains for the blackout. Talk after dinner was of the Maginot Line, and of the German side of the family. What would happen to them? The room smelled of worn chintz and black felt.
It was lonely to be left with all the people you cannot stand. Cooped up at Boisgrimot with her sisters-in-law and their young families, Priscilla read by lamplight and yawned incessantly. The dead deer on the wall kept her company. Behind her eyelids she listened to the rustle of dresses. The fire continued to crackle until it was time for dinner.
And then one day the children and their mothers were gone. Off to another chateau.
Inevitably, they were spun together, the old Vicomtesse and her young English daughter-in-law. They saw a lot more of the priest, Henri Yon. They walked unprompted to Mass, to Vespers. Shrunk back into her tapestry chair, Adelaide could not believe how the past was repeating itself. The sunlight of 1914 was filtering through the window. She looked through it at the tennis court laid by her late husband, the muddle of weeds, and remembered the last time her three sons had gone to war with Germany, the tearing-to-pieces. When Georges had left for the Front, she had said: ‘Georges, be careful you don’t catch a cold.’ Gassed, he had lost half his lungs. She reached out her hand. Priscilla was the future.
From the only telephone, Priscilla dialled Trinité 4319 and spoke to Gillian. There had been sirens in Paris for three nights in a row. Waiters in cafés asked Gillian to pay up front ‘in case of having to rush off’. Her family was living on tinned food. The best place to be was the country, she reassured Priscilla. ‘Mother wonders whether I should go to London. I’m appalled at the idea of leaving Vertès.’ But Daphne had decided, and on 22 September the Hammonds boarded the Golden Arrow for England.
The chateau was freezing. Priscilla stuffed more wood into the round iron stove in her bedroom. She listened to the morning ritual of Joseph Carer bringing the milk to Adelaide next door. And always Monsier Bezard in the field on his tractor, and his lame black dog hopping after seagulls, and the squawk of pheasants.
On 2 October 1939, SPB wrote: ‘I heard from Priscilla who says she will go mad if she stays alone in the big chateau in Normandy much longer. Quiet does not bring all people peace.’
If she stood Adelaide’s Bakelite wireless on edge and swivelled it in various directions, she could get a good reception. Tuning in one morning, she had caught her father talking about edible fungi – evacuated townees were on no account to eat mushrooms that they found in the fields.
SPB was speaking from the BBC’s secret new headquarters: a country house like Boisgrimot, in a wood bounded by an electric fence. The recording vans had branches of trees on them as camouflage against aerial reconnaissance. He had arrived at Wood Norton, outside Evesham, not knowing he needed a password and was arrested when he asked a constable for directions to the BBC. The superintendent had laughed, telling the constable: ‘If you don’t recognise that voice, you damned well ought to. It’s the best-known voice in England.’
That autumn, Priscilla listened to it give talks on caterpillars, fields, and the art of diary and letter writing. Conversational, solid, at arm’s reach, her father’s voice crackled out of the mesh: ‘We have talked about the newsy letter, writing letters to your parents and your friends, even people you don’t know, but I wonder if you ever think of the news in your letters which you don’t know you’ve sent e.g. the way you write it, pencil or ink, etc. and what you tell about yourself by the things you write.’
At last, a letter from Robert. He had found a primitive billet on a farm, a house with manure piled up outside. His room was freezing. To heat his hands so that he could write to her, he brewed coffee on an alcohol stove. Overtaken by everything that he had feared, he was working in an office in the industrial quarter of Grand-Quevilly as a corporal – the same rank that he held in the
First World War, as if he had been on extended leave for twenty years. He was part of the third Section de Commis et Ouvriers Militaires Administration, a ‘rice-bread-salt unit’ based at the chateau of Montmorency, an ugly nineteenth-century building set in a denuded park near the oil refineries. Every morning in the icy winter fog he took the tram along an endless avenue bordered by low workmen’s houses and deserted gardens. He had to arrive by 7 a.m. and sat at a desk in a large whitewashed room on the second floor, listening to the constant chatter of a socialist photographer, a croupier, a stammerer who had fought in the First World War. In the evenings he drank calvados and played ping-pong.
‘Here, life is terrible’ he wrote to Priscilla, ‘there’s nothing, and to top it off it’s glacially cold. I’m told that restaurants are closing, but that a few people are still going to bars, theatres and cinemas, hoping to find some animal warmth.’ A friend had left for the Front. ‘Poor kid, he was a little excited, but tried not to show it. At exactly his age 23 years ago I also left for the Front. How quickly life has gone by and how old I’ve become. This terrible war has destroyed everything around me, burying even my most precious memories.’ He imagined with winter coming on that ‘poor Boisgrimot’ would collapse a little more each day. ‘What will happen to us after these dreadful times? Every day, I beg God to protect you. I have only one wish – to see you happy.’
Towards the end of October, Priscilla was called to the telephone. On the other end, Gillian – back in Rue de Clichy! Fed up with shoving shillings into a gas fire, fed up with drinking tea, and the excitement of Heinz tomato soup having waned, the Hammonds had returned to Paris. The war was unreal, Gillian said. The most dramatic incident had been the sinking of HMS Royal Oak with the loss of all 785 men, including the naval officer who had infected her with gonorrhoea. Otherwise, not a thing, except that her chilblains had restarted. ‘But the bliss of seeing Vertès again.’
In November, Priscilla snapped. With money saved from modelling, she bought a second-hand grey Simca for £5 and announced to Adelaide that she intended to motor to Rouen to join Robert. She had her passport, to which she was determined to cling – she had discovered that the British were the only foreigners in France who could travel without a laissez-passer. ‘It was the first time I had shown any independence or initiative, and everyone was most surprised, including myself.’ Adelaide was reluctant to let her go. But how else could Priscilla get pregnant?
Robert was pleased to see his wife. Her appearance galvanised him to take a room in a large hotel in the centre of Rouen. Each morning at 6 a.m., Priscilla chauffered him past the storage tanks of the oil refinery to the chateau where he continued to work in an ‘executive position of no importance’. Outside, the coldest winter since 1889 was icing the flag-poles and cobbles.
Back in her hotel, Priscilla spent the rest of the day beneath the bedclothes with one of the novels that her father had given her. Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars promised more clarity and warmth than what was going on beneath her window: the roll calls, the drill inspection, the guard duties, the non-stop trundle of vehicles. She kept the wireless on all day, tuned to the BBC.
In England, SPB was adapting his favourite novel for transmission. ‘I’m trying to read The Thirty-nine Steps for broadcasting,’ he wrote to his producer, ‘and all the time consumed with fury because my Raven Among the Rooks hasn’t sold like that.’ On 9 December, he worked on Buchan’s thriller to the sound of dance music being broadcast to the British Expeditionary Force in France. ‘It’s an odd feeling to be sitting in cosy comfort and know that they’re listening just behind the line to the same dances and longing for their girls and England.’ Starting in March, he gave a weekly talk to the troops on poetry and prose.
In France, the days passed monotonously. The English troops had little to do. They listened to SPB on the radio. They organised races on carthorses. Dug ditches. Played ping-pong and soccer (the BEF had donated 2,000 footballs). The ‘bore war’ they were calling it. Some of Robert’s French officers requisitioned cars to fetch hairdressers for their girlfriends.
Anxious to keep alive her pilot flame of independence, Priscilla put on a prickly uniform and joined the YMCA, transporting canteens to the Belgian border and dispensing tea, cold drinks and bully beef to English troops. When Robert raised an objection, she said that she was only putting to use what she had learned at cooking school. She made friends of her own age, other girls in the YMCA and in the ambulance units, like Elisabeth Haden-Guest, who drove a Ford lorry. This was the period when Priscilla learned to drive trucks. ‘It was fun,’ she wrote.
But she was disturbed about her husband.
In November 1939 General Alan Brooke inspected a regiment of troops from Normandy and was appalled. ‘Seldom have I seen anything more slovenly . . . men unshaven, horses ungroomed . . . complete lack of pride in themselves or their units.’ He could have been describing Robert.
Numbed with apathy and cold, demoralised by the guerre des nerfs, or ‘war of nerves’ as the French called the Phoney War, Robert’s spirits failed to rise, not even when the Paris stock market reached a new high. ‘He had taken to wearing long woollen undergarments and was full of morbid thoughts and prognostics.’ The woollen pants reminded Priscilla of the stockings that her mother made her wear, ‘although I must admit that he needed them as his uniform was not very warm’. Still, it worried Priscilla that Robert did not remove them when he came to bed. His hands, long-fingered, the nails no longer trimmed, rested inert by his side. ‘I was amazed at the change only a few weeks had made in him. He had always been fastidious and something of a dandy, but now he was unwashed and refused to shave. He had also completely lost his sense of humour. In fact, he had gone to pieces. When I remonstrated with him he merely shrugged his shoulders: “You are just a child,” he told me. “You don’t understand. I was in the 1914–18 war and I know what wars are like. This is the end. We have nothing to look forward to.”’
Buoyed by her youth, Priscilla refused to be gloomy. The trams in the evenings were packed with English soldiers in khaki, young, brilliantined, laughing. She had known several of the officers in London, ‘mostly fairly high rank’. Pleased to meet up again with Priscilla, they invited her to cocktail parties and out dancing. Robert was asked to come too, but declined: he did not speak English, he had an inglorious job and he was embarrassed to be seen in his rough serge corporal’s tunic. She started going to parties without him.
English soldiers filled two smart cafés in Rouen, a female jazz band playing in each. The largest was Café Victor, with a band dressed as pierrots. Café de la Bourse was the other, where a jolly tubercular woman conducted a less eccentric orchestra composed of younger girls. Priscilla was taken to both, to her husband’s displeasure.
On 23 December 1939, SPB recorded in his journal: ‘Priscilla writes from Rouen that her brothers-in-law are getting sick because she sees so much of British officers.’ It alarmed Georges and Guy, visiting Robert on leave, to observe how fully she appeared to be enjoying herself. Priscilla denied that she was behaving badly, and insisted that she remained loyal and faithful to Robert. ‘Various people tried to make love to me, but apart from mild flirtations I behaved myself.’ Untouched by her husband since their honeymoon, Priscilla was, even now, leaving a space for physical love to move in. But after her experience of driving a YMCA tea-van she was no longer willing to be treated like a child who did not understand.
Priscilla had two persistent admirers during her months based in Rouen. One, a blast from her English past; the other, a harbinger of the life that she was to lead during the Occupation.
Ted was the tall Irish Guards captain who had courted her in London when she was waiting for Robert to make up his mind. Over a meal in a brasserie in Rue Grand-Pont, he told her how upset he had been when Doris told him of Priscilla’s marriage.
‘Why did you do it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It just happened.’ And when pressed: ‘He was s
o kind to me. He replaced the father that I never had.’
‘Have you ever regretted it?’
‘No . . .’
On 27 January, the temperature sank to minus 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Roads were icebound, horses could not move. With Robert stuck in his office trying to drum up extra blankets and socks, Ted pursued Priscilla. ‘You used to be pretty, now you are beautiful.’ He had not got over his infatuation. He wanted to go to bed with her. ‘Life is short, darling. We must live from day to day.’ But Priscilla batted him off. She did love her husband, even if he was old enough to be her father and never touched her. ‘He taught me all I know. He had a good influence on me.’ Furthermore, he was a Catholic. ‘He doesn’t believe in divorce.’
Her second suitor was more tenacious. Priscilla nicknamed him ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’.
Daniel was thirty-five, a sprightly Paris businessman, with a wife and four children whom he had sent to the south of France upon being mobilised. Priscilla did not find him attractive. He was short, compact, with dark eyebrows that almost joined, and a way of crinkling his eyes when he gazed at her. But he was different from anyone that Priscilla had met in Robert’s circle. ‘To begin with he was rich and knew a lot about food and wine. He enjoyed life to the full and had been happily married for ten years. He had never been unfaithful to his wife (which was rare in France).’
She had been aware of him in the Café Victor, his keyed-up face weaving through the crowd on the dance floor. From the moment he introduced himself, Daniel laid siege – inviting her to dance, to play poker, to dinner, to a chateau near Rouen that belonged to his in-laws. He teased her. They talked nonsense and ate chocolates named after Joan of Arc’s tears. She loved it. But she did not love Daniel, energetic and attentive though he was, and repulsed him gently but firmly. When in the New Year, owing to the fact that he had a young family, Daniel was demobilised, he begged Priscilla to call on him should she ever come to Paris.
Priscilla Page 13
