Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Nevertheless, Gillian was the person Priscilla most wanted to see. In one of the long uncertain days of late spring, Priscilla secured a forty-eight-hour permission of leave, and made an excursion to Paris without Robert, standing all the way in a packed train.

  Sandbags were heaped up around the fountains. In the pitch dark, it was hard to recognise her favourite restaurants behind the careful drapes. When she knocked at Prunier’s, she was whisked through the revolving door before an officer from the défense passive had time to bellow ‘Lumière!’

  At dinner were Gillian’s sister Jacqueline, and her fiancé Max Ruppé, an exquisitely mannered Egyptian Jew in a teddy-bear coat, who was Maurice Chevalier’s manager. The couple had met at the Casino de Paris, where Chevalier was performing; Jacqueline had been dancing an acrobatic rumba. When Ruppé proposed, Jacqueline, seventeen, as eager to leave home as her sister, accepted.

  Jacqueline admitted to Gillian, ‘I never thought I’d be marrying before you.’

  ‘I don’t think marriage is for me,’ Gillian said.

  Vertès arrived late, in an ill-fitting uniform and wearing a hideous khaki rice-stitch scarf which Gillian had knitted for him in London. He held the same low corporal’s rank as Robert, but his experience of the war was upbeat. Vertès had been put to work painting murals in the Officers’ Mess at General Gamelin’s HQ. The General – commander-in-chief of the French army – was a gourmet who had bagged the best chefs for his Mess. According to Vertès, Gamelin had a weakness for ‘elaborate confections of meringue, crème Chantilly and spun sugar of various hues’.

  Vertès was confident of victory, despite the bad news from Denmark and Norway. The Germans would be ‘pushed into the sea’. Gillian wanted to believe him. She was the happiest that Priscilla had seen her. She had done a film test for Marc Allegret and been given a part in Parade en Sept Nuits. Max Ophuls had also offered her a small part in Sans Lendemain. Jacqueline’s fiancé knew all the film producers – he would speak to them about Gillian. ‘One believed what one wished,’ Gillian said. Priscilla and Robert might even have their baby.

  The following Friday, 10 May 1940, German troops invaded Holland and Belgium, and the Luftwaffe bombed Brussels and Lille and airfields across northern France to Le Bourget.

  ‘I have noticed the sun shines at its most perfect on the most ghastly occasions.’ On a beautiful spring day from her balcony in Rue de Clichy, Gillian watched the refugees from Belgium. Everyone was streaming south. Cars with red and white number plates, mattresses strapped to their roofs as protection against bombs, suitcases tied with rope, horse carts laden with boxes, peasants seated on top, bicycles, families on foot mopping sweat from blackened faces.

  At the Café de Paris, a policeman checked Gillian’s documents. Fifth columnists were about. ‘We were obsessed by rumours of phoney nuns dropped by parachute. If we spotted a nun we looked at her feet in case of boots.’ If the Germans really were floating down as nuns or ballerinas – another rumour – they shouldn’t be surprised if Allied troops ravished them, someone joked.

  Walking home down Rue Royale, Gillian heard a man’s voice behind her. ‘Look, they’re burning the archives!’

  Smoke rose from the Quai d’Orsay. She came closer and saw ashes flying about.

  ‘That’s dreadful,’ said a girl’s voice, ‘what are we going to do?’

  ‘At least we’re not Jewish.’

  But Vertès was. On 18 May, disregarding the petrol shortage, he drove Gillian to Ville d’Avray where they ate a meal of melon, filet de boeuf and fraises des bois, and made love. She saw Vertès one last time, on 7 June, to say goodbye. ‘You’ll see,’ he assured her, ‘the Germans will be definitely stopped and your mother will regret her departure.’

  On Sunday 9 June, Max Ruppé crammed his fiancée into a car, along with Daphne and Gillian, and drove them to the Gare Montparnassse to catch the train to Saint-Malo. They carried food and water for forty-eight hours and one overloaded suitcase each. ‘The train was the last one, it turned out.’

  At Saint-Malo in blazing sun they queued until dark for an exit visa. Gillian could hear the distant sound of guns. Her ankles swelling in the heat, she sat on her suitcase in which she had packed her film test. The French authorities took their time, intent on examining all documents. ‘Nothing would hurry them, in fact they seemed to grudge us the chance of escaping out of France.’

  Around midnight, the Hammonds boarded a battered cargo ship. Gillian pushed through a crowd of passive Italians to the rail. She looked back at Saint-Malo and thought of Vertès fleeing south in his Buick with his wife and yapping dog. ‘I wondered when I would see that coast again, if ever. And Pris, left behind in Paris.’

  In fact, Priscilla was not in Paris, but at Boisgrimot where the German invasion meant little bits of lampblack floating from the sky.

  One of General Weygand’s first acts on replacing General Gamelin had been to order women away from the front. That was on 19 May. Priscilla was one of the refugees Marshal Pétain later spoke of as clogging the roads.

  In Rouen, Priscilla said a hurried goodbye to her husband – Robert had been ordered from his desk to carry sacks of earth to barricade the bridges over the Seine. The English held responsibility for the left bank, but all those troops who were camping there had vanished.

  She drove west in her Simca. There was no traffic on her side of the road. ‘But hundreds of cars were going the other way, piled high with luggage and mattresses and all the personal belongings of the owners who were trying to get as far south as possible. It was a pathetic sight.’

  The road to Caen was dangerous, covered in broken glass, pitted with steaming craters. Summer had been early and dry, and her eyes were red from the dust. Anguished faces peered at her through dirty or cracked windscreens, many of the hands that gripped the steering wheels belonging to boys or girls. The traffic juddered along at a cow’s amble, and a warm breeze blew the smell of phosphorus into her face. She was forced to drive in first gear. Progress was painfully slow.

  What she recalled was the noise: the non-stop, ear-splitting honk of car horns, the groan and rattle of engines of all sizes accelerating and slowing, the lorries that thundered past taking with them lines of grey paint from the side of her Simca. The stream of oncoming vehicles extended bumper to bumper to the horizon. In the absence of directions or reassurance, the nation was in flight.

  In the sky, sunlight on metal. German planes in tight little groups with black crosses on their wings flew over with a roar. She heard piercing sirens, hellish explosions, horses neighing, children shrieking. The effect of this din on her nerves, the girl who used to wake screaming from dreams, was something that she would battle with for the rest of her life. When she heard the first bombs, she was so nervous that she wanted to laugh.

  The invasion had been inconceivably rapid, the German army advancing not at the walking pace of Robert in 1916, but at the speed of their tanks, spurting flames, ploughing up land, crushing into corrugated mats the carts piled up across the country lanes. Every hour another thirty miles of French territory was added to the Reich. Birds let out of their cages flapped about, and horses roamed ownerless in the fields.

  Priscilla had read War and Peace. It was like a scene from that, she later told Gillian. Exhausted men slept on the grass. She kept thinking that she saw Robert’s face among them. The countryside was littered with the debris left by the British army as it ran over itself to reach Dunkirk and Saint-Malo: abandoned jeeps and lorries, packets of Woodbines, cans of bully beef, blankets, even brand-new motorbikes thrown aside in the stampede to reach the coast. He was out there somewhere.

  She reached Caen at nightfall. A sentry waving a red light stopped her, checked her papers. Looking back, she saw orange flashes in the darkness. The clock on a bell tower tolled ten, but over a world where time no longer had relevance.

  At Carentan next morning, the level-crossing gates were shut. On the platform where Priscilla had seen off Robert nine month
s before, women in light cotton dresses stood in tense silence, their eyes fixed to the end of the tracks. Priscilla drove on for a further two miles, then her car gave a sputter and stopped. The strain of driving it in first gear had burned out a piston. She had to be rescued by Yolande, ‘whom I still disliked as much as ever’.

  The Doynels were back at Boisgrimot in force, but their genius for surviving cataclysms was deserting them. On their faces, pandemonium and fear. Little attention was paid, just then, to Priscilla. Ted, her Irish Guards officer, managed to telephone from Cherbourg: leave right now and he could squeeze her on to a boat. But she refused. ‘I have to stay to learn Robert’s fate,’ she told him.

  At Boisgrimot, the country lanes belonged to an earlier world. The birds appeared to be singing more. Then, on 7 June, Priscilla sat in her room, windows open, listening to gunshots. The sounds came from the direction of the pigeonnier. Monsieur Carer, in obedience to a government missive to destroy all domestic pigeons, was shooting the birds.

  Two days later, black snow started falling, the sky went dark. The chateau lay under a greasy canopy of smoke which rolled west from the burning refineries at Rouen. Four British officers were responsible for the conflagration: Robert had watched them pass by his window from the ugly chateau where he worked – their mission to set fire to the petrol dumps in Quevilly to prevent the Germans from using the fuel.

  The smell was terrible and there was something terrifying about the darkness. ‘At midday, we had to light candles,’ said Joseph Carer’s sister Zizi, the steward’s daughter. She remembered the aurora borealis of two years before, the premonitions. ‘We thought the misery had arrived.’

  Adelaide sat in her wheelchair behind the closed windows. No news of her three sons. In the distance, muffled detonations. Incomprehensibly to those congregated in the room, General Weygand had announced on the radio, which had become the focus of their prayers, that the enemy had suffered considerable losses. Victory was in sight. ‘This is the last quarter of an hour.’

  On 10 June, the smoke dispersed. Priscilla no longer needed candles to see her soup. In the evening there was a great thunderstorm. She could not work out which were lightning flashes and which explosions from German artillery.

  Her relationship with her in-laws became more intense. At 7.30 p.m. the family stopped eating and listened in silence to another bulletin, holding their breath to catch the sounds which would tell them how the war was going. Rouen had been taken. Nothing about Paris, the whereabouts of the French army, the British. Her father probably knew more, but the only means of communicating with England was to wire via New York at 8d a word – and she had no money left. On 12 June, the Germans crossed the Seine. A pirate edition of Paris-Soir had put it about that the English would fight to the last Frenchman. Priscilla felt that Yolande held her responsible for the sounds in the distance.

  A report on 16 June that the British Government had offered to join France and England together in a Franco-British Union was the last mention of the subject. On 17 June, Priscilla heard the dry coughing voice of an eighty-four-year-old man saying that he had asked the enemy to put an end to hostilities and that he would remain with them in the dark days as the new head of the government. ‘Nous, Philippe Pétain . . .’ The plural was majestic, comforting. A narcissistic and doddery philanderer who fell asleep at cabinet meetings had woken with a jerk to find himself king.

  Pétain made no mention of England’s position, merely hinted that the Old Enemy had failed France. ‘In June 1918 we had 85 English Divisions with us . . . in June 1940 we had ten English Divisions.’ Priscilla was aware that she had straightened in her chair. ‘The attitude taken by Mr Churchill is inexcusable.’ When she heard Pétain say that France owed its disasters to the ‘people’s love of pleasure’ and to ‘too few babies’ her eyes met Yolande’s and Priscilla knew that her time was running out.

  On 25 June, the Armistice came into force. Its terms were not divulged, but Yolande and Georgette took for granted that it would bring about their men’s release and that the invasion of England was imminent. Weygand’s opinion: ‘Britain won’t wait a week before negotiating with the Reich.’ The navy’s head, Admiral Darlan, was certain that England would be completely conquered by Germany within five weeks.

  Yolande was in the hall, moving forward the hands of the clock. As Priscilla stepped outside into the unmowed grass, she saw grey feathers and black ash. The chateau was no longer languorous, but stifling. She walked down the avenue to the village, now occupied by a German parachute division.

  Sainteny had sent 200 men to fight in the First World War. Sixty did not come back and their houses had remained empty. The majority of those who did return were invalids; or, like Robert, they remained traumatised by their experience. One veteran who watched German troops enter Sainteny that summer fell on his face with the shock.

  Jacqueline Hodey remembered the morning when the Germans arrived. ‘On 17 June, at 11a.m. they made a tour of the place and they came into our grocer’s shop. They were wearing helmets and machine guns. One took his bayonet off and we thought we’d be killed. But he was looking for butter.’

  No one could get over the amount of French butter Les Fritz ate. They wolfed it straight off the slab like ice cream.

  Vehicles surged night and day through the narrow streets. Dark green tanks with black-goggled faces taking in the tower of Saint-Pierre from the open turrets; troop-carriers; motorbikes with sidecars, canvas-covered wagons with branches on them. Robert’s general in Rouen had possessed not one detailed map of the region under his command. These men knew every lane.

  And how strong and handsome and young they looked. It had needed only half a million of them to rout a French army ten times the size.

  French newspapers had trumpeted that German soldiers had nothing to dress in but rags. They survived on a diet of ‘fishless fish paste’. Their tanks were made out of cardboard. But the men who marched in neat grey-green uniforms past Sainteny’s graveyard, singing their songs, past the Mairie draped with a swastika, looked like film stars: proud, healthy, tanned. ‘They must really have been chosen,’ a woman told me who had watched them. ‘They looked straight ahead like effigies, like something abstract, like symbols. And as the day went on, more people came into the street – and more smiling people. “But look, they behave correctly.”’

  The villagers had heard of their brutal behaviour in Poland, but Jacqueline Hodey recalled only one instance of violence in those early days, when the Germans requisitioned the teacher’s car and manhandled two lady teachers who objected. Otherwise, the men who occupied the vacant houses were very polite as they emptied your petrol tanks, very disciplined. Two of them, simple NCOs – after seventy-one years she could remember their names, Hans Schumann and Albert Jung – were billeted upstairs, in rooms next to her. Jacqueline’s mother forbade her to talk to them.

  German soldiers stripped outside the grocery to wash their naked torsos from the water pump. It troubled the priest, Henri Yon, the way the young women of his parish lingered to watch these blond barbarians shave or perform their gymnastics. ‘They are sons of the devil, you’ll catch a disease.’ But it was hard to tear your eyes away.

  ‘It was like being fascinated by a snake,’ a woman wrote. These men doing their outdoor exercises in short red swimming trunks were so unlike the pitiable shambles of the French army – the columns of defeated poilus whom the Germans marched through the village to an unknown destination, heads lowered, spattered in mud and blood, uniforms ripped, falling down with fatigue. So unlike Robert – wherever he was.

  At the entrance to the oak avenue, a German soldier stopped Priscilla. ‘I was asked to show a proof of my identity so I showed my driving licence. This had British written on it, but I kept my thumb over the dreaded word and was allowed to pass.’

  German planes flew continually over, heading north. After France, England.

  Priscilla had become an alien with the signing of the Armistice. It was forbi
dden to speak English. Forbidden to listen to the English wireless. ‘The English tell us only lies.’ But if she reversed the positions of the aerial and earth leads, closed the doors and windows and kept the volume turned low, she could hear her father’s voice talking about tinned food.

  Tyres on the gravel. A German officer in a scarlet-lined cloak. He strode into the house, down the corridor, past the smoke-cracked portraits, saluted Adelaide in her wheelchair. He was requisitioning the chateau.

  Most officers found billets in Sainteny. ‘But the Grand Capitaine lodged at Boisgrimot,’ Jacqueline Hodey said.

  The Captain left it to the Doynels to decide which rooms they required for themselves; he promised to treat these as out of bounds. His men would live in farm buildings or in tents.

  In the summer heat, the Captain’s men lay on the grass with their shirts off, studying maps of England and plotting the inevitable invasion. The crossing of the Channel was a formality. See that moat, it was no wider than that. President Roosevelt shared General Weygand’s view: ‘The show is over. I don’t think Great Britain can hold out.’ The Germans planned to put ashore 90,000 men in the first wave in a simultaneous landing from Folkestone to Brighton. In a few weeks’ time, the Captain would march into SPB’s favourite pub in Shoreham and, after shooting dead the publican, tell his men to help themselves. England was doomed. England was everyone’s enemy. England stood in the way of the new order which every day brought a fresh decree.

  There were so many decrees, it was hard to catch up. Robert’s shotguns were to be handed in at the Mairie. The Tricolore was banned, the word Boche forbidden. Clocks had to be moved forward an hour to Berlin time. You could not go outside between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.

  In their bewilderment, the Doynel women were like every wife, daughter and mother of an estimated 1.8 million French prisoners of war. All they cared about was for their captured husbands to be freed. Three empty chairs kept the men’s places at dinner.